Would you be willing to purchase a month's membership to a site for $4 just to be able to view one article past its abstract?
and services like Patreon
I've read reports in comments to an adtech blog that "please put some coins in our cup" isn't enough to fully fund a site's operation unless it puts donation nags in your face like Wikipedia does: "If YOU do not donate, this site will have to SHUT DOWN."
If you disable JavaScript, you can no longer run web applications. Instead, you'll be limited to running only native applications made for your particular operating system. Want to use an app on your Windows PC, but it was made for a Mac? Too bad. Want to use an app on your Mac, but it was made for a Windows PC? Too bad.
Bring advertising in-house. Its not 1997 anymore, there is no reason to rely on 3rd party platforms for advertising. Everyone knows the internet is a thing now
How do advertisers know which particular sites are "a thing", especially smaller sites that are too big to be run as a pure hobby but not yet big enough to be household names?
and wants to advertise on it.
But without an intermediary, you can't advertise on "the internet". Instead, you would have to advertise on individual publishers' sites, which is much more time-consuming for both advertisers and publishers.*
Say you have 30 publishers, each of which wants to find relevant advertisers, and 30 advertisers, each of which wants to find relevant publishers. If there is an intermediary, this means 60 contracts to review and sign. If there is no intermediary, there are 900. How does a change from O(n) with an intermediary to O(n^2) without one improve the market?
And even then, how will an individual publisher be able to reassure its advertisers that view and click statistics are accurate and not inflated? All other things being equal, an intermediary such as Google is considered more trustworthy because it has more to lose should a claim of fraud end up substantiated.
* In the advertising market, a "publisher" is the operator of a site that carriers ads.
There was a post two weeks ago on an adtech blog suggesting that some publishers* are about to go full DMCA/CFAA on developers of ad blockers that include an ad blocker blocker blocker. By this legal theory, an ad blocker blocker is an "access control" measure, and an ad blocker blocker blocker is a "circumvention device".
Learning about this plan has led me to think of ways to provide a better experience on a metered Internet connection without specifically blocking ads. One is to set a cap on how much data an individual page loads, with a "Load More" button after each megabyte. Another is to block video content types, script content types, and things loaded from third-party domains. If this becomes common, advertisers will at least have to start making their "creative" leaner.
Which Doom are you talking about? The first Doom isn't in Google Play Store. I searched, and all I got were Doom 3 ($9.95) and several apps whose titles included "Doom" but were unrelated to Idthesda's franchise.
Besides, how would I go about trying a paid game in order to understand how its input method works? Back in the old days of cartridge- and CD-based consoles, I could rent the cartridge from a local video store, and I could scan my local friends' collections on their shelves. Nowadays, with paid downloads, I'd have to ask each of my local friends whether he or she owns each game on this list, and I don't foresee much success in that especially in an era where one's gamer friends are more likely to live in a different city.
Perpetual licenses seems a very bad idea in the first place. I see no reason why they shouldn't have to be renegotiated yearly, by law
If it becomes standard practice for a motion picture's producer to own its copyright, then studios could make it a standard practice to require producers to defer royalties for a year and further require producers to forfeit royalties earned during the previous year if the producer declines to renew the license. Otherwise, if a producer can take the royalties and run, studios would be unwilling to give producers hundreds of millions of dollars to make motion pictures.
Ownership by the individual or individuals credited as the film's producer or producers and an exclusive license to a corporation for the life of the copyright would have exactly the same practical effect as a corporate owner. Or if you plan to abolish "work made for hire" entirely, even if the person doing the hiring is an individual, who would own copyright in a motion picture with a cast and crew of hundreds?
Because developers who implement IAPs tend to do it in such a way where you cannot outright buy a game. You will always get nickel and dimed for something.
The documentation for the OUYA development kit described two kinds of in-app purchase: "entitlement" IAPs, which are purchased once and then forever associated with your store account, and "consumable" IAPs, the nickel-and-dime energy-mechanic crap that game reviewers love to hate. Sale of downloadable campaigns through IAP would be an entitlement, something you "outright buy" to the extent that it's possible to "outright buy" something downloadable.
just take a look at the permissions they request.
Part of overreaching permissions relates to a limit of Android's manifest file prior to Android 6 "Marshmallow". If an optional game feature requires the use of a permission, such as the camera, microphone, or contacts, the application has to request it at install time whether or not the user chooses to enable the feature associated with the permission. Before Marshmallow, there was no way to mark a permission as optional for the user.
Episodic video games and DLC are a scam to get people to pay more for a full game.
Not new. The pay-per-episode concept has been around as long as expansions have been around, dating back to Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996) and StarCraft: Brood War (1998). Even if a game with all its optional downloadable campaigns costs $120, games nowadays are far longer than games used to be, and a single $120 game has far more play time than three $40 games used to.
How does sale of episodes through IAP suck more than sale of episodes through other means? Or are you opposed to episodic video games in the first place?
For convenience, I shall quote the relevant part of the statute:
it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided: (1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner
tlhIngan wrote:
That defense doesn't work because you're format-shifting.
The format shifting is "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine".
Mask works have higher protections
Mask works are covered under chapter 9 of the U.S. copyright statute. And as flink pointed out, protection under chapter 9 subsists until the end of the Gregorian calendar year of first publication plus ten more years (17 USC 904). It's shorter than even a patent.
I really wish the Android Play Store had a search option to only show games priced $5 or more, because micro transaction and spam-the-player are dismal experiences.
Would a 1-episode game available without charge on Google Play Store, with additional episodes available for in-app purchase, also be a "dismal experience"?
Adding physical buttons to smartphone or tablet is not a problem. I constatnly use my iPega controller
How many other people own that controller or others like it? I haven't seen one third-party controller maker release sales figures, and without them, it becomes hard for a for-profit company to justify developing a game targeted at a particular third-party controller. It's also bulky to carry in a pocket.
I think there is lot of money to make if Nintendo released an attachable controler that hosts the device such as smartphone as its screen with built-in battery. AND also released its vast library of oldschool games on it. They have means to do it via all this virtual console stuff they have on their current systems.
Then why hasn't every third-party developer on the NES and Super NES released iPega editions of its games?
A smartphone does not beat an Atari 2600, because fundamentally it doesn't have enough buttons.
In theory, a multitouch device can support seven actions per thumb: tap, hold, swipe up, swipe down, swipe left, swipe right, and large swipe. Swipes can be combined diagonally. That already gives you more gestures than a 2600 controller. One might make a platformer by using tap to stop, swipe sideways to go (large swipe to dash), swipe up to jump, and tap with the other thumb to shoot. Do any Android games use a similar control scheme?
Why don't modern games do free-to-play the way Doom did? The first episode was available without charge as Doom: Knee-Deep in the Dead, and additional episodes were available in paid expansion packs titled Ultimate Doom and Doom II.
Agreed, none of the iPhone, Android, Windows Phone games have anywhere near the depth or fun of a halfway decent DS/3DS cartridge game.
I'm pretty sure that's for two technical reasons.
Limits of blind positional input
A touch screen is designed for applications where you activate objects that you're looking at. That's fine for point-and-click games or continuous runner games like Rayman Jungle Run where a whole quadrant of the screen is the button. But a lot of other genres don't handle well with a touch screen as the only input method, especially games where you control the speed and direction of movement and attacks of a character in the center of a scrolling view. The virtual gamepad in Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure for Android was an exercise in frustration, as I kept pressing outside the controls' active area. Unlike a modern smartphone, the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS systems have physical buttons and directional controls, and I'm pretty sure that most action-oriented games for those systems use them.
Latency
Android is reportedly plagued by input lag and audio lag. A game like Punch-Out!! would be unplayable under such conditions.
But if I go buy the game cart at the flea market, download a dump of the same cart, and play it on an emulator, in practice nobody is going to sue me.
And if you buy the Game Pak and a Kazzo or Retrode dumper, you have a defense under 17 USC 117(a)(1) (or foreign counterparts) if someone does sue you, so long as you can afford a lawyer and don't distribute the dumps.
AOL had already bought the consumer-facing side of CompuServe back in 1998. The networking side went to WorldCom. Both AOL and WorldCom are part of Verizon now.
SBC (now called AT&T) bought Prodigy in 2001. Ybrant bought Lycos. Excite.com is owned by IAC.
Slashdot Mirror
I support the sites I visit through memberships
Would you be willing to purchase a month's membership to a site for $4 just to be able to view one article past its abstract?
and services like Patreon
I've read reports in comments to an adtech blog that "please put some coins in our cup" isn't enough to fully fund a site's operation unless it puts donation nags in your face like Wikipedia does: "If YOU do not donate, this site will have to SHUT DOWN."
If you disable JavaScript, you can no longer run web applications. Instead, you'll be limited to running only native applications made for your particular operating system. Want to use an app on your Windows PC, but it was made for a Mac? Too bad. Want to use an app on your Mac, but it was made for a Windows PC? Too bad.
If you disable JavaScript, you can no longer petition the government for the redress of grievances.
Bring advertising in-house. Its not 1997 anymore, there is no reason to rely on 3rd party platforms for advertising. Everyone knows the internet is a thing now
How do advertisers know which particular sites are "a thing", especially smaller sites that are too big to be run as a pure hobby but not yet big enough to be household names?
and wants to advertise on it.
But without an intermediary, you can't advertise on "the internet". Instead, you would have to advertise on individual publishers' sites, which is much more time-consuming for both advertisers and publishers.*
Say you have 30 publishers, each of which wants to find relevant advertisers, and 30 advertisers, each of which wants to find relevant publishers. If there is an intermediary, this means 60 contracts to review and sign. If there is no intermediary, there are 900. How does a change from O(n) with an intermediary to O(n^2) without one improve the market?
And even then, how will an individual publisher be able to reassure its advertisers that view and click statistics are accurate and not inflated? All other things being equal, an intermediary such as Google is considered more trustworthy because it has more to lose should a claim of fraud end up substantiated.
* In the advertising market, a "publisher" is the operator of a site that carriers ads.
There was a post two weeks ago on an adtech blog suggesting that some publishers* are about to go full DMCA/CFAA on developers of ad blockers that include an ad blocker blocker blocker. By this legal theory, an ad blocker blocker is an "access control" measure, and an ad blocker blocker blocker is a "circumvention device".
Learning about this plan has led me to think of ways to provide a better experience on a metered Internet connection without specifically blocking ads. One is to set a cap on how much data an individual page loads, with a "Load More" button after each megabyte. Another is to block video content types, script content types, and things loaded from third-party domains. If this becomes common, advertisers will at least have to start making their "creative" leaner.
* Operators of websites that carry advertising.
Doom, with its limited interactivity works fine.
Which Doom are you talking about? The first Doom isn't in Google Play Store. I searched, and all I got were Doom 3 ($9.95) and several apps whose titles included "Doom" but were unrelated to Idthesda's franchise.
Besides, how would I go about trying a paid game in order to understand how its input method works? Back in the old days of cartridge- and CD-based consoles, I could rent the cartridge from a local video store, and I could scan my local friends' collections on their shelves. Nowadays, with paid downloads, I'd have to ask each of my local friends whether he or she owns each game on this list, and I don't foresee much success in that especially in an era where one's gamer friends are more likely to live in a different city.
Perpetual licenses seems a very bad idea in the first place. I see no reason why they shouldn't have to be renegotiated yearly, by law
If it becomes standard practice for a motion picture's producer to own its copyright, then studios could make it a standard practice to require producers to defer royalties for a year and further require producers to forfeit royalties earned during the previous year if the producer declines to renew the license. Otherwise, if a producer can take the royalties and run, studios would be unwilling to give producers hundreds of millions of dollars to make motion pictures.
Ownership by the individual or individuals credited as the film's producer or producers and an exclusive license to a corporation for the life of the copyright would have exactly the same practical effect as a corporate owner. Or if you plan to abolish "work made for hire" entirely, even if the person doing the hiring is an individual, who would own copyright in a motion picture with a cast and crew of hundreds?
Because developers who implement IAPs tend to do it in such a way where you cannot outright buy a game. You will always get nickel and dimed for something.
The documentation for the OUYA development kit described two kinds of in-app purchase: "entitlement" IAPs, which are purchased once and then forever associated with your store account, and "consumable" IAPs, the nickel-and-dime energy-mechanic crap that game reviewers love to hate. Sale of downloadable campaigns through IAP would be an entitlement, something you "outright buy" to the extent that it's possible to "outright buy" something downloadable.
just take a look at the permissions they request.
Part of overreaching permissions relates to a limit of Android's manifest file prior to Android 6 "Marshmallow". If an optional game feature requires the use of a permission, such as the camera, microphone, or contacts, the application has to request it at install time whether or not the user chooses to enable the feature associated with the permission. Before Marshmallow, there was no way to mark a permission as optional for the user.
Episodic video games and DLC are a scam to get people to pay more for a full game.
Not new. The pay-per-episode concept has been around as long as expansions have been around, dating back to Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal (1996) and StarCraft: Brood War (1998). Even if a game with all its optional downloadable campaigns costs $120, games nowadays are far longer than games used to be, and a single $120 game has far more play time than three $40 games used to.
How does sale of episodes through IAP suck more than sale of episodes through other means? Or are you opposed to episodic video games in the first place?
Though swipes have the disadvantage of being less responsive, they have the advantage of being usable on devices that are more widely deployed.
For convenience, I shall quote the relevant part of the statute:
tlhIngan wrote:
That defense doesn't work because you're format-shifting.
The format shifting is "an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine".
Mask works have higher protections
Mask works are covered under chapter 9 of the U.S. copyright statute. And as flink pointed out, protection under chapter 9 subsists until the end of the Gregorian calendar year of first publication plus ten more years (17 USC 904). It's shorter than even a patent.
As for your second question I guess that developers who developed for Nintendo platforms do not have rights to release these games elsewhere.
I don't see how that's anywhere near the case. Konami released Castlevania and Contra for PC, for example.
Other Slashdot users seem to be under the impression that large families already buy a console for the TV in each kid's bedroom.
I really wish the Android Play Store had a search option to only show games priced $5 or more, because micro transaction and spam-the-player are dismal experiences.
Would a 1-episode game available without charge on Google Play Store, with additional episodes available for in-app purchase, also be a "dismal experience"?
Adding physical buttons to smartphone or tablet is not a problem. I constatnly use my iPega controller
How many other people own that controller or others like it? I haven't seen one third-party controller maker release sales figures, and without them, it becomes hard for a for-profit company to justify developing a game targeted at a particular third-party controller. It's also bulky to carry in a pocket.
I think there is lot of money to make if Nintendo released an attachable controler that hosts the device such as smartphone as its screen with built-in battery. AND also released its vast library of oldschool games on it. They have means to do it via all this virtual console stuff they have on their current systems.
Then why hasn't every third-party developer on the NES and Super NES released iPega editions of its games?
A smartphone does not beat an Atari 2600, because fundamentally it doesn't have enough buttons.
In theory, a multitouch device can support seven actions per thumb: tap, hold, swipe up, swipe down, swipe left, swipe right, and large swipe. Swipes can be combined diagonally. That already gives you more gestures than a 2600 controller. One might make a platformer by using tap to stop, swipe sideways to go (large swipe to dash), swipe up to jump, and tap with the other thumb to shoot. Do any Android games use a similar control scheme?
Why don't modern games do free-to-play the way Doom did? The first episode was available without charge as Doom: Knee-Deep in the Dead, and additional episodes were available in paid expansion packs titled Ultimate Doom and Doom II.
Agreed, none of the iPhone, Android, Windows Phone games have anywhere near the depth or fun of a halfway decent DS/3DS cartridge game.
I'm pretty sure that's for two technical reasons.
Limits of blind positional input A touch screen is designed for applications where you activate objects that you're looking at. That's fine for point-and-click games or continuous runner games like Rayman Jungle Run where a whole quadrant of the screen is the button. But a lot of other genres don't handle well with a touch screen as the only input method, especially games where you control the speed and direction of movement and attacks of a character in the center of a scrolling view. The virtual gamepad in Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure for Android was an exercise in frustration, as I kept pressing outside the controls' active area. Unlike a modern smartphone, the Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS systems have physical buttons and directional controls, and I'm pretty sure that most action-oriented games for those systems use them. Latency Android is reportedly plagued by input lag and audio lag. A game like Punch-Out!! would be unplayable under such conditions.But if I go buy the game cart at the flea market, download a dump of the same cart, and play it on an emulator, in practice nobody is going to sue me.
And if you buy the Game Pak and a Kazzo or Retrode dumper, you have a defense under 17 USC 117(a)(1) (or foreign counterparts) if someone does sue you, so long as you can afford a lawyer and don't distribute the dumps.
Just install onto separate physical drives.
Fine for a full-size tower, hard for a small form factor desktop or a laptop.
A digital signature tells only who signed a program. It doesn't tell whether the behavior of the signed program meets platform guidelines.
The difference is that Apple users opted in to that ecosystem by buying Apple products.
As did Microsoft users by buying Xbox, Xbox 360, and Xbox One products.
AOL had already bought the consumer-facing side of CompuServe back in 1998. The networking side went to WorldCom. Both AOL and WorldCom are part of Verizon now.
SBC (now called AT&T) bought Prodigy in 2001. Ybrant bought Lycos. Excite.com is owned by IAC.
You appear not to have run into ASCAP's enforcers. Yet.
In the story about making out with your girlfriend, getting a call from her parent to check on her, and discovering that her dad is dead?
Simple. Mom was phone.