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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.
Everywhere we look, all we can see is licensing. Regardless of whether the product be a tangible item (such as a games console), or a service (your phone connection, a piece of software), there are license agreements telling you what you may and may not do with it.
Is there going to come a point where we will not actually own anything, merely own a license to use it? Do we really want to owe our souls to the capitalist companies we work for?
Perhaps I'm exaggerating here, but I think it's a future that, currently, is coming for us, and one that I certainly don't want to live in.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
"The issue is front and center in an obscure but important legal battle under way in Hong Kong. The three major video-game console makers -- Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft -- have used the courts against a seller of hardware modification chips, often called ``mod chips,'' that give the boxes more capabilities than the makers allow when sold off the shelf."
I wonder how the amount of money spent on legal fees compares to the $$ lost from just allowing mod chips? Is this just a principle thing?
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.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
A lot of these prosecutions seem to hinge on a modification being marketed in a fashion that leaves its intended purpose open to interpretation.
While lawyers will of course always oil the wheels of litigatation regardless of commonsense, morality, ethics, or the laws of physics, one should at least make it a little bit harder for them wherever possible.
For example, in the case of the Xbox mod chip, if a company created and marketed a device with the single and sole purpose of allowing Linux to be booted natively on powerup, and supported this purpose with Xbox Linux distros on its website plus all the relevant FAQs, and with extra features in the bootstrap making the purpose plain (eg. kernel boot parameter storage) as well as displaying a prominent intended-use disclaimer, this would make litigating against the company significantly harder than at present.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The article talks compares this to auto makers authorizing repair only at specific places. Such a practice will be shot down immediately. But in case of the e-world, the big cartels have hyped this up as a specific domain where rules are different. And the law makers are also beginning to see this as such. Unless we break this mindset of the e-world as something different and obscure such practices will go unnoticed. This will keep happening until the common man, the silent majority does not start using infotech in daily life. For example if such a practice came in a budget automobile, there would be an outcry, because many many people use it, but in case of DVD, a small percentage of the users will ever go to Europe to Buy DVDs. We need to go a long way.. and going by the incresing restrictions on internet.. this will take a long time. No matter how hard the detracters try, this revolution will come and nobody can do anything about it :)
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The car analogy at the beginning of the story is more true than the writer knows. Car manufacturers did attempt to lock car buyers into extra-pricey dealer service, and the US Congress did react by passing the Magnusson-Moss act. Not only did this "unlock the hood", it also fixed things so that you wouldn't violate the warranty just by doing your own oil change.
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.
Lik-Sang has more than mod chips, GBA dev kits and such. They also sell the afterburner internal light for the the GBA and the excellent Gamepark GP32. This little handheld game has a much bigger screen than the GBA, has a 113Mhz ARM 7 CPU and uses SMC cards instead of cartridges.
Yes, a Linux port is under way. Anybody know of an existing Linux SMC driver?
Actually, it's rather easy. In one case you are being granted rights that you otherwise wouldn't have. That's the GPL. It's like saying I'll give you free reign in my house if you promise to clean up after yourself. You come in and don't clean I have the right to bitch.
The other case has companies trying to artificially remove rights that you already have under current law, that being the right to use something you've purchased however you see fit. That includes breaking out the soldier and a flash-rom you bought and having fun.
To summerise - I give you extra rights with some conditions and you break them == justified bitching. You try to take away rights I already have == justified bitching.
jello.
aka aron.
... but it doesn't. Companies have used their power over the legislative process to get the best of all worlds... for them. So now we can neither (legally) copy our own software/music NOR get the kind of backup and exchange service you mention.
So I think I can understand why the original poster was a little disgusted with licensing.
Sean
The analogy given in the article of a car manufacturer dictating where the car may be repaired is fairly good, but maybe this analogy would be even better.
The primary purpose of a DVD player or a DVD/CD-based games console is to play media. The primary purpose of a car is to transport passengers.
Consider then the uproar that would be caused if a US car manufacturer only allowed US nationals to be transported in its cars, only Japanese nationals in Japanese-manufactured cars, and so on. That is the direct counterpart to DVD and game regionalization. It's wrong, regardless of the economic reasoning behind it.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The sage of Lik-Sang has continued with Dan Gillmor's recent visit to the region.
This has gone too far!! I have never before heard of the sage of Lik-Sang, but I am sure he is a member of a venerable monastic order. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo should stick to the world of electronics and leave the sage alone.
Ooh, unless this is about the herb. Then I don't care what they do.
*Sigh* I'm gonna have to read the article, aren't I....