I think developers need to decide whether they are selling a product or a service - and not both.
The "product" and the "service" are two parts of the same thing. The way MMOs are designed, one without the other is useless. The product (the initial game box with all its content) cost several million dollars to produce over the course of a few years. The service (running the servers) costs a large fraction of a million dollars *per month* to run. It's a much riskier financial bargain if they give one or the other away for free, since it becomes a lot harder to break even. If they didn't charge for the game box, they'd have to charge more for the service; if they didn't charge for the service, the game would cost more. It's simple economics. There's nothing "unfair" about "playing both ends," and you're ignoring the fact that every subscription-based MMO gives you a free month (or more) of service included with the initial game. Earth & Beyond was $45, and that includes a free month of service. A month of service normally costs $12.95. That means the game was really only $32 to me, which is a pretty good price for a game like that (most first-tier games cost $50-$60 when released).
No, Diablo II was not run entirely from the servers. You had the option to play on their "closed" servers, which meant that all character data was stored on Blizzard's servers (and the game processing was done server side) -- this is akin to the way actual MMOs like EQ or DAOC do it. However you could also have "open" servers, where the character data was stored locally -- these were the peer-to-peer setups, where the game was actually hosted on one of the players' computers.
Nonetheless, Blizzard's closed servers require a lot less maintenance than, say, EQ does -- for one thing, a single server box could probably host a few dozen separate D2 games at once, at the very least. Second, with EQ, a single world server is actually comprised of around 40 boxes, and each box has *different* code on it (each box hosts 1-5 zones). With D2, all Blizzard needs is a single instance of the server code which can be duplicated multiple times.
Yeah, it still costs money, but battle.net is a loss-leader, something which attracts more players to buy the game, whether or not they take advantage of the online service.
Where did I say I don't care? I said that the GNU/Linux vs. Linux discussion was less important than the "Trusted Computing" discussion. I didn't say that GNU/Linux was unimportant, or even whether or not I agreed with RMS's position on the GNU/Linux issue.
Please don't put words into my mouth that I didn't say.
You'd have to carpet bomb the entire USA to be sure of taking out all 13 of them
No, you'd only have to bomb the 13 sites where the servers are located. And not even that many, since a couple of the servers are located in the same facility. Three of the servers aren't even in the U.S.A. Check here for a list. Finding out where the servers are physically located would not be a difficult task for anyone with the resources to actually bomb 13 facilities simultaneously.
Yeah, it would still take a lot of effort, but not "the resources to turn the entire country into a self-illuminating glass-floored parking lot". Not even close.
The economic model in Earth & Beyond is an interesting change from games like EverQuest. It's closer to DAOC's model, as I understand it (I'm not very familiar with DAOC though).
Basically, the best items are player-made versions of loot-only items. Players can make better-quality items than the NPC merchants sell, but the best overall items aren't sold by merchants at all, but rather are dropped off NPCs that you have to go out and kill. So player crafting is important, because it yields the best items; but hunting is also important, because in order for the crafters to make those items, they (or others) have to go out and kill monsters to get those items in the first place. A big problem with EQ's economy is that *all* the best items are dropped off creatures. The best player-made items are pretty good, but do not compare to loot items.
What i don't approve is that the games cost full price like every offline game plus the subscription, which is not cheap at all.
The cost of purchasing the game box is there to offset the development costs of the game -- i.e. all the money spent paying the programmers, artists, designers, and managers who develop the game to begin with. For a modern, first-tier computer game, this process can take two to four years; all that money is invested in the project before the company gets a single dime from customers.
Now for a regular game, once the game launches, there's some followup (patches, fixes, etc.) but the amount of effort is small compared to the amount of effort that went into creating the original game. But with an MMO, once the game launches, the company is also providing servers for you to play on. Providing that service is an ongoing cost; you have to pay people to admin and maintain the servers, pay for new or replacement hardware, pay for bandwidth, electricity, etc. It's a significant chunk of change, which is why there's the ongoing fee. In addition, MMOs tend to have additional (free) content introduced down the line; the monthly fee pays for this as well (although full expansions are usually Sold Separately, and the development costs for the content in those expansions are paid for by the box cost... in theory).
AO allows a download of the client to test out the game, but if you want to play the game, you still need to buy a game box (in order to receive a registration key). Most MMOs don't have this option, since downloading a 1 gig+ client just to test would be an additional huge load on their bandwidth.
There is a reason for the up-front cost plus the ongoing monthly cost; it's just odd that so few people seem to understand that running servers that can handle thousands of simultaneous players for months at a time is an expensive thing to do.
I've always hated the word "telephony". Mostly because it has "phony" on the end, although that seems appropriate when you consider what absolute crap most telephony software is.:)
My point was that his earlier tirades against relatively unimportant topics (like "GNU/Linux vs. Linux") lessen the power of his words when he talks about something more important.
I'm not making any statements about whether his work on GNU is valuable or not; I'm saying that the way he handles debate about it causes people to pay less heed to him when he brings up a more important issue. Hence, "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."
Well, if Congress decided not to exercise that right, then the States presumably would have it.
Agreed. De facto, at least, Congress has exercised that right extensively.
I knew about that link, but you asked me for a "case tried in U.S. courts where the defendant was found guilty or liable due to 'plagiarism.'" I figured it wasn't worth fighting over whether or not that source was accurate, which you certainly are free to contend. Especially when you are perfectly free to do a google search yourself before contesting my assertion about common law.
Granted. I should have looked into common law more (I did do a Google search on it the first time, but it was cursory).
But next time you should make points of your own instead of jumping in to quibble about irrelevant points in a discussion between two others.
It's a public discussion on a public discussion board. There are no rules on/. (codified or otherwise;)) that demand that such conversations remain uninterrupted.
It was hardly an "irrelevant point"; you made a definite, positive assertion regarding whether a specific behavior constitutes copyright infringement, and I corrected you (albeit in a clumsy, ham-handed fashion). Would it have been better to leave the inaccuracy intact?
Granted. I should have been more clear that I was talking about federal law, not state law. I don't believe states have power over copyright, though, since the Constitution specifically gives that right to Congress. California code, for example, refers to certain financial practices regarding copyright (payment of royalties, etc.) but says nothing about what can be copyrighted, etc.
I'm not sure there is any evidence available online.
Well, since you for some reason didn't want to do the research yourself, I did it for you. The second comment in this article [aaanet.org] makes a distinction between common-law plagiarism and statutory copyright infringement. If we assume this source is accurate, then you're right in that there is a separate entity known as plagiarism, existing in state common law and not statute, state or federal.
Claiming another's work as your own is not copyright infringement.
Whether something infringes on a copyright is difficult to discern; thus, a great deal of case law has been generated on the subject. For example, in a written work,
outright plagiarism--the exact copying of words--is copyright infringement, but the copyright does not prevent others from using the facts and ideas used in that work.
(emphasis mine)
In any case, your quibble is irrelevant, because my statement of "wouldn't it be simpler if there were no copyright laws" does not preclude plagiarism laws.
Straw man. I didn't say anything about your initial statement. ("Wouldn't it be simpler if we didn't have copyright laws at all?" was your original quote -- which I agree with. Of course it would be simpler. But would it be better? That's the real issue, and not one so easily solved.) What I was responding to was this post of yours:
Yes, that way when I write something or record something, I can forget about worrying if someone is going to copy it and claim it as their own.
Umm, no that's plagiarism, not copyright infringement.
Your assertion is false. Doing what he described ("if someone is going to copy it and claim it as their own") may be plagiarism according to common law, but it is also copyright infringement according to federal law, assuming the proper circumstances (the work is indeed copyrighted and still covered under copyright, and the author did not give permission for others to claim the work as their own). According to 17 USC 106A (a) (1) (A) (shown here [cornell.edu]), authors have a right to claim ownership of a work. This implies, at least, that no one else has that right.
Furthermore, "does not preclude plagiarism laws" implies that there are actual plagiarism laws, which there are not (e.g. the California Code [ca.gov] does not include the words "plagiarism" or "plagiarize"). Plagiarism, as we've established, is a common-law doctrine and is not codified.
I really wish RMS would think more about long-term strategy. He spends time ranting about the name you use to refer to your OS, which hurts his credibility when he argues against things that actually are worth arguing against. There's a reason that "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is a common folktale.
I'm not arguing that it isn't plagiarism. I'm arguing that plagiarism isn't a legal standard in the United States.
Plagiarism is illegal under common law.
The U.S. legal system does not use common law. Everything is codified. If something is not codified as law, then you cannot be brought up on charges based on it (or sued under it as a tort action). If you can find me any case tried in U.S. courts where the defendant was found guilty or liable due to "plagiarism", please cite it, because I'm reasonably certain no such thing exists. (Basically, you're making a claim here, but have provided no evidence to back it up.)
The legal system in other countries may be different, but then, I'm not talking about other countries. I'm talking about the U.S.
Unless it is fair use.
What I described is emphatically not fair use. Claiming another's work as your own and distributing it does not fall under fair use, no matter what.
Not that I mind the good PR for Linux, but it is a curious phenomenon that this kind of detail of a big corporation's IT affairs is considered newsworthy.
Keep in mind that the majority of the news sources (or "news sources" where appropriate) covering this story are, if not actual pro-Linux sources (like/.), at the very least computer news sources. Google News comes up with only about 10 hits for chrysler linux (compared to 726 for sniper arrests), so it's not like it's even been that widely covered so far; and this kind of business change actually is a newsworthy development in the computer industry.
You'd see this as a news story from computer-themed news sources; it'd be a "feature" in mainstream or general news sources.
Nah, FPS isn't important. This is *crash* testing, remember; they want to see what happens to a penguin when it hits a snow drift at 6,000 miles per hour.
If the direct cause of the savings is the ability to use cheap commodity hardware, then the savings are still indirectly due to Linux -- since Linux is what allows them to use cheap hardware, instead of the big server iron required by the corporate Unix. (Theoretically, anyway; I don't know much about corporate Unices.)
Legally, it is copyright infringement. As far as I know there are no laws regarding "plagiarism" as a separate legal entity from copyright infringement. If someone creates a copyrighted work, and you take it, claim it as your own, and distributed it, you have infringed their copyright.
If I'm wrong, then please cite the section of the U.S. Code (or any body of law) regarding plagiarism. (FYI, nowhere in the U.S. Code do the words "plagiarism" or "plagiarize" appear, according to Cornell's search engine at this link.)
I also learned in a technical writing class that reading from a computer screen is 25% slower than reading from a book. My own experience tells me this is true as well.
This sounds like a fairly person-specific metric. I've clocked myself, and I read faster on a computer screen than I do from a book (about 8.6 words per second on a computer vs. 6.6 on a page). It'd be interesting to see what the distributions are for the general population.
and I don't want to nit-pick (read: "of course means I want to nit-pick and am about to do so")
I use that same idiom myself a lot ("I don't want to nitpick, but...") and for me, at least, I think what I'm really saying is, "I don't want to sound like I'm being a whiny nitpicker, but I think there is an important detail/distinction here, etc..."
It's that there's some minor point which you want to clarify, but you don't want people to think it's insignificant or unimportant. I think, anyway.:)
"HIPAAA"? (It's HIPAA.) "Compiance"? (Try "compliance.") I don't want this to turn into another "stupid editor tricks" rant, but I'm really getting annoyed.
Do these guys really care? Honestly, this is sad. The/. editors, we know, have wants and desires like any other human. Most of them seem to want open source to win. Do they not realize that taking the tiny amount of effort necessary to proofread and edit the story submissions and titles, would go a significant way toward reducing the perception of/. as a bunch of hyperactive nerds? (No, I don't see us that way, but a lot of non-geeks do.) If the editors really truly do want open source to "win" (whatever that would mean), they could do a lot just by ensuring that the front of the site looks competent, rather than incompetent.
I'm not claiming they have some kind of journalistic duty here; it's just normal freakin' common sense. If you write like you don't care, people will assume you don't care, and will ignore you. (Not, of course, the/. regulars who don't come here for what the editors have to say, but rather the discussions by the users.)
Not even remotely. The DMCA only applies to devices or technologies that are used to break encryption that is protecting a copyrighted work. Reverse-engineering a trade secret (which is what PageRank is) has absolutely nothing to do with the DMCA, and in fact is a time-honored (and court-approved) method of business competition. If you manage to figure it out yourself, and don't engage in any illegal practices to get the trade secret (such as bribing one of the company's engineers), you're totally in the clear.
Yes, it's more complicated than that, but the DMCA has absolutely nothing to do with this.
One interesting aspect of the world is the fact that everything is owned. There is no land that isn't owned by some country (not counting Antarctica, which is "unownable" by international treaty, as I understand it). So it's not like you can up and go start your own country. You'd have to find some land, and wrest control away from someone; and the people who are already there (or at least own it legally, e.g. uninhabited tiny islands out in the middle of the ocean) will generally not be real keen on that.
What happens if the entire population (or at least an overwhelming majority) of one of the U.S. states decides to secede? Well, it happened once before, and we had a nasty civil war about it. So what would it take for a state to secede *legally*? Would a constitutional amendment do it? Or just an act of Congress?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you should do a little research before spouting off about how there are no useful distributed computing projects out there.
That reminds me of an old one-liner from the margins of Mad Magazine:
"Nine out of ten doctors agree: money talks."
No, Diablo II was not run entirely from the servers. You had the option to play on their "closed" servers, which meant that all character data was stored on Blizzard's servers (and the game processing was done server side) -- this is akin to the way actual MMOs like EQ or DAOC do it. However you could also have "open" servers, where the character data was stored locally -- these were the peer-to-peer setups, where the game was actually hosted on one of the players' computers.
Nonetheless, Blizzard's closed servers require a lot less maintenance than, say, EQ does -- for one thing, a single server box could probably host a few dozen separate D2 games at once, at the very least. Second, with EQ, a single world server is actually comprised of around 40 boxes, and each box has *different* code on it (each box hosts 1-5 zones). With D2, all Blizzard needs is a single instance of the server code which can be duplicated multiple times.
Yeah, it still costs money, but battle.net is a loss-leader, something which attracts more players to buy the game, whether or not they take advantage of the online service.
Where did I say I don't care? I said that the GNU/Linux vs. Linux discussion was less important than the "Trusted Computing" discussion. I didn't say that GNU/Linux was unimportant, or even whether or not I agreed with RMS's position on the GNU/Linux issue.
Please don't put words into my mouth that I didn't say.
Yeah, it would still take a lot of effort, but not "the resources to turn the entire country into a self-illuminating glass-floored parking lot". Not even close.
The economic model in Earth & Beyond is an interesting change from games like EverQuest. It's closer to DAOC's model, as I understand it (I'm not very familiar with DAOC though).
Basically, the best items are player-made versions of loot-only items. Players can make better-quality items than the NPC merchants sell, but the best overall items aren't sold by merchants at all, but rather are dropped off NPCs that you have to go out and kill. So player crafting is important, because it yields the best items; but hunting is also important, because in order for the crafters to make those items, they (or others) have to go out and kill monsters to get those items in the first place. A big problem with EQ's economy is that *all* the best items are dropped off creatures. The best player-made items are pretty good, but do not compare to loot items.
Now for a regular game, once the game launches, there's some followup (patches, fixes, etc.) but the amount of effort is small compared to the amount of effort that went into creating the original game. But with an MMO, once the game launches, the company is also providing servers for you to play on. Providing that service is an ongoing cost; you have to pay people to admin and maintain the servers, pay for new or replacement hardware, pay for bandwidth, electricity, etc. It's a significant chunk of change, which is why there's the ongoing fee. In addition, MMOs tend to have additional (free) content introduced down the line; the monthly fee pays for this as well (although full expansions are usually Sold Separately, and the development costs for the content in those expansions are paid for by the box cost... in theory).
AO allows a download of the client to test out the game, but if you want to play the game, you still need to buy a game box (in order to receive a registration key). Most MMOs don't have this option, since downloading a 1 gig+ client just to test would be an additional huge load on their bandwidth.
There is a reason for the up-front cost plus the ongoing monthly cost; it's just odd that so few people seem to understand that running servers that can handle thousands of simultaneous players for months at a time is an expensive thing to do.
I've always hated the word "telephony". Mostly because it has "phony" on the end, although that seems appropriate when you consider what absolute crap most telephony software is. :)
My point was that his earlier tirades against relatively unimportant topics (like "GNU/Linux vs. Linux") lessen the power of his words when he talks about something more important.
I'm not making any statements about whether his work on GNU is valuable or not; I'm saying that the way he handles debate about it causes people to pay less heed to him when he brings up a more important issue. Hence, "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."
It was hardly an "irrelevant point"; you made a definite, positive assertion regarding whether a specific behavior constitutes copyright infringement, and I corrected you (albeit in a clumsy, ham-handed fashion). Would it have been better to leave the inaccuracy intact?
Furthermore, "does not preclude plagiarism laws" implies that there are actual plagiarism laws, which there are not (e.g. the California Code [ca.gov] does not include the words "plagiarism" or "plagiarize"). Plagiarism, as we've established, is a common-law doctrine and is not codified.
I really wish RMS would think more about long-term strategy. He spends time ranting about the name you use to refer to your OS, which hurts his credibility when he argues against things that actually are worth arguing against. There's a reason that "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is a common folktale.
(Yes, I was once a teenager, too.)
The legal system in other countries may be different, but then, I'm not talking about other countries. I'm talking about the U.S.
What I described is emphatically not fair use. Claiming another's work as your own and distributing it does not fall under fair use, no matter what.You'd see this as a news story from computer-themed news sources; it'd be a "feature" in mainstream or general news sources.
Nah, FPS isn't important. This is *crash* testing, remember; they want to see what happens to a penguin when it hits a snow drift at 6,000 miles per hour.
If the direct cause of the savings is the ability to use cheap commodity hardware, then the savings are still indirectly due to Linux -- since Linux is what allows them to use cheap hardware, instead of the big server iron required by the corporate Unix. (Theoretically, anyway; I don't know much about corporate Unices.)
I always through we should take out Canada first ;)
Legally, it is copyright infringement. As far as I know there are no laws regarding "plagiarism" as a separate legal entity from copyright infringement. If someone creates a copyrighted work, and you take it, claim it as your own, and distributed it, you have infringed their copyright.
If I'm wrong, then please cite the section of the U.S. Code (or any body of law) regarding plagiarism. (FYI, nowhere in the U.S. Code do the words "plagiarism" or "plagiarize" appear, according to Cornell's search engine at this link.)
It's that there's some minor point which you want to clarify, but you don't want people to think it's insignificant or unimportant. I think, anyway. :)
"HIPAAA"? (It's HIPAA.) "Compiance"? (Try "compliance.") I don't want this to turn into another "stupid editor tricks" rant, but I'm really getting annoyed.
/. editors, we know, have wants and desires like any other human. Most of them seem to want open source to win. Do they not realize that taking the tiny amount of effort necessary to proofread and edit the story submissions and titles, would go a significant way toward reducing the perception of /. as a bunch of hyperactive nerds? (No, I don't see us that way, but a lot of non-geeks do.) If the editors really truly do want open source to "win" (whatever that would mean), they could do a lot just by ensuring that the front of the site looks competent, rather than incompetent.
/. regulars who don't come here for what the editors have to say, but rather the discussions by the users.)
Do these guys really care? Honestly, this is sad. The
I'm not claiming they have some kind of journalistic duty here; it's just normal freakin' common sense. If you write like you don't care, people will assume you don't care, and will ignore you. (Not, of course, the
Not even remotely. The DMCA only applies to devices or technologies that are used to break encryption that is protecting a copyrighted work. Reverse-engineering a trade secret (which is what PageRank is) has absolutely nothing to do with the DMCA, and in fact is a time-honored (and court-approved) method of business competition. If you manage to figure it out yourself, and don't engage in any illegal practices to get the trade secret (such as bribing one of the company's engineers), you're totally in the clear.
Yes, it's more complicated than that, but the DMCA has absolutely nothing to do with this.
One interesting aspect of the world is the fact that everything is owned. There is no land that isn't owned by some country (not counting Antarctica, which is "unownable" by international treaty, as I understand it). So it's not like you can up and go start your own country. You'd have to find some land, and wrest control away from someone; and the people who are already there (or at least own it legally, e.g. uninhabited tiny islands out in the middle of the ocean) will generally not be real keen on that.
What happens if the entire population (or at least an overwhelming majority) of one of the U.S. states decides to secede? Well, it happened once before, and we had a nasty civil war about it. So what would it take for a state to secede *legally*? Would a constitutional amendment do it? Or just an act of Congress?