The Lik-Sang Saga Continues

The sage of Lik-Sang has continued with Dan Gillmor's recent visit to the region. He and Alex Kampl met and talked for a while. The comparasions are good ones - and ones that are clearly enough drawn that everyone should see the loss of their rights.

Comments

Re:Software

[altgrr]

Have they even evaluated just doing worldwide releases and saving the cash? I mean really, the days before macromedia didn't kill off the movie industry, and the easily available radio shack macromedia disabler didn't kill em off either.

The fact of the matter is, as long as there is a disabling technology (Macrovision et al), there will be a re-enabling technology (Macrovision Disabler) which renders this useful again.

The reason why there is so much money in piracy is because the entertainment industry is creating opportunities for piracy to make money. If DVDs weren't (a) encrypted, (b) so expensive, then there wouldn't be so much of a call for ways round the problem, and these semi-legal* systems wouldn't have to be made.

*semi-legal: Illegality under US law is constantly under doubt; such actions in other countries are often legal.

Re:Make the Xbox mods *clearly* for Linux use

[IanA]

No one would make a significant profit on a modchip designed only for using Linux.

95%, at least, of modchips are used for backing up games/getting around regional protection/playing warez copies, and a defense for that type of usage (esp. warez) would not be feasible imho.

Re:Their 'rights'?

[lvdrproject]

Perhaps you're not quite as familiar with games as you go on. Ignoring the whole piracy issue for the moment, cheat devices have many uses beyond just "i'm going to buy/rent this game so i can beat it in 5 minutes and impress my friends". Firstly, there are some of us (me included) who purchase LEGITIMATE Japanese hardware/software. I, for instance, purchased a Sony PocketStation a year or so ago. Many of the games that featured PocketStation support in Japan (a certain Street Fighter game, Alpha 3, i think, being the most popular example) had that support removed, or should i say hidden, from the American retail version. How did i (and others living in America) get to play Street Fighter on their PocketStation? We used a GameShark to enable the feature. What was the disrespect in this case was not our use of the GameShark, but rather the American team that fucked with the original Japanese design. This "disrespect" can be seen in hundreds upon hundreds of Japanese games, where the American translaters/localisers/what-have-you have come in and stripped the games of their original meaning and/or features. But that's another point entirely.

The Japanese software/hardware thing aside, there are other uses for cheat devices. Personally, when i buy a game (my favourite genre being RPGs), i play it as a challenge, an interactive story that desires my hand in completing it. However, once i've beaten the game, and got the satisfaction of completing it myself, i may want to play it again. When i play Final Fantasy VIII for the six hundredth time, am i playing it to relive the billion annoying random battles that i had to spend hours on defeating insignificant enemies? No, i'm playing it to relive the story. Using a cheat device here to maybe boost my attack strength, or give me all the spells, or give me quick level gain, is not disrespecting the developers. I paid my money, i got the satisfaction of beating it once. Now i want to relive the story, and i don't want to be bothered by the less-than-stellar parts of the game.

Besides that. This isn't the way i would do it it, but if someone felt so inclined to purchase a $60 video game and cheat the whole way through, fine. Let them. They paid 60 fucking dollars for it. Maybe the people that are ultimately "behind" the game will object, saying that that's not what it was intended for... but to Nintendo, Sony, Square, Sega, etc., IT'S JUST ANOTHER 60 DOLLARS.

As for piracy... there's two sides to this. Mod chips != piracy. More often than not, they do, yes. But this is like the whole RIAA thing and disabling CDs on computers and all that jazz. Just because some people rip the CDs that they buy and distribute them to millions of people doesn't mean the legit people like me, who rip their music to play on their PC because they don't feel like swapping through hundreds of CDs, should have to pay for that. The same goes for pirating. Just because there's a bunch of pirates out there ripping off Sony for their games doesn't mean i shouldn't be allowed to buy an import game and play it in my modded PlayStation. The money goes back to Sony anyway, why does it matter?

You've picked up some misconceptions about mod chips, ace. Not everybody is a bad guy.

:Lav

Re:Licensing has gone too far.

[surprise_audit]

Sadly, though, that will never happen as long as vendors continue to get away with selling you the same license over and over again so that you can access the product on different media.

It would indeed be great to buy (the right to watch) a movie on a DVD, and for little or no extra cost, be able to copy it to video tape to watch elsewhere in the house. For such a future to exist, all your entertainment media systems would have to talk to each other to determine that any given "license" wasn't being used in more places in your house than you have licenses for.

Better yet, instead of multiple DVD, VCR and CD players around the house, have a central server that "checks out" a movie to the living room TV and won't allow it to play in the bedroom until it finishes, or stops, in the living room.