Ahm, what you are describing is a derived work. We may not want it to be, but it can be considered one and they do have some rights over the combined work.
I think one of the problems in discussions like this is people have difficulty differentiating between what they want and what is, then go a step further and define what is as what they want it to be.
*nod* anyone who has tried to go the consulting or freelance route can appreciate this tradeoff. When one works for themselves they tend to make more per job, it can be good money. On the other hand, one takes all the risk and there is no shared buffer to absorb shortfalls and there is no collective bargaining or scaled position when going to suppliers of resources or benefits.
Though it should be noted that it is not quite true that the company took no risk. Besides the risk (and up front investment) of the game itself, but they put developer time (and later, support) into their modding support. That creation kit did not spring into life with zero effort, it was a risk they took in the hopes of making back enough money to justify the additional time of developers, testers, support, etc.
Backlash can be a funny thing, and the message companies take from it can be very different from what the community thinks they should. For instance I have heard rumblings of companies not wanting to follow in Mojang's footsteps with their permissive modding license due to some of the headaches and flack it has caused them. The 3rd party server owners believe their backlash was to keep Mojang fair/ethical, but others see it as having created an entitled beast that hurts their image and revenue.
Well, the tool example you can, but people actually do this and it is a pretty healthy market. Lots of software is marketed that way (free for non-commercial use, paid license for commercial derivative works), and movies work that way too (the license for home viewing and commercial display are not the same).
One you move away from consumer goods into industrial (believe it or not, there are customers out there other than end consumers.) these types of contracts are actually pretty common, with it not being unusual for a company to get a cut of the revenue from downstream users of their product. Crow, there were probably libraries IN Skyrim that worked that way. 3rd party tools and libraries used in professional development often have per-seat or per-unit-sold licensing on them.
In all these cases though, you are forgetting that this was not an EULA change, but experimenting with a new system that ran in parallel with the classic 'donation' stuff authors have been doing for quite some time.
Well, keep in mind that said 'greedy fucks' are developers who continue to work on new games. Also keep in mind that the success or failure of programs like this will factor in to how much development time (and thus expense) goes into mod friendliness in the future.
Something to keep in mind though is that in a way, people are 'voting' on how to change copyright laws here. A great deal of how 'fair use' copyright is determined is pulling from contemporary standards, what is reasonable or typical usage that an IP owner and 3rd party author can expect?
Experiments like this can help set precedent, if they become large enough they help define what is normal and what is not, which affects expectations in other cases. So by embracing or rejecting this model, the community actually gets more of a voice in setting law then they ever would by voting.
Wait, so the IP owner is being exploitative by trying to monetize derivative works, but the mod authors are not being exploitative by trying to monetize the IP owners work?
I really doubt they 'stepped back' because of other parts of the world. This is pretty standard stuff and I can not think of any major market where one can sell derived works without the consent of the author.
I suspect a lot of people were worried about the idea of Bethesda taking anything. Paying mod authors people can get behind, and people are generally ok with distribution services taking a cut, but the idea of mod revenue going back to the publisher would represent an uncomfortable shift.
The 'annoyance' part was commentary created by the OP. The actual law is anti-harassment, which has a higher legal standard then 'annoyance'. Which leads me to suspect that the people behind the piece are worried that their harassing behavior might get called into question so they are trying to paint it as 'this law might be coming for you too!' when, in reality, it isn't.
This varies greatly by field. STEM tends to be particularly bad about this there is so much money to be brought in, but fields with less research money in them put more weight on teaching. For instance, for english departments, funding is not a factor. English professors are often thrilled to manage a grant for a few thousand dollars to do poll or get students to some theater, while STEM professors are often considered failures if they are only bringing in a half million per year or so.
The problem is that TAing is not actually a 'job'. It is part of a financial aid package which results in departments being given a near slave labor workforce that they need to find things to do with. This could probably be solved by simply giving people actual scholarships, but people complained about that since it was being too nice to students and they 'needed to work!', even though it screwed with their studies.
So the current system is the result of mutually exclusive goals being pushed from different directions and nobody winning.
I suspect a lot of the outrage is rooted in forum dwellers freaking out at the idea there might be limits on how much they can harass people and any suggestion is attacked. In short, being horrible people is REALLY important to a significant and vocal part of the nerd/geek community, and they really do not want any tools for victims to counter them other than 'man up and ignore!'.
Yes, laws can be abused. What needs to be weighed is the benefits of the law against the costs.
By the looks of it, the original law was designed to address serial offenders like scam artists. So if they get caught and prosecuted, those individuals are less likely to keep doing it.
Yeah, if you are mugged you should be a man and just get over it, no reason to catch or prosecute the robber. People should just do whatever they want and their victims just need to man up and do whatever they want back. Who needs laws anyway.
Unless the law has been selectively enforced already, expanding its interpretation would go against precedent and thus be an uphill battle. I think some people here are falling for the 'adding an e changes everything!' when it does not always do so.
Not only does it require the user to be complicit, it requires the download channel to be vulnerable to man in the middle attacks so that the content can be changed mid stream. This is of course possible, but modern browsers make it non trivial to accomplish on all but the most focused cases.
Wait wait wait. If we are talking about little more than a word swap, wouldn't the standards that were previously applied to things like snail mail be the same for electronic communication? Has the law ever been used or interpreted to cover mailing a paperback fiction book counting?
This strikes me as going beyond a 'literal' interpretation of the law and goes well into the territory of taking serious liberties with the text and its interpretation. If all this is doing is extending existing laws for fraud and harassment to cover electronic transfers too, then looking to how those laws were applied by judges and lawyers would be a strong (if not outright binding) indicator of what the change actually means.
People who are careful to not publicly disclose the issue before it is fixed? Yeah, it was a mistake, but one Groupon takes rather seriously. This is not 'weaseling out', this is a legitimate gripe that they decided to call him on. They could have been more understanding and that would be nice of them, but their grievance is real and they should not be shamed into pretending it is not.
Even if 'only once, by mistake', he still did something that their disclosure rules explicitly said not to do or it invalided the process. It would be nice if they made an exception or were more understanding, but they are under no obligation and have every right to be pissed off, even if it was an accident.
Think about when a company accidently puts an archive of customer details up on their download site. Even if they fix it quickly and it was an honest mistake, they still screwed up and people are going to be annoyed with them.
I think we did not see the real expansion of DLS till we saw bundling of video and data services, so expansion fueled by media companies and their ability to get preferential treatment. Before that, telcos still made good money off leasing their lines, they got paid no matter which ISP the customer went with.
I have not really seen prices go down after deregulation, and I would say it did NOT produce competition in the least, it eliminated it almost completely. Companies folded left and right because they found themselves no longer accessible to their customer base. Overnight all your customers could become Verizon customers by virtue of Verizon making itself the only option to people on its lines.
Chances are the only reason that is possible in your area is that the local telco is voluntarily (or due to existing contracts) leasing its lines to other ISPs.
Well, it only executes in a root context if the application is given root access. There is not much you can do when you click the little 'yes I want to run this as root' confirmation. The OS can not really prevent exploits from being exploited in root level applications.
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Ahm, what you are describing is a derived work. We may not want it to be, but it can be considered one and they do have some rights over the combined work.
I think one of the problems in discussions like this is people have difficulty differentiating between what they want and what is, then go a step further and define what is as what they want it to be.
*nod* anyone who has tried to go the consulting or freelance route can appreciate this tradeoff. When one works for themselves they tend to make more per job, it can be good money. On the other hand, one takes all the risk and there is no shared buffer to absorb shortfalls and there is no collective bargaining or scaled position when going to suppliers of resources or benefits.
Though it should be noted that it is not quite true that the company took no risk. Besides the risk (and up front investment) of the game itself, but they put developer time (and later, support) into their modding support. That creation kit did not spring into life with zero effort, it was a risk they took in the hopes of making back enough money to justify the additional time of developers, testers, support, etc.
Backlash can be a funny thing, and the message companies take from it can be very different from what the community thinks they should. For instance I have heard rumblings of companies not wanting to follow in Mojang's footsteps with their permissive modding license due to some of the headaches and flack it has caused them. The 3rd party server owners believe their backlash was to keep Mojang fair/ethical, but others see it as having created an entitled beast that hurts their image and revenue.
Ahm, because you can't do those things?
Well, the tool example you can, but people actually do this and it is a pretty healthy market. Lots of software is marketed that way (free for non-commercial use, paid license for commercial derivative works), and movies work that way too (the license for home viewing and commercial display are not the same).
One you move away from consumer goods into industrial (believe it or not, there are customers out there other than end consumers.) these types of contracts are actually pretty common, with it not being unusual for a company to get a cut of the revenue from downstream users of their product. Crow, there were probably libraries IN Skyrim that worked that way. 3rd party tools and libraries used in professional development often have per-seat or per-unit-sold licensing on them.
In all these cases though, you are forgetting that this was not an EULA change, but experimenting with a new system that ran in parallel with the classic 'donation' stuff authors have been doing for quite some time.
Well, keep in mind that said 'greedy fucks' are developers who continue to work on new games. Also keep in mind that the success or failure of programs like this will factor in to how much development time (and thus expense) goes into mod friendliness in the future.
Something to keep in mind though is that in a way, people are 'voting' on how to change copyright laws here. A great deal of how 'fair use' copyright is determined is pulling from contemporary standards, what is reasonable or typical usage that an IP owner and 3rd party author can expect?
Experiments like this can help set precedent, if they become large enough they help define what is normal and what is not, which affects expectations in other cases. So by embracing or rejecting this model, the community actually gets more of a voice in setting law then they ever would by voting.
Wait, so the IP owner is being exploitative by trying to monetize derivative works, but the mod authors are not being exploitative by trying to monetize the IP owners work?
I really doubt they 'stepped back' because of other parts of the world. This is pretty standard stuff and I can not think of any major market where one can sell derived works without the consent of the author.
Ahm, isn't Bethesda responsible for the game itself? That kinda strikes me as requiring effort, creativity, and a great deal of cost.
I suspect a lot of people were worried about the idea of Bethesda taking anything. Paying mod authors people can get behind, and people are generally ok with distribution services taking a cut, but the idea of mod revenue going back to the publisher would represent an uncomfortable shift.
The 'annoyance' part was commentary created by the OP. The actual law is anti-harassment, which has a higher legal standard then 'annoyance'. Which leads me to suspect that the people behind the piece are worried that their harassing behavior might get called into question so they are trying to paint it as 'this law might be coming for you too!' when, in reality, it isn't.
And those answers on Google will probably be written by people who were sent to schools that did not participate in these programs.
This varies greatly by field. STEM tends to be particularly bad about this there is so much money to be brought in, but fields with less research money in them put more weight on teaching. For instance, for english departments, funding is not a factor. English professors are often thrilled to manage a grant for a few thousand dollars to do poll or get students to some theater, while STEM professors are often considered failures if they are only bringing in a half million per year or so.
The problem is that TAing is not actually a 'job'. It is part of a financial aid package which results in departments being given a near slave labor workforce that they need to find things to do with. This could probably be solved by simply giving people actual scholarships, but people complained about that since it was being too nice to students and they 'needed to work!', even though it screwed with their studies.
So the current system is the result of mutually exclusive goals being pushed from different directions and nobody winning.
I suspect a lot of the outrage is rooted in forum dwellers freaking out at the idea there might be limits on how much they can harass people and any suggestion is attacked. In short, being horrible people is REALLY important to a significant and vocal part of the nerd/geek community, and they really do not want any tools for victims to counter them other than 'man up and ignore!'.
Yes, laws can be abused. What needs to be weighed is the benefits of the law against the costs.
By the looks of it, the original law was designed to address serial offenders like scam artists. So if they get caught and prosecuted, those individuals are less likely to keep doing it.
Yeah, if you are mugged you should be a man and just get over it, no reason to catch or prosecute the robber. People should just do whatever they want and their victims just need to man up and do whatever they want back. Who needs laws anyway.
Unless the law has been selectively enforced already, expanding its interpretation would go against precedent and thus be an uphill battle. I think some people here are falling for the 'adding an e changes everything!' when it does not always do so.
Not only does it require the user to be complicit, it requires the download channel to be vulnerable to man in the middle attacks so that the content can be changed mid stream. This is of course possible, but modern browsers make it non trivial to accomplish on all but the most focused cases.
Wait wait wait. If we are talking about little more than a word swap, wouldn't the standards that were previously applied to things like snail mail be the same for electronic communication? Has the law ever been used or interpreted to cover mailing a paperback fiction book counting?
This strikes me as going beyond a 'literal' interpretation of the law and goes well into the territory of taking serious liberties with the text and its interpretation. If all this is doing is extending existing laws for fraud and harassment to cover electronic transfers too, then looking to how those laws were applied by judges and lawyers would be a strong (if not outright binding) indicator of what the change actually means.
People who are careful to not publicly disclose the issue before it is fixed? Yeah, it was a mistake, but one Groupon takes rather seriously. This is not 'weaseling out', this is a legitimate gripe that they decided to call him on. They could have been more understanding and that would be nice of them, but their grievance is real and they should not be shamed into pretending it is not.
Even if 'only once, by mistake', he still did something that their disclosure rules explicitly said not to do or it invalided the process. It would be nice if they made an exception or were more understanding, but they are under no obligation and have every right to be pissed off, even if it was an accident.
Think about when a company accidently puts an archive of customer details up on their download site. Even if they fix it quickly and it was an honest mistake, they still screwed up and people are going to be annoyed with them.
I think we did not see the real expansion of DLS till we saw bundling of video and data services, so expansion fueled by media companies and their ability to get preferential treatment. Before that, telcos still made good money off leasing their lines, they got paid no matter which ISP the customer went with.
I have not really seen prices go down after deregulation, and I would say it did NOT produce competition in the least, it eliminated it almost completely. Companies folded left and right because they found themselves no longer accessible to their customer base. Overnight all your customers could become Verizon customers by virtue of Verizon making itself the only option to people on its lines.
Chances are the only reason that is possible in your area is that the local telco is voluntarily (or due to existing contracts) leasing its lines to other ISPs.
Well, it only executes in a root context if the application is given root access. There is not much you can do when you click the little 'yes I want to run this as root' confirmation. The OS can not really prevent exploits from being exploited in root level applications.
*nod* expecting a system to do more than it is intended to do might represent a problem with user expectations, but that is a whole other domain.