Wikipedia is not a legal resource the fact that people put in their unresearhed opinions in it doesn't mean those opinions are always right. The truth isn't determined by who can pull the most citations out of their ass.
The DMCA prevents circumvention of measures put in place to prevent copyright infringement. Region locking is not a measure put in place to prevent copyright infringment nor is it meant to be.
DVD region locking, however, can be protected by CSS, which is protected by the DMCA and therefore in those cases, it would be illegal for you to circumvent CSS for other than purposes protected in the DMCA (such as interopability).
However, even then, you are not running afoul of the DMCA by poping that disc into a region free DVD player or a DVD player coded specificly for the region the DVD was encoded for.
And if you want me to believe otherwise, given the GP comment I was refering to included other such BS as the "ink cartridge" issue (btw, you can in fact legally refill chipped cartridges). I suggest you be the one to actually provide references. Specificlly one instance where anyone anywhere has been threatened to be or actually was sued for either selling region free players or utilizing them.
DVD's have been in exsistance for over a decade now. Given the ravenous nature of the particular organizations watching over the content being sold on DVD's, if you can't even come up with one case of this happening in that amount of time with the MPAA watching over the format, then I call your arguement BS.
Yes, there is the element of time control as well, after all if you can't get your movie in the theaters everywhere till six months after it's premier in the country you 'made it for', then it'd be foolish for you to sell your DVDs in those places the day before the movie actually comes out.
The fact that there exist people out there who are not paranoid does not exclude the existance of those who are. Since region locking is an optional component in most cases, there will be people trusting enough to go without. In fact both region coding and CSS is absent on about half of the DVD's I own. That doesn't negate the arguement that was put forward.
That, and unlike DRM, there is not even the pretense that a region lock fights copyright infringement thus they aren't protected under the DMCA or it's worldwide clone brothers.
PS. I know of zero laws anywhere that prevent someone from getting around region locks other than in the cases where you are hit as a byproduct of a real DRM issue and the region lock just got swept in as part of that.
A: It's trivial in most cases to get around B: It actually serves a purpose, just not one that is immediately appearent to the consumer.
In most cases, region locking is used for one and only one purpose, to allow a producer to find a distributor who is willing to sell the product in a specific region. Very few (if any) companies do their own worldwide distribution. Distributors want exclusivity in a region, and they have good reason for this. No one wants to sign a deal to distribute your product for $X if the guy next door is doing it for 1/2 $X because their area is too poor to be willing to pay $X.
Because you know what'll happen? Your 'official' distributor will get his lunch eaten by a mob of opportunists who buy the product next door in mass quanities and then sell it in his area.
And they'll be selling it not for 1/2 $X but $X minus a couple of cents, since they know the folk in his area are willing to pay more.
Now that's not a defense for region locking as much as the reason why it exists. But frankly I'm alot more tolerant of DVD's that need a region unlocked player than I am of DVD's that require I uninstall programs from my machine and will only install three times before I have to jump through hoops with customer service.
The ironic thing here is that while it is also something of an attack on the consumer, region locking is a completely seperate issue from DRM.
Region Locking = You can only use content on devices sold in or for the same region you purchased the content in.
DRM = You can only use content if you agree to give up certain rights you otherwise had and agree to allow the company selling the content to place technological locks in place on your property to ensure your compliance.
It's from the trial. One of the TPB admins did a survey of a portion of the torrents they had and went through and categorized which he considered legitimate traffic and which wasn't. 80% were legitimate.
I believe this is a demonstration of the widely touted "MAD" method of diplomacy.
Either someone blinks, they all walk away with a renegotiated deal, or they all attempt to kill each other, with someone coming along later to pick up the pieces.
In this respect, Intel is in the best of the three positions. Unlike AMD or nVidia, Intel is actually not struggling financially.
You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it's crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't, not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?
Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
One more question. You're watching a stage play. A banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog.
Dominio's - 1 large pizza, any number of toppings, $12.99.
Regular Crust Extra White Garlic Parm, Extra Cheddar Cheese, Extra Shredded Parmesan, Extra Cheese, Extra Shredded Provolone Cheese, Extra Feta Cheese, Extra Fresh Spinach.
Add meats to liking.
If that doesn't feed you for two days, consider consulting a doctor.
Granted, after two months, you'll need one anyway.
I should also grumble here about my ethical issues with an institution of learning that charges $45,000/year, and intentionally limits the number of students it takes on, despite having a pool of applicants that (by their own admission) are perfectly qualified to attend.
My car comfortably seats four, uncomfortably seats five, and has the potential to carry eight if I ignore the law.
Regardless, if I've got seven friends, three get a ride.
Lock-in? New fees? C'mon, let's get serious. They're giving away the encoder for free on their website! Do you really think that the company that owns the MP3 format would just let this new format, crappy though it is, be used by enough people so that it becomes a de-facto standard and then decide to start enforcing their IP and try to wring money out of something that already has numerous superior free implementations?
At the risk of getting a *whoosh* directed at me, isn't that exactly what they did with the mp3 format/patent?
Really, I can't tell if you have successfully trolled me or honestly didn't remember that...
Savana Redding, an eighth grade honor roll student at Safford Middle School in Safford, Arizona, was pulled from class on October 8, 2003 by the school's vice principal, Kerry Wilson. Earlier that day, Wilson had discovered prescription-strength ibuprofen - 400 milligram pills equivalent to two over-the-counter ibuprofen pills, such as Advil - in the possession of Redding's classmate. Under questioning and faced with punishment, the classmate claimed that Redding, who had no history of disciplinary problems or substance abuse, had given her the pills. Safford maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward all prescription medicines, including prescription-strength ibuprofen.
After escorting Redding to his office, Wilson presented Redding with the ibuprofen pills and informed her of her classmate's accusations. Redding said she had never seen the pills before and agreed to a search of her possessions, wanting to prove she had nothing to hide. Joined by a female school administrative assistant, Wilson searched Redding's backpack and found nothing. Instructed by Wilson, the administrative assistant then took Redding to the school nurse's office in order to perform a strip search.
In the school nurse's office, Redding was ordered to strip to her underwear. She was then commanded to pull her bra out and to the side, exposing her breasts, and to pull her underwear out at the crotch, exposing her pelvic area. The strip search failed to uncover any ibuprofen pills.
"The strip search was the most humiliating experience I have ever had," said Redding in a sworn affidavit following the incident. "I held my head down so that they could not see that I was about to cry."
It was pure abuse of authority by a moron who didn't understand he didn't have any.
Corrupt, no. Terminally stupid in many areas, yes.
Corrupt would have been the school acknowledging that they shouldn't have pulled this stunt and then saying "fuck you, we are the law".
Stupid is standing there and attempting to explain to the Supreme Court of the United States how you possibly could consider it at all appropriate, knowing that not only will you likely get bitch slapped into the next century, and the entire world is watching the proceedings either way.
I mean, really, even if they win, do you see that school district getting much in funding for the next decade? How many parents are going to trust their children to that administration. And on top of it, this happened SIX years ago. Even the most feverant believer in their actions at some point should have engaged a brain cell or two and said "WTF, settle and lets bury this before it burys us."
The smallest iPod classic, now considered a clunky dinosaur by Apple, is 120G.
A 4G iPod can hold 11 CD's of your 350mb Flac variety.
But that doesn't matter. Because the point was, a 120G iPod classic costs $250. I can walk into Best Buy, that overpriced mecca of electronic goods, and buy a terabyte USB drive for $150. And the classic is the iPod with the best 'storage vs cost' ratio.
That 4G shuffle costs $79 and it's nearest cousins, the 8G iPods cost $150.
At the same price: 8G vs 1000G (round about) Or in other words: 22 CDs vs just under 3,000 CDs
Portable storage is expensive. Home storage is cheap.
Wasting portable storage on something that would only be used at home, is pointless to the extreme.
DRM, gamewise, has never been about reducing piracy. If it were, it would not be so trivially easy to strip off.
Back in the days when it was called "copy protection", that was about reducing piracy. Back when they actually put in code crafted for the game itself rather than cookie cutter wrappers.
DRM, as it is today, is purely and completely about killing resale value. If you can't buy a used copy of Animal Crossing without losing the ability to use the voice channel. If you can't buy a used copy of Guitar Hero without losing the 'bonus tracks'. If you can't buy Spore without wondering if there all the installs are used up. Then you are more likely to buy the game new.
"Pirates" already strip off the DRM; it's so trivial that in most cases you can run a generic program to do it for you. Pirates have alternate means for downloading those "one time bonuses" for your game. You aren't stopping or even slowing them with these measures.
If you do, remember that you also need to back up the cookie Steam uses to say you are authenticated. With that and the installers, the only time you need to be online is for online games.
There were fairly detailed instructions on how to do the whole thing (which I won't link to because I'm at work and most of the sites are on domains that are obviously gaming related) the last time I looked.
In both events, it's up to you whether your old games work. It's just the path taken to ensure that is different. Potentially, if you are looking for an "I am sinless" solution, CD's are a better choice. But frankly, even down that path, I'd be cracking and backing up the CD's simply to ensure that the random act of God doesn't destroy the entire library of games I've amassed over the decades.
Unless things change drastically, it is trivial to break away from Steam. The only issue you'd have would be playing online with 'official' servers. That would be an issue either way, given if Steam was dead, there would be no 'official' servers and if it weren't but under the hands of the 'greedy' then it would be no different with Steam. The greed isn't an intrinsic value of the platform but of the maintainer of the servers.
Really the only difference I see in your world view and mine is that you've chosen to plan your purchases along the worse case scenario, where I've chosen the rosier scenario but have made arrangements for the event of the worse case.
There is a way to install the games offline, you just need to use the backup utility after downloading the first time. This creates a nice bundled installer you can save away somewhere for that rainy day where it's needed.
In my reply to another commenter, I've described what I would see happening if it were ever come to bankruptcy or Valve out and out being sold.
But at the end of it all, we both seem to agree with the basic premise that the people who've made the promise intend to keep it. Where we disagree is their ability to do so.
At that point, I concede that they may some day be in a position that they wouldn't be able to. On the other hand, as a rebuttal to that, I would say that I don't see that day coming at any point in time where this discussion would still be relevant.
By the time Steam becomes defunct, if it were to, I would posit we'd be to the point where these games would require a VM to run anyway. The majority of them will be defunct purely by the virtue that they are solely multiplayer and have no servers/players left and the rest will be playable indefinitely via the currently available offline mode.
And in reality, Valve isn't a startup anymore. Half-Life was released a decade ago. The whole "will they or won't they" question concerning Valve's viability as a corporation seems fairly well decided in the "will they" category. If they were to fall, it would likely be a fairly well foreshadowed fall, with plenty of time for all involved to make their own arrangements.
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Wikipedia is not a legal resource the fact that people put in their unresearhed opinions in it doesn't mean those opinions are always right. The truth isn't determined by who can pull the most citations out of their ass.
The DMCA prevents circumvention of measures put in place to prevent copyright infringement. Region locking is not a measure put in place to prevent copyright infringment nor is it meant to be.
DVD region locking, however, can be protected by CSS, which is protected by the DMCA and therefore in those cases, it would be illegal for you to circumvent CSS for other than purposes protected in the DMCA (such as interopability).
However, even then, you are not running afoul of the DMCA by poping that disc into a region free DVD player or a DVD player coded specificly for the region the DVD was encoded for.
And if you want me to believe otherwise, given the GP comment I was refering to included other such BS as the "ink cartridge" issue (btw, you can in fact legally refill chipped cartridges). I suggest you be the one to actually provide references. Specificlly one instance where anyone anywhere has been threatened to be or actually was sued for either selling region free players or utilizing them.
DVD's have been in exsistance for over a decade now. Given the ravenous nature of the particular organizations watching over the content being sold on DVD's, if you can't even come up with one case of this happening in that amount of time with the MPAA watching over the format, then I call your arguement BS.
Actually, I'm fairly sure that's exactly what being an officer of the company is about, you are legaly responsible for the actions of your company.
And as I stated, DRM != Region Coding, Region Coding != DRM
Yes, there is the element of time control as well, after all if you can't get your movie in the theaters everywhere till six months after it's premier in the country you 'made it for', then it'd be foolish for you to sell your DVDs in those places the day before the movie actually comes out.
The fact that there exist people out there who are not paranoid does not exclude the existance of those who are. Since region locking is an optional component in most cases, there will be people trusting enough to go without. In fact both region coding and CSS is absent on about half of the DVD's I own. That doesn't negate the arguement that was put forward.
That, and unlike DRM, there is not even the pretense that a region lock fights copyright infringement thus they aren't protected under the DMCA or it's worldwide clone brothers.
PS. I know of zero laws anywhere that prevent someone from getting around region locks other than in the cases where you are hit as a byproduct of a real DRM issue and the region lock just got swept in as part of that.
The thing about region locking is
A: It's trivial in most cases to get around
B: It actually serves a purpose, just not one that is immediately appearent to the consumer.
In most cases, region locking is used for one and only one purpose, to allow a producer to find a distributor who is willing to sell the product in a specific region. Very few (if any) companies do their own worldwide distribution. Distributors want exclusivity in a region, and they have good reason for this. No one wants to sign a deal to distribute your product for $X if the guy next door is doing it for 1/2 $X because their area is too poor to be willing to pay $X.
Because you know what'll happen? Your 'official' distributor will get his lunch eaten by a mob of opportunists who buy the product next door in mass quanities and then sell it in his area.
And they'll be selling it not for 1/2 $X but $X minus a couple of cents, since they know the folk in his area are willing to pay more.
Now that's not a defense for region locking as much as the reason why it exists. But frankly I'm alot more tolerant of DVD's that need a region unlocked player than I am of DVD's that require I uninstall programs from my machine and will only install three times before I have to jump through hoops with customer service.
The ironic thing here is that while it is also something of an attack on the consumer, region locking is a completely seperate issue from DRM.
Region Locking = You can only use content on devices sold in or for the same region you purchased the content in.
DRM = You can only use content if you agree to give up certain rights you otherwise had and agree to allow the company selling the content to place technological locks in place on your property to ensure your compliance.
It's from the trial. One of the TPB admins did a survey of a portion of the torrents they had and went through and categorized which he considered legitimate traffic and which wasn't. 80% were legitimate.
I believe this is a demonstration of the widely touted "MAD" method of diplomacy.
Either someone blinks, they all walk away with a renegotiated deal, or they all attempt to kill each other, with someone coming along later to pick up the pieces.
In this respect, Intel is in the best of the three positions. Unlike AMD or nVidia, Intel is actually not struggling financially.
Dominio's - 1 large pizza, any number of toppings, $12.99.
Regular Crust
Extra White Garlic Parm,
Extra Cheddar Cheese,
Extra Shredded Parmesan,
Extra Cheese,
Extra Shredded Provolone Cheese,
Extra Feta Cheese,
Extra Fresh Spinach.
Add meats to liking.
If that doesn't feed you for two days, consider consulting a doctor.
Granted, after two months, you'll need one anyway.
For a second there I could have sworn you said Harry Mudd and was going to ask what their rates for androids was.
My car comfortably seats four, uncomfortably seats five, and has the potential to carry eight if I ignore the law.
Regardless, if I've got seven friends, three get a ride.
At the risk of getting a *whoosh* directed at me, isn't that exactly what they did with the mp3 format/patent?
Really, I can't tell if you have successfully trolled me or honestly didn't remember that...
They had shit. Here's an older article concerning the case, before it got to the Supreme Court:
http://www.aclu.org/drugpolicy/search/35964prs20080711.html
Here is the relevant info:
It was pure abuse of authority by a moron who didn't understand he didn't have any.
Corrupt, no. Terminally stupid in many areas, yes.
Corrupt would have been the school acknowledging that they shouldn't have pulled this stunt and then saying "fuck you, we are the law".
Stupid is standing there and attempting to explain to the Supreme Court of the United States how you possibly could consider it at all appropriate, knowing that not only will you likely get bitch slapped into the next century, and the entire world is watching the proceedings either way.
I mean, really, even if they win, do you see that school district getting much in funding for the next decade? How many parents are going to trust their children to that administration. And on top of it, this happened SIX years ago. Even the most feverant believer in their actions at some point should have engaged a brain cell or two and said "WTF, settle and lets bury this before it burys us."
Actually the smallest iPod you can get is 4G.
The smallest iPod classic, now considered a clunky dinosaur by Apple, is 120G.
A 4G iPod can hold 11 CD's of your 350mb Flac variety.
But that doesn't matter. Because the point was, a 120G iPod classic costs $250. I can walk into Best Buy, that overpriced mecca of electronic goods, and buy a terabyte USB drive for $150. And the classic is the iPod with the best 'storage vs cost' ratio.
That 4G shuffle costs $79 and it's nearest cousins, the 8G iPods cost $150.
At the same price: 8G vs 1000G (round about) Or in other words: 22 CDs vs just under 3,000 CDs
Portable storage is expensive. Home storage is cheap.
Wasting portable storage on something that would only be used at home, is pointless to the extreme.
At the 'home station'? No. On the portable? Yes.
Cheap storage is not exactly portable yet, and portable storage isn't exactly cheap.
Accidentally?
DRM, gamewise, has never been about reducing piracy. If it were, it would not be so trivially easy to strip off.
Back in the days when it was called "copy protection", that was about reducing piracy. Back when they actually put in code crafted for the game itself rather than cookie cutter wrappers.
DRM, as it is today, is purely and completely about killing resale value. If you can't buy a used copy of Animal Crossing without losing the ability to use the voice channel. If you can't buy a used copy of Guitar Hero without losing the 'bonus tracks'. If you can't buy Spore without wondering if there all the installs are used up. Then you are more likely to buy the game new.
"Pirates" already strip off the DRM; it's so trivial that in most cases you can run a generic program to do it for you. Pirates have alternate means for downloading those "one time bonuses" for your game. You aren't stopping or even slowing them with these measures.
If you do, remember that you also need to back up the cookie Steam uses to say you are authenticated. With that and the installers, the only time you need to be online is for online games.
There were fairly detailed instructions on how to do the whole thing (which I won't link to because I'm at work and most of the sites are on domains that are obviously gaming related) the last time I looked.
In both events, it's up to you whether your old games work. It's just the path taken to ensure that is different. Potentially, if you are looking for an "I am sinless" solution, CD's are a better choice. But frankly, even down that path, I'd be cracking and backing up the CD's simply to ensure that the random act of God doesn't destroy the entire library of games I've amassed over the decades.
Unless things change drastically, it is trivial to break away from Steam. The only issue you'd have would be playing online with 'official' servers. That would be an issue either way, given if Steam was dead, there would be no 'official' servers and if it weren't but under the hands of the 'greedy' then it would be no different with Steam. The greed isn't an intrinsic value of the platform but of the maintainer of the servers.
Really the only difference I see in your world view and mine is that you've chosen to plan your purchases along the worse case scenario, where I've chosen the rosier scenario but have made arrangements for the event of the worse case.
There is a way to install the games offline, you just need to use the backup utility after downloading the first time. This creates a nice bundled installer you can save away somewhere for that rainy day where it's needed.
In my reply to another commenter, I've described what I would see happening if it were ever come to bankruptcy or Valve out and out being sold.
But at the end of it all, we both seem to agree with the basic premise that the people who've made the promise intend to keep it. Where we disagree is their ability to do so.
At that point, I concede that they may some day be in a position that they wouldn't be able to. On the other hand, as a rebuttal to that, I would say that I don't see that day coming at any point in time where this discussion would still be relevant.
By the time Steam becomes defunct, if it were to, I would posit we'd be to the point where these games would require a VM to run anyway. The majority of them will be defunct purely by the virtue that they are solely multiplayer and have no servers/players left and the rest will be playable indefinitely via the currently available offline mode.
And in reality, Valve isn't a startup anymore. Half-Life was released a decade ago. The whole "will they or won't they" question concerning Valve's viability as a corporation seems fairly well decided in the "will they" category. If they were to fall, it would likely be a fairly well foreshadowed fall, with plenty of time for all involved to make their own arrangements.