So they should open the console, so that someone can port a game to it without paying a percentage to publish, and steal the customers for the games they do get a cut from?
Yes, that's a very compelling argument for the platform developer...
The tactic they've taken to avoid the new limits is to sue the government for imposing the limits. This lawsuit is sort of a tit-for-tat response to that... They escalated to the courts first.
Well, I would expect *them* to flip flop. But they don't get to decide that, right? Surely someone other than the RIAA gets to define what "fair use" means in this case?
Pirates don't need fair use exemptions because if they're willing to break the law, they can get the music in other ways. Teachers, on the other hand, do need it because they can't exactly go on BitTorrent and download their resources.
If you're saying that the people developing the cracks are probably not after fair use, I might agree with you. But the people agitating for Fair Use exemptions to the DMCA are probably not pirates.
Why is it necessarily for entertainment purposes? Perhaps it's a film class... Without excerpts, film classes are sort of difficult. Perhaps it's a history class covering the social upheaval of the 1960s USA. Some sort of music clip would seem to be almost essential. Or perhaps the DRMed work is a book, and the "clip" is a cited paragraph. Or maybe it is just a teacher trying to engage their students' interest by playing a clip from a popular movie about the subject that they're discussing - sure, entertainment, but I'm sure it engages the class much more than dry reading. Should all of those uses be illegal?
I think that if the world could see everyone's search data, we would come to realize that this isn't that strange after all. Just the internet in general quickly makes me realize, at least, that there are a lot of people out there with non-mainstream tastes. Perhaps more than there are people with strictly mainstream tastes (the long tail of sex?).
Don't be so quick to judge. Would we find anything strange in *your* porn collection?
The people in the AOL search thing who really bother me are the ones searching for murders and ways to commit them. SomethingAwful had one log that made it look like the guy was trying to figure out if he'd been fingered for serial killings. (Although, that's potentially a biased view based on a small view of his search history - illustrating another danger in the release of this information).
Personally, I'm somewhat glad this information is out. It's akin to the Kinsey studies of an earlier age... It might make you realize that your neighbors are not as "normal" as you assume them to be. And might make you more comfortable in your abnormality.
OK, the only thing in your post I'm going to argue about is the first one.
Facism is classically placed on the far-right side of the two-dimensional political spectrum. You can certainly argue that a two-dimensional spectrum is lacking, but you can't really shoehorn Facism, as such, into a leftist world view. On the left, the authoritarian government of choice is Communism. Facism is much too concerned with corporate power and welfare to be a leftist trait.
I realize that no one likes to see their pet political views tarred with an epithet, but that doesn't mean you can redefine terms so that everything bad is automatically "leftist".
I agree with some of what you're saying. Being raised a closed, fanatical religious society is not a desirable thing. And that sort of thing happens even in other countries. In fact, the situation might even be worse in immigrant communities - people tend to be less flexible, to cling to "the old ways" and just generally react against the culture shock they find themselves in as immigrants.
But the question becomes, where do you draw the line? Because the societies you're describing can just as easily be Mormons, say, or fundamentalist Christians. In fact, aside from the specific religious characteristics, fundamentalist Islam shares a lot of ideology with fundamentalist Christianity. Things like gay rights, abortion, premarital sex, sex education, contraception, the place of the woman in the home, and so forth.
So then if we target the fundamentalist Islamics and ignore the other fundamentalists, we're implicitly placing one religion below others. We're discriminating, visibly and publically, and we're going down a road that is the same one used to persecute Jews, or Christians, or any other minority religious group through the ages. That's a dangerous path to head down.
Well, fine. But then, choosing not to commit murder is also a luxury. Moral codes like that assume that you'll never be in a situation where you have to kill to survive. Canabalism is the same way. Rape, theft, murder - There are situations where any of those might be seen as a luxury. People still sometimes choose not to commit them because they see the moral act as being preferable to death. And that's not even getting into religious ideals, which many people choose to die in order to uphold. Is there any reason veganism can't be the same way?
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You're absolutely right. When I was a poor college student, I pirated all my games. When I joined the industry, I started buying them, instead - and the quality of my experience dropped. I had to always have the right CD on hand, have an internet connection at the right time, not be using Alcohol for my networked disc-image repository... I had to pre-order from some monkey at EB if I wanted to play it near launch, and I had to physically get to the store during business hours in order to actually get my hands on it. Plus, I was lucky enough to buy a few games that weren't great. Not anything truly awful, but certainly not worth the ticket price (like, say, Doom 3?)
So I started buying the games and pirating them. I'll buy the game on physical media and CD-crack it, so I don't have to constantly swap discs, or I'll download it so that I can play it without pre-ordering or driving to the store, and then pick it up at my convenience.
But really, it's like the "don't steal movies" ads in theaters and legitimate DVDs - the only people who get annoyed are the legitimate paying customers. The pirates get the better end of the bargain in almost every way.
Can you "illicitly" drain demand, though? Not trolling, this is a serious question. I see what the GP is saying, and it makes sense. But then it becomes very hard to separate out the different drains on demand - sure, pirated games compete for time with legitimate games, but then so does TV, the outdoors, porn... In fact, pirated games also drain demand from all these other activities. Is that illicit, also? What makes playing pirated games different from the other activities?
If it's the illegality of the action, then does robbing banks also illicitly drain demand from video games? Or watching pirated movies?
Again, not an attack on your position, I'm just curious what your reasoning on these things would be.
Yeah... I know for a fact that "Barbie Horse Adventures" had to be rerated. Let's just say the developers had a different idea of "adventures" than the ESRB.
GDC and E3 are two totally different events, though. GDC is for the developers, you're right. E3 was for the retailers and the press. No one hears about GDC except for developers, and that's a good thing. It's like a medical conference, really.
But E3 was the one time of year my mother heard about the sort of things that go on in our industry. She could get interested in new hardware or games because they'd be in publications like Time and the local newspaper. Sure, the enthusiast press will cover news year-round, will attend the EA press conference, the Sony press conference, whatever else happens. But Time isn't going to bother. They'll probably still cover E3, but without the spectacle to report on, it'll have all the flavor (and get all the column space) of a press release. No one wants to hear about how men in business suits explained the market-capturing features of the latest FPS, but journalists love writing about the giant smoking demon heads, the hours-long lines, and the scantily-clad women. They provide the kind of details that make people who don't care about the game read the article.
E3 was maybe bad for the big publishers and for the attendees (well, it was great for me, I got to go down to LA on expense account...), but it was great for the industry as a whole. The spectacle was something that drew attention, and people got excited about. GDC will hopefully not become a spectacle, but something probably will... Maybe PAX.
And that's another reason why losing E3 is so stupid. Everyone's already looking for a replacement, and where ever the press and gamers go, the exhibitors will have to follow. They'll start with small booths at PAX, and then someone will build a bigger booth, and then someone will hire a former stripper, and then someone will build a giant smoking demon head, and then we'll be right back where we started, except we'll have lost a few years of the public's attention and part of the soul and history of the industry.
And that's another reason why E3 is a great loss. It's symptomatic of the transition of the gaming industry from a fun-filled, over-the-top, bizarre industry fuelled by collective love of geeky things and passion into just another business. The new E3 doesn't have to be about games, a similar conference could take place about the oil business, or medical databases, or making soft drinks. It shows that video games are becoming just another way of making money, run by people in suits who don't care whether the game involves elves or aliens or whether it's an RTS or an FPS, as long as it's whatever their research tells them will sell. That's happening regardless of E3, of course, but it was nice to see suits having to make concessions to the underlying passion of the industry. Now they can safely ignore all that messy stuff and get back to selling things.
You want to protest the war, fine -- but don't exepct me to care what you have to say when you can't make your voice heard in a public and legal forum. Defacing a website, any web site, is not the way to make me feel sympathy for your point of view.
Let's be honest, though. If they had instead posted to the Chilean version of Slashdot, or marched through the streets, would you have sympathy? Would you care what they have to say? Would you even hear about it?
This way they got their viewpoint out, much more effectively than they could have in any legal way.
Why are you under the impression that war should be fair? That crew is not obligated to give the insurgents a fighting chance -- if they don't have weapons ready, don't know where the fire is coming from and cannot defend themselves -- tough luck!
So, umm, why was Sept. 11th so bad, then? Was it just because it was our guys who weren't prepared? Or is there actually something immoral and despicable about attacking unarmed, defenseless civilians without warning?
Uh, the difference is that impersonating a federal officer is a crime, and that being an actual federal officer is not.
Well, there's the problem! All we need to do is make sure that actually *being* a federal officer is as much, if not more, of a crime as impersonating one.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The rights that we have are not ours because we're citizens of the US, they are unalienable rights of all human beings.
It's sad that we've forgotten that. It's sadder still that this used to be considered not only true, but "self-evident". I guess it wasn't as clear as all that.
So please, could we stop the hysteria and quit calling everything we don't like "terrorism"?
Calling something a "reign of terror" doesn't have anything to do with terrorism. The original reign of terror occurred during the French Revolution (wikipedia link).
So it's hyperbole, but it's not about calling things terrorism.
One thing in the article that heralds a huge change - perhaps not via Spore, but it's coming - is the fact that they can print out models of your creatures using a 3D printer. They just sort of toss out that you might be able to pay a few bucks to a service and get your own plastic creatures made in the same way.
Can you imagine the toy industry if this becomes popular? Using Spore's open-ended creature generation, plus the ability to make a plastic model for a relatively low-cost, and kids will be able to create their own figures that will be totally unlike any others. If that gets popular enough, it might create a market for home 3D printers...
As for Slashdot, we know where they stand - any Anti PS3 news you got, no matter now non-sensical - throw it their way!
It's not Slashdot, you know. I have Google news dig out some PS3-related news from random places every day, and you know what? It's all negative. I also have Nintendo-related stories, and they're almost all positive.
I also read a ton of other gaming sites, and it's the same story.
It's not a conspiracy. It's either badly-managed PR, or the facts have a Nintendo bias. Or a little bit of both.
You could try GreenCine, which while not as large as Netflix has a great selection of eclectic DVDs (and mainstream titles, too) and fantastic customer service... And no throttling!
Slashdot Mirror
So they should open the console, so that someone can port a game to it without paying a percentage to publish, and steal the customers for the games they do get a cut from?
Yes, that's a very compelling argument for the platform developer...
The tactic they've taken to avoid the new limits is to sue the government for imposing the limits. This lawsuit is sort of a tit-for-tat response to that... They escalated to the courts first.
Well, I would expect *them* to flip flop. But they don't get to decide that, right? Surely someone other than the RIAA gets to define what "fair use" means in this case?
:-(
Otherwise, I'm scared
What about the cat-detector vans? Don't tell me those are fake, too?
Pirates don't need fair use exemptions because if they're willing to break the law, they can get the music in other ways. Teachers, on the other hand, do need it because they can't exactly go on BitTorrent and download their resources.
If you're saying that the people developing the cracks are probably not after fair use, I might agree with you. But the people agitating for Fair Use exemptions to the DMCA are probably not pirates.
Why is it necessarily for entertainment purposes? Perhaps it's a film class... Without excerpts, film classes are sort of difficult. Perhaps it's a history class covering the social upheaval of the 1960s USA. Some sort of music clip would seem to be almost essential. Or perhaps the DRMed work is a book, and the "clip" is a cited paragraph. Or maybe it is just a teacher trying to engage their students' interest by playing a clip from a popular movie about the subject that they're discussing - sure, entertainment, but I'm sure it engages the class much more than dry reading. Should all of those uses be illegal?
"No duh."
I think that if the world could see everyone's search data, we would come to realize that this isn't that strange after all. Just the internet in general quickly makes me realize, at least, that there are a lot of people out there with non-mainstream tastes. Perhaps more than there are people with strictly mainstream tastes (the long tail of sex?).
Don't be so quick to judge. Would we find anything strange in *your* porn collection?
The people in the AOL search thing who really bother me are the ones searching for murders and ways to commit them. SomethingAwful had one log that made it look like the guy was trying to figure out if he'd been fingered for serial killings. (Although, that's potentially a biased view based on a small view of his search history - illustrating another danger in the release of this information).
Personally, I'm somewhat glad this information is out. It's akin to the Kinsey studies of an earlier age... It might make you realize that your neighbors are not as "normal" as you assume them to be. And might make you more comfortable in your abnormality.
OK, the only thing in your post I'm going to argue about is the first one.
Facism is classically placed on the far-right side of the two-dimensional political spectrum. You can certainly argue that a two-dimensional spectrum is lacking, but you can't really shoehorn Facism, as such, into a leftist world view. On the left, the authoritarian government of choice is Communism. Facism is much too concerned with corporate power and welfare to be a leftist trait.
I realize that no one likes to see their pet political views tarred with an epithet, but that doesn't mean you can redefine terms so that everything bad is automatically "leftist".
I agree with some of what you're saying. Being raised a closed, fanatical religious society is not a desirable thing. And that sort of thing happens even in other countries. In fact, the situation might even be worse in immigrant communities - people tend to be less flexible, to cling to "the old ways" and just generally react against the culture shock they find themselves in as immigrants.
But the question becomes, where do you draw the line? Because the societies you're describing can just as easily be Mormons, say, or fundamentalist Christians. In fact, aside from the specific religious characteristics, fundamentalist Islam shares a lot of ideology with fundamentalist Christianity. Things like gay rights, abortion, premarital sex, sex education, contraception, the place of the woman in the home, and so forth.
So then if we target the fundamentalist Islamics and ignore the other fundamentalists, we're implicitly placing one religion below others. We're discriminating, visibly and publically, and we're going down a road that is the same one used to persecute Jews, or Christians, or any other minority religious group through the ages. That's a dangerous path to head down.
Well, fine. But then, choosing not to commit murder is also a luxury. Moral codes like that assume that you'll never be in a situation where you have to kill to survive. Canabalism is the same way. Rape, theft, murder - There are situations where any of those might be seen as a luxury. People still sometimes choose not to commit them because they see the moral act as being preferable to death. And that's not even getting into religious ideals, which many people choose to die in order to uphold. Is there any reason veganism can't be the same way?
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You're absolutely right. When I was a poor college student, I pirated all my games. When I joined the industry, I started buying them, instead - and the quality of my experience dropped. I had to always have the right CD on hand, have an internet connection at the right time, not be using Alcohol for my networked disc-image repository... I had to pre-order from some monkey at EB if I wanted to play it near launch, and I had to physically get to the store during business hours in order to actually get my hands on it. Plus, I was lucky enough to buy a few games that weren't great. Not anything truly awful, but certainly not worth the ticket price (like, say, Doom 3?)
So I started buying the games and pirating them. I'll buy the game on physical media and CD-crack it, so I don't have to constantly swap discs, or I'll download it so that I can play it without pre-ordering or driving to the store, and then pick it up at my convenience.
But really, it's like the "don't steal movies" ads in theaters and legitimate DVDs - the only people who get annoyed are the legitimate paying customers. The pirates get the better end of the bargain in almost every way.
Can you "illicitly" drain demand, though? Not trolling, this is a serious question. I see what the GP is saying, and it makes sense. But then it becomes very hard to separate out the different drains on demand - sure, pirated games compete for time with legitimate games, but then so does TV, the outdoors, porn... In fact, pirated games also drain demand from all these other activities. Is that illicit, also? What makes playing pirated games different from the other activities?
If it's the illegality of the action, then does robbing banks also illicitly drain demand from video games? Or watching pirated movies?
Again, not an attack on your position, I'm just curious what your reasoning on these things would be.
Yeah... I know for a fact that "Barbie Horse Adventures" had to be rerated. Let's just say the developers had a different idea of "adventures" than the ESRB.
GDC and E3 are two totally different events, though. GDC is for the developers, you're right. E3 was for the retailers and the press. No one hears about GDC except for developers, and that's a good thing. It's like a medical conference, really.
But E3 was the one time of year my mother heard about the sort of things that go on in our industry. She could get interested in new hardware or games because they'd be in publications like Time and the local newspaper. Sure, the enthusiast press will cover news year-round, will attend the EA press conference, the Sony press conference, whatever else happens. But Time isn't going to bother. They'll probably still cover E3, but without the spectacle to report on, it'll have all the flavor (and get all the column space) of a press release. No one wants to hear about how men in business suits explained the market-capturing features of the latest FPS, but journalists love writing about the giant smoking demon heads, the hours-long lines, and the scantily-clad women. They provide the kind of details that make people who don't care about the game read the article.
E3 was maybe bad for the big publishers and for the attendees (well, it was great for me, I got to go down to LA on expense account...), but it was great for the industry as a whole. The spectacle was something that drew attention, and people got excited about. GDC will hopefully not become a spectacle, but something probably will... Maybe PAX.
And that's another reason why losing E3 is so stupid. Everyone's already looking for a replacement, and where ever the press and gamers go, the exhibitors will have to follow. They'll start with small booths at PAX, and then someone will build a bigger booth, and then someone will hire a former stripper, and then someone will build a giant smoking demon head, and then we'll be right back where we started, except we'll have lost a few years of the public's attention and part of the soul and history of the industry.
And that's another reason why E3 is a great loss. It's symptomatic of the transition of the gaming industry from a fun-filled, over-the-top, bizarre industry fuelled by collective love of geeky things and passion into just another business. The new E3 doesn't have to be about games, a similar conference could take place about the oil business, or medical databases, or making soft drinks. It shows that video games are becoming just another way of making money, run by people in suits who don't care whether the game involves elves or aliens or whether it's an RTS or an FPS, as long as it's whatever their research tells them will sell. That's happening regardless of E3, of course, but it was nice to see suits having to make concessions to the underlying passion of the industry. Now they can safely ignore all that messy stuff and get back to selling things.
And that's a damn shame.
You want to protest the war, fine -- but don't exepct me to care what you have to say when you can't make your voice heard in a public and legal forum. Defacing a website, any web site, is not the way to make me feel sympathy for your point of view.
Let's be honest, though. If they had instead posted to the Chilean version of Slashdot, or marched through the streets, would you have sympathy? Would you care what they have to say? Would you even hear about it?
This way they got their viewpoint out, much more effectively than they could have in any legal way.
Why are you under the impression that war should be fair? That crew is not obligated to give the insurgents a fighting chance -- if they don't have weapons ready, don't know where the fire is coming from and cannot defend themselves -- tough luck!
So, umm, why was Sept. 11th so bad, then? Was it just because it was our guys who weren't prepared? Or is there actually something immoral and despicable about attacking unarmed, defenseless civilians without warning?
Uh, the difference is that impersonating a federal officer is a crime, and that being an actual federal officer is not.
Well, there's the problem! All we need to do is make sure that actually *being* a federal officer is as much, if not more, of a crime as impersonating one.
Simple!
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The rights that we have are not ours because we're citizens of the US, they are unalienable rights of all human beings.
It's sad that we've forgotten that. It's sadder still that this used to be considered not only true, but "self-evident". I guess it wasn't as clear as all that.
So please, could we stop the hysteria and quit calling everything we don't like "terrorism"?
Calling something a "reign of terror" doesn't have anything to do with terrorism. The original reign of terror occurred during the French Revolution (wikipedia link).
So it's hyperbole, but it's not about calling things terrorism.
One thing in the article that heralds a huge change - perhaps not via Spore, but it's coming - is the fact that they can print out models of your creatures using a 3D printer. They just sort of toss out that you might be able to pay a few bucks to a service and get your own plastic creatures made in the same way.
Can you imagine the toy industry if this becomes popular? Using Spore's open-ended creature generation, plus the ability to make a plastic model for a relatively low-cost, and kids will be able to create their own figures that will be totally unlike any others. If that gets popular enough, it might create a market for home 3D printers...
As for Slashdot, we know where they stand - any Anti PS3 news you got, no matter now non-sensical - throw it their way!
It's not Slashdot, you know. I have Google news dig out some PS3-related news from random places every day, and you know what? It's all negative. I also have Nintendo-related stories, and they're almost all positive.
I also read a ton of other gaming sites, and it's the same story.
It's not a conspiracy. It's either badly-managed PR, or the facts have a Nintendo bias. Or a little bit of both.
You could try GreenCine, which while not as large as Netflix has a great selection of eclectic DVDs (and mainstream titles, too) and fantastic customer service... And no throttling!
Yeah, and medical insurance payments shouldn't go to doctors, then we'd see how concerned they are about serving humanity!
In fact, we should abolish salaries in general. If people don't want to do their work for the benefit of humanity as a whole, well, fuck 'em!