Apparently there are still enough people who don't understant the (L)GPL. The LGPL was created to allow poeple to use code from GPL applications as long as they only use it as a library. Which frees them from the need of redistributing their *own* code.
Even with the GPL you are NOT required to distribute the code along with the binary. The only abligation that you have is to make it available upon request. But this is not the same.
Even under the GPL I would be perfectly ok if I distribute a linux system, without giving MY customers the sourceode, as long as they don't ask for it. If my client is happy, why bother? And of course, then I would only have to give the sourcecode to MY clients and not everybody else as well.
I doubt that pricing is a factor in third world countries. Since they can't afford the prices anyway, but have to communicate with the rest of the world, the majority will using pirated copies of Windows. MS is probably well aware of this, and that is the reason why the local versions for these countries are also localized in the pricing. What these countries value though, is also the independence, which is the really galling thing for the US. Linux doesn't have a stron relation to a particular country, and if it ever will get one, then there is no big problem. You got the source, you can change it and develop it however you wish. When you start out with a mostly new infrostructure you don't need to think about existing ties, because there are none. So it's cheaper and more reliable to code the appropriate converters for like Word dcouments, then taking the whole OS just to get this stuff, and have the extra advatnages for free.
Maybe this is intersting to a moderator, but that doesn't make it more true. The desease doesnt care about the host, because teh host means not much to it. IF the host manages to kill off teh desease creating population it becomes an interest of the desease to not kill it off. If the host is killed and the desease population can spread just as effeciently there is no pressure on the desease to preserve it's host.
So only deseases which require the host to continue spreading it's population will mutate into less deathly deseases over time.
I wonder that EULAs can hold up anywhere in court, even in US. After all, it would be easy to write a program that shows the EULA for a splitsecond and inserts a button or keypress into the messagequeue. In fact smiilar techniques have been used by dialers in germany. After the regulation authorities decided that the fees, created by a dialer, can be challenged, when the user creates a backup of the binaries and sends it in for examination. The dialer would be installed by the authorities, so that they can see wether it really asked the user and told him about the fees, which would be the requirement. What happend then was that the dialers started to erase themselve after they created the connection, which left the user with nothing there to prove that he really was the victim.
A company that uses an EULA for actual legal bindings would have to proove that the user really pressed the acceptance himself. I doubt that it is enough to find the software installed on my machine. Here I could always claim that I was not even aware of the installation because my kids did it and it would have to be proven in a court case that it indeed was me.
++++ fake ticker ++++
Johnny Bash, famous for writing applications like WORM32 and Trojan.Hoax, has today filed a lawsuit against McAffee. His complaint is that the EULA for this applications specifically forbids the reverse engineering or analyzing of the code for anti-virus companies. He says that by downloading and installing his latestes achievment, McAffee implicitly agreed to the conditions and thus violated the EULA by including the anti-virus measures in their latest software.
* If anybody can name stories that follow this structure, published before Nov 28, 2003, now is the time to tell the USPTO about it
The Machinist anybody? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361862/
Well, I know this story is eaxctly the opposite, because the protagonist can not sleep at all during that time. Wich makes it the exact reverse of that patent claim. Crazy as patents are, this might even be enough.
Hmmm... If somebody already patented a forward rotating wheel, I might be able to patent one that is rotating backwards.
Considering that there are only about 30 plottypes this could dry out the content creation for all kind of media pretty fast. Patenting the plottypes would be even more rewarding. Oh crap! You can't patent them any more because of prior art. Now THAT would have been a money printing machine. You see where the patent law has failed, that something as important like this can not be patented anymore. So much money lost for the industry.
I don't specifically know about GC games. I think there are some PS2 games covnerted to PCs, but I think the number of them are inconsequential. I think it's mostly XBox games which are affected, because apparently some companies got contracts from MS requiring them to release the XBox version before the PC version to boost their importance. The Xbox lends itselfs probably much better to porting to the PC because it IS a kind of PC. I don't know about the other consoles but it might well be that they are totally different to code for, wich would make ports less attractive.
BTW: What do you mean by the "console" remark? I'm not a native speaker, but I thought these boxes are also called "consoles"? In german language this is the case though.
... because they got a contract clause demanding to first put out the console version, and eevn worse, get a dumbed down PC game for it as well, I sure wont buy any console.
The trend seems to be rising that games are produced for consoles first, most notibly XBox, and then crappily "converted" to PC with all the limitations that exists on consoles.
Why would you buy an XBox considering that it consists mostly of regular PC hardware?
But I know that if they were on.kids.us sites, I would be sure that they weren't looking at porn or anything.
What would they have to do looking at porn? They should better spend their time studying something usefull. Weapons comes to mind, after all how should they defend against all the pedophiles and terrorists waiting in line to get a chance to hit some US citicen.
My response was sarcastic because I also pointed out that the second review gave a scene by scene account of the movie and I got modded down as a troll. Don't know why, though.
I also re-read Harry Potter before seeing the movie and I agree that it spoiled the movie as you described. I didn't do it this time and I definitely wont't do it for LOTR. One time is enough. Reading the book afterwards is much more rewarding because you can imagine some characters much better (this is true for Harry Potter as well as for LOTR) even though these are movies that do a much better job of depicting a book then most other movies, based on books, I have seen so far. Most movies suck once you read the book and this is gladly not the case here as they preserve the spirit of the books they depict.
I often wonder about moderation but this time beats it all.:) Seems the moderators are gone crazy just by hearing that LOTR II is released. What will they do if the third part is on the horizon???
Ha! I just saved myself a few bucks for going to the theater as well as the time watching the movie. Just read the second review in the story and you get a complete description of the film. Very nice. Its not just a review its THE movie told without the annoying bits of moving pictures. Much more convinient and so much schorter than the books. The only distrubing thing is that the background music is from "Friday 13th" but you can't have everything.
Then this is a flaw in the game design which should be corrected. I can understand that in this case one wants to cheat. But my question aimed more on cheating that spoils the game entirely. I don't condem cheating per se, because the game should be entertaining. If the designer forgot to include features that keep gameplay interesting then it is ok for me to cheat around this and I don't consider this cheating. Upping levels by editing a save file is cheating though (only as an example) because you are supposed to play the game to gain levels. If you do things like that you take the fun out of the game for yourself (and for others probably as well). I never understood people who used aimbots in games like counterstrike or similar. To cheat the core game components that actually make up ther game is plain stupid for me. Basically I don't mind cheats that help you avoid situtations that don't add to the game experience. Travvling for hours through a map just to get from one point to another without anything happening is boring and doesn't add to the game experience. I remember playing Elite on the C64 and the most boring part was when you were travelling. You simply sat there waiting... waiting... waiting... and somtimes you were hit by bandits. The trading stuff was fun, though.
I always wonder about cheaters in general. I'm playing most of the time single player games and only shooters online, but still I don't really understand why people cheat.
I used cheats myself but I only use them in certain circumstances. I mostly use cheats when there is a feature that should have been in the game all along and improves gameplay. i.E. in Baldurs Gate 2 I activated the console to be able to teleport from one point on the map to another. I never used it for anything else and the only reason I use it is because it is boring, once you have explored a map, to wait for your characters to crossing it. I never use the cheat to explore the map itself. When I look at all the cheats available for games I always wonder what poeple do with it? Why paying for a game when you let automated scripts play it while you are not there? I play a game because I want to play and enjoy it. If I don't like a game I don't play it, but then why bothering with scripts? I see a point for people who sell characters or items for real money, but again, why buying that stuff? If I don't want to play a game why even waste my time with loading it and in case of online games why paying for it. The game is about collecting items, killing monsters, solving riddles and all that and cheating defeats the core point of the game. This will always be a mystery to me...
MY laws don't say anything like that. Last time I checked the Buegerliches Gesetzbuch (I guess you are familiar with it because every country uses this) it said nowhere that I may not carry a hammer with me just because I can use it to break the window of a shop. I don't know how it is in the US. If an office can simply arrest you just because you carry some stuff with you that the officer concludes you COULD use to break the law then you should sell your car and everything else you own. After all you can kill sombody with your bare hands so you should probably remove them too. Just to be sure of course.
As for "Possess Goods Obtained By Crime". How do you conclude that possesing a mod chip means you got it by commiting a crime???? I really wonder about that. Ah! Another one! NO! A mod chip is NOT Narcotics!:)
You shouldn't assume that the world revolves around USA. It doesn't and neither does it revolve around US law.
If you buy a piece of crap you can manipulate it as much as you like it. Of course you void the warranty but that is not the issue. Don't tell me that benevolent Microsoft tries to help poor users not forfeiting their warrant by banning the bad users that ignore such great things like warranty. I have no Xbox and I will never buy one so don't assume you can shout at me that shit just because you think you know anything.:)
Why would I provide a statistics (not) supporting your claim? Here in Europe there is a basic rule. Presumed innocent until proven guilty. I know that the phrase is slightly altered in US to "Presumed innocent now give over that cheque." Maybe you really believe that marketing FUD of companies like MS that try to protect their money by claiming all users are purely bad and the absolutely have to monitor every move they make just to be sure that the bad users don't do anything that might cost money to poor MS. If they have nothing to hide then they shouldn't object to being monitored by such trivial things like personal ID's or similar things.
If MS chooses to exclude paying customers that is within their right. But then they are no entitled to grab the money from them and still deny them the right they purchased. After all the customer payed for a service and if the provider doesn't wnat to provide it then he can't simply say "That's it you are banned forget your money you already paid."
Just because the user doesn't have piles of cash doesn't mean that his rights are somehow nullified.
Constuitution? What constitution are you talking about? Silly me. I always forget that US citizens think that the entire world is under the limitations US citizens are.:)
The only issue here is that Microsoft tries to lever a survaillance system onto the consumer by using cheap excuses like "Oh we are only acting in the interest of the users after all." Bullshit. If you don't do a better job you should give MS your payment back and they should start looking for better employees.
As for the example with the car: Think about it a second time. If you don't adhere to the regulation of the goverment and are caught driving around with such a car what would happen? Would the put you permanently in jail for that offense? Would they permanently ban you from driving? Or would they rather a) confiscate your car or b) request fixing of the safety features they require? See the difference here? The goverment is not't interested in regulating the people because of some politic/business plan they have. They regulate these things because the have to make sure that driving cars is reasonable safe. Therefore the don't ban you permantly for doing things like that, they only require you to fix the car. Removing the mod chip from the box is more then sufficient to achieve the claimed goal. Namely to enhance the user experience by discouraging cheaters. Obviously this is not the real intent and you have to pay for it.
I don't have a xbox nor am I able to do some wiring and stuff beyond simple things like building a standard PC. From the postings I had assumed that this is a simple thing.
On the other hand it shouldn't be to hard to write some software that intercepts the serial process somewhere and provides a more-or-less valid serial to the calling process. This way it is rather easy to flip through hundreds of serials in no time. Depending on how the overall process of connecting-detecting--banning-disconnecting works. Mabye someone could shed some light on this.
That's ok. But you apparently didn't read the article. They don't ban you for using a cheat, they ban you for being ABLE to use a cheat. See the difference? Modding doesn't neccessarily mean that you are actually cheating but you are banned because of it and not because you were caught cheating.
If this would be transfered to PCs then this would mean everybody with an internet connection must be banned because he is able to download a cheat and use it. Or your harddisk is scanned and when a cheat is detected you are banned. Even though you might never have used it. You could have the cheat lying around on your harddisk because you are curious how it works and how to guard against it, but you are banned for that nevertheless.
Are you sentenced for murder because you have a knife at home? No? Why not? After all you could use a knife to kill somebody and don't tell me you have no knife at home, so this means you are guilty.
The argument of "No need for a backup because we replace your broken DVD/disc/whatever." sounds good at first glance. On second glance it is not really that good.
1. I don't want to send in a DVD or whatever to a company, then wait ages to get back an answer and having to bear the costs of sending and resending. You claim that you pay even the postage? Experience shows that this doesn't happen and the consumer has to pay additional costs BEYOND the postage to get another copy of a broken disc.
2. If I have a broken disc I only go to the hassle of sending it in when I want to play the game enough. THis means that I don't want to wait for more than a month to get my replacement. If I can backup my disc then there is no need for waiting so long. This is reason enough for me to make a backup for myself.
3. If a game is really good (it might become a classic) then there is the additional problem of the company going out of business. How do you protect against that? You can't. I have many old games and some of them, I really liked to play, I keep installing and play them again, even though they would never win a price because they are so old. As you can see in the emulation scene there are many people who try to protect their old games by writing emulators to be able to use that games again. But many of these games are no longer available anywhere, so how will you ensure that I will get that copy after such a long time? And you can't possibly argue that a company shouldn't need to be able to provide a game after such a long time because that is not the point. I paid for the right to play the game as often as I like to and if that means that I still want to play it 20 years after purchasing it then I should be able to.
I can tell you that I have several games that I had to use a crack for because the original game refused to run for some reason. Would you remove the copy protection when I buy a game and can't run it? No. You might return my money (if anything at all) and that's it, but I don't think that this is a solution either. Modding (or copying) doesn't neccessarily mean that you intend to steal something. As companies keep saying about such things I can say with the same right: Modding just protects my investments and interests as a consumer. Something that companies seem to happily ignore as long as they can claim to protect their investment.
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Apparently there are still enough people who don't understant the (L)GPL. The LGPL was created to allow poeple to use code from GPL applications as long as they only use it as a library. Which frees them from the need of redistributing their *own* code. Even with the GPL you are NOT required to distribute the code along with the binary. The only abligation that you have is to make it available upon request. But this is not the same. Even under the GPL I would be perfectly ok if I distribute a linux system, without giving MY customers the sourceode, as long as they don't ask for it. If my client is happy, why bother? And of course, then I would only have to give the sourcecode to MY clients and not everybody else as well.
http://photos1.blogger.com/img/58/1396/400/bush%25 20or%2520chimp.jpg
I doubt that pricing is a factor in third world countries. Since they can't afford the prices anyway, but have to communicate with the rest of the world, the majority will using pirated copies of Windows. MS is probably well aware of this, and that is the reason why the local versions for these countries are also localized in the pricing. What these countries value though, is also the independence, which is the really galling thing for the US. Linux doesn't have a stron relation to a particular country, and if it ever will get one, then there is no big problem. You got the source, you can change it and develop it however you wish. When you start out with a mostly new infrostructure you don't need to think about existing ties, because there are none. So it's cheaper and more reliable to code the appropriate converters for like Word dcouments, then taking the whole OS just to get this stuff, and have the extra advatnages for free.
Maybe this is intersting to a moderator, but that doesn't make it more true. The desease doesnt care about the host, because teh host means not much to it. IF the host manages to kill off teh desease creating population it becomes an interest of the desease to not kill it off. If the host is killed and the desease population can spread just as effeciently there is no pressure on the desease to preserve it's host. So only deseases which require the host to continue spreading it's population will mutate into less deathly deseases over time.
I wonder that EULAs can hold up anywhere in court, even in US. After all, it would be easy to write a program that shows the EULA for a splitsecond and inserts a button or keypress into the messagequeue. In fact smiilar techniques have been used by dialers in germany. After the regulation authorities decided that the fees, created by a dialer, can be challenged, when the user creates a backup of the binaries and sends it in for examination. The dialer would be installed by the authorities, so that they can see wether it really asked the user and told him about the fees, which would be the requirement. What happend then was that the dialers started to erase themselve after they created the connection, which left the user with nothing there to prove that he really was the victim. A company that uses an EULA for actual legal bindings would have to proove that the user really pressed the acceptance himself. I doubt that it is enough to find the software installed on my machine. Here I could always claim that I was not even aware of the installation because my kids did it and it would have to be proven in a court case that it indeed was me.
++++ fake ticker ++++ Johnny Bash, famous for writing applications like WORM32 and Trojan.Hoax, has today filed a lawsuit against McAffee. His complaint is that the EULA for this applications specifically forbids the reverse engineering or analyzing of the code for anti-virus companies. He says that by downloading and installing his latestes achievment, McAffee implicitly agreed to the conditions and thus violated the EULA by including the anti-virus measures in their latest software.
* If anybody can name stories that follow this structure, published before Nov 28, 2003, now is the time to tell the USPTO about it
The Machinist anybody? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361862/
Well, I know this story is eaxctly the opposite, because the protagonist can not sleep at all during that time. Wich makes it the exact reverse of that patent claim. Crazy as patents are, this might even be enough.
Hmmm... If somebody already patented a forward rotating wheel, I might be able to patent one that is rotating backwards.
Considering that there are only about 30 plottypes this could dry out the content creation for all kind of media pretty fast. Patenting the plottypes would be even more rewarding. Oh crap! You can't patent them any more because of prior art. Now THAT would have been a money printing machine. You see where the patent law has failed, that something as important like this can not be patented anymore. So much money lost for the industry.
I don't specifically know about GC games. I think there are some PS2 games covnerted to PCs, but I think the number of them are inconsequential. I think it's mostly XBox games which are affected, because apparently some companies got contracts from MS requiring them to release the XBox version before the PC version to boost their importance. The Xbox lends itselfs probably much better to porting to the PC because it IS a kind of PC. I don't know about the other consoles but it might well be that they are totally different to code for, wich would make ports less attractive. BTW: What do you mean by the "console" remark? I'm not a native speaker, but I thought these boxes are also called "consoles"? In german language this is the case though.
... because they got a contract clause demanding to first put out the console version, and eevn worse, get a dumbed down PC game for it as well, I sure wont buy any console. The trend seems to be rising that games are produced for consoles first, most notibly XBox, and then crappily "converted" to PC with all the limitations that exists on consoles. Why would you buy an XBox considering that it consists mostly of regular PC hardware?
It seems the author tried to be funny. He failed. Whats more to say about this article?
But I know that if they were on .kids.us sites, I would be sure that they weren't looking at porn or anything.
What would they have to do looking at porn? They should better spend their time studying something usefull. Weapons comes to mind, after all how should they defend against all the pedophiles and terrorists waiting in line to get a chance to hit some US citicen.
My response was sarcastic because I also pointed out that the second review gave a scene by scene account of the movie and I got modded down as a troll. Don't know why, though.
I also re-read Harry Potter before seeing the movie and I agree that it spoiled the movie as you described. I didn't do it this time and I definitely wont't do it for LOTR. One time is enough. Reading the book afterwards is much more rewarding because you can imagine some characters much better (this is true for Harry Potter as well as for LOTR) even though these are movies that do a much better job of depicting a book then most other movies, based on books, I have seen so far. Most movies suck once you read the book and this is gladly not the case here as they preserve the spirit of the books they depict.
I wonder if you also get modded down as a troll because of pointing that out. :)
I often wonder about moderation but this time beats it all. :) Seems the moderators are gone crazy just by hearing that LOTR II is released. What will they do if the third part is on the horizon???
Ha! I just saved myself a few bucks for going to the theater as well as the time watching the movie. Just read the second review in the story and you get a complete description of the film. Very nice. Its not just a review its THE movie told without the annoying bits of moving pictures. Much more convinient and so much schorter than the books. The only distrubing thing is that the background music is from "Friday 13th" but you can't have everything.
Then this is a flaw in the game design which should be corrected. I can understand that in this case one wants to cheat. But my question aimed more on cheating that spoils the game entirely. I don't condem cheating per se, because the game should be entertaining. If the designer forgot to include features that keep gameplay interesting then it is ok for me to cheat around this and I don't consider this cheating. Upping levels by editing a save file is cheating though (only as an example) because you are supposed to play the game to gain levels. If you do things like that you take the fun out of the game for yourself (and for others probably as well). I never understood people who used aimbots in games like counterstrike or similar. To cheat the core game components that actually make up ther game is plain stupid for me. Basically I don't mind cheats that help you avoid situtations that don't add to the game experience. Travvling for hours through a map just to get from one point to another without anything happening is boring and doesn't add to the game experience. I remember playing Elite on the C64 and the most boring part was when you were travelling. You simply sat there waiting ... waiting ... waiting ... and somtimes you were hit by bandits. The trading stuff was fun, though.
I always wonder about cheaters in general. I'm playing most of the time single player games and only shooters online, but still I don't really understand why people cheat.
I used cheats myself but I only use them in certain circumstances. I mostly use cheats when there is a feature that should have been in the game all along and improves gameplay. i.E. in Baldurs Gate 2 I activated the console to be able to teleport from one point on the map to another. I never used it for anything else and the only reason I use it is because it is boring, once you have explored a map, to wait for your characters to crossing it. I never use the cheat to explore the map itself. When I look at all the cheats available for games I always wonder what poeple do with it? Why paying for a game when you let automated scripts play it while you are not there? I play a game because I want to play and enjoy it. If I don't like a game I don't play it, but then why bothering with scripts? I see a point for people who sell characters or items for real money, but again, why buying that stuff? If I don't want to play a game why even waste my time with loading it and in case of online games why paying for it. The game is about collecting items, killing monsters, solving riddles and all that and cheating defeats the core point of the game. This will always be a mystery to me...
MY laws don't say anything like that. Last time I checked the Buegerliches Gesetzbuch (I guess you are familiar with it because every country uses this) it said nowhere that I may not carry a hammer with me just because I can use it to break the window of a shop. I don't know how it is in the US. If an office can simply arrest you just because you carry some stuff with you that the officer concludes you COULD use to break the law then you should sell your car and everything else you own. After all you can kill sombody with your bare hands so you should probably remove them too. Just to be sure of course. :)
As for "Possess Goods Obtained By Crime". How do you conclude that possesing a mod chip means you got it by commiting a crime???? I really wonder about that. Ah! Another one! NO! A mod chip is NOT Narcotics!
You shouldn't assume that the world revolves around USA. It doesn't and neither does it revolve around US law. :) :)
If you buy a piece of crap you can manipulate it as much as you like it. Of course you void the warranty but that is not the issue. Don't tell me that benevolent Microsoft tries to help poor users not forfeiting their warrant by banning the bad users that ignore such great things like warranty. I have no Xbox and I will never buy one so don't assume you can shout at me that shit just because you think you know anything.
Why would I provide a statistics (not) supporting your claim? Here in Europe there is a basic rule. Presumed innocent until proven guilty. I know that the phrase is slightly altered in US to "Presumed innocent now give over that cheque." Maybe you really believe that marketing FUD of companies like MS that try to protect their money by claiming all users are purely bad and the absolutely have to monitor every move they make just to be sure that the bad users don't do anything that might cost money to poor MS. If they have nothing to hide then they shouldn't object to being monitored by such trivial things like personal ID's or similar things.
If MS chooses to exclude paying customers that is within their right. But then they are no entitled to grab the money from them and still deny them the right they purchased. After all the customer payed for a service and if the provider doesn't wnat to provide it then he can't simply say "That's it you are banned forget your money you already paid." Just because the user doesn't have piles of cash doesn't mean that his rights are somehow nullified.
Constuitution? What constitution are you talking about? Silly me. I always forget that US citizens think that the entire world is under the limitations US citizens are.
The only issue here is that Microsoft tries to lever a survaillance system onto the consumer by using cheap excuses like "Oh we are only acting in the interest of the users after all." Bullshit. If you don't do a better job you should give MS your payment back and they should start looking for better employees.
As for the example with the car: Think about it a second time. If you don't adhere to the regulation of the goverment and are caught driving around with such a car what would happen? Would the put you permanently in jail for that offense? Would they permanently ban you from driving? Or would they rather a) confiscate your car or b) request fixing of the safety features they require? See the difference here? The goverment is not't interested in regulating the people because of some politic/business plan they have. They regulate these things because the have to make sure that driving cars is reasonable safe. Therefore the don't ban you permantly for doing things like that, they only require you to fix the car. Removing the mod chip from the box is more then sufficient to achieve the claimed goal. Namely to enhance the user experience by discouraging cheaters. Obviously this is not the real intent and you have to pay for it.
I don't have a xbox nor am I able to do some wiring and stuff beyond simple things like building a standard PC. From the postings I had assumed that this is a simple thing.
On the other hand it shouldn't be to hard to write some software that intercepts the serial process somewhere and provides a more-or-less valid serial to the calling process. This way it is rather easy to flip through hundreds of serials in no time. Depending on how the overall process of connecting-detecting--banning-disconnecting works. Mabye someone could shed some light on this.
BUt you have to hit a valid serial every now and then. If this piles up then consumers would (should) start complaining.
That's ok. But you apparently didn't read the article. They don't ban you for using a cheat, they ban you for being ABLE to use a cheat. See the difference? Modding doesn't neccessarily mean that you are actually cheating but you are banned because of it and not because you were caught cheating.
If this would be transfered to PCs then this would mean everybody with an internet connection must be banned because he is able to download a cheat and use it. Or your harddisk is scanned and when a cheat is detected you are banned. Even though you might never have used it. You could have the cheat lying around on your harddisk because you are curious how it works and how to guard against it, but you are banned for that nevertheless.
Are you sentenced for murder because you have a knife at home? No? Why not? After all you could use a knife to kill somebody and don't tell me you have no knife at home, so this means you are guilty.
The argument of "No need for a backup because we replace your broken DVD/disc/whatever." sounds good at first glance. On second glance it is not really that good.
1. I don't want to send in a DVD or whatever to a company, then wait ages to get back an answer and having to bear the costs of sending and resending. You claim that you pay even the postage? Experience shows that this doesn't happen and the consumer has to pay additional costs BEYOND the postage to get another copy of a broken disc.
2. If I have a broken disc I only go to the hassle of sending it in when I want to play the game enough. THis means that I don't want to wait for more than a month to get my replacement. If I can backup my disc then there is no need for waiting so long. This is reason enough for me to make a backup for myself.
3. If a game is really good (it might become a classic) then there is the additional problem of the company going out of business. How do you protect against that? You can't. I have many old games and some of them, I really liked to play, I keep installing and play them again, even though they would never win a price because they are so old. As you can see in the emulation scene there are many people who try to protect their old games by writing emulators to be able to use that games again. But many of these games are no longer available anywhere, so how will you ensure that I will get that copy after such a long time? And you can't possibly argue that a company shouldn't need to be able to provide a game after such a long time because that is not the point. I paid for the right to play the game as often as I like to and if that means that I still want to play it 20 years after purchasing it then I should be able to.
I can tell you that I have several games that I had to use a crack for because the original game refused to run for some reason. Would you remove the copy protection when I buy a game and can't run it? No. You might return my money (if anything at all) and that's it, but I don't think that this is a solution either. Modding (or copying) doesn't neccessarily mean that you intend to steal something. As companies keep saying about such things I can say with the same right: Modding just protects my investments and interests as a consumer. Something that companies seem to happily ignore as long as they can claim to protect their investment.