Is it really a big deal to pay $1000 to get a classification so you can sell however you want as a publisher? It's the same in NZ incidentally, with the exception that we can get them rated on the cheap if they have an Australian rating PG or below.
Incorrect. The WCT (WIPO Copyright Treaty) applies to digital goods the way you describe. The Berne Convention only requires all countries who signed up to recognise the copyrights of all other signatories (and by extension any UCC signatories)..
No, it doesn't. The Berne Convention simply requires that every signatory country recognise as if it was locally made the copyright on any work made in another signatory country. It absolutely does not ban parallel importation of copyrighted goods. The WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) does this, but not all Berne signatories signed that, and it makes it illegal for the purchaser not the licensor.
Your post doesn't make sense, but it sounds like you're trying to claim this geo-blocking bullshit isn't a problem. Stuff bought outside the US is significiantly more expensive and restricted. I'm in NZ, and we're often considered part of Australia despite the fact that our economic status is considerably worse (where a game is $50 USD in the USA, it'll be $90 USD in Australia, and $90 USD in New Zealand, despite the fact that Australians have a lower tax rate than New Zealanders, and at least 40% margin on average wage). So no, you can't fucking argue against that point.
Illegally paying for Hulu (seriously, the fuck?) is the only way to semi-legitimately get TV within a year of air date in the US. We only have one online movie streaming company (QuickFlix, a play on Netflix I guess) whose selection is absolute shit, so to get a decent movie selection you have to illegally pay for Netflix. TV shows on iTunes require you to set up a US account and buy iTunes gift cards at markups of up to 50% from opportunistic Americans in order to buy at all.
And through all of this, you still have to have a VPN or something just so that these companies will even let you illegally pay them. It's bullshit.
And yet a product on Steam is twice the price in AU as it is in US, and it doesn't have any of the above factors to justify it.
Skyrim on AU Steam: $89.99. Skyrim on US Steam: $59.99. A $30 difference, to sell to a country which requires no localisation, in the same currency. There is no sales tax applied, or is there any retail margin. It's just Bethesda and Valve gouging because they think they can. The Bethesda Collection on Steam isn't even available in AU.
Ditto for The Witcher 2: $49.99 AU vs $39.99 US.
There are of course rare exceptions to the rule. Witness:
LA Noire on AU Steam: $14.99. LA Noire on US Steam: $19.99 (wait what?)
That's not an example of why copyright is unsustainable. It's still sustainable. It's an example of why you can't look at laws applying to the internet in the context of one small part of the world any more, because it's global
It's actually quite crafty when you think about it. If the Australian government explicitly outlaws geo-restrictions, then when an Australian citizen runs into a geo-block and then circumvents it to get the material illegally (under US law) then they are immune to extradition because an extradition can only be sought under most treaties (except the USA-UK one) when the alleged crime is a crime in bothcountries.
FYI if Australia's law is anything like New Zealand's (where I am), then Parallel Importing is already explicitly allowed (even of copyrighted materials) and there's not a damn thing the copyright owner can do about it, short of lobbying the US government to include anti-parallel-importing provisions in TPPA (which they are).
Vodo uses BitTorrent to distribute. That rules it out for those of us in the "ass-reaming bandwidth costs" part of the world. I pay $2 per GB after the first 50GB in a month thanks very much.
(Next time you complain about 250GB or 1TB bandwidth caps, just give it up in advance - you'll get no sympathy from us).
In what fucking reality is Auckland livable? I swear to god, this place is a clusterfuck of weird rules, obscene council rates (taxes for you 'merikans) and sky-high prices for everything!
Not really. That would only apply under GPL3 which requires a patent license grant (GPL2 does not). They could easily argue that they are contributing code for the benefit of licensed customers (SuSE for example). More likely, though, is also that the people in the server OS team don't give a flying fuck what Legal is doing - making Linux and Hyper-V work better together increases Windows Server uptake, which is all they care about.
They probably just glanced at it long enough to establish that it was unlikely to occur in normal code and was oddly numbered or whatever magic constants need to be, and so on. Doubt they actually stopped and read it to work out what words it can be interpreted as.
Of course, you're responding to Locutus, which I'm pretty sure is an alter-ego for Richard Stallman, with how anti-Microsoft he is. He actually seems to think Microsoft as an entity is evil (which is impossible, since corporates are no more than the sum of their parts. And frankly I don't subscribe to the belief that any corporation is evil, they are simply to varying degrees full of self-interest with no regard for the effect on others).
I am astonished. And you call us sexist? That was the biggest pile of sexist diatribe I've seen in a while, and I looked at Microsoft's contributions to the Linux kernel, so I know sexist!
As a developer, I can safely say that anyone who feels persecuted and starts on a "woah is me" campaign as the result of a constant would not survive 10 minutes ramping up to one of our annual deadline releases. The pressure from across the business to ensure we launch by July 1 or face losing tens of millions of dollars of funding tends to crush the unprepared into finely grained dust.
And for what it's worth, where I work we do not sacrifice our individuality just so that we can work - that's absolute bollocks. Companies just shouldn't hire people who don't fit in with their culture. We have quite a lot of women in our workplace, some of whom can get even more vulgar than the men (I know of one person in our entire workplace who will actually use the word "cunt" in a sentence, and you guessed it - she's female). And you know what? That's fine. It makes us work better together, strangely enough, because we can look past the fact that we're talking to Z from Team X and "that's not my job" and see that we're talking to Mark or Sarah who went to a barbeque with last week and "yeah I can spare you ten minutes to help you out with that".
A workplace is a group of individuals, not a fucking hive-mind. Individuals look, think, and act differently to one another, and frequently it's the compound of those differences that make any team more effective at solving a given issue. We should be prizing the individuality and how it can contribute to the whole, not crushing it into dust to satisfy some overly sensitive gits of either gender. There are workplaces that don't prize individuality, and don't even need to, and those are where people who believe everyone should sacrifice their own sense of self to satisfy the drone culture should work.
Not entirely. iAds can get your location without permission because it has a completely separate pre-approved entry under System Services to do it. So if the app uses iAds, it will appear to get your location without asking for it (even though only iAds has access to it).
The exception is if they have iAds embedded, as iAds has location services enabled for it specifically. He was probably seeing the results of the iAds system pulling location details so it can get location-based adverts.
If you embed iAds, it actually doesn't require your permission - as the setting controlling whether iAds is allowed your location is actually buried under Location Services > System Services (yes, the advertising is a system service). Third party advertising kits (AdMob, etc) do require your permission.
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Is it really a big deal to pay $1000 to get a classification so you can sell however you want as a publisher? It's the same in NZ incidentally, with the exception that we can get them rated on the cheap if they have an Australian rating PG or below.
Incorrect. The WCT (WIPO Copyright Treaty) applies to digital goods the way you describe. The Berne Convention only requires all countries who signed up to recognise the copyrights of all other signatories (and by extension any UCC signatories)..
LA Noire costs $15 on Steam to Australians, and $20 on Steam for Americans, so apparently we do sometimes get it the other way around. Hah!
No, it doesn't. The Berne Convention simply requires that every signatory country recognise as if it was locally made the copyright on any work made in another signatory country. It absolutely does not ban parallel importation of copyrighted goods. The WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) does this, but not all Berne signatories signed that, and it makes it illegal for the purchaser not the licensor.
You're missing out on a teriffic deal! No EULA, just a GPL.
Not even that. The GPL contains no provisions that apply to an end-user, only a distributor.
Go tell that to Kim Schmitz and Richard O'Dwyer.
Your post doesn't make sense, but it sounds like you're trying to claim this geo-blocking bullshit isn't a problem. Stuff bought outside the US is significiantly more expensive and restricted. I'm in NZ, and we're often considered part of Australia despite the fact that our economic status is considerably worse (where a game is $50 USD in the USA, it'll be $90 USD in Australia, and $90 USD in New Zealand, despite the fact that Australians have a lower tax rate than New Zealanders, and at least 40% margin on average wage). So no, you can't fucking argue against that point.
Illegally paying for Hulu (seriously, the fuck?) is the only way to semi-legitimately get TV within a year of air date in the US. We only have one online movie streaming company (QuickFlix, a play on Netflix I guess) whose selection is absolute shit, so to get a decent movie selection you have to illegally pay for Netflix. TV shows on iTunes require you to set up a US account and buy iTunes gift cards at markups of up to 50% from opportunistic Americans in order to buy at all.
And through all of this, you still have to have a VPN or something just so that these companies will even let you illegally pay them. It's bullshit.
And yet a product on Steam is twice the price in AU as it is in US, and it doesn't have any of the above factors to justify it.
Skyrim on AU Steam: $89.99. Skyrim on US Steam: $59.99. A $30 difference, to sell to a country which requires no localisation, in the same currency. There is no sales tax applied, or is there any retail margin. It's just Bethesda and Valve gouging because they think they can. The Bethesda Collection on Steam isn't even available in AU.
Ditto for The Witcher 2: $49.99 AU vs $39.99 US.
There are of course rare exceptions to the rule. Witness:
LA Noire on AU Steam: $14.99. LA Noire on US Steam: $19.99 (wait what?)
That's not an example of why copyright is unsustainable. It's still sustainable. It's an example of why you can't look at laws applying to the internet in the context of one small part of the world any more, because it's global
It's actually quite crafty when you think about it. If the Australian government explicitly outlaws geo-restrictions, then when an Australian citizen runs into a geo-block and then circumvents it to get the material illegally (under US law) then they are immune to extradition because an extradition can only be sought under most treaties (except the USA-UK one) when the alleged crime is a crime in bothcountries.
FYI if Australia's law is anything like New Zealand's (where I am), then Parallel Importing is already explicitly allowed (even of copyrighted materials) and there's not a damn thing the copyright owner can do about it, short of lobbying the US government to include anti-parallel-importing provisions in TPPA (which they are).
Vodo uses BitTorrent to distribute. That rules it out for those of us in the "ass-reaming bandwidth costs" part of the world. I pay $2 per GB after the first 50GB in a month thanks very much.
(Next time you complain about 250GB or 1TB bandwidth caps, just give it up in advance - you'll get no sympathy from us).
In what fucking reality is Auckland livable? I swear to god, this place is a clusterfuck of weird rules, obscene council rates (taxes for you 'merikans) and sky-high prices for everything!
Not really. That would only apply under GPL3 which requires a patent license grant (GPL2 does not). They could easily argue that they are contributing code for the benefit of licensed customers (SuSE for example). More likely, though, is also that the people in the server OS team don't give a flying fuck what Legal is doing - making Linux and Hyper-V work better together increases Windows Server uptake, which is all they care about.
To which the kernel responds "Fuck you."
You think I jest, but read the comments. Microsoft's constant is more professional than half the code comments in that behemoth.
Then Embarcadero bought the Borland code tools business, and took a dump ten times bigger on the Borland developers than Microsoft ever could have.
"Beat the price rise! Buy today!" (In case you haven't noticed, Embarcadero racks up the prices annually).
They probably just glanced at it long enough to establish that it was unlikely to occur in normal code and was oddly numbered or whatever magic constants need to be, and so on. Doubt they actually stopped and read it to work out what words it can be interpreted as.
Of course, you're responding to Locutus, which I'm pretty sure is an alter-ego for Richard Stallman, with how anti-Microsoft he is. He actually seems to think Microsoft as an entity is evil (which is impossible, since corporates are no more than the sum of their parts. And frankly I don't subscribe to the belief that any corporation is evil, they are simply to varying degrees full of self-interest with no regard for the effect on others).
I am astonished. And you call us sexist? That was the biggest pile of sexist diatribe I've seen in a while, and I looked at Microsoft's contributions to the Linux kernel, so I know sexist!
Because 9 cannot fit into a 32-bit dword?
7 doesn't work in hex.
The post below yours in the thread actually validates your statistic.
As a developer, I can safely say that anyone who feels persecuted and starts on a "woah is me" campaign as the result of a constant would not survive 10 minutes ramping up to one of our annual deadline releases. The pressure from across the business to ensure we launch by July 1 or face losing tens of millions of dollars of funding tends to crush the unprepared into finely grained dust.
And for what it's worth, where I work we do not sacrifice our individuality just so that we can work - that's absolute bollocks. Companies just shouldn't hire people who don't fit in with their culture. We have quite a lot of women in our workplace, some of whom can get even more vulgar than the men (I know of one person in our entire workplace who will actually use the word "cunt" in a sentence, and you guessed it - she's female). And you know what? That's fine. It makes us work better together, strangely enough, because we can look past the fact that we're talking to Z from Team X and "that's not my job" and see that we're talking to Mark or Sarah who went to a barbeque with last week and "yeah I can spare you ten minutes to help you out with that".
A workplace is a group of individuals, not a fucking hive-mind. Individuals look, think, and act differently to one another, and frequently it's the compound of those differences that make any team more effective at solving a given issue. We should be prizing the individuality and how it can contribute to the whole, not crushing it into dust to satisfy some overly sensitive gits of either gender. There are workplaces that don't prize individuality, and don't even need to, and those are where people who believe everyone should sacrifice their own sense of self to satisfy the drone culture should work.
You should have taken the opportunity to introduce the bigoted dickhead to the development team.
Not entirely. iAds can get your location without permission because it has a completely separate pre-approved entry under System Services to do it. So if the app uses iAds, it will appear to get your location without asking for it (even though only iAds has access to it).
The exception is if they have iAds embedded, as iAds has location services enabled for it specifically. He was probably seeing the results of the iAds system pulling location details so it can get location-based adverts.
If you embed iAds, it actually doesn't require your permission - as the setting controlling whether iAds is allowed your location is actually buried under Location Services > System Services (yes, the advertising is a system service). Third party advertising kits (AdMob, etc) do require your permission.