what the fsck is it with you Americans and your inability to spell "rogue"???
We have a general inability to spell certain words ending in -gue correctly. Consider how many people misspell "tongue" as "tounge". (You'll get more Google hits on the incorrect spelling if you turn SafeSearch off.) We also tend to drop the -ue in -logue words. Out of 20 -gue words maybe 7 or 8 get spelled correctly most of the time if at all.
I'm a bit more concerned about the slow death of the proper use of the hyphen. It is often incorrectly omitted in things like:
The movie "Eight Legged Freaks"
apparently about eight freaks who have legs
Pontiac's "Game Changing Performance" football highlights
where the game changes the player's performance, not the player's performance changing the result of the game, and
The Stargate Atlantis episode "Thirty Eight Minutes"
30 * 8 minutes == 4 hours.
Whenever someone puts forth a technology to take away more of your access, having them say, "please send (constructive) comments to", is a big "screw you, dissenters; we're doing this whether you like it or not" right to your face.
Next will be parallax restrictions to ensure only one person gets to see the content, and then comes plugging the memory hole:
"You are trying to remember copyrighted material. Visit Rekall to purchase a one-time-use decryption key to access this memory."
And they wont be found guilty of 77 charges of piracy, they pirated 77 games, multiple times.
But they had to conduct a sting operation to get evidence of a crime, and that is a single XBOX sale that had 77 copies on the hard drive. If they had evidence of other sales, why have a sting?
Now maybe after getting access to all their sales records they might be able to track down other sales and prove more instances, but there's not that much motivation. It may increase the damages in a civil suit, but for the criminal case the one sale would be sufficient for a conviction, and if they can beat the one (if it is installing games provided by the agents relegating the originals as backups or the same for cheap used games included in the bundle), they'll get a pass on all the other alleged sales too.
Consider the possibility that these ($3000 / 77 ~=) $38.95 games were themselves bought as used games for $3.00 each, and that selling them preinstalled at ($500 / 77 ~=) $6.50 each is ( $6.50 / $3 - 1 ~=) 117% profit per title for the used game vendor, and you get the playable copy on the drive and your backups as the original disks.
Or do we suddenly believe that we have no fair-use right to have functional backup copies of our games? that the DMCA rightfully strips us of the right to make backups?
Depending on facts that may have been excluded from the story, this case may yet be defensible.
Yes they were stealing from us developers. They took away sales that could have made hard earned money for dozens of team members who work 70 hour or longer weeks during months of crunch time.
Then so do stores that sell used games. After it is sold once, you don't get any cut from any resales.
There's no way you're going to get console games of any quality for 77 games at $265 in any sort of 'free market'. That's just over $3 each and is less than the media manufacturing and distribution costs alone.
And you've already recouped those costs on the first sale of the item. If the vendor bought those games for $2 each from people selling them to the store, then that's $1 profit from each title. And they just might be a glut in their inventory they're getting rid of like so many E.T. cartridges in the desert. Such a bulk sale of hard-to-resell titles is very understandable.
It's just that the industry feels installing them on the hard drive to be making an illegal copy, regardless of any transfer or destruction of the original disks or whether the agents provided original disks to be installed as proof of ownership.
Not really. "Pirated" is used synonymously with "copied". If you're putting them on the hard drive, you're copying them. Any copying is illegal, so they're pirated.
But you have no history of ownership for those 77 titles. Maybe the agents provided proof of ownership to entice the act of copying. Maybe the seller buys used games and sells them back cheap to make the modded box more interesting and get them as return customers for other titles at market prices (Columbia Record Company, 100 CDs for 1 cent anyone?). We don't know whether they got the 77 originals or that once copied the originals were destroyed.
All the law cares about is that a copy was made without permission of the copyright holder, ergo piracy. But there are ways to copy honorably that should not be considered criminal.
Hopefully though, this won't be used as some sort of precident against the modding aspect.
Only if convicted by a jury. But they might not accept a plea to just the 77 charges of piracy.
Then again, do we have all the facts? Did the agents provide reasonable proof of ownership of the 77 titles put on the drive, such as providing original discs to the vendor to have them installed on their behalf, rather than in their behalf as implied in the story?
The day the DVD comes out is the day they stop waiting for more box office returns, and DVD sales don't count to the penny counters looking for it to become a box office franchise series.
True, if you have the charging dock (optional on the base model, comes with the more expensive models), and if Roomba can find the charging dock before it dies.
Bad design. Not only could it die before it gets back, it will also waste power traversing part of the room it has already cleaned.
It should be like in-air refueling of fighter planes or calling AAA. It should send a signal to the recharger which is itself mobile. The charger homes in on the Roomba, charges the Roomba from its on-board battery, then returns to the recharging station to wait for the next time it is summoned.
The properly manufactured devices only recognize the flag when it is there; home produced recordings won't contain it.
Why not? It will be for your own protection so that others won't be able to copy your original works, giving you the same protection as enjoyed by the industry.
Except that the trusted members of the industry will be able to subvert your protections anyway.
Why do you think dual deck recorders are manufactured and sold at electronic stores?
Not for much longer I fear. Or at least the next models will include DRM support and force copies made from unprotected media be protected.
Have you forgotten this story of Fontographer's by-default restrictions on how fonts you create with it can be used?
Up until the point where you (a non-professional) are actually able to buy it, whereupon it instantly becomes illegal to possess, sell, or manufacture.
For a few years, my daughter put a microphone in front of the radio to record the songs she liked.
I did the same for television shows before the VCR.
Can you believe they actually make stereo cassette decks that have as an advertised feature the ability to record analog radio broadcasts and they haven't been sued out of existence?
I imagine that most of the purchasers of nicer equipment don't buy much pirated content. Can you imagine someone spending a few grand on AV and then being too cheap to buy a DVD?
Oh yes, I can. And even more in the future....
I predict this will do very little to solve the issue of piracy because too many people doing the pirating will be plenty happy with content that ignores these roadblocks altogether. The real losers will be people like me who'll be forced to re-buy ephemeral content that disapears with time.
And then they'll have to buy expensive professional equipment to regain their fair-use rights. And to recoup the cost of such equipment, they'll start selling pirated music and videos.
Meanwhile, if I remember correctly from the early proposals, the people who make the professional equipment will become liable for it being used by non-professionals.
The only real solution: copy-protect the actual audio output from the speakers, say by adding a high-energy ultrasonic screech which instantly obliterates all recording devices within hearing range.
RCA then may have to change their logo from His Master's Voice to one where the dog is mauling the phonograph under auspices of truth in advertising.
If you are a filmmaker in the established industry, you'll be able to afford the pricetag for the professional equipment that ignores and/or omits the copy protection on your work product, optionally adding it in only for the final print.
If you're a small, independent filmmaker using only consumer-priced equipment, all your equipment will include copy protection on everything, so each print you make will have to be a single continuous take since it will prevent you from making any copies or entering it into a consumer-level editing system.
And thus Hollywood is protected against independent filmmakers able to make good movies on the cheap entering their market.
The bigger the basket, the more eggs you can put in that one basket.
As to dirt cheap storage, the best deal I've ever seen was a 160 GB Seagate drive for $20 after two mail-in rebates and a downloadable coupon. 8 GB/$1. And it wasn't even Black Friday. Unfortunately, Best Buy was out of stock that day.
In this dark age of eternally extended copyright terms and the ephemeral lifetimes of so-protected works, I applaud anyone who enters the order of the digital monk to preserve these rare and fleeting works for the enjoyment of an enlightened future that must eventually allow the copyrights to expire so that these works can be released to the world, providing a rich public domain, even as their acts of preservation for the future run afoul of the laws of the present.
Even the copyright on unreleased works must eventually expire and give back to the public domain.
If I remember correctly, wasn't Filter that "show" where there was some sort of storyline that was played by various toons from various games? Who walked around moving with human voiceovers?
That was Portal, and I felt it was the best show on G4 before the takeover. Take that as you will.
Call For Help came back, but it seems they only bought one block of episodes, and they've started repeating them. They also moved its timeslot back a couple hours rather early.
Strangely enough, they bought previously recorded Canadian episodes, so you have periodic mentions that the show will be coming back to US audiences. Has Leo been welcoming the return of his US audience in Canadian episodes that we won't be getting?
I think the only shows from TechTV that truly survived were X-Play and Anime Unleashed, and looks like I'll be manually cancelling episodes of the latter until "Colorful!" finishes its run. It's not surprising that a show about games (X-Play) managed to survive the transition to G4 relatively unscathed.
With the other crass programming coming in I can only assume Unscrewed was cancelled because G4 couldn't own it outright.
I used to watch Cinematech(u), but lost interest. I can't watch Attack of the Show (I gave it several weeks of chance, but the musical guests and Furry Fridays turned me off). But then I actually liked Portal, so I guess my tastes are suspect.
SpikeTV seems to want to be the other gamers' channel, but they lost me when they were still The National Network, cropping then distorting their programming with their omnipresent bar at the bottom of the screen.
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what the fsck is it with you Americans and your inability to spell "rogue"???
We have a general inability to spell certain words ending in -gue correctly. Consider how many people misspell "tongue" as "tounge". (You'll get more Google hits on the incorrect spelling if you turn SafeSearch off.) We also tend to drop the -ue in -logue words. Out of 20 -gue words maybe 7 or 8 get spelled correctly most of the time if at all.
I'm a bit more concerned about the slow death of the proper use of the hyphen. It is often incorrectly omitted in things like:
The movie "Eight Legged Freaks" apparently about eight freaks who have legs
Pontiac's "Game Changing Performance" football highlights where the game changes the player's performance, not the player's performance changing the result of the game, and
The Stargate Atlantis episode "Thirty Eight Minutes" 30 * 8 minutes == 4 hours.
Wonder if he used the 10k he was supposed to donate.
Or if he'll donate the profits earned from his shares to The Society for the Promotion of the Satirical Arts.
it was downloaded even if users rejected a license agreement.
How is installing software from a CD to the hard drive considered downloading? There's no network transfer; it's just installing from dumb media.
I hope the charge uses the correct terminology.
on my keybaord, the delete (backspace) key is under my left thumb, which is an awesome improvement (to use two thumbs for two of the most common keys)
You must either make a lot of mistakes or type in a language that doesn't use many vowels.
Whenever someone puts forth a technology to take away more of your access, having them say, "please send (constructive) comments to", is a big "screw you, dissenters; we're doing this whether you like it or not" right to your face.
Next will be parallax restrictions to ensure only one person gets to see the content, and then comes plugging the memory hole:
"You are trying to remember copyrighted material. Visit Rekall to purchase a one-time-use decryption key to access this memory."
And they wont be found guilty of 77 charges of piracy, they pirated 77 games, multiple times.
But they had to conduct a sting operation to get evidence of a crime, and that is a single XBOX sale that had 77 copies on the hard drive. If they had evidence of other sales, why have a sting?
Now maybe after getting access to all their sales records they might be able to track down other sales and prove more instances, but there's not that much motivation. It may increase the damages in a civil suit, but for the criminal case the one sale would be sufficient for a conviction, and if they can beat the one (if it is installing games provided by the agents relegating the originals as backups or the same for cheap used games included in the bundle), they'll get a pass on all the other alleged sales too.
Consider the possibility that these ($3000 / 77 ~=) $38.95 games were themselves bought as used games for $3.00 each, and that selling them preinstalled at ($500 / 77 ~=) $6.50 each is ( $6.50 / $3 - 1 ~=) 117% profit per title for the used game vendor, and you get the playable copy on the drive and your backups as the original disks.
Or do we suddenly believe that we have no fair-use right to have functional backup copies of our games? that the DMCA rightfully strips us of the right to make backups?
Depending on facts that may have been excluded from the story, this case may yet be defensible.
Yes they were stealing from us developers. They took away sales that could have made hard earned money for dozens of team members who work 70 hour or longer weeks during months of crunch time.
Then so do stores that sell used games. After it is sold once, you don't get any cut from any resales.
There's no way you're going to get console games of any quality for 77 games at $265 in any sort of 'free market'. That's just over $3 each and is less than the media manufacturing and distribution costs alone.
And you've already recouped those costs on the first sale of the item. If the vendor bought those games for $2 each from people selling them to the store, then that's $1 profit from each title. And they just might be a glut in their inventory they're getting rid of like so many E.T. cartridges in the desert. Such a bulk sale of hard-to-resell titles is very understandable.
It's just that the industry feels installing them on the hard drive to be making an illegal copy, regardless of any transfer or destruction of the original disks or whether the agents provided original disks to be installed as proof of ownership.
"77 pirated games" is self-explaining enough
Not really. "Pirated" is used synonymously with "copied". If you're putting them on the hard drive, you're copying them. Any copying is illegal, so they're pirated.
But you have no history of ownership for those 77 titles. Maybe the agents provided proof of ownership to entice the act of copying. Maybe the seller buys used games and sells them back cheap to make the modded box more interesting and get them as return customers for other titles at market prices (Columbia Record Company, 100 CDs for 1 cent anyone?). We don't know whether they got the 77 originals or that once copied the originals were destroyed.
All the law cares about is that a copy was made without permission of the copyright holder, ergo piracy. But there are ways to copy honorably that should not be considered criminal.
Hopefully though, this won't be used as some sort of precident against the modding aspect.
Only if convicted by a jury. But they might not accept a plea to just the 77 charges of piracy.
Then again, do we have all the facts? Did the agents provide reasonable proof of ownership of the 77 titles put on the drive, such as providing original discs to the vendor to have them installed on their behalf, rather than in their behalf as implied in the story?
The day the DVD comes out is the day they stop waiting for more box office returns, and DVD sales don't count to the penny counters looking for it to become a box office franchise series.
True, if you have the charging dock (optional on the base model, comes with the more expensive models), and if Roomba can find the charging dock before it dies.
Bad design. Not only could it die before it gets back, it will also waste power traversing part of the room it has already cleaned.
It should be like in-air refueling of fighter planes or calling AAA. It should send a signal to the recharger which is itself mobile. The charger homes in on the Roomba, charges the Roomba from its on-board battery, then returns to the recharging station to wait for the next time it is summoned.
It wouldn't be cheap, but it looks like the NorthStar system from Evolution Robotics can do pretty accurate robot localization.
Could it also be used by Hollywood in motion capture to eliminate the need for reflective ping-pong balls?
The properly manufactured devices only recognize the flag when it is there; home produced recordings won't contain it.
Why not? It will be for your own protection so that others won't be able to copy your original works, giving you the same protection as enjoyed by the industry.
Except that the trusted members of the industry will be able to subvert your protections anyway.
Why do you think dual deck recorders are manufactured and sold at electronic stores?
Not for much longer I fear. Or at least the next models will include DRM support and force copies made from unprotected media be protected.
Have you forgotten this story of Fontographer's by-default restrictions on how fonts you create with it can be used?
Zen, put the battle computers on line. Put up the force wall, activate the radiation flare shield, and clear the neutron blasters for firing.
but which are exempt from this stupid law
Up until the point where you (a non-professional) are actually able to buy it, whereupon it instantly becomes illegal to possess, sell, or manufacture.
For a few years, my daughter put a microphone in front of the radio to record the songs she liked.
I did the same for television shows before the VCR.
Can you believe they actually make stereo cassette decks that have as an advertised feature the ability to record analog radio broadcasts and they haven't been sued out of existence?
I imagine that most of the purchasers of nicer equipment don't buy much pirated content. Can you imagine someone spending a few grand on AV and then being too cheap to buy a DVD?
Oh yes, I can. And even more in the future....
I predict this will do very little to solve the issue of piracy because too many people doing the pirating will be plenty happy with content that ignores these roadblocks altogether. The real losers will be people like me who'll be forced to re-buy ephemeral content that disapears with time.
And then they'll have to buy expensive professional equipment to regain their fair-use rights. And to recoup the cost of such equipment, they'll start selling pirated music and videos.
Meanwhile, if I remember correctly from the early proposals, the people who make the professional equipment will become liable for it being used by non-professionals.
The only real solution: copy-protect the actual audio output from the speakers, say by adding a high-energy ultrasonic screech which instantly obliterates all recording devices within hearing range.
RCA then may have to change their logo from His Master's Voice to one where the dog is mauling the phonograph under auspices of truth in advertising.
If you are a filmmaker in the established industry, you'll be able to afford the pricetag for the professional equipment that ignores and/or omits the copy protection on your work product, optionally adding it in only for the final print.
If you're a small, independent filmmaker using only consumer-priced equipment, all your equipment will include copy protection on everything, so each print you make will have to be a single continuous take since it will prevent you from making any copies or entering it into a consumer-level editing system.
And thus Hollywood is protected against independent filmmakers able to make good movies on the cheap entering their market.
Surely you mean $0.33/GB, not $.033/GB, right?
Otherwise, off what truck are you getting a 250 GB drive for $8.25?!
The cheapest I've seen was $0.125/GB ($20 for 160 GB after two mail-in rebates and a $20 off coupon).
The bigger the basket, the more eggs you can put in that one basket.
As to dirt cheap storage, the best deal I've ever seen was a 160 GB Seagate drive for $20 after two mail-in rebates and a downloadable coupon. 8 GB/$1. And it wasn't even Black Friday. Unfortunately, Best Buy was out of stock that day.
Something like one of... these?
Thanks for that link. There are so many examples there that now I'm officially bored with the idea.
Does anyone bother to make anything other than clocks out of these things?
these people are not interested in releasing anything.
Maybe not now, but perhaps in 150 years when they can't be prosecuted for it....
In this dark age of eternally extended copyright terms and the ephemeral lifetimes of so-protected works, I applaud anyone who enters the order of the digital monk to preserve these rare and fleeting works for the enjoyment of an enlightened future that must eventually allow the copyrights to expire so that these works can be released to the world, providing a rich public domain, even as their acts of preservation for the future run afoul of the laws of the present.
Even the copyright on unreleased works must eventually expire and give back to the public domain.
If I remember correctly, wasn't Filter that "show" where there was some sort of storyline that was played by various toons from various games? Who walked around moving with human voiceovers?
That was Portal, and I felt it was the best show on G4 before the takeover. Take that as you will.
Call For Help came back, but it seems they only bought one block of episodes, and they've started repeating them. They also moved its timeslot back a couple hours rather early.
Strangely enough, they bought previously recorded Canadian episodes, so you have periodic mentions that the show will be coming back to US audiences. Has Leo been welcoming the return of his US audience in Canadian episodes that we won't be getting?
I think the only shows from TechTV that truly survived were X-Play and Anime Unleashed, and looks like I'll be manually cancelling episodes of the latter until "Colorful!" finishes its run. It's not surprising that a show about games (X-Play) managed to survive the transition to G4 relatively unscathed.
With the other crass programming coming in I can only assume Unscrewed was cancelled because G4 couldn't own it outright.
I used to watch Cinematech(u), but lost interest. I can't watch Attack of the Show (I gave it several weeks of chance, but the musical guests and Furry Fridays turned me off). But then I actually liked Portal, so I guess my tastes are suspect.
SpikeTV seems to want to be the other gamers' channel, but they lost me when they were still The National Network, cropping then distorting their programming with their omnipresent bar at the bottom of the screen.