I don't see any justification for that. True, many MMORPG developers state that exact line, but repetition doesn't create truth.
I suspect that many game designers have a simulationist tendency- they like to create world that are "realistic", or at least self-consistent. It's more satisfying to watch good behavior emerge from a simple set of ground rules than to script in every little detail yourself. (Less effort, too)
However, looking at existing top MMORPGs from the players' perspective, I don't see how an in-game economy helps them at all. Most players want to explore/quest/fight (mainly fight). And some players like to craft a little, making stuff to sell or use for their party.
None of that actually requires that players be able to trade arbitrary items for arbitrary game-money. Indeed, there is great precedent for items that are permanently attached to the first player to grab it, so that ownership can never be transferred (although the item can be archived or destroyed)
The virtual goods have value attached to them regardless of the game companies recognizing them.
No, no they don't. If Blizzard goes out of business and WoW goes offline, then I don't care if I have 10 gold or 10 billion.
The evidence is clear on this: ask players if he prefered to keep the items he has or loose them with no compensation. If only one of them opts to keep, the goods are actually valuable. But this is unecessary since ebay auction not only proove that people attach value
Wrong. That evidence, even if true, proves nothing. 1) The main reason the player wants to keep it is because he's unsure if the game company has really decided to permanently stop recognizing it, or will make the item useful again in the future. Generally, if you ask if a player wants to keep the item, he will answer assuming the game will continue to recognize it. (If the company does not, then I'd argue he isn't really keeping the item at all.)
2) Even in the rare case that the player truely believed the company would never make the item useful again, it still retains some sliver of sentimental value- like the cashed paycheck from your first job- but still, the economic meaning has been destroyed.
I know it's a grey area, but wouldn't that be entrapment?
So what if it's entrapment? Not as if that's illegal!
Many people believe a myth that entrapment is illegal, but that's just wrong. There is a legal defense of "entrapment" that applies only to police officers, and which is much more specific and limited than what "entrapment" means in the English language.
The strategy was sound, but the forces used to execute it were too small in number.
No, the strategy and force size were both adequate for the stated mission objectives. Those objectives were to destroy any major WMD and remove Saddam Hussein from office.
However, it turned out later that the real objectives were to create a safe democracy in Iraq, and that task requires a far higher level of infantry presence. Maybe if George W. Bush hadn't sworn in his presidential campaign that the US military would not be used for nation building, there might've been some more planning for that aspect of the objective. (Or at least an acknowledgement of that task)
Neither downloading nor sharing is an offense- but reproduction (copying) is, and since downloading is a form of copying, it's illegal too. (The same way that impaling people isn't specifically illegal, but falls under ordinary murder)
PS. If you were talking about Canadian law only, then you might be correct, but should've specified the non-USA jurisdiction.
Alice has allready been convicted of the crime of distributing this data. How can they ALSO be guilty?
Or what if I plant a bomb on an airplane, and you detonate it? If you're convicted of the crime, then how can I ALSO be guilty??
(In reality, law enforcement has no problem with the concept that multiple persons may work together to commit a single offense. And with P2p file sharing, that's the usual way it happens)
I would bet the costs of catching and gathering evidence on a file-sharer are much higher as well.
They're not. For about $200 worth of programming time, I could write you a script that'll monitor a few major BitTorrent sites and collect thousands of cases of copyright infringement each hour.
True, that system won't collect air-tight evidence, but that doesn't really matter. It's perfectly alright for a society to punish misdemeanors with a small fine and a presumption of guilt, as long as it's easily contestible.
Specifically, if the police mailed off $50 fines to every US citizen they caught taking an obviously-copyrighted file from piratepay.org, that would cut the infringement rate cut the infringement rate tremendously. Even if a suspect can easily beat the charge by just showing up in court, it will be enough in general.
if you break the law despite its punishment, then shouldn't you accept the punishment?
Others have already answered, but I will expand in a few ways.
Suppose the punishment for driving over the speed limit was summary execution (the cop shoots you, right there in the car). That would make people less likely to speed, but it wouldn't be fair. (Unless you're of the opinion that every law is by-definition fair)
A fairer way to punish P2p copyright infringers would be to treat it more like traffic tickets: low punishment, but a much higher chance of being caught. (And remember, traffic tickets are rather inexpensive for the government to hand out, as they don't have a burden of proof unless it's contested)
they produced a DERIVED WORK of a copyrighted item. That is what they are being sued for. Its exactly the same as if they had done it for a
If that were true, this suit would be based on traditional copyright, not the completely different Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which prohibits things other than infringement.
Er, so don't go looking, just sit down and play. It's not as if they come 'round and bury your TV under a pile of CDs of mods,
No, but it is like you click on the server list and 95% of the active games are running a single non-included mod, Desert Combat. And unlike other online FPS programs, bf1942 doesn't have a feature to automatically download mod content.
The reason is, the harcore gamer tries to find the best path to beat the game through analysis.
One superb example is 2004's "Battlefield Vietnam". The competitive game had 10 allowable player classes, 5 per team. One of those classes was dramatically superior to all the others, as he carried both M60 and LAW weapons which could destroy any opposing infantry or vehicle easily.
The stupidity of such a lopsided design was apparent to even moderately enthusiastic players, so it's rather telling that one of the world's largest game publishers had not even one person watching the product with the eye of an average customer.
because that would imply that either Ford is using the BMW trademark to represent their product or that BMW is using Ford's Mustang trademark to represent theirs.
I just felt like quoting that line, only to ensure that the delicious insanity of its anti-logic is prominent to everyone.
I mean, you actually believe that if I search Google for "Linux" and a green box reading "Windows XP free for 60 days" appears in the corner of the results page, it implies that Microsoft is somehow "respresenting" Windows XP as Linux. Sublime!
That's not what I said. Copyright is irrelevant here- the thing is, if they're going to change even one little thing about the gameplay, then there is NO reason to use any of the original code whatsoever.
The other respondant mentioned Tetris, and that's a fine example. Almost any game programmer could clone Tetris from memory, without looking at the original code at all. However, there are subtlties of the way the original Nintendo Tetrises played, which possibly some hard-core fans will recognize and care about. (What are those little differences? I don't know, maybe the piece-dropping order isn't quite uniformly random or something)
The game rules to Archon are more complex than Tetris, but only slightly. Almost any modern programmer* would find it easier to re-implement Archon based on a few play-throughs than to adapt and update the ancient code for a very different piece of modern hardware. The only motivation to working from the original code is if you want the gameplay to be precisely identical- and since they've decided to intentionally change gameplay, that reason doesn't apply.
* Except possibly for a guy who specialized heavily in 8-bit emulators.
No, that isn't what happened. If that had happened, the knockoff company would have been directly liable for trademark infringement, and no one would care about google's role at all. Here's what really happened:
A knock off company put up a website similar to Louis Vitton's and sold similiar looking products.
Company B is using Company A's trademark when it tells Google to do something with it.
And you are using Google's trademark whenever you type in "www.google.com". And whenever you look in your kitchen for some Coca-Cola, you are using their trademark too. And when I post another rant about how Windows XP sucks, I'm using Microsoft's trademark too. Fortunately, all those things are allowed, because there's nothing wrong or illegal about using someone else's trademark.
Otherwise, the instant a product was sold to you at a store, they'd burn off all the labels to prevent trademark usage. Only a few kinds of possible use are restricted to the trademark holder- specifically, presenting the trademark as the label under which you do business.
The kinds of use Google's searches (can) make is to internally match that trademark as a way of recognizing the competitor company, so their own ads can be displayed. That is exactly what trademarks are intended for: to recognize the same vendor again, regardless of whether you are a customer, or a competitor.
The user has no interest in Company B's products if they are searching for Company A's trademark.
There's no justification for that claim. Frequently, the opposite is true. Many searchers would be very happy to learn about a cheaper competitor to a name-brand product.
What if Microsoft started this practice with Linux and started paying Google to have Linux search ads with links to microsoft.com?
Oh, there you go again! You used 4 different trademarks in that line! Good thing the law doesn't work the way you thought, or you'd be going to jail...
Hmm, given that I already said that in my own post, why do you think I wanted to hear about it again? Or maybe you didn't fully read my post. It explained why those secret text fields are inadequate.
How do you mean? Trying it now, the toolbox can be stretched to one item tall and lots wide, and positioned anywhere the WM'll allow...
A suppose a highly-configurable WM could allow it, but I haven't tried to specifically set this up.
I alluded to Fitt's Law, which states that buttons which are exactly on the edge of the screen are easier to click (because it's impossible to move the mouse too far reaching for them), and that buttons on the corners are easiest of all. Simply stretching out the main The GIMP window along the top doesn't help, because you've still got a menubar, titlebar, and window border above those buttons.
Maybe I could configure The GIMP to suppress the menu bar, and a smart WM could suppress the titlebar and window border, but that'd be a lot of extra work. (Note that some applications like XMMS inhibit WM-decorations on their own)
makes a lot more sense than C's rather brute-force "malloc" and "free"
Those aren't even part of C. They're function calls in an external library, and have nothing to do with the language itself.
That's part of the reason C succeeded, and Ada failed. Ada made specific language concepts for things like memory management and threading, which C left for external libraries. That made porting Ada to a new platform difficult and error-prone, because capabilities the platform might not support were required to be reimplemented.
You can specify layout of data down to the byte-order and bit-width,
Replace "can" with "must", because what some view as a priviledge, others will find an obligation.
Ada didn't catch on much more are down to an early lack of good compilers
Which was a direct consequence of language overcomplexity. Writing a complete, minimally adequate C compiler is 6-month's work for a talented undergrad. Writing a complete Ada compiler...?
And why would anyone want to dock a toolbar to a specific image window when they can
So the buttons are closer to the work surface, for less back & forth wrist motion.
That's just one of many possible motivations- personally I'd prefer a Fitt's Law situation where the buttons are at the extreme top/corners of the screen, but The GIMP can't do that either.
Actually the stupid open dialog is GTK's fault, not the GIMP's.
GTK stands for "GIMP Tool Kit". So, GTK is GIMP's fault, and the blame goes back to GIMP again.
Note that because GTK is one of the top 3 widget-sets for Linux, and it's GIMP-derived, picking on The GIMP is often a proxy for broader shortcomings in other Linux apps.
Rather, the issue is that current mainstream X11 window managers fail to implement the basic required functionality to make such a situation easy to handle elegantly.
No. None of the WMs handle The GIMP elegantly. Some of them provide systems that allow for tolerable workarounds, but none are elegant.
You keep passing the blame off to the WM, but that's not the right place to put it: the X11 specification doesn't describe windows in enough detail for the WM to handle it as intelligently as (for example) Photoshop handles its internally-managed floating palettes. A window which displays 2d document data has different grouping/moving needs from one that contains tool buttons or a time-series indicator, but to X11, they're all just drawable surfaces.
I'm not really apologising for GIMP so much as criticising the current mainstream window managers for having fundamentally broken/incomplete behaviour.
So, what it comes down to is that The GIMP is tolerable on some WMs, and not on others.
Compatibility with a subset of host systems isn't something to be proud of. Look at Firefox and OpenOffice.org: when you're using those apps on a single document file, you hardly notice or care what WM is running.
And yet it is exactly what the user will be presented with when they deal with Photoshop on a Macintosh: multiple windows, even for a single document.
The Mac is a very special case, because it's non-multitasking origins left it an application-centric legacy, so that today it's possible to interact with a program that has ZERO windows open... a situation ludicrous to a Microsoft Windows or X11 user.
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It is essential for virtual economies to exitst.
I don't see any justification for that. True, many MMORPG developers state that exact line, but repetition doesn't create truth.
I suspect that many game designers have a simulationist tendency- they like to create world that are "realistic", or at least self-consistent. It's more satisfying to watch good behavior emerge from a simple set of ground rules than to script in every little detail yourself. (Less effort, too)
However, looking at existing top MMORPGs from the players' perspective, I don't see how an in-game economy helps them at all. Most players want to explore/quest/fight (mainly fight). And some players like to craft a little, making stuff to sell or use for their party.
None of that actually requires that players be able to trade arbitrary items for arbitrary game-money. Indeed, there is great precedent for items that are permanently attached to the first player to grab it, so that ownership can never be transferred (although the item can be archived or destroyed)
The virtual goods have value attached to them regardless of the game companies recognizing them.
No, no they don't. If Blizzard goes out of business and WoW goes offline, then I don't care if I have 10 gold or 10 billion.
The evidence is clear on this: ask players if he prefered to keep the items he has or loose them with no compensation. If only one of them opts to keep, the goods are actually valuable. But this is unecessary since ebay auction not only proove that people attach value
Wrong. That evidence, even if true, proves nothing.
1) The main reason the player wants to keep it is because he's unsure if the game company has really decided to permanently stop recognizing it, or will make the item useful again in the future. Generally, if you ask if a player wants to keep the item, he will answer assuming the game will continue to recognize it. (If the company does not, then I'd argue he isn't really keeping the item at all.)
2) Even in the rare case that the player truely believed the company would never make the item useful again, it still retains some sliver of sentimental value- like the cashed paycheck from your first job- but still, the economic meaning has been destroyed.
I know it's a grey area, but wouldn't that be entrapment?
So what if it's entrapment? Not as if that's illegal!
Many people believe a myth that entrapment is illegal, but that's just wrong. There is a legal defense of "entrapment" that applies only to police officers, and which is much more specific and limited than what "entrapment" means in the English language.
The strategy was sound, but the forces used to execute it were too small in number.
No, the strategy and force size were both adequate for the stated mission objectives. Those objectives were to destroy any major WMD and remove Saddam Hussein from office.
However, it turned out later that the real objectives were to create a safe democracy in Iraq, and that task requires a far higher level of infantry presence. Maybe if George W. Bush hadn't sworn in his presidential campaign that the US military would not be used for nation building, there might've been some more planning for that aspect of the objective. (Or at least an acknowledgement of that task)
2) Downloading a file IS NOT an offense (yet). However, this has not been tested in court
3) Sharing a file IS an offense
Both of those are completely false. Be careful about posting ignorant anti-facts like those, or Kangarooski will jump all over you.
Neither downloading nor sharing is an offense- but reproduction (copying) is, and since downloading is a form of copying, it's illegal too. (The same way that impaling people isn't specifically illegal, but falls under ordinary murder)
PS. If you were talking about Canadian law only, then you might be correct, but should've specified the non-USA jurisdiction.
Alice has allready been convicted of the crime of distributing this data. How can they ALSO be guilty?
Or what if I plant a bomb on an airplane, and you detonate it? If you're convicted of the crime, then how can I ALSO be guilty??
(In reality, law enforcement has no problem with the concept that multiple persons may work together to commit a single offense. And with P2p file sharing, that's the usual way it happens)
I would bet the costs of catching and gathering evidence on a file-sharer are much higher as well.
They're not. For about $200 worth of programming time, I could write you a script that'll monitor a few major BitTorrent sites and collect thousands of cases of copyright infringement each hour.
True, that system won't collect air-tight evidence, but that doesn't really matter. It's perfectly alright for a society to punish misdemeanors with a small fine and a presumption of guilt, as long as it's easily contestible.
Specifically, if the police mailed off $50 fines to every US citizen they caught taking an obviously-copyrighted file from piratepay.org, that would cut the infringement rate cut the infringement rate tremendously. Even if a suspect can easily beat the charge by just showing up in court, it will be enough in general.
if you break the law despite its punishment, then shouldn't you accept the punishment?
Others have already answered, but I will expand in a few ways.
Suppose the punishment for driving over the speed limit was summary execution (the cop shoots you, right there in the car). That would make people less likely to speed, but it wouldn't be fair. (Unless you're of the opinion that every law is by-definition fair)
A fairer way to punish P2p copyright infringers would be to treat it more like traffic tickets: low punishment, but a much higher chance of being caught. (And remember, traffic tickets are rather inexpensive for the government to hand out, as they don't have a burden of proof unless it's contested)
they produced a DERIVED WORK of a copyrighted item. That is what they are being sued for. Its exactly the same as if they had done it for a
If that were true, this suit would be based on traditional copyright, not the completely different Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which prohibits things other than infringement.
Er, so don't go looking, just sit down and play. It's not as if they come 'round and bury your TV under a pile of CDs of mods,
No, but it is like you click on the server list and 95% of the active games are running a single non-included mod, Desert Combat. And unlike other online FPS programs, bf1942 doesn't have a feature to automatically download mod content.
What the heck is OMF?
Keep on studying, and eventually you too may master the intricacies of Google.
The reason is, the harcore gamer tries to find the best path to beat the game through analysis.
One superb example is 2004's "Battlefield Vietnam". The competitive game had 10 allowable player classes, 5 per team. One of those classes was dramatically superior to all the others, as he carried both M60 and LAW weapons which could destroy any opposing infantry or vehicle easily.
The stupidity of such a lopsided design was apparent to even moderately enthusiastic players, so it's rather telling that one of the world's largest game publishers had not even one person watching the product with the eye of an average customer.
because that would imply that either Ford is using the BMW trademark to represent their product or that BMW is using Ford's Mustang trademark to represent theirs.
I just felt like quoting that line, only to ensure that the delicious insanity of its anti-logic is prominent to everyone.
I mean, you actually believe that if I search Google for "Linux" and a green box reading "Windows XP free for 60 days" appears in the corner of the results page, it implies that Microsoft is somehow "respresenting" Windows XP as Linux. Sublime!
One change does not cancel out copyright,
That's not what I said. Copyright is irrelevant here- the thing is, if they're going to change even one little thing about the gameplay, then there is NO reason to use any of the original code whatsoever.
The other respondant mentioned Tetris, and that's a fine example. Almost any game programmer could clone Tetris from memory, without looking at the original code at all. However, there are subtlties of the way the original Nintendo Tetrises played, which possibly some hard-core fans will recognize and care about. (What are those little differences? I don't know, maybe the piece-dropping order isn't quite uniformly random or something)
The game rules to Archon are more complex than Tetris, but only slightly. Almost any modern programmer* would find it easier to re-implement Archon based on a few play-throughs than to adapt and update the ancient code for a very different piece of modern hardware. The only motivation to working from the original code is if you want the gameplay to be precisely identical- and since they've decided to intentionally change gameplay, that reason doesn't apply.
* Except possibly for a guy who specialized heavily in 8-bit emulators.
In the case cited, that's exactly what happened.
No, that isn't what happened. If that had happened, the knockoff company would have been directly liable for trademark infringement, and no one would care about google's role at all. Here's what really happened:
A knock off company put up a website similar to Louis Vitton's and sold similiar looking products.
(Why do you contradict yourself like that?)
Company B is using Company A's trademark when it tells Google to do something with it.
And you are using Google's trademark whenever you type in "www.google.com". And whenever you look in your kitchen for some Coca-Cola, you are using their trademark too. And when I post another rant about how Windows XP sucks, I'm using Microsoft's trademark too. Fortunately, all those things are allowed, because there's nothing wrong or illegal about using someone else's trademark.
Otherwise, the instant a product was sold to you at a store, they'd burn off all the labels to prevent trademark usage. Only a few kinds of possible use are restricted to the trademark holder- specifically, presenting the trademark as the label under which you do business.
The kinds of use Google's searches (can) make is to internally match that trademark as a way of recognizing the competitor company, so their own ads can be displayed. That is exactly what trademarks are intended for: to recognize the same vendor again, regardless of whether you are a customer, or a competitor.
The user has no interest in Company B's products if they are searching for Company A's trademark.
There's no justification for that claim. Frequently, the opposite is true. Many searchers would be very happy to learn about a cheaper competitor to a name-brand product.
What if Microsoft started this practice with Linux and started paying Google to have Linux search ads with links to microsoft.com?
Oh, there you go again! You used 4 different trademarks in that line! Good thing the law doesn't work the way you thought, or you'd be going to jail...
So, if I create a fast food restaurant called McDonalds, serving Big Macs and use all the same colors etc, you're okay with that?
As has already been explained, that would be performing trade under another company's mark, which is exactly (and only) what trademark should prevent.
But you want it to be illegal for me to tell my friend about a Burger King or Subway around the corner if he asks me where the nearest McDonalds is.
Just start typing, and a text box appears.
Hmm, given that I already said that in my own post, why do you think I wanted to hear about it again? Or maybe you didn't fully read my post. It explained why those secret text fields are inadequate.
How do you mean? Trying it now, the toolbox can be stretched to one item tall and lots wide, and positioned anywhere the WM'll allow...
A suppose a highly-configurable WM could allow it, but I haven't tried to specifically set this up.
I alluded to Fitt's Law, which states that buttons which are exactly on the edge of the screen are easier to click (because it's impossible to move the mouse too far reaching for them), and that buttons on the corners are easiest of all. Simply stretching out the main The GIMP window along the top doesn't help, because you've still got a menubar, titlebar, and window border above those buttons.
Maybe I could configure The GIMP to suppress the menu bar, and a smart WM could suppress the titlebar and window border, but that'd be a lot of extra work. (Note that some applications like XMMS inhibit WM-decorations on their own)
makes a lot more sense than C's rather brute-force "malloc" and "free"
Those aren't even part of C. They're function calls in an external library, and have nothing to do with the language itself.
That's part of the reason C succeeded, and Ada failed. Ada made specific language concepts for things like memory management and threading, which C left for external libraries. That made porting Ada to a new platform difficult and error-prone, because capabilities the platform might not support were required to be reimplemented.
You can specify layout of data down to the byte-order and bit-width,
Replace "can" with "must", because what some view as a priviledge, others will find an obligation.
Ada didn't catch on much more are down to an early lack of good compilers
Which was a direct consequence of language overcomplexity. Writing a complete, minimally adequate C compiler is 6-month's work for a talented undergrad. Writing a complete Ada compiler...?
And why would anyone want to dock a toolbar to a specific image window when they can
So the buttons are closer to the work surface, for less back & forth wrist motion.
That's just one of many possible motivations- personally I'd prefer a Fitt's Law situation where the buttons are at the extreme top/corners of the screen, but The GIMP can't do that either.
Actually the stupid open dialog is GTK's fault, not the GIMP's.
GTK stands for "GIMP Tool Kit". So, GTK is GIMP's fault, and the blame goes back to GIMP again.
Note that because GTK is one of the top 3 widget-sets for Linux, and it's GIMP-derived, picking on The GIMP is often a proxy for broader shortcomings in other Linux apps.
Rather, the issue is that current mainstream X11 window managers fail to implement the basic required functionality to make such a situation easy to handle elegantly.
No. None of the WMs handle The GIMP elegantly. Some of them provide systems that allow for tolerable workarounds, but none are elegant.
You keep passing the blame off to the WM, but that's not the right place to put it: the X11 specification doesn't describe windows in enough detail for the WM to handle it as intelligently as (for example) Photoshop handles its internally-managed floating palettes. A window which displays 2d document data has different grouping/moving needs from one that contains tool buttons or a time-series indicator, but to X11, they're all just drawable surfaces.
I'm not really apologising for GIMP so much as criticising the current mainstream window managers for having fundamentally broken/incomplete behaviour.
So, what it comes down to is that The GIMP is tolerable on some WMs, and not on others.
Compatibility with a subset of host systems isn't something to be proud of. Look at Firefox and OpenOffice.org: when you're using those apps on a single document file, you hardly notice or care what WM is running.
And yet it is exactly what the user will be presented with when they deal with Photoshop on a Macintosh: multiple windows, even for a single document.
The Mac is a very special case, because it's non-multitasking origins left it an application-centric legacy, so that today it's possible to interact with a program that has ZERO windows open... a situation ludicrous to a Microsoft Windows or X11 user.