[salawat]

It's hard to respect the rights of someone who is willing to sacrifice yours to ensure theirs.

That isn't even just a software thing. It's a fundamental problem of civil life; backed by willingness/asymmetry in means to practically apply force.

I'd gladly pay for a good game. I am very much less likely to pay for a game I cannot try. I will not do SaaS games anymore on principle. The business model may be the most advantageous in terms of operating game studios, but I'm done handing over information to third parties, and being left high and dry when they decide they want to fundamentally change things/not host infrastructure anymore. In that sense, I treat it like any other piece of software I rely on. If I can't mirror/host/modify/distribute/fork source; I'm not terribly interested.

For me a game is a tool. It is a tool through which wonder and joy can be experienced at the myriad of things we can coerce a computer into doing. Tell me I can't do anything with it except pay for it and let it take up space on my drive, and you've lost a sale.

Then again, as an astute architect once pointed out to me; clearly I'm not the intended audience; and the number of people committed to servicing the audience I'm a part of is few and far between. This will likely remain the status quo until the end of my days; and it isn't even like I've made a contribution to the space as of yet; so I tend to suffer in silence as the sinner with a rock should.

When the day comes that I do, (especially in the unlikely event the game is actually good) I may come down off the fence and make the debate space intolerable for game-industry status quo people.

[Silhouette]

It's hard to respect the rights of someone who is willing to sacrifice yours to ensure theirs.

Indeed. So how do you think game developers felt watching their hard work get ripped by pirates who would offer absurd rationalisations to justify breaking the law and taking something that other people spent a lot of time and money to make without paying for it?

I'd gladly pay for a good game. I am very much less likely to pay for a game I cannot try.

That is your prerogative. In days gone by, before online distribution was the norm and other strategies became viable, game developers used to release demos that featured, say, the first couple of levels of a game so you could try it out. This is hardly a new thing, and it's never something that many game developers were against.

If I can't mirror/host/modify/distribute/fork source; I'm not terribly interested.

Again, that's your prerogative. I actually have a lot of sympathy for this view; at my businesses, we adopt a very similar strategy in avoiding SaaS for anything critical to our business operations.

But we have to realise that we are in a relatively small minority here. As long as the online systems or DRM or whatever are reasonably transparent, most people simply don't care. As you say, the likes of us are not the intended audience of these products.

[som33]

American IP law was alway writtein in a one sided way to deny ownership rights to the general public, what about big media and game companies lobbying away the public domain?

So I won't feel anything for people like you and your pro drm arguments, none of this would be talked about pre-internet because the only way to give us software was to give us all the files.

The modern game industry is committing fraud and stealing software on a mass scale because of the criminally underhanded IP laws.

Steam/uplay/origin were forced into existence, no one wanted them and were imposed on the population because game consumers were 100's of miles away.

The internet is just one sized world computer and programmers and ceo's know they can now issue commands down the wire to impose their will on the computer illiterate.

[Silhouette]

your pro drm arguments

I don't know what a pro-DRM argument looks like here. Do you think an argument that solving a problem where two huge groups have each been abused by a significant fraction of the other group over a multi-decade period in a way that affects everyone's lives and billions in economic activity might need more nuance than giving one side everything it wants and putting the other side in front of a firing squad is pro-DRM?

none of this would be talked about pre-internet

Most of this wasn't very relevant pre-Internet. You couldn't see a new work you'd spent the equivalent of $100,000,000 developing with a team of hundreds over a period of years being cracked and then copied to millions of people within a matter of hours pre-Internet.

In those days, sure, you got all the files, but you also probably got asked to read a word from a certain page in the manual or something when you loaded the game as a crude but surprisingly effective form of copy protection. You couldn't just look anything you needed to know up online because that sort of "online" didn't exist back then. Sometimes people did distribute cracked versions of games, but again they didn't circulate rapidly among the community because they had to be individually copied and shared around on physical media.

Using the capabilities of the Internet to counter widespread abuse facilitated by those same capabilities is hardly a radical strategy. Absent a radical global overhaul of IP law (which I'd fully support, but I don't see happening any time soon) relying on technological solutions to protect itself is all the creative industry has.

Clearly you have strong views on this, so how would you resolve the impasse in a way that better respects the rights of consumers without obliterating all viable business models for creators?

[som33]

>Clearly you have strong views on this, so how would you resolve the impasse in a way that better respects the rights of consumers without obliterating all viable business models for creators?

The creators need to get fucked because piracy was never an issue, EA, Microsoft and activison became huge companies before they started coding their software in criminal underhanded ways enabled by the internet. The internet has merely enabled creators to steal from the public because the public can't reach them, that's how we ended up with steam/drm.

Your pro creator stance, is a non argument. When steam was released I didn't know the FTC existed or I would have called the FTC and blew the whistle on the fact that Valve, EA, activison, and sony were lying to the public selling them stolen games, and RPG's (aka mmo's).

Any client-server piece of software, mean's your being robbed, there's no rational reason not to get complete set of files that runs locally on your machine. The end game for microsoft and other companies was to kill the idea of local applications users own and control (aka get rid of everyones basic human rights to own their shit).

You don't seem to get the entire tech industry is run by criminals, you're trying to apply capitalistic idea of property rights to ELECTRONS, it's impossible to make files uncopyable, as it is impossible to make water unwet unless you physically put defects into the hardware and software or hack it (aka encrypt files and basically hack your own software).

Big media companies have gained huge profits by fraud (aka stealing software by taking advantage of a compute illiterate public).

Valve, and the entire industry is criminal and corrupt as fuck... it's literally selling you incomplete programs.

Why the hell should anyone need permission from your a rack of servers colocated somewhere to use their videogames? That's feudalism right there.

Your whole worldview is based on laws written in country who's citizenry are idiots and who've been living in a lawless oligarchy for 2 centuries.

Every time IP law came up for extension big business always extended it and the public domain lost, you don't live in a democracy.

So trying to argue with you, would be trying to argue with an illiterate peasant who has no idea that he has been giving a free pass to a corrupt lawless oligarchy to steal all human culture and lock it down behind bullshit one sided intellectual property laws that were specifically written to deny basic human rights to the citizens..

AKA the right to OWN what you buy, software licensing should have never gotten the ground, and both businesses and consumers should have gotten full property rights transfer to anything they buy.

You don't get software licensing was a one sided con because our christian grandmothers and grandpa's had no idea how technology worked, it was magic for 99% of the public which is why silicon valley got to write laws in such a criminally human rights denying way to begin with.

If anything the creators have been stealing from the public domain for two centuries, it's on people like you why we should believe someone who is defending the rich, their big media companies and their lobbyists from removing basic rights everyone should have - the right to own what they buy outright, the right to repair it, the right to modify it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/...