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Game Industry Pushes Back Against Efforts To Restore Gameplay Servers (arstechnica.com)
Kyle Orland reports via Ars Technica: A group of video game preservationists wants the legal right to replicate "abandoned" servers in order to re-enable defunct online multiplayer gameplay for study. The game industry says those efforts would hurt their business, allow the theft of their copyrighted content, and essentially let researchers "blur the line between preservation and play." Both sides are arguing their case to the U.S. Copyright Office right now, submitting lengthy comments on the subject as part of the Copyright Register's triennial review of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Analyzing the arguments on both sides shows how passionate both industry and academia are about the issue, and how mistrust and misunderstanding seem to have infected the debate.
Even if they can't do anything with their code, they refuse to let go. And when the copyright finally expires sometime next century, no one will be alive who remembers the game and no hardware exists which contains the code. Such is life with digital ephemera.
The idea of "owning the means to play" was one of the key changes in gaming industry. The entire concept of multiplayer on modern consoles is predicated upon this principle, and with windows 10, PC gaming is headed in the same direction.
Not giving players servers they could control was just one step on this progression.
we are no longer purchasing a perpetual license for the use of the software (in this case, the game). Instead, we are renting the game on the publishers terms, Once the publisher decides to no longer to support the auth. servers to host the game sessions, the license is no longer valid. If this is their advertised business model, would there still be such a backlash from the gamers?
Didn't Turbine explicitly say they'd be happy to let players run their own servers when Asheron's Call went down for good, but them WB lawyered up and acted like the assclowns they really are?
Copyright was introduced to allow authors a temporary monopoly on their works (something pretty much unheard of before then), in order to encourage creation and the proliferation of creative works. The point was not to give authors complete control over their works.
So it seems only fair that a cultural work is free for all if the author chooses to no longer sell it. And that would include running servers for discontinued games. Offer the server or let others. And in that light, the argument that people running servers for older games would compete with newer similar games offered by the studio, is interesting. If there is a lot of interest in the older game, would it not be profitable for the company to keep its servers up? And if there is only interest in the older game because it would be free, wouldn’t that mean that most of those players would not pony up the cash to play the new one, with only a small resulting loss of sales?
Of course I know that copyright has been perverted far beyond its original intent. But whatever.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
So resurrecting abandoned servers -- which means that people can't play those games -- would hurt their business?
This means one of two things:
1. They're lying
2. Their new games suck so badly that players would instantly drop them for the older versions.
Either way, not a good thing for them to say...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
No, it means that people can play those games. They don't want that.
Not quite, but it will mean some people play the older games without the revenue from that going into their pockets. This (a) could reduce new-game purchases and/or play, and (b) means that abandoning software (something they all do) implies that they are abandoning the rights to that software, an idea that scares them silly, because their entire business model is based upon providing a temporary product that they have complete control over so they can make you buy again, and again, and again until your patience finally runs out.
I am 100% in favor of the idea that if the software developer stops supporting the software, they lose ALL rights to controlling its use by the people who purchased it. If they want the benefits from providing a thing, then they have to support that thing. Support gone? Benefits gone.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This is an interactive medium. If it's not playable, it's not fucking preserved! That's not blurry at all!
For example, why spend time and money on Dungeon Keeper for mobile when the old PC Dungeon Keeper is infinitely better; or why waste your time on Destiny 2 or 3 or whatever the next clusterfuck will be called, if someone else is maintaining the original Destiny servers.
Wasn't one of the key reasons for copyright to enrich the public wealth of culture by encouraging the creation of artistic works to eventually be released into the public domain by granting time-limited exclusivity to the creator? Doesn't its use, now, to keep artistic works out of the public domain and, effectively, cause them to cease to exist, fly in the face of the spirit of copyright? On those grounds alone, the gaming industry should be given a swift kick in the ass by the courts; and I say this as someone who makes his entire living on copyright law.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Not only has Sony (now Daybreak) not run Project 1999 into the ground, they took the unusual step of officially endorsing it in 2015.
This is quite a change from their attitude a decade earlier, when they forced Winter's Roar, a customized emulated server, to shut down.
As a former City of Heroes player, all I can say is Fuck You ESA.
I read the internet for the articles.
Democracy in context of modern western state is a system of electing political representative based on established ruleset in a democratic fashion.
I'm genuinely confused as to why you think that overwhelming majority of Western nations are "a farce". Most Western states don't actually have a two party system, and have prime minister rather than president as the political top job that leads the country. Which means that these people are elected by far fewer than a quarter of people in the nation.
And there's nothing farcical about it. The best part about Western style liberal democracy is that pluralism of opinions is what results in the outcome, and that whoever gets to the top must secure sufficient support from the political representatives of the populace who are in turn elected in a democratic vote by their constituents.
If only there was some consumer protection law that requires a product guaranteed to last at least for a reasonable life cycle of said product... For software running on a supported computer, this would be infinite, as the computer itself is more likely to decay compared to the software running on it.
Speaking of decaying multiplayer, even old games such as Doom, Quake, and related didn't stop working simply because some multiplayer master server went down. If only modern developers knew how to implement that feature as well...
Under no circumstances whatsoever should copyright be usable to deprive the public of access to something that has already been published. Why? Because loss of access to information and culture leads straight back into the dark ages.
How fragile must these companies be if a gaming museum operating a private server on a closed network is a threat to their bottom line?
If the museum were operating a private server on the public internet and letting just anyone log in and play then maybe they'd have a valid argument.
Maybe these companies should just make a deal with the gaming museum's "Hey, want to host our old servers for us? You do all the support and pay for all the upkeep, and you can let however many people you want play on them provided you charge them a subscription fee and give us our cut. Oh, and you're not allowed to change any of the code or the assets (cause you're a museum and we're only giving you this 'deal' for the sake of historical preservation)."
Democracy in context of modern western state is a system of electing political representative based on established ruleset in a democratic fashion.
You are correct. But there is a problem and it was identified by Harvard University that what we see, as the result of the Great Recession, is excessive fragmentation in political parties. What that means is that due to that fragmentation, Congress is not effectively making decisions because there is SIGNIFICANT political in-fighting. This results in the, for all intents and purposes, indecisive lawmaking that we have observed for some time in Congress that citizens are frustrated with. In that context, Democracy actually doesn't work. It results in an indecisive Congress that does nothing instead of something. I don't know what the solution to that problem is other than to ride out the transition while the Conservative and Liberal parties redefine themselves. The Great Recession significantly altered America and Western Europe.
If you're interested, here is the Harvard Lecture entitled "Globalization and the Backlash of Populism" by Mark Blyth on the subject.
We'll make great pets
The electoral college was /not/ designed to reduce the voting power of the majority of people, it was designed to ensure that the states had voting rights relative to their population.
Do you have something you can cite that shows this, because it's not my understanding, and it doesn't even make sense.
A popular vote ensure that the states had voting rights relative to their population. More population, more votes.
My understanding (possibly misguided) was that the electoral college was designed to ensure that states with less population still had at least some voice in the decision making.
I know this is slashdot. I will probably be downvoted in flames as a capitalist pig. Still, I want to give you the scoop from this side:
I am currently making an MMO. I will have a few servers that people can connect to.
Why don't I release a version of my server so people can run their own servers?
This is not my first game, and from experience I can tell you piracy is just rampant. By controlling the servers I don't have to worry about piracy anymore.
I can offer my game for free, which directly benefit my users, and support my game by having a built in vanity store. You can complete 100% of the game without paying a dime, but if you think those wings look pretty, fork a few bucks and support development. If I give the server away, I no longer have this revenue stream, and my servers will be competing with other people's servers and pirated servers. Thus it would be impossible for me to offer my game for free.
Now, Ideally the game will never die, I will keep developing it for ever. But let's say that it is not profitable, if I give away the code so people can run their own servers and I develop new games, I will end up competing with my own game. Worst, people will blame me for bugs, or their kids purchased something by accident. I will end up dragged into support even though I won't be making money.
Moreover, people might perceive my game as dead whether justified or not. They might decide to sue me to release the server. Now I have to deal with a lawsuit because I made a game.
So yes, forcing me to give away my servers now or in the future will hurt me.
It's actually called the oligarchy of the electoral college ignoring the voters.
As far as I can tell, almost every Electoral College voter actually voted the way the general populace in his/her district voted. There were seven EC voters who voted differently from their state. Seven out of 531. Not much faithlessness there.
If you want to complain, complain about the "winner take all" that almost (almost, because they don't have to, and some don't) every state uses to decide its electoral vote. I know people are all up in arms about the "popular vote," but the United States is a confederation of 50 states, not a giant conglomeration of 323m people. Each state votes. Moving the EC away from WTA would cause the EC vote to more closely resemble the overall popular vote anyway.