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Mod Chip Raids In Perspective
GamePolitics has extensive coverage on the aftermath of this past week's Federal raids on suspected modchippers. There were numerous negative reactions to the action here on the site, and your comments were not alone. Many commenters at the site Dvorak Uncensored expressed similar frustration and disbelief at the federal government's priorities. As stated on the site's original post: "Are you kidding me? With drug dealers everywhere, murder, porous borders, terrorism the Feds are concerned about game mods?? Holy crap. Next I supposed they will be cracking heads over unlocked phones. Great." Meanwhile, one of the raided men is now without any electronics whatsoever as a result of the search and seizure, and feeling very much alone. Another man has (more seriously) been barred from seeing his girlfriend and daughter, and has been reduced to sleeping in his car. As he puts it: "I would like to formally thank Microsoft and Nintendo for cracking down on the little guy with a soldering iron in his garage, rather than going after the people that are responsible for the bootlegs being available."
As a software writer, I say if it's worth playing it's worth buying.
A completely different matter is if the game is unavailable to you. For example, I don't mind it too much if someone without a CC and no way to send me money "pirates" my software. He would not have bought it either, so why bother?
Actually, most of my software is free. I don't believe in inconveniencing my customer with copy protection and content crippling. Instead, I offer support to paying customers, and generally, it pays off. I have a few customers who didn't "buy" the software but copied it, then thought it might be a good idea to have access to the developer to get some new features.
I just don't know how this business model should work with games.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2007 SourceForge, Inc." There is copyright law. There is patent law. There is trademark law. There is trade secret law. The letter of the law in the United States does not recognize these four areas of law as some sort of monolithic "intellectual property" regime. They remain separate, and for a good reason: they are more different than similar in rationale, in scope, and in duration.
No thanks. I would rather not move to a country that has 4 security cameras for every person. Heck you guys are even adding capabilities that allow the cameras to talk back. It just seems a bit Orwellian...
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it