The reason is simply because the rights of copyright holders are being stretched to breaking point.
Do you have the right to get paid for your work? Yes, of course you do, I don't believe that's an issue.
Do you have the right to STILL get paid now for the work you did 10 years ago? That's getting shaky. After all, if you leave your job, your boss doesn't carry on paying you because the firm is still making money using the stuff you worked on. (And you can bet that the same applies to the guys who actually wrote those early games, so all you do is pay the Nintendo execs.)
Saying "any justification doesn't matter because it's illegal" is rather daft. Something being illegal is not a state of nature, it's a decision made by people, and others have the right to question that decision (although not to ignore it).
Jeff Minter is one of the most well-respected programmers in the industry, and author of a large number of games on several platforms including at least 2 platform killer apps. He has always worked pretty much completely independantly. Thus it should not be surprising that he doesn't have many kind words for pirates!;)
As for the claim about software/music, I think the idea there was that a piece of music is just that, a single piece of music, and once you've listened to it it's done, so you might buy more from that band. A game, on the other hand, you can play right through once pirated, and most people do not buy games based on the names of their developers.
I've posted on this topic before, but I thought I'd better say it here.
When it comes to *applications* software, piracy does more to *increase* prices than anything else. This is because it kills the concept of price competition. Why bring out a lower priced version of one of the big name programs, when all that'll happen is that those who can afford the big name will buy it, and those who can't will just pirate it?
> Perhaps most fascinating is that you are > suggesting that the market leaders should be > clandestinely encouraging or at least turning > a blind eye toward piracy in order to maintain > their position, which is not currently the case
Um, not true. I remember it being very frequently stated that the reason why MS Office had almost no copy protection on any version prior to XP was that MS could afford it and it was helping them build a market base.
Office XP, with its activation features, only appeared a while after Lotus SmartSuite etc. had been pretty much wiped off the map.
Actually, piracy of application software is especially bad because it's unique amongst IP protected works in that one piece can be substituted for another. If you can't afford one CD, you can't buy another different CD that has all the same value to it. And piracy is bad in this case because it [i]badly[/i] hurts lower price competitors.
What art software do you want to use? Adobe Photoshop, for a few hundred dollars? Or maybe Paint Shop Pro, for less? Or maybe HandyPaint (fictitious) for even less money?
I mean, those extra features in Photoshop you probably aren't going to *use*, are you? So we may as well buy a cheaper one? PSP, then? Well, maybe. Or maybe that's too much...
Oh, right. You're a pirate. So you aren't going to pay for any of the software. So, might as well pirate Photoshop 'cos you don't care. And JASC and HandySoft get hosed, because their attempts to offer reasonable budget alternatives only leads to them being passed over by people who aren't paying for the software anyway.
Worse yet, if you get busted, the settlement money goes to Adobe. Even if, if it wasn't for piracy, they would have bought Jasc's product.
By unbundling Media Player, users are *forced* to "care", because they'll have to manually install software to play media files with. If they "don't care", they'll never get to play anything.
It's true that markets aren't fair. But they *are* supposed to be "free markets". A market in which any new entrant has no chance of getting a foothold, and the factors causing that are 100% predictable/static, is not free. And non-free markets are very bad, because they screw up the core ideas of capitalism. Maybe not everyone can have a share of the money/market, but everyone should have a *chance* of doing so, not be frozen out by 100% predictable/static factors. Capitalism depends on some chaos and instability in the system.
MS is singled out for two reasons. First, because Windows is a monopoly. And second, because Windows maintains its monopoly, not by being good, by just being a monopoly. Windows has a monopoly because it supports a wide range of hardware, right? Nope, it's the other way round, Windows is a monopoly because hardware devices support *it*.
Sure, but that doesn't quite apply to this case, because in this case they're not just failing to provide something for Linux; they're taking something that you *could* do on a Linux box - play music - and locking it down.
> Regrettably, the holders of IP are > untouchable. They have too much power. They > control the media, they contribute huge sums > of money to campaigns to get polititians > elected, and they have access to databases > that the average citizen could only dream of.
I don't see where you're drawing this from. It's true that media companies and mega-rich companies have unreasonable amounts of power over government, but this isn't necessarily related to ownership of IP. Indeed, it's already been observed that the effect of most DMCA laws is *not* to protect IP holders.
Often people seem to think a conspiracy exists where it doesn't. For example, the "payola" business. The truth is that many music publishers are just as hacked off about having to pay huge amounts of money to have their songs played as the small publishers are about getting forced off the air. (Bear in mind that, because of publicity, chances are DJs would have chosen to pay the larger companies' songs anyway - so the "ulterior motive" argument is weak.) But the big music publishers aren't able to just stop paying, because they're competing with each other, and if one stops paying the others will gladly fill in the airtime gap. Ie, "tragedy of the commons".
Likewise, the claim that huge campaign contributions are the only reason these things got passed has some merit, but is probably not the whole story. It's probably far more likely to be the case that the simple "We make stuff. They annoy us. We annoyed, we no make stuff. You want stuff, you stop them" argument that the firms could offer was more persuasive to a non-savvy politician than any number of pages of carefully argued technical difficulties which probably flew straight over their heads.
Microsoft are considered to have a monopoly because any new OS is caught in the chicken-and-egg problem: nobody will use the new OS because it doesn't support hardware/software, but nobody will code hardware/software support for it because - since nobody is using it - doing so doesn't gain them any customers.
Microsoft may not have acted to create that monopoly, but that isn't necessary for a monopoly to thrive. The last mile problem is still grounds for monopoly regulation of telecoms even though the telecom firms didn't invent the problem.
Just because somebody downloaded it, doesn't mean they would have bought it had they not been able to download it. Before you rush to discredit that - it's true that this argument doesn't hold up as an excuse for piracy (which it is often used as) but it *does* hold up as a reason why just seeing the amount that's being downloaded doesn't let you measure the amount of sales the firms are losing.
For example, 6060 CDs a month? Do you think that most of those filesharers could have afforded to buy their share of those? Do you think that they would save up and buy those CD's a few months later instead of buying the new CD's released in the later months?
There is no way they are losing that many sales.
(Anyone responding with a 'but why should you get it for free because you can't afford it' argument gets a free bash on the noggin, which they certainly can afford. As above, the argument is *not* an excuse for piracy, but it *is* a clear reason for a disparity between piracy volume and volume of lost sales.)
AFAIR what happened was that the titles were licensed to Kool Dog, who farmed them out to various people to write in Blitz.. some of them did a good job (like, the Iridis Alpha port is excellent), but some of them didn't (like their Hover Bovver port).
Slightly complicating the fact was that nobody (not even Jeff) has the source to those games anymore, so they had to write them based on playing the emulation versions, and some of them didn't bother to play for long enough (like their version of Ancipital, which lacks many of the features found in the original)
KoolDog was a brand of Idigicon, who pulled it after getting some serious flak from shareware authors (they bought up shareware and tried to sell it in stores.. problem was, since they didn't pay for shelf space, no stores wanted to sell them. So the shareware authors signed up hoping to get their stuff in stores, and actually got no store coverage and garnished online sales.. they also offered to market any game written in Blitz Basic, which kinda messed up when they managed to hack off the owner/author of Blitz as well)
AFAIK Jeff's emulated games still are, and always have been, freely distributable with his permission... I think the downloads were pulled from llamasoft.co.uk for image reasons, not a permission removal.
Or, if you want something right now, go to www.llamasoft.co.uk for Gridrunner++ or http://www.medwaypvb.com/softie_games.htm for Hover Bovver 2 and Deflex - all shareware PC games (a fiver each) completely written by Jeff himself.
They'll arrange "developer agreements" with those who make a certain amount of money from their software or are companies of a certain size. Everyone else (ie, OS developers) has to pay the fee..
> I already have DRM on my P800. Software > vendors tie their applications to the IMEI > number of the phone. I've used hardware keyed > DRM software on Sun boxen since the early '90s.
Although they are forms of DRM, neither of them are the destructive forms that people are worried about. Anyone can obtain a mobile SDK and write software that locks to the IMEI number, and not all software is obliged to do so. Dongles are easily transfered between machines, you can purchase dongles and dongle drivers for software you write, and you can still run non-dongled software.
The dangerous kind of DRM is the type where one or more of the following is true: a) anything that does NOT use the DRM is banned from use, b) to use the DRM on something you have made yourself requires you to enter an agreement with a certain company or pay an amount of money that is out of proportion with the value of a market newcomer; or c) it restricts your fair use or transfer rights.
The DRMs you've described break none of these. But many media DRMs break all of them. A and B are dangerous because they close the market for newcomers and competitors to existing publishers. C is dangerous because it establishes a precedent that firms that wish to gain a particular benefit from technology may do so by using a technology that restricts people's legal rights.
> If that means 'bully-ish' contracts, then > fine. There is nothing against the law about > that.
Actually, there is: the law explicitly requires consideration from both sides in a contract, and expects the contract to be balanced with regard to the negotiating power of both sides.
Note that it does not matter WHY one side has negotiating power. Even if it is because they have worked hard etc. and thus have it for a "good reason", they still aren't allowed to use it to create bullying contracts.
Look at Linux. It manages to be a viable competitor to Microsoft but only manages to do so by NOT BEING A BUSINESS.
Every other commercial competitor to MS has been crushed. And this is NOT because they have been worse products. MS isn't highly supported because it's a good product; it's only highly supported because it's been successful before.
Shouldn't I have the freedom to start a business writing operating systems?
(Saying that I *do* have that freedom, but it will have negative consequences (the business will fail), as like saying that I'm free to murder people, because I could physically do it, it would just have negative consequences (the whole life sentence thing))
> How many of those had their jobs replaced by > machines? It's all the same bullshit argument. > One day it's machines that will destroy the > American worker, the next it's cheap overseas > labor.
Sure, but there's a difference. Of the people who had their jobs replaced by machines, the vast majority either had limited qualifications or on-the-job training.
But the jobs going now are the kind where you have to train for years, and then have experience, in order to get anywhere. "Get a higher-level job" isn't a good answer - there are naturally going to be less of those than there were of lower-level jobs, and if there aren't enough to go round then SOMEBODY is going to be unemployed *no matter how good they are*. Re-education will throw you into a possibly lifetime debt.
Also, the "gung-ho capitalists" (if you can't compete, ship out) are out of place here. Nobody can help the fact that they CAN'T compete because of where they live. They can't freely change where they live, because there's protectionism involved in that (ie, work visas). Heck, what if they were competing against a non-capitalism? What if a small country with a dictatorship, but with just enough resources to be self-sufficient (at a low standard) for a few years, abolished capitalism and then starting offering outsourced labour to US firms FOR FREE? Wouldn't you have to intervene in that case?
I don't think it's quite the case of having food replicators etc.
What Marx pointed out about capitalism was that it's very productive, but it eventually shuts itself down. Initially, there's competition and those who do well, get more resources, and carry on doing well with them. This creates lots of productivity and innovation and many other good things.
The problem is that eventually, those who have won in the past get so many resources that nobody can beat them. Newcomers can't compete without resources, but can't get resources without competing. At that point productivity and innovation go out the window because the established companies don't need them anymore, and you have an economy ruled by either single companies or multiple companies with slight differences between their products. How do you know that Coke couldn't halve the price of their soft drinks tomorrow? You don't. And you never will, because Coke would only do that if somebody was competing with them, and nobody can realistically compete with Coke anymore - with the possible exception of Pepsi, who have however already reached a state of static cooperation.
At this point, you might as *well* switch to Communism because Capitalism isn't going to give you any more benefit. "But if we had communism we'd never have had X innovation, Y innovation, etc.." Sure, that's right, but we've got them now. Unless capitalism is going to deliver Z innovation IN THE FUTURE, all of that doesn't matter, and at the moment it certainly looks like capitalism is more about choking off innovation than anything else (the established firms don't need it, and the non-established firms can't get established by innovating precisely because innovative products tend to be a hard sell).
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The reason is simply because the rights of copyright holders are being stretched to breaking point.
Do you have the right to get paid for your work? Yes, of course you do, I don't believe that's an issue.
Do you have the right to STILL get paid now for the work you did 10 years ago? That's getting shaky. After all, if you leave your job, your boss doesn't carry on paying you because the firm is still making money using the stuff you worked on. (And you can bet that the same applies to the guys who actually wrote those early games, so all you do is pay the Nintendo execs.)
Saying "any justification doesn't matter because it's illegal" is rather daft. Something being illegal is not a state of nature, it's a decision made by people, and others have the right to question that decision (although not to ignore it).
Jeff Minter is one of the most well-respected programmers in the industry, and author of a large number of games on several platforms including at least 2 platform killer apps. He has always worked pretty much completely independantly. Thus it should not be surprising that he doesn't have many kind words for pirates! ;)
As for the claim about software/music, I think the idea there was that a piece of music is just that, a single piece of music, and once you've listened to it it's done, so you might buy more from that band. A game, on the other hand, you can play right through once pirated, and most people do not buy games based on the names of their developers.
I've posted on this topic before, but I thought I'd better say it here.
When it comes to *applications* software, piracy does more to *increase* prices than anything else. This is because it kills the concept of price competition. Why bring out a lower priced version of one of the big name programs, when all that'll happen is that those who can afford the big name will buy it, and those who can't will just pirate it?
> Perhaps most fascinating is that you are
> suggesting that the market leaders should be
> clandestinely encouraging or at least turning
> a blind eye toward piracy in order to maintain
> their position, which is not currently the case
Um, not true. I remember it being very frequently stated that the reason why MS Office had almost no copy protection on any version prior to XP was that MS could afford it and it was helping them build a market base.
Office XP, with its activation features, only appeared a while after Lotus SmartSuite etc. had been pretty much wiped off the map.
Actually, piracy of application software is especially bad because it's unique amongst IP protected works in that one piece can be substituted for another. If you can't afford one CD, you can't buy another different CD that has all the same value to it. And piracy is bad in this case because it [i]badly[/i] hurts lower price competitors.
What art software do you want to use? Adobe Photoshop, for a few hundred dollars? Or maybe Paint Shop Pro, for less? Or maybe HandyPaint (fictitious) for even less money?
I mean, those extra features in Photoshop you probably aren't going to *use*, are you? So we may as well buy a cheaper one? PSP, then? Well, maybe. Or maybe that's too much...
Oh, right. You're a pirate. So you aren't going to pay for any of the software. So, might as well pirate Photoshop 'cos you don't care. And JASC and HandySoft get hosed, because their attempts to offer reasonable budget alternatives only leads to them being passed over by people who aren't paying for the software anyway.
Worse yet, if you get busted, the settlement money goes to Adobe. Even if, if it wasn't for piracy, they would have bought Jasc's product.
By unbundling Media Player, users are *forced* to "care", because they'll have to manually install software to play media files with. If they "don't care", they'll never get to play anything.
It's true that markets aren't fair. But they *are* supposed to be "free markets". A market in which any new entrant has no chance of getting a foothold, and the factors causing that are 100% predictable/static, is not free. And non-free markets are very bad, because they screw up the core ideas of capitalism. Maybe not everyone can have a share of the money/market, but everyone should have a *chance* of doing so, not be frozen out by 100% predictable/static factors. Capitalism depends on some chaos and instability in the system.
MS is singled out for two reasons. First, because Windows is a monopoly. And second, because Windows maintains its monopoly, not by being good, by just being a monopoly. Windows has a monopoly because it supports a wide range of hardware, right? Nope, it's the other way round, Windows is a monopoly because hardware devices support *it*.
AFAIK Winamp just invokes the Media Player DLL..
Sure, but that doesn't quite apply to this case, because in this case they're not just failing to provide something for Linux; they're taking something that you *could* do on a Linux box - play music - and locking it down.
> Regrettably, the holders of IP are
> untouchable. They have too much power. They
> control the media, they contribute huge sums
> of money to campaigns to get polititians
> elected, and they have access to databases
> that the average citizen could only dream of.
I don't see where you're drawing this from. It's true that media companies and mega-rich companies have unreasonable amounts of power over government, but this isn't necessarily related to ownership of IP. Indeed, it's already been observed that the effect of most DMCA laws is *not* to protect IP holders.
Often people seem to think a conspiracy exists where it doesn't. For example, the "payola" business. The truth is that many music publishers are just as hacked off about having to pay huge amounts of money to have their songs played as the small publishers are about getting forced off the air. (Bear in mind that, because of publicity, chances are DJs would have chosen to pay the larger companies' songs anyway - so the "ulterior motive" argument is weak.) But the big music publishers aren't able to just stop paying, because they're competing with each other, and if one stops paying the others will gladly fill in the airtime gap. Ie, "tragedy of the commons".
Likewise, the claim that huge campaign contributions are the only reason these things got passed has some merit, but is probably not the whole story. It's probably far more likely to be the case that the simple "We make stuff. They annoy us. We annoyed, we no make stuff. You want stuff, you stop them" argument that the firms could offer was more persuasive to a non-savvy politician than any number of pages of carefully argued technical difficulties which probably flew straight over their heads.
Easy.
Just pass a law making it illegal to write software for Windows..
No, it's not that.
Microsoft are considered to have a monopoly because any new OS is caught in the chicken-and-egg problem: nobody will use the new OS because it doesn't support hardware/software, but nobody will code hardware/software support for it because - since nobody is using it - doing so doesn't gain them any customers.
Microsoft may not have acted to create that monopoly, but that isn't necessary for a monopoly to thrive. The last mile problem is still grounds for monopoly regulation of telecoms even though the telecom firms didn't invent the problem.
When the RIAA start suing retailers who have listening booths I'll believe that.
(And I can believe they'd do it too. Unauthorized public broadcast or something.)
Right. Except it isn't true.
Just because somebody downloaded it, doesn't mean they would have bought it had they not been able to download it. Before you rush to discredit that - it's true that this argument doesn't hold up as an excuse for piracy (which it is often used as) but it *does* hold up as a reason why just seeing the amount that's being downloaded doesn't let you measure the amount of sales the firms are losing.
For example, 6060 CDs a month? Do you think that most of those filesharers could have afforded to buy their share of those? Do you think that they would save up and buy those CD's a few months later instead of buying the new CD's released in the later months?
There is no way they are losing that many sales.
(Anyone responding with a 'but why should you get it for free because you can't afford it' argument gets a free bash on the noggin, which they certainly can afford. As above, the argument is *not* an excuse for piracy, but it *is* a clear reason for a disparity between piracy volume and volume of lost sales.)
In several of the Sim games, "Llama" is offered as a speed setting. In Sim Life, the demo creature in the tutorial was a Llama.
> He does own at least one (maybe three) sheep
> (one is 16 years old and called Flossie)
Actually, Flossie died in September last year.
AFAIR what happened was that the titles were licensed to Kool Dog, who farmed them out to various people to write in Blitz.. some of them did a good job (like, the Iridis Alpha port is excellent), but some of them didn't (like their Hover Bovver port).
Slightly complicating the fact was that nobody (not even Jeff) has the source to those games anymore, so they had to write them based on playing the emulation versions, and some of them didn't bother to play for long enough (like their version of Ancipital, which lacks many of the features found in the original)
KoolDog was a brand of Idigicon, who pulled it after getting some serious flak from shareware authors (they bought up shareware and tried to sell it in stores.. problem was, since they didn't pay for shelf space, no stores wanted to sell them. So the shareware authors signed up hoping to get their stuff in stores, and actually got no store coverage and garnished online sales.. they also offered to market any game written in Blitz Basic, which kinda messed up when they managed to hack off the owner/author of Blitz as well)
AFAIK Jeff's emulated games still are, and always have been, freely distributable with his permission... I think the downloads were pulled from llamasoft.co.uk for image reasons, not a permission removal.
Or, if you want something right now, go to www.llamasoft.co.uk for Gridrunner++ or http://www.medwaypvb.com/softie_games.htm for Hover Bovver 2 and Deflex - all shareware PC games (a fiver each) completely written by Jeff himself.
Gridrunner++ especially is heinously addictive.
Sure, but they won't.
They'll arrange "developer agreements" with those who make a certain amount of money from their software or are companies of a certain size. Everyone else (ie, OS developers) has to pay the fee..
> I already have DRM on my P800. Software
> vendors tie their applications to the IMEI
> number of the phone. I've used hardware keyed
> DRM software on Sun boxen since the early '90s.
Although they are forms of DRM, neither of them are the destructive forms that people are worried about. Anyone can obtain a mobile SDK and write software that locks to the IMEI number, and not all software is obliged to do so. Dongles are easily transfered between machines, you can purchase dongles and dongle drivers for software you write, and you can still run non-dongled software.
The dangerous kind of DRM is the type where one or more of the following is true: a) anything that does NOT use the DRM is banned from use, b) to use the DRM on something you have made yourself requires you to enter an agreement with a certain company or pay an amount of money that is out of proportion with the value of a market newcomer; or c) it restricts your fair use or transfer rights.
The DRMs you've described break none of these. But many media DRMs break all of them. A and B are dangerous because they close the market for newcomers and competitors to existing publishers. C is dangerous because it establishes a precedent that firms that wish to gain a particular benefit from technology may do so by using a technology that restricts people's legal rights.
> If that means 'bully-ish' contracts, then
> fine. There is nothing against the law about
> that.
Actually, there is: the law explicitly requires consideration from both sides in a contract, and expects the contract to be balanced with regard to the negotiating power of both sides.
Note that it does not matter WHY one side has negotiating power. Even if it is because they have worked hard etc. and thus have it for a "good reason", they still aren't allowed to use it to create bullying contracts.
> As a hardware vendor, Dell wants to sell
> working hardware. Why would it ship a machine
> on which some of the hardware wasn't usable?
Dell chooses what hardware to include in its laptops. Why is it choosing hardware which is supported by MS and not Linux?
Um, no.
Look at Linux. It manages to be a viable competitor to Microsoft but only manages to do so by NOT BEING A BUSINESS.
Every other commercial competitor to MS has been crushed. And this is NOT because they have been worse products. MS isn't highly supported because it's a good product; it's only highly supported because it's been successful before.
Shouldn't I have the freedom to start a business writing operating systems?
(Saying that I *do* have that freedom, but it will have negative consequences (the business will fail), as like saying that I'm free to murder people, because I could physically do it, it would just have negative consequences (the whole life sentence thing))
> How many of those had their jobs replaced by
> machines? It's all the same bullshit argument.
> One day it's machines that will destroy the
> American worker, the next it's cheap overseas
> labor.
Sure, but there's a difference. Of the people who had their jobs replaced by machines, the vast majority either had limited qualifications or on-the-job training.
But the jobs going now are the kind where you have to train for years, and then have experience, in order to get anywhere. "Get a higher-level job" isn't a good answer - there are naturally going to be less of those than there were of lower-level jobs, and if there aren't enough to go round then SOMEBODY is going to be unemployed *no matter how good they are*. Re-education will throw you into a possibly lifetime debt.
Also, the "gung-ho capitalists" (if you can't compete, ship out) are out of place here. Nobody can help the fact that they CAN'T compete because of where they live. They can't freely change where they live, because there's protectionism involved in that (ie, work visas). Heck, what if they were competing against a non-capitalism? What if a small country with a dictatorship, but with just enough resources to be self-sufficient (at a low standard) for a few years, abolished capitalism and then starting offering outsourced labour to US firms FOR FREE? Wouldn't you have to intervene in that case?
I don't think it's quite the case of having food replicators etc.
What Marx pointed out about capitalism was that it's very productive, but it eventually shuts itself down. Initially, there's competition and those who do well, get more resources, and carry on doing well with them. This creates lots of productivity and innovation and many other good things.
The problem is that eventually, those who have won in the past get so many resources that nobody can beat them. Newcomers can't compete without resources, but can't get resources without competing. At that point productivity and innovation go out the window because the established companies don't need them anymore, and you have an economy ruled by either single companies or multiple companies with slight differences between their products. How do you know that Coke couldn't halve the price of their soft drinks tomorrow? You don't. And you never will, because Coke would only do that if somebody was competing with them, and nobody can realistically compete with Coke anymore - with the possible exception of Pepsi, who have however already reached a state of static cooperation.
At this point, you might as *well* switch to Communism because Capitalism isn't going to give you any more benefit. "But if we had communism we'd never have had X innovation, Y innovation, etc.." Sure, that's right, but we've got them now. Unless capitalism is going to deliver Z innovation IN THE FUTURE, all of that doesn't matter, and at the moment it certainly looks like capitalism is more about choking off innovation than anything else (the established firms don't need it, and the non-established firms can't get established by innovating precisely because innovative products tend to be a hard sell).
Nothing in the proposed law mentions "without permission".
Unless they were going to include a complete disclaimer in the license and even that is shaky.