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Lik-Sang To Take On The Big 3?
kableh writes "According to a press release on Lik-Sang's website, the gaming accessory company has new management, and is prepared to mount a strong defense in their upcoming lawsuit against Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. "Just a few days after having received High Court Orders not allowing us to sell Mod Chip products for the Playstation 2 and Flash Linker products for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance, Lik Sang realized that the powers of those three multi-billion dollar corporations are simply infinite compared to the budgets and resources businesses like Lik Sang have available. Their legal actions have been hurting our customers and our business a lot in the last couple of weeks, so that we have finally decided to let somebody else take over Lik-Sang.com and solely concentrate on the lawsuit", says Alex Kampl, Director of Lik Sang International Limited."
"Their legal actions have been hurting our customers and our business a lot"
That's something you don't see often - they mentioned customers first. Lik-Sang really are great, and I'm personally glad to see them sticking it to the man.
Large corporations have too much power.
Sueing only Microsoft is virtualy impossible, sueing Nintendo, Sony AND Microsoft is going to be quite a suicidal task... how much money do they have to burn?
If at first you don't succeed, then sky diving definitely isn't for you.
Hopefully, it can become a huge PR boost to take on a big powerful company and let the common people know more about these sort of conflicts. That can act as extra incentive for small companies to stick up for their rights and further bring attention to these problems.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
We had developed a special proprietary media for the GameCube, which makes piracy all but impossible. There is also no internal hard drive to act as storage, either. Therefore, you don't see much GameCube warez or modchips floating about, compared to the PS2 and Xbox scene.
MS and Sony, with their resources, should have invested time and money to develop proprietary media as well.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
Which law, the law that says once you bought something it's yours to do whatever you like to it? It's this transformation from purchase to "licensing" that's very obviously against the spirit, not only of the law, but also the spirit of capitalism as well.
Hmm, while I do not own a playstation, xbox, or anything newer than my "classic" nintendo. I don't see anything wrong with a company producing a chip that I can put into something I purchased. If I purchased the ps2 or something, I would expect to be able to open it up and plug whatever damn piece of electronics into it that I want.
It could be that I am missing some grand point here since I haven't been following all of this very well. It just seems to me that some company is creating a product that allows me to void my warranty on a piece of hardware that *I* own. If I buy a Toasmaster brand toaster and a company makes a Toastmaster hack that connects my toaster to the internet I expect to be able to mod my own toaster.
Am I missing something?
Is charging $200 for an American operating system honest?
Yes it is. When you consider the years and years of research, planning, development, testing, documentation, and support that comes along with that pricetag, it seems very fair to me.
Microsoft products all have a similar look and feel and the interfaces are intuitive. That's much more than one can say for competing products. The cost of user training alone to use three dozen different GNU-ish applications would far outweight the licensing costs to obtain Windows. Teaching a secretary how to download, configure, and compile the latest version of OpenOffice via a command line interface would probably take a good 3 or 4 weeks (months?) of training.
If you don't wish to use the best product of its type on the market, that's your prerogative. But doing so would be shunning capitalism.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
If you made a copy of it beforehand, and had it stored in a safe place, then yes, you are entitled to a free backup.
However, your analogy isn't very good. A better one would be, if car companies behaved like the media and software industry, you wouldn't be allowed to make copies of your car keys. Lose your key and you have to buy a new car, at full price.
Umm, would that be the same American ingenuity that eschewed strong copyright laws for the first, oh, 200 years of its existence? That used protectionist trade barriers to develop its own industries and then denies them to third world countries now that they're strong enough to crush upstarts?
Beyond that, if I buy a product, I think I have a right to modify it if I choose to do so. I own the bloody thing. Imagine the uproar is Ford decided you couldn't change the mags on their cars anymore.
iopha
Here's my take...
In the Napster case, we saw the defendants argue for their software as a means to distributed free/independent/other music. I think that's what Lik-Sang has to argue here; the ability to play foreign games.
However, in both cases we see another, huge aspect: the ability to distributed copyrighted music (Napster) and the ability to play pirated games (mod-chips).
Do we really have to wonder how this one will turn out? Yeah, Lik-Sang might have a minor issue here, but when the product is being used by so many people to do much illegality, I don't see how any logical person can permit its existence.
And have you thought how evil are Microsofts, Nintendos and other large corporations before stating: "What happened to making an honest living?"
Your patriotism is raw as you didn't think about this...
As if you would take some care about how certain corporations came into these megapredatory enterprises, you would just put your patriotism in first place and ask when someone would be able to make an honest living again.
It is not necessary to leave the US to see what certain large corporations did to Amrican ingenuity and innovation. Where are all those small companies that rised the M$ DOS world into the main trend in computing? Where is the shareware world? Where is the chance to rise a profit from a brilliant idea? What happened to Stack, old Borland, Novell and other major palyers in the market? What happened to the ancient Evil Empire of Big Blue which was a menace but still was full of innovation?
There is one thing. Ten years ago we had lots of major players: Microsoft, IBM, AMD, Intel, Novell, Symantec, Oracle, Borland, Lotus and several others. Today we have two sides: the *NIX world vs Micro$oft domination. Some may say this is natural, that there should be some congragation. However it is well known that this was achieved not by natural events and free market but rather by predatory politics. And US courts showed that this was a fact, no matter the half agreements that, for more than 10 years, US governments had with Redmond.
Before looking at Asian expertises, look at your own country and your own countrymen who cannot no longer make an honest living as before. Because you have no worser experts on stealing, distributing and profiting from hard American's work.
One thing to think about...
Microsoft is not Sega, Microsoft has _DEEP_ pockets and they clearly said it, they are willing to loose money for some time to gain market share. Microsoft can afford to loose $1B on one product for its launch, sega wasn't able too.
It's actually the publishers, not the developers, that are hurt by piracy. So, unless a company is publishing their own game, piracy doesn't make a lick of difference to them, they still get paid.
Such a small percentage of console games even use mod chips that I doubt the percentage revenue loss by pirates has even hit a mark higher than a fraction of a percent.
Piracy may be wrong, but so is going after after someone who makes a product that is used just as often for legitimate reasons. (especially with no legal basis for doing so)
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Within the next year and a half, what percentage of computer users and gamers do you expect to own DVD burners? Of these people, how many are willing to spend the money and effort necessary to obtain media for these devices just to play pirated video games? The few people I know of who own DVD burners use them for backing up large amounts of data, not for copying DVDs. The DVD piracy war will hardly even scratch the current generation of game systems. It probably won't even come into being until the X-Box 2, Playstation 3 and the Nintendo SmallerMoreColorfulExpensiveThing are already out.
With the PS2, it may be different, simply because the console actually can play CDs, which can be burned fairly easily, but with the X-Box and Gamecube, it's highly impractical, even with a mod chip, to pirate games. Gamecube mods, which consist of a switch and a couple of wires, are about region coding. The X-Box mods are all about running unlicensed software, like Linux and MPlayer.
The way Lik-Sang is being attacked is not about piracy, but about control. Microsoft doesn't want to lose $250 per console (I've heard it takes ten game sales to recoup the loss from a sold X-Box), and Nintendo doesn't want people to break their market segmentation. Whether you believe these companies should lose money this way is irrelevant; do you really think we ought to be left holding the bag for their flawed business models? I want my X-Theater-Box, and if Microsoft really thinks it's a good idea to sell a $550 console for $250, then they need a reality check.
Well, it depends where it is located. IANAL, but from what I understand in Australia, they'd have one leg (Sony lost a case on the de-region chips). In hong kong I believe they don't even acknoledge copyright law, and in the US it will probably get DCMAed (and I imagine they would try that even for the de-regioning chips). So in other words, if they fight it out in the US, bye bye Lik-Sang.
The real reason all 3 companies are sueing Lik-sang is becuase they want to keep their regional game monopolies regional. They sell more expensive in the US than in europe, or vice versa, or they may sell then in japan for 3x as much as in amercia. It's mostly statistics and how they can extract the optimum amount of money. As we all know the lower the price of an item, the more it well sell and vice versa, the more expensive an item is the less it will sell. Throwing all other factors aside, you'll notice that when you plot a graph of this you get a nice curve. Find the optimum point ont he curve, and estemate for those other factors, do some tricky math, and you find metroid prime should be selling at $49.99 in europe and $59.99 in the USA to make the maximum amount of money, even though they are the same game. So, they regionalize their systems, which is inexpensive, and they increase their profits by fixing the market price of their units. Illegally, mind you. Then, some guy comes along with a soddering iron, figures out how to bypass it. Some company starts selling chips becuase the guy figured he can save $20-40 a game by buying it in europe, or some european can get a game 5 months in advance of it's european release, and you start having problems with those statistics. In short, shops would literally spring up overnight to do this kind of thing if retailers didn't think they'd get the full wraith of hades forced upon them. Another thing. The system is designed to play the game while the disk is in. They don't make nay fancy carrieing cases or fancy protective gear for the game when it's on CD. So, over time, the CD will become damaged to the point where it has to be rebaught. By making sure the person can't play the game in the future, and by making sure that you can force people to buy a new game when the original breaks, you can further increase your profit margins. Then when someone questions them, they pay off the reporter or person, or tell them that they do it to ward off piracy then deny the fact that, statistically, they are completly incorrect. They then release the statistics at the end of the year, round off to some big number, and then publish it for joe-smoe's kid to use in his report. So no, it's not hard work anymore. It's the fact that one guy is good at something, and another guy who isn't as good decided to take legal action so he can compete. Game designers, on the other hand, I have a certain respect for. They do work hard and I bet they enjoy every moment of it.
Candy-Coated Knowledge