Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo To Take On Piracy In 3-D
crimeandpunishment writes "Nintendo says when its new handheld game device with 3-D technology comes out, it will have beefed-up anti-piracy measures. For obvious reasons, the company is keeping tight-lipped on the specifics. Nintendo President Satoru Iwata says they're not only concerned about software piracy, but also a growing tolerance for it. He said, 'We fear a kind of thinking is become widespread that paying for software is meaningless.'"
I'm kind of hesitant to reply. I see a kind of discrepancy, but I'm not quite sure how to explain it, or how to rectify it. So I'm just going to do my best to describe what I see.
As it stands, buying software is kind of like buying music. And neither is really anything like buying, for example, cake. While a lot of slashdotters support Software as a Service, very few, if any, would support Music as a Service. Why? We want to own media content, but we don't really care about owning software, just using it. But both are very similar. We can't ever actually own either. Other people own copyrights or patents on them. In both cases, when we "buy" the product, we're actually just buying a license to use that product. We don't own the product, we just have a license to use it under certain conditions. Same goes for games.
Now I've just described what IS the case, not what OUGHT to be the case. I don't know what the case ought to be. On the one hand, I hate not being able to copy my music across devices. I hate having to be connected to the internet to be able to play a certain game. On the other hand, people who create useful/entertaining/valuable things should be compensated for it, if they so wish.
SaaS solves the problem by giving control to the software publishers. The client only gets to use the software when he pays for it, and on the publisher's terms. Would the same model applied to music or games not work? Why wouldn't it work? Is it just a conceptual problem (i.e., we have this idea that we should "own" music or games that we pay for)? What if it was marketed appropriately (i.e., just honestly tell people that they're simply paying for a license to play the game or listen to music on the licenser's terms, instead of implying that paying for it = owning it), would that solve the problem?
Thinking about all of this is making my head hurt. I have no idea what the actual solution should be. There are arguments to be made on every side, and I'm not in a particularly good position to make any of those arguments. I just wanted to get the conversation started.
What are the benefits and drawbacks of SaaS? How would that be fundamentally different from MaaS or GaaS?