Reading this makes reading some of the snippets from Denuvo's main site rather amusing:
* "Recent release of [Denuvo-protected] Just Cause 3 has pushed the Chinese piracy group's (3DM) cracking abilities practically past their limits. "In two years' time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world."
* "Chinese hackers have admitted defeat in their attempt to pirate a new video game release and warned that increasingly sophisticated software could wipe out piracy in the gaming industry altogether. "
It may be business saviness, or the naive hope that "this time, it may work" or "it's better than nothing", which keeps developers & publishers buying into their product, though short a fundamental re-thinking of how their technology works, I can't imagine integration of their Denuvo into new games continuing to accelerate like it did in the back half of 2015 and on through 2016.
What affect it will have on future releases, I don't know. AAA games previously only the domain of consoles began to come to steam before Denuvo hit the market, and I would presume that will remain the case, though it may some companies from bringing some titles.
I do expect that if Denuvo "goes away" though, that (for gamers) will be a self-defeating, since any future solution will replaced with something only more draconian.
I'll be eagerly looking forward to the soon-to-be-announced reality TV version of "Orange is the New Black", starting the members of The Dark Overlord hacker group.
There is a difference between providing a general purpose search engine that serves millions of legitimate needs (as well as a handful of illegitimate needs) and a site whose sole purpose is to provide people with easy access to electronic movies, music, games and other software that they would normally be required to purchase.
That difference? Intent.
I'm not saying that copyright law isn't broken, and certainly any service can be abused (including Google's search engine). But seriously...the organizational goals and company operations for Google and KickassTorrents are nothing alike.
For a modern, well-functioning commerce and legal framework to work, law enforcement have to be able to distinguish between the two. It's not black and white.
The university said there was no indication that research data or personal information was stolen in the attacks, though usernames and passwords had been compromised.
Because you know...who would consider passwords to be personal information...
Honestly, based on all indicators from the press over the last couple years, Weev has been a fairly miserable human being on most accounts, interested in causing disruption and not much else. The New York Times in particular did a very good expose on a number of individuals (Including Weev), covering their behaviors over the last couple of years, and their admitted trolling behaviors.
* http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08...
Here is a gem, highlighting some of his conduct. Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.
I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”
I don't know why people would do, or admit, things such as what the New York Times describes (usually it involves some kind of mental disorders)...but in the end, it all caught up to him.
The problem George Broussard has with the issue is that companies like 3D Realms (while they were actually still a game development studio, and now during it's quasi-half-existence as a publisher) cling desperately to old properties as their their only source of revenue. They've failed miserably at actually releasing any updates to their own works or creating new properties, and so their revenue streams has devolved to porting Duke Nukem 3D to the Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and any other platform that comes to mind, and licensing everything else out to separate studios (such as the Duke Nukem Forever, and last year's Shadow Warrior update).
The later, I assume, is the only thing that is holding them together as a corporate entity, along with anything that might of come out of the settlement with Gearbox (if they got anything).
Take away their copyright to those IPs, and companies like 3D Realms would not last another year.
As a result, his reaction to these kinds of comments is totally unsurprising.
Why do you say that? He's an established scientist and has a Bachelors in Physics and a Graduate/PH-D in Astrophysics. He's held positions at several universities and is the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Sure he goes on television more than your average physicist, but so did Carl Sagan. He's charismatic, and it works well for him. Nothing wrong with that.
Dr. Phil is a pool of waste that puts people on television and exposes their issues to millions of viewers, for the ratings and a fat pay check. He doesn't add anything to his profession, and his discussions on television don't enlighten anyone.
I'm confused - What "exciting new techniques" did the candidates came up with? Using Twitter? Writing a blog? Campaigns and PACs soliciting donations or informing people of important dates through text messages, phone calls, emails or applications on phones?
Wow - What an age we live in...if you ignore that the underpinnings of these technologies have been around for years if not decades.
All they did was leverage what was there to spam everyone and rake in money for advertisements, travel, staff expenses and otherwise. The tools may be relatively new, but the "technique" is a century old.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was also on Steam, and only missed being the piracy top-dog by about 10%.
> Whether that difference has to do with being available on digital download services, or just because people are attached to the online play for Black Ops over Crysis and needed legit copies to play, it's hard to tell.
'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"?
Cartridges will result in somewhat lower load times, for sure, but the complete elimination? I highly doubt it - The terrains of games like Oblivion and Fallout still take massive amounts of time to render in memory, and then display on the screen...The bottleneck is not necessarily the time required to simply extract it off the DVD or Blu Ray disk it resides on.
As game creators push the limits further and further with the inevitable next generation of consoles, you'll find the limiting factor in how long it takes to get up-and-running has less and less to do with the choice of optical media vs. SSD.
I find it incredulous that they would throw money on the purchase of something such as this, given the fact their projected Q3 income for 2009 is just $400,000 with a staff of 75+ - Either they're paying ~$6000/year salaries, or just wasting the venture capital dollars they have on things which really can't improve the bottom line or resolve major issues their users truly have with their site.
Of course, they project $4 mil in sustained incoming for Q4 2009 and up to perhaps $1.5 billion by 2013 if you believe their estimates, though I have a hard time accepting that - Especially in a down economy like this which doesn't look to recover back to it's former pace for at least another year or two. Quite frankly, this has 1999 dot-com bust written all over it, complete complete with the ridiculous hype, overpriced acquisitions and no defined strategy for how to actually make money.
In United States legal system, all things are weighed within the context of their predominate actual use. You have no idea what you're talking about.
If I had the heart to continue this debate, I would. But since you have no interest in posting facts to support your arguments, I will leave it at this.
And your point is? It requires a rather narrow scope of vision to state that public-domain material constitutes a "substantial" amount of it's indexed torrents. The fact that there exists a non-copyrighted copy cannot justify the existence of a service if it is predominantly used for acquisition of illegally acquired materials.
Here's the Top 100 for The Pirate Bay:
- http://thepiratebay.org/top/all...Count them. How many non-copyrighted works can you find? And of those which are freely available, how many of those torrent seeders are really authorized to publish these materials? Or do you think it's an entitlement that you have quick, fast and free access to these materials?
I mean, it has the name THE PIRATE BAY, for god sakes. Courts and legal authorities can execute search warrants if they believe that an organization is assisting or enabling criminal acts if there is substantial indications of such - In modern courts, the name of an organization IS CONSIDERED an indication of intent (the same is true if a I opened a shop called "Bongs and Things").
As a software engineer who cannot bear to see his work stolen, I would tend to completely disagree - You assert that offering links to illegal materials submitted by users is not an offense; For the sake of argument, let's assume I agree.
What I do NOT agree with though, is that:
- Being an accessory to a criminal act
- Having intent to provide a forum for a criminal act
- Being negligent in not removing infringing materials after the copyright holder has asked you to remove the material...is not criminal - Because it is.
The fact that a minority (and don't kid yourself - They are a minority) share Ubuntu, PBS programs and other free material does not justify the actions of the larger community.
Culpability and liability are real words in real world courts - The difference between the mass of posters on this board, and the judge/jury in Sweden is that they realized this; You do not.
I will not defend the draconian practices of the MPAA and RIAA which are, quite honestly, disgusting. However, I cannot sympathize with 4 stupid Swedish software engineers who couldn't account for 3 years of contradictory statements, and couldn't hire a competent defense attorney.
I have to completely agree with the poster - The thing that seems to be missing here for a lot of posters is that:
-...accessory to a crime...
-...intent...
-...and negligence......though not as serious as the original offense, are still criminal in most North American and European courts.
The fact that the Pirate Bay did not actually partake in the illegal sharing of files, or the fact that a minority of users choose to use the service for legal purposes, does not excuse the individuals from culpability for the actions of it's users.
I am not a sympathizer of the RIAA, the MPAA or any other draconian trade group, but I find it hard to sympathize with 4 Swedish morons who:
- Couldn't hire a competent defense attorney
- Couldn't answer for 3 years of contradictory statements.
- Couldn't stop from trying to make the trial a circus show.
The difference between the slashdotters on this site, and the judge/jury in Sweden is that they realized it, while so many here don't.
Discs that are more expensive than DVDs? Having to buy new type of player? Limited selections? Difference noticeable only on HD TV sets? Gee...seems like the perfect combination to me.
And do you know what is probably even less cool? The fact that the individuals who are trying to initiate this stunt probably have no intention of showing up at the genius bars themselves...
I'd be curious to find out whether the author of this article (or any of it's backers at the FSF) actually intend on showing up, or if the plan merely involves their zealots who would rather disrupt an business rather than lend their time to something more productive like charity.
Microsoft "irrelevant"? Those are odd words for a company that still maintains a 90% operating system market share, an equivalent market share percentage for office and productivity software, and what was (till a few weeks ago) the top selling current-gen video game console in the United States.
And that's not counting Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, their development platforms such as Visual Studio and a host of other profitable and well known product lines.
I agree that some of their attempts at breaking into new markets (see Zune, Windows Mobile, Live) have been failures or mixed successes at best, but to regard MSFT as "irrelevant" because headlines about them are not plastering your favorite blogs seems to demonstrate a high disregard for the facts.
Call me a fool, but am I the only one who is wondering why we need *MORE* Social Networking? What happened to editorial integrity, with it's provider staking it's credibility on the accuracy it's content? Informative opinions from knowledgeable sources?
We're somehow losing sight of this, in favor of "social networking", which really just amounts to cheap content creation that generates large advertising dollars.
The internet is quickly becoming just one big complaint line - And who will deny that when everyone shouts, no one listens.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading this makes reading some of the snippets from Denuvo's main site rather amusing:
* "Recent release of [Denuvo-protected] Just Cause 3 has pushed the Chinese piracy group's (3DM) cracking abilities practically past their limits. "In two years' time I’m afraid there will be no free games to play in the world."
* "Chinese hackers have admitted defeat in their attempt to pirate a new video game release and warned that increasingly sophisticated software could wipe out piracy in the gaming industry altogether. "
It may be business saviness, or the naive hope that "this time, it may work" or "it's better than nothing", which keeps developers & publishers buying into their product, though short a fundamental re-thinking of how their technology works, I can't imagine integration of their Denuvo into new games continuing to accelerate like it did in the back half of 2015 and on through 2016.
What affect it will have on future releases, I don't know. AAA games previously only the domain of consoles began to come to steam before Denuvo hit the market, and I would presume that will remain the case, though it may some companies from bringing some titles.
I do expect that if Denuvo "goes away" though, that (for gamers) will be a self-defeating, since any future solution will replaced with something only more draconian.
I'll be eagerly looking forward to the soon-to-be-announced reality TV version of "Orange is the New Black", starting the members of The Dark Overlord hacker group.
There is a difference between providing a general purpose search engine that serves millions of legitimate needs (as well as a handful of illegitimate needs) and a site whose sole purpose is to provide people with easy access to electronic movies, music, games and other software that they would normally be required to purchase.
That difference? Intent.
I'm not saying that copyright law isn't broken, and certainly any service can be abused (including Google's search engine). But seriously...the organizational goals and company operations for Google and KickassTorrents are nothing alike.
For a modern, well-functioning commerce and legal framework to work, law enforcement have to be able to distinguish between the two. It's not black and white.
The university said there was no indication that research data or personal information was stolen in the attacks, though usernames and passwords had been compromised.
Because you know...who would consider passwords to be personal information...
Honestly, based on all indicators from the press over the last couple years, Weev has been a fairly miserable human being on most accounts, interested in causing disruption and not much else. The New York Times in particular did a very good expose on a number of individuals (Including Weev), covering their behaviors over the last couple of years, and their admitted trolling behaviors.
* http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08...
Here is a gem, highlighting some of his conduct.
Weev, the troll who thought hacking the epilepsy site was immoral, is legendary among trolls. He is said to have jammed the cellphones of daughters of C.E.O.’s and demanded ransom from their fathers; he is also said to have trashed his enemies’ credit ratings. Better documented are his repeated assaults on LiveJournal, an online diary site where he himself maintains a personal blog. Working with a group of fellow hackers and trolls, he once obtained access to thousands of user accounts.
I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny’s house. “I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money,” he boasted. “I make people afraid for their lives.” On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny’s. “Trolling is basically Internet eugenics,” he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. “I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!”
I don't know why people would do, or admit, things such as what the New York Times describes (usually it involves some kind of mental disorders)...but in the end, it all caught up to him.
The problem George Broussard has with the issue is that companies like 3D Realms (while they were actually still a game development studio, and now during it's quasi-half-existence as a publisher) cling desperately to old properties as their their only source of revenue. They've failed miserably at actually releasing any updates to their own works or creating new properties, and so their revenue streams has devolved to porting Duke Nukem 3D to the Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and any other platform that comes to mind, and licensing everything else out to separate studios (such as the Duke Nukem Forever, and last year's Shadow Warrior update).
The later, I assume, is the only thing that is holding them together as a corporate entity, along with anything that might of come out of the settlement with Gearbox (if they got anything).
Take away their copyright to those IPs, and companies like 3D Realms would not last another year.
As a result, his reaction to these kinds of comments is totally unsurprising.
Why do you say that? He's an established scientist and has a Bachelors in Physics and a Graduate/PH-D in Astrophysics. He's held positions at several universities and is the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Sure he goes on television more than your average physicist, but so did Carl Sagan. He's charismatic, and it works well for him. Nothing wrong with that.
Dr. Phil is a pool of waste that puts people on television and exposes their issues to millions of viewers, for the ratings and a fat pay check. He doesn't add anything to his profession, and his discussions on television don't enlighten anyone.
There's a huge difference.
I'm confused - What "exciting new techniques" did the candidates came up with? Using Twitter? Writing a blog? Campaigns and PACs soliciting donations or informing people of important dates through text messages, phone calls, emails or applications on phones?
Wow - What an age we live in...if you ignore that the underpinnings of these technologies have been around for years if not decades.
All they did was leverage what was there to spam everyone and rake in money for advertisements, travel, staff expenses and otherwise. The tools may be relatively new, but the "technique" is a century old.
What you said is not true - Do your homework. Origin was launched on June 3rd of 2011. Crysis was pulled on June 14th
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(digital_distribution_platform)
* http://kotaku.com/5811996/crysis-2-pulled-from-steam-now-only-on-eas-origin
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was also on Steam, and only missed being the piracy top-dog by about 10%.
> Whether that difference has to do with being available on digital download services, or just because people are attached to the online play for Black Ops over Crysis and needed legit copies to play, it's hard to tell.
Origin? It may not be your preferred platform for purchasing Crysis 2, but it was available on Origins at the time it was pulled from Steam.
Of course CD Projekt Red reported having 20-25% more piracy (4.5m) for their major title of the year (Witcher 2) than either Call of Duty or Crysis 2
* http://www.gamespot.com/news/the-witcher-2-pirated-45-million-times-cd-projekt-6346876
If those numbers are correct, I have to wonder where the Witcher 2 devs got their figures.
"While most speculate that one of the Big Three are behind the purge–Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft"
Why even speculate which of the Big Three it was? The emulators were for:
- Nintendo SNES
- Nintendo Gameboy
- Nintendo NES
- Nintendo N64
Call me crazy, but if it wasn't pulled because of licensing issues, shouldn't it be obvious who would of had the beef with this guy?
Back in as early as '09, Google was stating that ChromeOS was not intended for tablet or solely-touchscreen devices; Only netbooks and other small laptops.
- http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/google-not-focused-on-touchscreens-for-chrome-os-652656
'Imagine if you could marry the vast spaces of discs with the blazing fast speeds of solid state memory. Can you say "no more load times"?
Cartridges will result in somewhat lower load times, for sure, but the complete elimination? I highly doubt it - The terrains of games like Oblivion and Fallout still take massive amounts of time to render in memory, and then display on the screen...The bottleneck is not necessarily the time required to simply extract it off the DVD or Blu Ray disk it resides on.
As game creators push the limits further and further with the inevitable next generation of consoles, you'll find the limiting factor in how long it takes to get up-and-running has less and less to do with the choice of optical media vs. SSD.
I find it incredulous that they would throw money on the purchase of something such as this, given the fact their projected Q3 income for 2009 is just $400,000 with a staff of 75+ - Either they're paying ~$6000/year salaries, or just wasting the venture capital dollars they have on things which really can't improve the bottom line or resolve major issues their users truly have with their site.
Of course, they project $4 mil in sustained incoming for Q4 2009 and up to perhaps $1.5 billion by 2013 if you believe their estimates, though I have a hard time accepting that - Especially in a down economy like this which doesn't look to recover back to it's former pace for at least another year or two. Quite frankly, this has 1999 dot-com bust written all over it, complete complete with the ridiculous hype, overpriced acquisitions and no defined strategy for how to actually make money.
All we need now is an IPO
In United States legal system, all things are weighed within the context of their predominate actual use. You have no idea what you're talking about.
If I had the heart to continue this debate, I would. But since you have no interest in posting facts to support your arguments, I will leave it at this.
And your point is? It requires a rather narrow scope of vision to state that public-domain material constitutes a "substantial" amount of it's indexed torrents. The fact that there exists a non-copyrighted copy cannot justify the existence of a service if it is predominantly used for acquisition of illegally acquired materials.
Here's the Top 100 for The Pirate Bay: ...Count them. How many non-copyrighted works can you find? And of those which are freely available, how many of those torrent seeders are really authorized to publish these materials? Or do you think it's an entitlement that you have quick, fast and free access to these materials?
- http://thepiratebay.org/top/all
I mean, it has the name THE PIRATE BAY, for god sakes. Courts and legal authorities can execute search warrants if they believe that an organization is assisting or enabling criminal acts if there is substantial indications of such - In modern courts, the name of an organization IS CONSIDERED an indication of intent (the same is true if a I opened a shop called "Bongs and Things").
As a software engineer who cannot bear to see his work stolen, I would tend to completely disagree - You assert that offering links to illegal materials submitted by users is not an offense; For the sake of argument, let's assume I agree.
What I do NOT agree with though, is that: ...is not criminal - Because it is.
- Being an accessory to a criminal act
- Having intent to provide a forum for a criminal act
- Being negligent in not removing infringing materials after the copyright holder has asked you to remove the material
The fact that a minority (and don't kid yourself - They are a minority) share Ubuntu, PBS programs and other free material does not justify the actions of the larger community.
Culpability and liability are real words in real world courts - The difference between the mass of posters on this board, and the judge/jury in Sweden is that they realized this; You do not.
I will not defend the draconian practices of the MPAA and RIAA which are, quite honestly, disgusting. However, I cannot sympathize with 4 stupid Swedish software engineers who couldn't account for 3 years of contradictory statements, and couldn't hire a competent defense attorney.
I have to completely agree with the poster - The thing that seems to be missing here for a lot of posters is that: ...accessory to a crime... ...intent... ...and negligence... ...though not as serious as the original offense, are still criminal in most North American and European courts.
-
-
-
The fact that the Pirate Bay did not actually partake in the illegal sharing of files, or the fact that a minority of users choose to use the service for legal purposes, does not excuse the individuals from culpability for the actions of it's users.
I am not a sympathizer of the RIAA, the MPAA or any other draconian trade group, but I find it hard to sympathize with 4 Swedish morons who:
- Couldn't hire a competent defense attorney
- Couldn't answer for 3 years of contradictory statements.
- Couldn't stop from trying to make the trial a circus show.
The difference between the slashdotters on this site, and the judge/jury in Sweden is that they realized it, while so many here don't.
My personal favorite open source app is this one this one. But I guess I'm just a bit picky....
Discs that are more expensive than DVDs? Having to buy new type of player? Limited selections? Difference noticeable only on HD TV sets? Gee...seems like the perfect combination to me.
And do you know what is probably even less cool? The fact that the individuals who are trying to initiate this stunt probably have no intention of showing up at the genius bars themselves...
I'd be curious to find out whether the author of this article (or any of it's backers at the FSF) actually intend on showing up, or if the plan merely involves their zealots who would rather disrupt an business rather than lend their time to something more productive like charity.
Microsoft "irrelevant"? Those are odd words for a company that still maintains a 90% operating system market share, an equivalent market share percentage for office and productivity software, and what was (till a few weeks ago) the top selling current-gen video game console in the United States.
And that's not counting Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, their development platforms such as Visual Studio and a host of other profitable and well known product lines.
I agree that some of their attempts at breaking into new markets (see Zune, Windows Mobile, Live) have been failures or mixed successes at best, but to regard MSFT as "irrelevant" because headlines about them are not plastering your favorite blogs seems to demonstrate a high disregard for the facts.
Call me a fool, but am I the only one who is wondering why we need *MORE* Social Networking? What happened to editorial integrity, with it's provider staking it's credibility on the accuracy it's content? Informative opinions from knowledgeable sources?
We're somehow losing sight of this, in favor of "social networking", which really just amounts to cheap content creation that generates large advertising dollars.
The internet is quickly becoming just one big complaint line - And who will deny that when everyone shouts, no one listens.