You're thinking about this from an engineer's perspective. Logic and facts and such.
The key thing to realize is that in the commercial world, THAT DOESN'T MATTER. Perception is everything. Facts are a distant second. Having a good platform is necessary, but not sufficient. The spin and marketing are everything.
It's ALL about the public opinion. How many cool technological innovations have lost because of poor marketing?
Look at Apple's own 1980s experience with the Macintosh versus Windows. They've learned their lesson, and now they're marketing experts. They have successfully trained the public to believe they invented cool features.
And, incidentally, their phone really does work better compared to every other clunky phone web browser I've ever used, including Android.
It doesn't matter whether you or I think that it's right or wrong that people are trading information freely. It is what is happening already, whether you personally approve of the change or not, and it's a trend that's only going to get stronger as home internet use increases and home bandwidth increases. Welcome to the Information Age.
Short of not allowing people to transfer information freely, cheaply, and fast amongst themselves, there's absolutely no way to stop it. Environmental conditions are changing. Evolve, or you'll be out-competed and pushed out by others who do.
(Fortunately, the current intellectual property model will take a while yet to die, so you've still got plenty of time to come up with another means of supporting yourself..)
The thing is - the collapse of the viability of IP business models isn't a value judgement. It doesn't matter whether I or anyone else thinks that it's a good thing that nobody will be able to make money from selling information anymore. It is simply a logical consequence of human behavior combined with a prolific mechanism to transfer large amounts of information around the world cheaply and quickly.
People want to share things with other people. If there is no significant cost involved in doing so, people will always pass the information along to a friend. Nobody cared when it was taping an album for a friend; but now there is no degradation in the quality in the copy anymore, nor any time/effort expense involved in making the copy. Thus, the media consumer thinks it's great, and the media manufacturers think it's horrible, because technology has evolved to make their entire (highly profitable) role in the information transfer chain obsolete. Which means no more stacks of money for copying and distributing tangible media encoding others' work for the RIAA/MPAA honchos.
Whether this elimination of the middleman is ultimately going to have a detrimental effect on the quality of available media is an altogether different issue than whether it's going to happen. It's already happening. And, short of severely restricting the cheap, fast, and free (as in speech) flow of information between people somehow, there's no way to stop it. Vested telco interests don't want that to happen, and they have as many high-priced lawyers as the media guys do.
Certainly, there will be a huge shakeup of the content-production industries (e.g. the record industries and film studios). My guess is that they will evolve their profit making methods somewhat, somehow, eventually, but only after a long and futile fight to preserve their current now-obsolete business model as long as possible.
Probably they'll have to do something like start charging $5 for a CD that costs them 50 cents per unit to produce the content for and then a tenth of a penny to manufacture, instead of $20, and also sell subscriptions to their own online media download service. Who wouldn't pay a few bucks a month for legal access to the entire RIAA catalog hooked up to a few parallel T3 lines?
If you're a big corporation with a "legitimate" business use for encryption, you'll be able to buy a license - much like they license radio waves. For $500,000 per year, you can encrypt your DVDs all you want.
But if you're an individual, with no encryption license, using an encrypted link will bring jail time....
.. that the BitTorrent trackers will just migrate to places like Russia and China, where there are no intellectual property laws to speak of, and where the Clerk of the Court would laugh if a lawyer for the MPAA tried to file a lawsuit against people for running trackers.
What are they going to try next? Snooping on people's personal net connections at home? They'll add a trivial encryption layer to BitTorrent - just try and prove what's being transferred over that link to Russia. Firewall China and Russia off from the rest of the Internet? Make encryption illegal? I don't think (or rather, I desperately hope) that people will accept such measures.
The information genie is out of the bottle. Business models that rely on the sale of information are doomed. It may take 50 years for them to finally give up on these models - they'll fight tooth and nail to save them, since they essentially rake in mountains of cash for doing nothing except copying digital media, which is now practically free. The long, slow decline of the viability of selling information has begun.
On the other hand, the active propagation of disinformation in schools has successfully managed to convince many people that "drugs are bad, mmmmmkay..." in the absence of any rational logical supports for the arbitrary classification of certain drugs as "bad", and others as "not drugs". (Only certain drugs - caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol are socially acceptable and legal; marijuana is (somehow) not, even though alcohol clearly has far more deleterious social and personal health effects).
Perhaps they'll wage a similar disinformation campaign to indoctrinate our children to believe in the sacredness of intellectual property, and thus get people to accept that encryption should be illegal, to prevent information piracy....
You'll note that we paid for the game system, and pay through the nose for the IDE. However, we don't use 'building blocks' to make games. There is no generic 'monster AI' class provided with VC++. Nor are there generic 'RPG creatures' classes, or 'DM Client Creation Wizards'. When you get NWN, you're getting a lot more than a compiler. Artists worked hard on those models and textures, and programmers slaved over making everything work just so. I've worked with the NWN toolset.
You seem to be implying that coding up a good C++ compiler is trivial compared to making an RPG game. I'd say they're both pretty tough. Take a look at the
GCC source code some time
The effort that you have to put in to make something cool is pretty minimal in comparison to the back-end that makes it work. Building things in Neverwinter is like building things out of Lego. Take the pieces, add some imagination, and you're there!
Maybe so, but then, writing an application in C++ is like building things out of pre-made Legos when compared to writing the same application in assembly. Packages like the Neverwinter Nights editor are merely the tip of the iceberg, an extension of the massive set of pre-made back end tools (from the motherboard firmware and chip design, on up through the operating system and user space libraries) that allow someone to rearrange a bunch of 1's and 0's into a particular pattern that does something useful or interesting to phosphor stuck to glass somewhere.
If BioWare should be allowed to own IP created with their Neverwinter Nights editor, then it logically follows that Intel should own all x86 architecture machine code, compiler vendors should own all programs produced with their compilers, Adobe should own all jpegs produced with Photoshop and all mpegs made with Premiere, Silicon Graphics should own Jurassic Park and Toy Story, Discreet should own all the dozens of games made with 3D Studio Max, etc. After all, engineers slaved away for years to make that fancy protected mode chip. Programmers worked for years to make all those cool plugins. You get a lot more with any of these packages than just a set of CPU registers and I/O ports to the video card, no?
When you do something with the NWN toolset, you're USING NEVERWINTER. Not only have you been provided with the tools, but you've been provided with the content. ALL YOU'RE ADDING IS YOUR IMAGINATION. While that may arguably be the single most important part of a good campaign, the fact remains that you've used our toolset to lay some tiles (which we made) place some models (which we made) use some textures (which we made - but it's possible for you to make) and use a scripting language (which we made) to provide behaviours. Did I mention that the creatures, weapons and items are all things that were made at BioWare? Oh, and you're working within a rule-set that belongs to someone else, too.
This is equivalent to Roland or Korg saying, "When you buy our synthesizer, you're USING ROLAND.... ALL YOU'RE ADDING IS YOUR IMAGINATION... the fact remains that you've used our toolset to activate a synthesizer (which we made), place some instruments (which we recorded), use some samples (which we made - but it's possible for you to make) and use a sequencing format (which we made) to provide a song. Did I mention that the synthesizer, instruments, samples, and sequencer format are all things that were made at Roland? Oh, and you're working within a user interface that belongs to someone else, too. Therefore, you agree that all songs you make with this synthesizer become the property of Roland."
Or Microsoft saying, "When you code something with Microsoft Visual C++, ALL YOU'RE ADDING IS YOUR IMAGINATION... You're using our compiler (which we made), our preprocessor (which we made), our editor (which we made), our debugger (which we made), our linker (which we made), our standard object library and API's (which we made - but it's possible for you to make) to code a program. Oh, and you're working within a language definition that belongs to someone else, too. Therefore, any program you make with Visual C++ is automatically the property of Microsoft."
This is clearly not an instance of BioWare's lawyers trying to protect BioWare from some rogue developer who releases a racist mod or something. If that was the case, a Quake-style license that simply gives BioWare the option to forbid distribution of a questionable module would be more than adequate.
BioWare's motives are clear -- they want to
be able to cash in when people come up with a really great mod. They see what engine licensees did with e.g. HalfLife, Counterstrike, Alice, etc., and they figure heck, we've got a great engine, a lot of people are going to make a lot of high quality mods for this, so we sneak a clause in the editor EULA giving us exclusive and total ownership of everything made with it. Then, every three months we gather up the best four or five mods off the net and sell them retail at $49.95 a pop.
Sure, this clause of the EULA is legally questionable, so they've probably got a small sum set aside to buy off anyone with a lot of money who threatens to sue. Most mod authors will lack the resources to press legal claims to their intellectual property, and BioWare gets a free cash cow...
It'll be great when the providers here in the US get around to upgrading their service.. In Japan, they already have relatively cheap cell phones with nice, big hi-res color LCD displays and Internet access. I have a tiny and grainy black and white LCD display on my phone that barely does e-mail (and the UI sucks, at that). Cell phone games will be huge in the US in maybe 5 years or so. They won't take off until hi-res color becomes the standard for the cheap commodity free-but-sign-your-soul-over-to-Verizon promotional giveaway phones..
I think what we've seen again and again is that, unless you're a huge juggernaut (like Microsoft), your proprietary "open" standards never win. Even Microsoft can only pull it off, sometimes.
> I did them just fine on all the tests, thank you very much
You are sarcastically thanking the person in advance for correcting the presumably negative mental opinion they've formed as a result of what you've said prior to that.
So in this case, the poster is assuming that the reader will think he can't do integration himself because he said he has a fancy calculator with symbolic integration. He corrects this erroneous assumption, and thanks the reader very much for then amending their derisive, evil thoughts.
Atleast SGI will still have their Lava Lamp Random Number generator page up. http://lavarand.sgi.com !!!!
From the aforementioned page:
An O2cam digital camera is set up in front of six Lava Lite lamps. The digital camera takes a picture of the Lava Lite lamps every once in a while:
-picture-
Last update: 2000 September 15 00:44:03 UTC
The people most harmed are the musicians. When you pirate music, you are stealing from the artist who slaved to create it for you. Gnutella and Napster are theft on a huge and organised scale. The fact that millions of ordinary Americans engage in this theft is no excuse - ethically and legally, it is
wrong.
Irrelevant!
Dime store philosophers, ivory tower academics, Congressional representatives, and record company IT departments can (and will) prattle on and on for years about intellectual property rights, encrypted digital music protection formats, whether we're really hurting the big rich heartless record labels or the little independant groups by unrestricted mp3 trading on the Internet...
The de facto reality of the situation is that all this abstract intellectual posturing is completely and totally inconsequential, and always will be. The oft-quoted "The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it." And it does.
Every new encryption scheme for digital intellectual property will, sooner or later, be broken by someone, somewhere, and the code will be all over the world within half an hour. Bandwidth, disk space, and network address space will increase exponentially. Peer to peer file sharing infrastructures will evolve and become exponentially more efficient, more anonymous, and more distributed. In 5 or 10 years you will be able to get first run, DVD quality commercial Hollywood films on your hard drive in 10 seconds before they're even released with a few clicks of your mouse.
Mob rule. It ain't pretty, but ultimately, that's reality; abstract notions of 'right' are defined by society, not the other way around. It was illegal to drink alcohol during Prohibition. One could make the argument that it was thus morally 'wrong' to violate the laws of society by doing it anyway, but millions of people did just that, because they personally did not feel that it was 'wrong'. Prohibition was, consequently, rendered impotent and meaningless, just as intellectual property laws are now.
What we are witnessing here is evolution. Survival of the fittest social paradigm with regard to intellectual property. In this case, "fittest" means "acceptable to the biggest chunk of society". There are two primary competing paradigms, the classical "copying others' IP is stealing" paradigm, and the still emerging "information wants to be free" paradigm. The DMCA and whatever other swan song laws and encryption schemes purists of the first paradigm will come up with in the next few years are the dying gasps of the former. The latter is about to hit critical mass and will supersede the former in the next 10 or 15 years.
Before you flame me for not caring about all the starving artists who will be put out of business and be forced to get real jobs from the loss of CD sales, bear in mind that I am not saying that what is happening is a good thing or a bad thing. It's just a thing. It's the reality of the situation. I'm not advocating it, I'm saying that it's going to happen; it's already happening, whether you or I like it or think it's 'wrong' or not. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. The intellectual polemics about the morality of the situation are interesting but ultimately futile. Sure, you might eventually convince a few thousand people to not trade mp3's out of some sense that it's not 'right', but that is, practically speaking, totally meaningless, since there are literally millions more who don't think it's wrong.
The games of today can't hold a candle to the creativity present in the games of 15 years ago. 16 colors and 320x200 screen resolution isn't a heck of a lot to work with, so in order to be successful game designers were forced to actually be innovative with their games, and not just repackage the same concept/engine with different graphics again and again and again like they do today.
Quake 3 Arena or Unreal or whatever the latest first person shootemup is are essentially Wolfenstein 3D with fancier graphics and different guns. The concept is the same (basically), the controls are the same, the user interface is the same save for a few cosmetic changes (select gun, aim and fire), the monsters are the same (large scary looking thing trying to kill you), problem solving is the same (find keycard, open door).. Overhead strategy games suffer from the same problem. How many Warcraft/Starcraft/Command & Conquer/etc. games are out now?
Go back a few years. Maniac Mansion - unquestionably the best video game ever. Totally original concept. Innovative plot line and user interface, memorable characters and plot twists, multiple endings, detailed graphics in all their low-res splendor, cool sound effects that were actually relevant to the plot.. Moreover, there had never been anything like it before. It was a totally new concept in computer gaming. That's becoming rarer and rarer in games today as more territory is explored, and there is less of a financial incentive to innovate today as you can make quite a bit of money without breaking any new ground by just licensing somebody else's engine and hiring a few artists to draw new monsters.
Not that Quake 3 isn't fun to play or doesn't have a new and exciting engine better than anything else ever, it's just not a terribly new concept gameplaywise. As bigger and better graphics boards keep coming out, we'll get more and more Wolfenstein clones with fancy 3D rendered explosions...
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking about this from an engineer's perspective. Logic and facts and such.
The key thing to realize is that in the commercial world, THAT DOESN'T MATTER. Perception is everything. Facts are a distant second. Having a good platform is necessary, but not sufficient. The spin and marketing are everything.
It's ALL about the public opinion. How many cool technological innovations have lost because of poor marketing?
Look at Apple's own 1980s experience with the Macintosh versus Windows. They've learned their lesson, and now they're marketing experts. They have successfully trained the public to believe they invented cool features.
And, incidentally, their phone really does work better compared to every other clunky phone web browser I've ever used, including Android.
How about some non-subjective reasons? The UI is designed intuitively - to adapt to human thought processes, rather than forcing the user to adapt to computer programming conveniences, or the convoluted thoughts of a semi-autistic KDE developer. If you need a painfully detailled explanation, check out http://developer.apple.com/documentation/userexperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html
It doesn't matter whether you or I think that it's right or wrong that people are trading information freely. It is what is happening already, whether you personally approve of the change or not, and it's a trend that's only going to get stronger as home internet use increases and home bandwidth increases. Welcome to the Information Age.
Short of not allowing people to transfer information freely, cheaply, and fast amongst themselves, there's absolutely no way to stop it. Environmental conditions are changing. Evolve, or you'll be out-competed and pushed out by others who do.
(Fortunately, the current intellectual property model will take a while yet to die, so you've still got plenty of time to come up with another means of supporting yourself..)
The thing is - the collapse of the viability of IP business models isn't a value judgement. It doesn't matter whether I or anyone else thinks that it's a good thing that nobody will be able to make money from selling information anymore. It is simply a logical consequence of human behavior combined with a prolific mechanism to transfer large amounts of information around the world cheaply and quickly.
People want to share things with other people. If there is no significant cost involved in doing so, people will always pass the information along to a friend. Nobody cared when it was taping an album for a friend; but now there is no degradation in the quality in the copy anymore, nor any time/effort expense involved in making the copy. Thus, the media consumer thinks it's great, and the media manufacturers think it's horrible, because technology has evolved to make their entire (highly profitable) role in the information transfer chain obsolete. Which means no more stacks of money for copying and distributing tangible media encoding others' work for the RIAA/MPAA honchos.
Whether this elimination of the middleman is ultimately going to have a detrimental effect on the quality of available media is an altogether different issue than whether it's going to happen. It's already happening. And, short of severely restricting the cheap, fast, and free (as in speech) flow of information between people somehow, there's no way to stop it. Vested telco interests don't want that to happen, and they have as many high-priced lawyers as the media guys do.
Certainly, there will be a huge shakeup of the content-production industries (e.g. the record industries and film studios). My guess is that they will evolve their profit making methods somewhat, somehow, eventually, but only after a long and futile fight to preserve their current now-obsolete business model as long as possible. Probably they'll have to do something like start charging $5 for a CD that costs them 50 cents per unit to produce the content for and then a tenth of a penny to manufacture, instead of $20, and also sell subscriptions to their own online media download service. Who wouldn't pay a few bucks a month for legal access to the entire RIAA catalog hooked up to a few parallel T3 lines?
If you're a big corporation with a "legitimate" business use for encryption, you'll be able to buy a license - much like they license radio waves. For $500,000 per year, you can encrypt your DVDs all you want.
But if you're an individual, with no encryption license, using an encrypted link will bring jail time....
.. that the BitTorrent trackers will just migrate to places like Russia and China, where there are no intellectual property laws to speak of, and where the Clerk of the Court would laugh if a lawyer for the MPAA tried to file a lawsuit against people for running trackers.
What are they going to try next? Snooping on people's personal net connections at home? They'll add a trivial encryption layer to BitTorrent - just try and prove what's being transferred over that link to Russia. Firewall China and Russia off from the rest of the Internet? Make encryption illegal? I don't think (or rather, I desperately hope) that people will accept such measures.
The information genie is out of the bottle. Business models that rely on the sale of information are doomed. It may take 50 years for them to finally give up on these models - they'll fight tooth and nail to save them, since they essentially rake in mountains of cash for doing nothing except copying digital media, which is now practically free. The long, slow decline of the viability of selling information has begun.
On the other hand, the active propagation of disinformation in schools has successfully managed to convince many people that "drugs are bad, mmmmmkay..." in the absence of any rational logical supports for the arbitrary classification of certain drugs as "bad", and others as "not drugs". (Only certain drugs - caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol are socially acceptable and legal; marijuana is (somehow) not, even though alcohol clearly has far more deleterious social and personal health effects).
Perhaps they'll wage a similar disinformation campaign to indoctrinate our children to believe in the sacredness of intellectual property, and thus get people to accept that encryption should be illegal, to prevent information piracy....
You seem to be implying that coding up a good C++ compiler is trivial compared to making an RPG game. I'd say they're both pretty tough. Take a look at the GCC source code some time
Maybe so, but then, writing an application in C++ is like building things out of pre-made Legos when compared to writing the same application in assembly. Packages like the Neverwinter Nights editor are merely the tip of the iceberg, an extension of the massive set of pre-made back end tools (from the motherboard firmware and chip design, on up through the operating system and user space libraries) that allow someone to rearrange a bunch of 1's and 0's into a particular pattern that does something useful or interesting to phosphor stuck to glass somewhere.
If BioWare should be allowed to own IP created with their Neverwinter Nights editor, then it logically follows that Intel should own all x86 architecture machine code, compiler vendors should own all programs produced with their compilers, Adobe should own all jpegs produced with Photoshop and all mpegs made with Premiere, Silicon Graphics should own Jurassic Park and Toy Story, Discreet should own all the dozens of games made with 3D Studio Max, etc. After all, engineers slaved away for years to make that fancy protected mode chip. Programmers worked for years to make all those cool plugins. You get a lot more with any of these packages than just a set of CPU registers and I/O ports to the video card, no?
This is equivalent to Roland or Korg saying, "When you buy our synthesizer, you're USING ROLAND. ... ALL YOU'RE ADDING IS YOUR IMAGINATION... the fact remains that you've used our toolset to activate a synthesizer (which we made), place some instruments (which we recorded), use some samples (which we made - but it's possible for you to make) and use a sequencing format (which we made) to provide a song. Did I mention that the synthesizer, instruments, samples, and sequencer format are all things that were made at Roland? Oh, and you're working within a user interface that belongs to someone else, too. Therefore, you agree that all songs you make with this synthesizer become the property of Roland."
Or Microsoft saying, "When you code something with Microsoft Visual C++, ALL YOU'RE ADDING IS YOUR IMAGINATION... You're using our compiler (which we made), our preprocessor (which we made), our editor (which we made), our debugger (which we made), our linker (which we made), our standard object library and API's (which we made - but it's possible for you to make) to code a program. Oh, and you're working within a language definition that belongs to someone else, too. Therefore, any program you make with Visual C++ is automatically the property of Microsoft."
This is clearly not an instance of BioWare's lawyers trying to protect BioWare from some rogue developer who releases a racist mod or something. If that was the case, a Quake-style license that simply gives BioWare the option to forbid distribution of a questionable module would be more than adequate.
BioWare's motives are clear -- they want to be able to cash in when people come up with a really great mod. They see what engine licensees did with e.g. HalfLife, Counterstrike, Alice, etc., and they figure heck, we've got a great engine, a lot of people are going to make a lot of high quality mods for this, so we sneak a clause in the editor EULA giving us exclusive and total ownership of everything made with it. Then, every three months we gather up the best four or five mods off the net and sell them retail at $49.95 a pop.
Sure, this clause of the EULA is legally questionable, so they've probably got a small sum set aside to buy off anyone with a lot of money who threatens to sue. Most mod authors will lack the resources to press legal claims to their intellectual property, and BioWare gets a free cash cow...
hmm.. According to AT&T's year 2000 balance sheet, they had cash assets of $126,000,000 lying around at the end of the year, not to mention $3,341,000,000 they paid to stockholders in dividends. Good to see they have their priorities straight....
It'll be great when the providers here in the US get around to upgrading their service.. In Japan, they already have relatively cheap cell phones with nice, big hi-res color LCD displays and Internet access. I have a tiny and grainy black and white LCD display on my phone that barely does e-mail (and the UI sucks, at that). Cell phone games will be huge in the US in maybe 5 years or so. They won't take off until hi-res color becomes the standard for the cheap commodity free-but-sign-your-soul-over-to-Verizon promotional giveaway phones..
err.. Java? PDF? PostScript? RSA (until recently)? MP3?
You are sarcastically thanking the person in advance for correcting the presumably negative mental opinion they've formed as a result of what you've said prior to that.
So in this case, the poster is assuming that the reader will think he can't do integration himself because he said he has a fancy calculator with symbolic integration. He corrects this erroneous assumption, and thanks the reader very much for then amending their derisive, evil thoughts.
k
From the aforementioned page:
hmm...
Irrelevant!
Dime store philosophers, ivory tower academics, Congressional representatives, and record company IT departments can (and will) prattle on and on for years about intellectual property rights, encrypted digital music protection formats, whether we're really hurting the big rich heartless record labels or the little independant groups by unrestricted mp3 trading on the Internet...
The de facto reality of the situation is that all this abstract intellectual posturing is completely and totally inconsequential, and always will be. The oft-quoted "The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it." And it does.
Every new encryption scheme for digital intellectual property will, sooner or later, be broken by someone, somewhere, and the code will be all over the world within half an hour. Bandwidth, disk space, and network address space will increase exponentially. Peer to peer file sharing infrastructures will evolve and become exponentially more efficient, more anonymous, and more distributed. In 5 or 10 years you will be able to get first run, DVD quality commercial Hollywood films on your hard drive in 10 seconds before they're even released with a few clicks of your mouse.
Mob rule. It ain't pretty, but ultimately, that's reality; abstract notions of 'right' are defined by society, not the other way around. It was illegal to drink alcohol during Prohibition. One could make the argument that it was thus morally 'wrong' to violate the laws of society by doing it anyway, but millions of people did just that, because they personally did not feel that it was 'wrong'. Prohibition was, consequently, rendered impotent and meaningless, just as intellectual property laws are now.
What we are witnessing here is evolution. Survival of the fittest social paradigm with regard to intellectual property. In this case, "fittest" means "acceptable to the biggest chunk of society". There are two primary competing paradigms, the classical "copying others' IP is stealing" paradigm, and the still emerging "information wants to be free" paradigm. The DMCA and whatever other swan song laws and encryption schemes purists of the first paradigm will come up with in the next few years are the dying gasps of the former. The latter is about to hit critical mass and will supersede the former in the next 10 or 15 years.
Before you flame me for not caring about all the starving artists who will be put out of business and be forced to get real jobs from the loss of CD sales, bear in mind that I am not saying that what is happening is a good thing or a bad thing. It's just a thing. It's the reality of the situation. I'm not advocating it, I'm saying that it's going to happen; it's already happening, whether you or I like it or think it's 'wrong' or not. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. The intellectual polemics about the morality of the situation are interesting but ultimately futile. Sure, you might eventually convince a few thousand people to not trade mp3's out of some sense that it's not 'right', but that is, practically speaking, totally meaningless, since there are literally millions more who don't think it's wrong.
-kwertii
The games of today can't hold a candle to the creativity present in the games of 15 years ago. 16 colors and 320x200 screen resolution isn't a heck of a lot to work with, so in order to be successful game designers were forced to actually be innovative with their games, and not just repackage the same concept/engine with different graphics again and again and again like they do today.
Quake 3 Arena or Unreal or whatever the latest first person shootemup is are essentially Wolfenstein 3D with fancier graphics and different guns. The concept is the same (basically), the controls are the same, the user interface is the same save for a few cosmetic changes (select gun, aim and fire), the monsters are the same (large scary looking thing trying to kill you), problem solving is the same (find keycard, open door).. Overhead strategy games suffer from the same problem. How many Warcraft/Starcraft/Command & Conquer/etc. games are out now?
Go back a few years. Maniac Mansion - unquestionably the best video game ever. Totally original concept. Innovative plot line and user interface, memorable characters and plot twists, multiple endings, detailed graphics in all their low-res splendor, cool sound effects that were actually relevant to the plot.. Moreover, there had never been anything like it before. It was a totally new concept in computer gaming. That's becoming rarer and rarer in games today as more territory is explored, and there is less of a financial incentive to innovate today as you can make quite a bit of money without breaking any new ground by just licensing somebody else's engine and hiring a few artists to draw new monsters.
Not that Quake 3 isn't fun to play or doesn't have a new and exciting engine better than anything else ever, it's just not a terribly new concept gameplaywise. As bigger and better graphics boards keep coming out, we'll get more and more Wolfenstein clones with fancy 3D rendered explosions...
-kwertii