So one company doesn't like it when another erects road blocks to lock out competition... But they love it when they erect such roadblocks themselves. Hypocrisy at its finest.
If DRM is supposed to combat piracy, then why no DRM in the country with one of the highest piracy rates in the world?
Perhaps because DRM has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with screwing every last cent out of law abiding customers. Seems the chinese are smarter than that and simply won't stand for being screwed like that, so they are forced to actually offer a better product at a competitive price. So what the west needs to do, is follow china's example, pirate more and eventually the record labels will be forced to stop treating us with such utter contempt.
Cross platform compatibility? msoffice? Clearly a troll... They have a windows version, and a half assed mac version with poor compatibility, and nothing else... OOo runs on linux (multiple architectures), windows, mac, solaris (both x86 and sparc), and possibly other unix systems aswell.
Go after the seller, he can go back to wherever he bought it and get 20% of the original price back which should be more than 20% of what you paid anyway...
Under such a default system, if you wanted to take my car you would have to get past me first - and i would be trying to kill you for attempting to take my car. Winner takes all.
With physical goods it's a social contract that takes the burden of having to physically defend those items yourself... With no laws whatsoever you can still "own" physical items so long as you are able to stop anyone else from taking them, either by hiding them or physically defending them.
You even admit it yourself "with anyone able to take anything they can" - if i'm bigger and stronger than you, then you can't take anything i have unless i let you.
Commercial interests are often at odds with the greater good or even common sense... They only make sense in certain areas, and even there need to be controlled to prevent them distorting the market and becoming too powerful...
Look at healthcare, even the US is moving towards non commercial healthcare because the commercial model is simply flawed... Consider drug research too...
It's simply more profitable to keep someone sick and coming back for continued treatments, there is no incentive to provide a cure as then that revenue stream would dry up unless they became sick again. Corporations will always do what's most profitable for themselves, even if that is detrimental to everyone else.
Cause and effect... It's the other way round from what you state - if we'd had long copyright and patent terms earlier, then much of what we take for granted today would never have existed... Even Bill Gates admitted this a few years ago, if software patents had existed when he first set out IBM would have patented anything worth having and MS (or anyone else for that matter) would never have been able to get anywhere...
Why should an artist be able to continue making money from some work he did 7 years ago? Copyright is intended to promote the arts, but letting an artist sit on his ass collecting money from work he did 7 years ago doesn't achieve that... Look at amy winehouse, hasn't produced any new material for 3+ years, wastes all her money getting completely off her face on drink and drugs setting a terrible example for young people and getting away with things that any non-celebrity would be thrown in jail for...
Doesn't anyone else think that artists should actually have to WORK for their money like anyone else? Not just sit around getting fucked up?
Incidentally, marketing media these days is a lot cheaper than it used to be thanks to the internet...
You need to ensure that the distribution is fair, for instance a company might decide that instead of stopping selling a given work, they will simply increase the price to such an unreasonable level that noone will consider buying it even tho technically they are still publishing it. They should be required to continue offering the work on the same or better terms. There are also DRM schemes, whereby even tho a work is technically in the public domain it may be difficult for someone to exercise their rights in that area. Also in this age of global communication, 5 years is an awfully long time.
Musicians don't make most of their money from CD sales... Think live shows, radio/tv airplay, merchandising etc... Plus some people actually want to buy the original even when an identical copy is available for free. The only people this would hurt, are the greedy middlemen. Free sharing could actually serve to increase peoples exposure to some bands.
The length of copyright terms should be variable depending on the type of work... A piece of music written today may still have relevance 14 years from now, but a piece of software probably won't.
There is no reason consoles have to be sold at a loss. They do so as a bait and switch, lure you in with a cheap console and then overcharge you on the games now that you're locked in. Also, if they didn't expend so much effort trying to implement anti copying schemes the consoles themselves would actually be cheaper to produce and more reliable.
Most games didn't use non standard formats, but even those that did could easily be copied with tools like Xcopy.
Things like code tables were easily cracked, sometimes you would just get a copy of the codes either printed or in the form of a textfile, and many games had cracked versions available which removed the code requirement entirely.
Publishers stopped making games for the Amiga for a number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with piracy...
Commodore were very slow in updating the Amiga hardware, while the original Amiga was revolutionary in 1985, it wasn't until 1992 - 7 years later that the updated AGA chipset was released, and by this time it was nothing really special compared to the competition. Commodore also went bankrupt in 1994, resulting in no further Amiga hardware coming out - very few publishers wanted to continue producing anything for a platform that had an uncertain future.
Those same publishers who stopped making Amiga games, usually continued making PC games... PC games were even easier to pirate than Amiga games primarily because you could almost always install them to HD (most Amiga users didn't have an HD, and very few games would install to it if you did).
Many technical people, especially those using Linux as a desktop OS have a deep distrust of anything MS does and will avoid their products whenever possible.
The window buttons on the top left is nothing new... AmigaOS had the close button on the top left, as has MacOS (and still does).. Windows 3.1 also had the the menu (providing the close option) in the top left... Unix window managers like SGI 4DWm were similar... I have a feeling CDE did the same too.
Ubuntu also offer an easy way to change back to the old behavior, something microsoft never offered when they changed the interface radically for windows 95..
It's hard to forget the years of stagnation, and how much lasting damage IE and its various attempts at lock-in have caused... The horrendous security problems are just the most visible tip of the iceberg, and the relative security of IE8 owes much to if being less of a monoculture than IE6 was, making it less attractive... Which is why blackhats now target acrobat and flash on windows - both of these have far higher marketshare than any specific web browser these days.
What is it with separating things by publisher? People aren't going to necessarily associate the name of the publisher with the name of the game/app...
Typical home users are more likely to pirate games, given the opportunity to do so... It's a simple matter of economics...
Pirate game - $5 Non pirated game - $50
That's why anti-piracy propaganda tries to claim that pirate copies are somehow inferior (based on analog media like vhs losing quality when copied)... The only thing stopping joe public from pirating games is a lack of knowledge, if you go to a member of the public and offer to modchip their console and sell them copied games for $5 a pop most will jump at the chance.
Their console is in third place... Their console is the only one which doesn't have rampant piracy...
Anyone else notice the connection? I know plenty of people with xbox or wii consoles, most of which are modchipped to run copied games... Most of these people have a mix of copied and original games. The few people i know who have ps3 consoles have a much smaller number of original games, and no copied ones...
However by making copying games difficult, you reduce the usefulness of the device... Back in the days of the Amiga, i knew lots of people who had a handful of bought and paid for games, and we would share those games between ourselves (ie copy them)... We were schoolkids and couldn't afford to buy all the games but between us we bought a fair few. Had it not been possible to copy the games, we simply wouldn't have had them, we would have used another platform where game copying was easy. Very few of us had cartridge based consoles for instance, unless they were old ones where the games had become dirt cheap simply because we couldn't afford to have a big library of games.
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So one company doesn't like it when another erects road blocks to lock out competition... But they love it when they erect such roadblocks themselves. Hypocrisy at its finest.
If DRM is supposed to combat piracy, then why no DRM in the country with one of the highest piracy rates in the world?
Perhaps because DRM has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with screwing every last cent out of law abiding customers. Seems the chinese are smarter than that and simply won't stand for being screwed like that, so they are forced to actually offer a better product at a competitive price.
So what the west needs to do, is follow china's example, pirate more and eventually the record labels will be forced to stop treating us with such utter contempt.
Cross platform compatibility? msoffice? Clearly a troll...
They have a windows version, and a half assed mac version with poor compatibility, and nothing else... OOo runs on linux (multiple architectures), windows, mac, solaris (both x86 and sparc), and possibly other unix systems aswell.
People go back to MS products even after being burned time and time again, because they're locked in... The 360 is no different really.
Wether your flatmate used the feature or not, 20% cashback on the cost of a PS3 is worth taking.
Go after the seller, he can go back to wherever he bought it and get 20% of the original price back which should be more than 20% of what you paid anyway...
Under such a default system, if you wanted to take my car you would have to get past me first - and i would be trying to kill you for attempting to take my car. Winner takes all.
With physical goods it's a social contract that takes the burden of having to physically defend those items yourself...
With no laws whatsoever you can still "own" physical items so long as you are able to stop anyone else from taking them, either by hiding them or physically defending them.
You even admit it yourself "with anyone able to take anything they can" - if i'm bigger and stronger than you, then you can't take anything i have unless i let you.
Mod parent up...
Commercial interests are often at odds with the greater good or even common sense... They only make sense in certain areas, and even there need to be controlled to prevent them distorting the market and becoming too powerful...
Look at healthcare, even the US is moving towards non commercial healthcare because the commercial model is simply flawed...
Consider drug research too...
It's simply more profitable to keep someone sick and coming back for continued treatments, there is no incentive to provide a cure as then that revenue stream would dry up unless they became sick again. Corporations will always do what's most profitable for themselves, even if that is detrimental to everyone else.
Cause and effect...
It's the other way round from what you state - if we'd had long copyright and patent terms earlier, then much of what we take for granted today would never have existed...
Even Bill Gates admitted this a few years ago, if software patents had existed when he first set out IBM would have patented anything worth having and MS (or anyone else for that matter) would never have been able to get anywhere...
Why should an artist be able to continue making money from some work he did 7 years ago? Copyright is intended to promote the arts, but letting an artist sit on his ass collecting money from work he did 7 years ago doesn't achieve that... Look at amy winehouse, hasn't produced any new material for 3+ years, wastes all her money getting completely off her face on drink and drugs setting a terrible example for young people and getting away with things that any non-celebrity would be thrown in jail for...
Doesn't anyone else think that artists should actually have to WORK for their money like anyone else? Not just sit around getting fucked up?
Incidentally, marketing media these days is a lot cheaper than it used to be thanks to the internet...
You need to ensure that the distribution is fair, for instance a company might decide that instead of stopping selling a given work, they will simply increase the price to such an unreasonable level that noone will consider buying it even tho technically they are still publishing it. They should be required to continue offering the work on the same or better terms.
There are also DRM schemes, whereby even tho a work is technically in the public domain it may be difficult for someone to exercise their rights in that area.
Also in this age of global communication, 5 years is an awfully long time.
Musicians don't make most of their money from CD sales... Think live shows, radio/tv airplay, merchandising etc... Plus some people actually want to buy the original even when an identical copy is available for free. The only people this would hurt, are the greedy middlemen. Free sharing could actually serve to increase peoples exposure to some bands.
The length of copyright terms should be variable depending on the type of work...
A piece of music written today may still have relevance 14 years from now, but a piece of software probably won't.
There is no reason consoles have to be sold at a loss. They do so as a bait and switch, lure you in with a cheap console and then overcharge you on the games now that you're locked in.
Also, if they didn't expend so much effort trying to implement anti copying schemes the consoles themselves would actually be cheaper to produce and more reliable.
Most games didn't use non standard formats, but even those that did could easily be copied with tools like Xcopy.
Things like code tables were easily cracked, sometimes you would just get a copy of the codes either printed or in the form of a textfile, and many games had cracked versions available which removed the code requirement entirely.
Publishers stopped making games for the Amiga for a number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with piracy...
Commodore were very slow in updating the Amiga hardware, while the original Amiga was revolutionary in 1985, it wasn't until 1992 - 7 years later that the updated AGA chipset was released, and by this time it was nothing really special compared to the competition.
Commodore also went bankrupt in 1994, resulting in no further Amiga hardware coming out - very few publishers wanted to continue producing anything for a platform that had an uncertain future.
Those same publishers who stopped making Amiga games, usually continued making PC games... PC games were even easier to pirate than Amiga games primarily because you could almost always install them to HD (most Amiga users didn't have an HD, and very few games would install to it if you did).
Many technical people, especially those using Linux as a desktop OS have a deep distrust of anything MS does and will avoid their products whenever possible.
The window buttons on the top left is nothing new...
AmigaOS had the close button on the top left, as has MacOS (and still does)..
Windows 3.1 also had the the menu (providing the close option) in the top left...
Unix window managers like SGI 4DWm were similar... I have a feeling CDE did the same too.
Ubuntu also offer an easy way to change back to the old behavior, something microsoft never offered when they changed the interface radically for windows 95..
It's hard to forget the years of stagnation, and how much lasting damage IE and its various attempts at lock-in have caused... The horrendous security problems are just the most visible tip of the iceberg, and the relative security of IE8 owes much to if being less of a monoculture than IE6 was, making it less attractive... Which is why blackhats now target acrobat and flash on windows - both of these have far higher marketshare than any specific web browser these days.
If he discloses the MAC address of his device then sony would be able to identify him... If i were him i wouldn't want to disclose it.
What is it with separating things by publisher?
People aren't going to necessarily associate the name of the publisher with the name of the game/app...
Typical home users are more likely to pirate games, given the opportunity to do so...
It's a simple matter of economics...
Pirate game - $5
Non pirated game - $50
That's why anti-piracy propaganda tries to claim that pirate copies are somehow inferior (based on analog media like vhs losing quality when copied)...
The only thing stopping joe public from pirating games is a lack of knowledge, if you go to a member of the public and offer to modchip their console and sell them copied games for $5 a pop most will jump at the chance.
Their console is in third place...
Their console is the only one which doesn't have rampant piracy...
Anyone else notice the connection?
I know plenty of people with xbox or wii consoles, most of which are modchipped to run copied games... Most of these people have a mix of copied and original games.
The few people i know who have ps3 consoles have a much smaller number of original games, and no copied ones...
However by making copying games difficult, you reduce the usefulness of the device...
Back in the days of the Amiga, i knew lots of people who had a handful of bought and paid for games, and we would share those games between ourselves (ie copy them)... We were schoolkids and couldn't afford to buy all the games but between us we bought a fair few.
Had it not been possible to copy the games, we simply wouldn't have had them, we would have used another platform where game copying was easy. Very few of us had cartridge based consoles for instance, unless they were old ones where the games had become dirt cheap simply because we couldn't afford to have a big library of games.