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GOG Launches FCKDRM To Promote DRM-Free Art and Media (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: GOG, the digital distribution platform for DRM-free video games and video, has launched a new initiative designed to promote content without embedded DRM. The platform aims to promote GOG and other companies with a similar ethos, including those offering DRM-free music, books, and video. "DRM-free approach in games has been at the heart of GOG.COM from day one. We strongly believe that if you buy a game, it should be yours, and you can play it the way it's convenient for you, and not how others want you to use it," GOG said in a statement. While Digital Rights Management is seen by many companies as necessary to prevent piracy, GOG believes that its restrictions are anti-consumer and run counter to freedoms that should exist alongside content ownership.
DRM is easily circumvented BS, harms legitimate users, and should be removed from the landscape.
aaaaaaa
Given the broad move towards content streaming, and Kindle Unlimited, I'm not hopeful that people will increasingly move towards ownership of what media they consume. Noone cares about DRM of Netflix streams because they accept that they can't do whatever they want with the stream. Steam now allows refunds, so if the DRM prevents the game from working, you can refund it. Legally it's the EULA and not the DRM that prevents you from owning your media, and that practice is a larger problem that doesn't seem to be going anywhere either.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The value of a product is by definition what someone else is willing to pay for it. Not your asking price. Not even how valuable you consider it. I treasure the wedding ring of my grandmother and wouldn't sell it for millions, even though the average jeweler would probably only pay a few 100 bucks for it. And that is actually the price I could sell it for, not a dime more.
The argument many companies field for DRM is that without, their product becomes easy to copy and hence worthless because it can be multiplied at the whim of the one holding it. What they fail to understand is what they're competing with. They are competing with the product being offered for free. Not legally, true, but for free. You cannot compete with 'free' on price. Unless you'd be willing to pay people to take your product, something that has rarely been done in history, at least without the added requirement to actually use it and pay that way in some other fashion.
What you can compete on is convenience and value. DRM now devalues your product, in the eyes of the customer. With DRM, I cannot easily transport it from my laptop to my desktop, I have to enter keys or insert some physical medium somewhere or, in its worst incarnation, I have to be online all the time and maybe can't even play sensibly the first few weeks after launch because the servers the DRM wants to connect to are overtaxed. These are all problems a cracked version does not have.
A cracked version of even the most fiendishly DRMified product can be used on any computer at any time by any person without jumping through any hoops. At worst it may even be that the buyer of a genuine copy cannot play because the DRM-Servers are not responding while someone who did not buy the game but instead got it from an illegal source can.
This is the main danger of DRM to your product. Because here is what happens: People talk with each other. User A who bought your product, and now cannot play, talks with User B who copied it, and who will show User A how to get a copy himself. User A doesn't even feel guilty because not only did he pay good money for a product he cannot use, he feels cheated by you and has exactly zero problem with a potentially existing conscience copying the game. He paid for it, so according to his moral attitude (and, frankly, probably almost everyone else's too) he has the right to use that game. This is how he learns that copying a game isn't that difficult.
Next time he omits the step that is of no value to him. I.e. buying the game that he then has to copy anyway to actually play it.
DRM damages your product in the eyes of the one paying for it, i.e. the one whose opinion about the value of a product actually matters. Whether you consider it more valuable with DRM is irrelevant.
Steam, GOG and various other online distribution channels have proven that people are willing to pay for games delivered with convenience and hassle-free. Knowing that you get the game you want quickly and easily, not having to store it locally while you don't play it, being able to transfer save games easily between computers and even to other players, a centralized modding repository and so on, these things are of value to people, and they convince them that they're better off paying a few bucks for a game rather than downloading what hopefully is the game, fiddling with it to make it work and then spend some more hours trying to figure out how to add mods or integrate someone else's save games.
Add value to your products and people will buy them. Remove value and people will find other ways to get them in a more valuable version.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Lol, RWNJ is delusional to the last.
Lock him up!
Lock him up!
Lock him up!
I'd like to think that people are moral enough to generally act in good faith when the other party is acting in good faith. I believe that applies to software and piracy. An example would be opening the source to products once they're essentially obsolete. Or require a one-time online activation when a product is installed, but releasing a patch to remove the need for online activation when the servers are taken offline.
Copyright length also needs to be shortened and be different depending on the type of work. Software tends to become obsolete very quickly relative to other works, so limit the copyright length to something like 15 years. Films and TV don't become obsolete as quickly, and there are TV shows that have run longer than 15 years. A copyright length of 30 years might be more reasonable, but after a time, such works still seem dated. Written works don't become obsolete in the same way as software and film so they probably deserve a longer copyright. Something like 50 years might be reasonable.
I suspect the only real solution is to reduce copyright lengths because too few businesses see the wisdom of acting in good faith and expecting customers to do the same. It's unfortunate.
Would you pirate from a business that pledged to open source a product a few years after the original release? I'd like to think most people would say no.
They manage to thrive, even though every one of their releases immediately ends up on the torrents and other channels to download.
That says more about the actual value of DRM than it does about piracy.
There are two problems with copyrights and related rights, and both aren't DRM.
The first problem is that the original meaning of the copyright contract - right to monopoly sales (and profits) for a LIMITED TIME in exchange for placing the work in the PUBLIC DOMAIN once the limited time is over - has been destroyed. The LIMITED MONOPOLY is today being called "intellectual property" and the effort to make it perpetual has only increased.
The second problem is that what was essentially a CIVIL matter - the violations of the LIMITED MONOPOLY, has now been turned into a CRIMINAL MATTER.
Thus, the society, which feeds the "IP lawyers" has been shafted twice. Once by giving up its rights on the "copyright" contract, and then by paying for its enforcement.
DRM is just the icing on the cake of misery we suffer at the hands of the "IP lawyers".
Just so you know, that post breaks the law.
No steam lock-down installer bullshit, no DRM, awesome games, great deals, an abundance of great old and new games, a website not built by complete morons ... All in all a very, very good e-commerce offering for digital goods.
This is how it should be done. I'll probably support their initiative for that reason alone.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Just so you know, nobody gives a shit. Bootlicker.
Am I the only one that thought someone was against dynamic random access memory?
Get a lawyer. Subpoena slashdot logs. Have at it. Out the nazi. Sue. Get judgement. Laugh. Or ignore the nazis. They are idiots.
The EULA is the only way you have any rights to the software *at all*.
Without a EULA, the software would be subject to the statutory rules of software copyright. In the United States, these rules carve out exceptions for the owner of a lawfully made copy to do the following:
- resell that copy (17 USC 109);
- copy the software into RAM to execute it (17 USC 117(a)(1)); and
- make private backup copies, but not distribute those copies to others (17 USC 117(a)(2)).
Well I'm gonna rile you up some more and point out that their emailadres is iwantto@fckdrm.com
It gets a chuckle out of me, and I haven't been a teenager in decades
It's called Digital Restrictions Management. Details matter.
I purchased Carmageddon TD2000. It was an expensive game when it came out. I had a pretty beefy computer back then (for the day) but the game play was so laggy that it was basically unplayable. It was so unplayable that I read the entire manual. I noticed something that stuck a note in my mind. There were two lines (don't remember the exact words so I am paraphrasing it) that were at odds of each other. The first said that the game is copy protected. The second said that you are entitled to make one back up copy of the game. They had an email address so I emailed them about it. I asked since I am allowed to make 1 legal backup copy, but the game is copy protected, how do I do it. I was shocked when I got a reply from them. It only had two words in the email (other than my quoted text). It just simply said "You dont". Pretty much summed up what corporate thinks of the people who buy their games....
I buy PC games from GOG. No GOG, or at least another DRM-free store, no sale.
If we want DRM to die, we have to change the supply/demand curve so that happens. It has to become a death knell to release your game without a DRM-free version, because people won't buy locked down shit. We have to support companies that release DRM-free games... which many are doing nowadays.
People need to stop this mentality that they need game X. You don't need it. It's a luxury item, and there are hundreds of other great games you can play instead. If you bend over and take it, companies will keep abusing you.
IT's basic econ. Reward what you want more of, and punish what you want less of. Support DRM-free everything in the marketplace, games, music, art, software, whatever. GOG has been doing the right thing by PC gamers for many years now.
And do the platform support that transfer?
In niche industries where each customer pays tens of thousands of dollars per user or small work-group for specialized software, DRM works.
However, the "rights management" is the contracts and the lawyers, and the "digital" is the large number of digits in the dollar amounts in the penalties laid out in the contracts. Severe violations can result in a lawsuit that can bankrupt the customer.
In such cases, the customer may even PREFER that software help enforce the contract to make it more difficult for a rogue employee to bankrupt the company through a license violation.
Much more common in such industries are is "hardware enforcement" where the software is useless without the hardware. I'm thinking things like million-dollar-medical devices. Where the software can run on ordinary PCs, it may be accompanied by a PC-add-on board or a "dongle" that runs some of the actual code from its own ROM even though that code could have been compiled to run on an ordinary PC. This makes piracy extremely difficult without either reverse-engineering or finding some way to read the ROM of the device.
A lawyer paying off a whore with money of his client to keep her mouth shut is one thing. It may be legal, it may be not, I don't know.
However, the same lawyer paying off a whore with his own money on behalf of a client to keep her mouth shut during an election campaign is, apparently, another. Unfortunately, the second is, it seems, defined by the law as illegal, and the lawyer will face scrutiny because of this, whether you call it an overreach or not.
But you know what's the saddest thing here? That the said lawyer learned about this the hard way and admitted guilt. You'd think he'd see it coming, having studied and practiced law, and would be able to defend himself.
If you are a lawyer and can't do your lawyer shit, I have as much sympathy for you as I'd have if you were a sysadmin who left his systems unpatched for years and then came to a spam filter's mailing list to bitch about being blocked.
...or at least Pence.
because I'm renting it. If there's something on Netflix I want enough to have it permanently I can buy it on DVD/Blue Ray and break the encryption to back it up.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Some time ago I thought to take a peek at GOG. After all, they where the site to go to for older, free games. So I picked one I thought I would like, and downloaded it.
What I got was an single-file executable installer. Why ? And whats wrong with any of the standard installers ?
Or better yet: a simple .ZIP (or alike) file. 'Cause most games do not even need to be installed (experience talking here).
The result is that I've stil got that installer, but refuse to run it on my game machine. (I thoroughly dislike them. From the moment I became aware that they where easily abused to also install unrelated and mostly unwanted "browser add-ons", or worse)
The rights of one party act as restrictions on others.
In DRM, the majority of people act as the restricted party, not the party with rights. Therefore, DRM is "digital restrictions management" for more parties than it is "digital rights management".
If I have the right to life, you are prohibited from killing me. If I control copyright on a work, you are prohibited from copying it without permission.
The prohibition of murder isn't quite the best example. In the case of copyright, far more parties are affected by the restrictions than enjoy meaningful exercise of the rights. This imbalance does not apply to the prohibition of murder.
A while back there was a discussion on how much effort Nintendo and others put in to make it difficult for people to play old games (Battletoads of course being a classic example of this) legally. If they would take a look at GOG they could see how they could do it, make money, and make the fans happy. There are plenty of games on there that date to the 90s (some even earlier) that people are happily paying small amounts of money for so they can play them on their newer PCs. Nindendo got close to this with Virtual Console but there were some glaring omissions - and of course it is close to shutting down for the WiiU.
Ask yourself this question; would you pay $5 to play your favorite 8 bit NES title on your newest Nintendo system? I know I would.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Nobody wants the next Lionsgate money-laundering movie falsification of history with 666 and triangles and all-seeing [pink] eye and other stupid bullshit all over the screen. Indie all the way. Media costs nothing now.
CD Project Red, The owners of GOG and makers of The Witcher games included a DRM related pun in the Witcher 3: Quoting from the Witcher 3's Wiki: "During the quest involving Sigo Buntz, Geralt must deactivate the DRM ("Defensive Regulatory Magicon") with the aid of the Gottfried's Omni-opening Grimoire, or GOG". :)
That was funny and not very subtle
No, DRM isn't just icing on the cake. It causes additional, new problems along a whole other dimension.
You described some problems with copyright, but nevertheless a bunch of us think that copyright is basically a good idea. We're better off with copyright, than without it. You have some legitimate gripes about how it got fucked up and I'm not disagreeing, but if copyright were for limited times and civilly enforced, then those problems would be addressed, no?
But with DRM, even repaired copyright would be highly defective. First of all, "limited times" would only be by statute but still effectively unlimited. Worse, though, is that DRM interferes with casual use. Something with DRM is substantially worse than the same thing without it. Ergo, buying DRMed things is a bad idea, because they don't work right.
In a world with sane copyright policy, nobody needs to pirate until there's DRM. And then with DRM, everyone needs to pirate and you are seriously losing out if you don't. As a pirate, my videos all Just Work. They don't have deliberate defects.. And my non-pirated music also Just Works, because it's not DRMed. So I buy music but pirate all my video.
That's not what we want. That's incompatible with copyright being a good idea. DRM is direcly anti-copyright and all people who favor the preservation of copyright should be working to make DRM illegal.
But assuming we can't outlaw it (and I suppose there are First Amendment reasons why we shouldn't), then here's what we should do:
If a copyrighted work has a technological measure which limits access, and this was added with the authority (or even the knowledge) of the copyright holder, it should lose its copyright and fall into public domain. This is a fair compromise, repairs copyright so that it works as intended, while also allowing publishers who trust DRM more than copyright, to try their thing.
So this is PR bullshit.
This is the Republican Party in a nut shell.
How about: DependsDRM.
Is that mature enough for you?
What? Most games need to be installed. Who gives a shit. Install the game. GOG doesn't do third party installs on their installers as far as I know.
Off-topic as hell, but I'll respond since you're the first post in the OT branch that's actually coherent, albeit not correct. The argument made by the prosecution was, essentially, that Cohen paying off a whore on behalf of a client counts as an in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign because the campaign benefited from that act. Under the actual text of the law, this is not the case, but Cohen agreed to plead guilty to this charge as part of an overall plea deal. Essentially, the prosecutor said, "You'll probably be able to get off on charge A, but we're sure we can convict you on charges B through M. However, if you plead guilty to A-D, we'll drop E-M."
The key tenet of Campaign Finance Law is that you have to keep campaign expenses separate from personal expenses, and campaign funds separate from personal funds. If I'm running for office, buying a nice suit and a haircut is going to help my campaign, but those are personal expenses - I'd need clothes and a haircut whether I were running for office or not - so I can't use campaign funds for them. Now, it's probably safe to assume that, throughout his well-established history of whoring around, Trump has probably paid off a lot of whores to keep their mouths shut. It's something he would be doing whether he'd been running for office or not. Therefore, even though it helped his campaign, it's not a campaign expense.
So how does this factor in to having a 3rd-party pay off said whores? That's when we get in to the issue of in-kind contributions to campaigns. Again, suppose I'm running for office. Also suppose I have a good friend that owns a printing shop. He agrees to print up a batch of campaign flyers and donate them to my campaign. This is an in-kind contribution, and the value of those flyers would be subject to the same contribution limits as monetary donations. If he had maxed out his cash donation, then also donated the flyers, he's then violated the law. As an aside, this only applies to actually working with my campaign. If he had maxed out his cash donation, then printed up a bunch of flyers and went door-to-door on his own passing them out, he's fine. This is why all campaign materials have to list whether they were paid for by the campaign, or a separate organization.
In order to claim the whore payoffs as an in-kind contribution, you'd have to argue that paying off those women was a legitimate campaign expense and - not only would it have been legal for Trump to use campaign funds for the payoffs, but that he was required to do so. Claiming any spending by any person that helps a campaign is an in-kind contribution doesn't match the law, and would be unworkable to boot. Remember all the media coverage that Trump got during the primaries? Does all the money the media spent on that coverage count as an in-kind contribution? Do all the anti-Trump jokes on late-night talk shows during the campaign count as in-kind contributions to Hillary?
I totally agree that Michael Cohen is a crap lawyer. However, the fact that he agreed to plead guilty on this issue doesn't mean he broke this law, it just means that the overall deal he was offered was worth taking, in his calculation.
Redundancy is good And also good.
Now now, looks like we got ourselves an Internet Tough Guy here!
That was a long whataboutistic whine. The attempt to equate the actions of a hired Trump agent with the media coverage of the campaign is especially endearing. You trumpoids are really operated from common decency.
Why ? What does it do that absolutily needs to be done that isn't also performed by extracting from a .ZIP ?
Though if this is the moment where you actually start to think about it you already lost the game I'm afraid. "Opening mouth before engaging brains" and all that. :-)
Dumb question, as you already know the answer.
Oh, you mean because you do not give a rats ass I shouldn't either ? Strange, it never seems to work the other way around ... :-)
Stick you head some further into the sand, why don't you ?
Even this very website offers you examples of (big) companies being/becoming untrustworthy, like, among others, this one from just over a week ago:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/08/13/1335202/many-google-services-on-android-devices-and-iphones-store-location-data-even-if-location-sharing-is-disabled-from-privacy-settings-ap
.
The big question though is, why are you so worked up about someone wanting to be able to check what he's putting on his machine ?
By the way:
The game did not need to be installed. Just copying a few selected files from the extracted-from-the-installer ones (ignoring a number of DLL files and registry entries) was all that was needed to play it.
Now all I have to do is to see if I will actually enjoy the game. :-)