Thirty years have passed since that cursed day when Ayrton had his accident on the Imola track.

Inside the Tamburello curve each year, there continue to be thousands of people who pay tribute by leaving a flag, a photo or even just a thought.

Gone but never forgotten, forever in our hearts <3. Thank you Codemasters for this tribute

“That made him very very special and that’s why we are still talking about it today, which is unbelievable.”

European Citizens' Initiative :

Video games have grown into an industry with billions of customers worth hundreds of billions of euros. During this time, a specific business practice in the industry has been slowly emerging that is not only an assault on basic consumer rights but is destroying the medium itself.

An increasing number of publishers are selling video games that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or "phone home" to function. While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way.

This practice is effectively robbing customers of their purchases and makes restoration impossible. Besides being an affront on consumer rights, video games themselves are unique creative works. Like film, or music, one cannot be simply substituted with another. By destroying them, it represents a creative loss for everyone involved and erases history in ways not possible in other mediums.

Existing laws and consumer agencies are ill-prepared to protect customers against this practice. The ability for a company to destroy an item it has already sold to the customer long after the fact is not something that normally occurs in other industries. With license agreements required to simply run the game, many existing consumer protections are circumvented. This practice challenges the concept of ownership itself, where the customer is left with nothing after "buying" a game.

We wish to invoke Article 17 §1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union [EUR-Lex - 12012P/TXT - EN - EUR-Lex (europa.eu)] – “No one may be deprived of his or her possessions, except in the public interest and in the cases and under the conditions provided for by law, subject to fair compensation being paid in good time for their loss.” – This practice deprives European citizens of their property by making it so that they lose access to their product an indeterminate/arbitrary amount of time after the point of sale. We wish to see this remedied, at the core of this Initiative.

We also invoke Title XV of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU)[EUR-Lex - 12012E/TXT - EN - EUR-Lex (europa.eu)] and the following TFEU Articles as our justification for and the Union’s imperative to respond to this initiative:

Article 169 – Per §1, the EU has an obligation “to promote the interests of consumers and to ensure a high level of consumer protection…to protecting the health, safety and economic interests of consumers”. We believe this practice infringes upon or requires correction to be commensurate with the EU’s obligation. The actions taken in response to this initiative must supersede any end user license agreements associated with videogames.

Article 12 – “Consumer protection requirements shall be taken into account in defining and implementing other Union policies and activities.” Given that this practice extends across Member States and beyond the EU, the Union’s actions regarding this practice ought to keep consumer protection in mind. The actions taken in response to this initiative must supersede any end user license agreements associated with video games.

Article 114, §3 – “The Commission, in its proposals envisaged in paragraph 1 concerning health, safety, environmental protection and consumer protection, will take as a base a high level of protection… Within their respective powers, the European Parliament and the Council will also seek to achieve this objective” This practice undermines the high level of consumer protection that the Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council takes as the basis of law in the Union, and their objectives of establishing and maintaining the functioning of an internal market as described in §1 of this Article, and Article 26 TFEU.