Possibly they don't want people to experience the "end game", as then they might realise how boring and pointless the whole thing is and stop paying the monthly subscription fee.
So - Blizzard doesn't get their day in court because you think their game is "boring and pointless."
But, contrary to your assertion, they want everyone to experience the end-game. Two patches ago, they greatly reduced the amount of experience points you need to get to level at every level between 20 and 60. (Getting to 20 only takes a week or so of casual play anyway.) In addition, the same quests between levels 30 and 60 reward more XP.
Up to level 60, it takes less XP to level and you get it faster. Why? Because at around 55, you can experience the new content in the "Burning Crusade" expansion. They've also made instanced dungeons less tedious to run - needing only 25 people instead of 40 - so that more people can experience these areas. They also made PvP loot more powerful, so people who don't want to be raiding for hours every night can pick up and play, and still get comparable loot.
Their goal is to have even casual players at level 70, so that they can move their next expansion that'll let you go from 70 to 80. They make more money and sell more expansions if more people can reach the "end game" - so they've been making it easier to get there.
RTFA. There's a nice link at the top of the page for you.
They're suing for copyright infringement, and they are completely entitled to take them to court. Whether their arguments fly or not is completely different, but their suit is far from frivolous. So, as far as I'm concerned, they should have their day in court.
I mostly agree with you - especially the Architect-esque use of needless latin. Ergo, I respond, ex post.
Technically, the consumers are the ones violating their Terms of Service - but the deepest pockets principle applies. Do you go after the little guy, RIAA style, or the millionaire who's making it all possible? It may be legally more difficult, but it's far better to attack the source of the problem.
"Playing as dirty as the botters?" Somebody failed a hyperbole check.
This guy made millions; it's not like they're picking on Joe Shmo. Would you rather they sue individual subscribers? He's breaking the law, and going after him in civil court is the proper way to rectify the situation.
Don't be silly. If I write an application that requires Windows, I'm not making a derivative work, and Microsoft can't sue me for requiring windows.
That's a bad analogy; Microsoft releases and documents APIs just for that purpose - just look at MSDN sometime.
The equivalent to what you said would be Blizzard suing someone over writing a LUA script, which they aren't - somebody hijacked their entire program.
The "suing Apple and Microsoft because their operating systems copy the game to RAM" is a non sequitur. You bought the license to do that - run a copy in RAM. You did not buy a license to run two copies so you can cheat the game - on top of violate the EULA.
Granted, it would be easier to go after the individual players - but better to attack the problem at its source. I have zero sympathy for people who spend money to cheat at a game, nor do I have sympathy for the $millionaire who makes it all possible.
From Wikipedia, the infallable font of all wisdom: In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major, basic copyrighted aspects of an original, previously created first work.
WoW Glider works by copying the entire game into memory.
Also, it is after all, a mod for World of Warcraft. That means it's using an incredible amount of game code to interface with the game. May not be as obvious as a screen reproduction or a translation - BUT, WoW Glider definitely wouldn't work without WoW. Seems pretty derivative to me.
Abusing the legal system? Hardly. Blizzard has (or, more likely, could) suffer actual monetary losses from a bot destroying the playability of their game. The bot makes a duplicate copy of the game to defeat anti-bot checks, and is arguably a derivative work. I hope this guy gets run into the ground, and I hope Blizzard finds a better software check to block this.
If you're creating some legitimate program that requires WoW, you think you should have to request Blizzard's permission just to say on the packaging that you require World of Warcraft? Definitely not.
IANAL, but I belive that's called a "derivative work." That infringes copyright.
Fine, can I have all the taxes that I pay for your roads back? Or at the very least have all roads built and maintained exclusively by fuel taxes?
Don't try to pretend that personal automobile transportation isn't subsidized.
Sure you can. I expect fuel taxes and users fees to pay for roads.
Actually, I expect pork-laden transportation bills to. I want fuel taxes to pay for maintenance - it's fairer to tax the people that use the roads, and in theory, a fuel tax does this.
But, while I'm dreaming, I want 90% of the federal government shut down. And a pony. Those get good gas mileage.
According to the Wikipedia entry on Hydrogen Sulfide, scientists did a study on mice in 2005 that came to the same conclusions as the summary. I hope this article isn't that old.
But, even more interestingly, good ol' Wikipedia links to a study done in 2008 on larger mammals (pigs). They could not reproduce the "suspended animation" effect - in fact, it seemed to do the opposite.
So - I guess no H2S administered in ambulances any time soon.
Vlasic was, for lack of a better word, stupid in their dealings with Wal-Mart.
IIRC from an article I read a few years ago, they agreed to sell industrial-sized jars of pickles to Wal-Mart. For (figurative) peanuts, a few bucks a piece. They were making a loss on every picke sold.
Why'd they still go through with it even though they were taking a loss? 'Cuz they were selling a lot of them!
A multilingual Japanese once told me that Spanish is the easiest foreign language for Japanese speakers to learn. Its grammer is regular and it uses about the same set of sounds that Japanese does.
Makes sense - not that I speak or know a lick of Japanese, but I watch too many subtitled cartoons. And in Bleach, the characters all use Spanish for "technical" terminology - like "Hueco Mundo" for hollow world.
I don't like this trend. I speak Spanish, and their pronunciation is better than mine. It's funnier to hear Japanese characters pronounce English words. (And funnier to hear Japanese bastardized in English dubs!).
Maybe I should elaborate a bit more. I have a special grudge against these machines because these are always the machines I end up having to "support" for family and friends. They're always the ones that are painfully slow to work on and come pre-loaded with bloatware.
Computers aren't commodities. There is a huge difference between a $999 computer and a $399 computer, but the ones expecting free tech support known as "family" will invariably buy the $399 one, and then complain to me about it being "slow."
So, I have an irrational hatred of these machines. Nothing wrong with cheap computers - defective people still want me to make them fast, tho, and it's a pain explaining why their free tech support plan with me has "expired."
Y'know, it's not that hard to build your own computer. If you're not shooting for a bottom-of-the-barrel $399-plus-cheese-grater model (in which case, you should be shot) you can generally save money that way, too.
In this month's MaximumPC, for example, they have step-by-step instructions with pictures for building your own $1500 gaming rig. PDF Version You can spend considerably less if you don't plan on doing any gaming - cheaper video card, slower processor, and the like. And, it comes with any OS you want! ^.^
My dad's not that cool - he rode a bicycle, human-powered, not a motorcycle ^.^
But, as far as I know, he's a safe rider. Though other than a guy who managed to break 3 ribs, puncture a lung, and bruise a kidney when a little girl on her own bicycle ran into him, most bicycle incidents that don't involve cars seem to be a lot less severe.
For most kinds of product, a competing vendor could sell cheaper product that is adequately substitutable - due to copyright monopoly law, doing that is classed as "piracy" for some types of information pattern expressed in a physical substrate.
Whoah, whoah, whoah. You can sell a "competing product" all you want - go make your own band, record your own songs, and burn your own CDs, and put them on your own store shelves.
What? You were talking about buying one disc, and burning a thousand "competing" copies to re-sell? Then and only then is "copyright monopoly law" involved. The only "monopoly" involved is the right for the artist, or a label if the artist chooses to deal with them, to hold on to their own work.
Besides, I don't think "substrate" means what you think it means. Lern2chemistry.
I mess around on *nix because it's fun, not because ed is my way of sticking it to Microsoft.
But... they failures of human beings that can't figure out how to plug in the damn box? I get calls from them, too. If I don't want to help them, I tell them so - it's unreasonable to expect me to spend literally hours over the phone, or even worse, have to burn gas and be there in person to fix something they borked. I don't care if you're friends/family/friends of family - especially if I just fixed it for you a while ago.
My usual deal is "feed me." If some family member thinks I owe them tech support because they're too lazy to Google something, I'm expecting a meal. If I spend an afternoon removing a virus from your machine because you couldn't be bothered to let Windows or your virus scanner (that you uninstalled after I put it on!) automatically update itself... Well, I'm thinking Arby's. And it had better be hot and delicious.
So, I guess I never was in the "unpaid" computer support business. And it encourages people to learn a few things for themselves, too. People tend to treat their computers like their cars - they run them until they break, even if the "no oil" light is beeping away. (Heck, even I know how to fill and change the oil in my car.
I guess the point of my rant is: there's no need to be "unpaid." If they call you in the middle of the night, well, exact your vengeance. Blacklist their number if you can, or as I did, have my modem-equipped computer I used as an answering machine automatically call their house at that time the next night.
I know there are people that absolutely adore them for some reason, that have collected hundreds over the years, that have bookshelves devoted to their "libary." In a blatant disregard for the definition of words, they consider it an "investment."
But, it's not like there are a dozen or so online stores where you can buy music from at $1 a track. Considering all I ever want off of a CD is the one good song anyway, the market has adjusted to provide me a net $14 savings of the physical disc.
It makes sense - not that a single CD costs all that much to produce, but there are shipping costs to move it to the store. Then the store suffers an opportunity cost due to limited shelf space - if they stock label x's CD, they can't stock label y's.
There isn't "infinite supply", either. For the armchair economists out there, yes, voltage differentials are "non-rival." But, bandwidth costs money - especially if you want to start your own iTunes competitor. Storage costs money.
And the labels and artists still want their cut. Supply is only "infinite" if, unlike the physical and online stores, you completely cut out the label and the artist and torrent everything.
You say that freely torrenting everything will benefit the artists (who are primarily performers), especially the lesser-known ones. Where were the well-known artists before the label adopted them? That's right, they were "lesser-known" - those evil Armani-suit-wearing villains do provide a service through all the legal manhandling.
If artists want their music to be freely available to everyone with a AOL free trial CD, they can - there's nothing stopping them. Radiohead and Dragonforce have experimented with this. But, for whatever reason, most artists have gone the record label route.
Perhaps there's value in having someone put your music on every store, radio, and television across American and the world that we're missing here, hm?
Very true. There seems to be a "lot" of activism around here, with most new roads having bike lanes. But, there was also an incident where a guy ran down a cyclist in his car just for fun...
Slashdot Mirror
Possibly they don't want people to experience the "end game", as then they might realise how boring and pointless the whole thing is and stop paying the monthly subscription fee.
So - Blizzard doesn't get their day in court because you think their game is "boring and pointless."
But, contrary to your assertion, they want everyone to experience the end-game. Two patches ago, they greatly reduced the amount of experience points you need to get to level at every level between 20 and 60. (Getting to 20 only takes a week or so of casual play anyway.) In addition, the same quests between levels 30 and 60 reward more XP.
Up to level 60, it takes less XP to level and you get it faster. Why? Because at around 55, you can experience the new content in the "Burning Crusade" expansion. They've also made instanced dungeons less tedious to run - needing only 25 people instead of 40 - so that more people can experience these areas. They also made PvP loot more powerful, so people who don't want to be raiding for hours every night can pick up and play, and still get comparable loot.
Their goal is to have even casual players at level 70, so that they can move their next expansion that'll let you go from 70 to 80. They make more money and sell more expansions if more people can reach the "end game" - so they've been making it easier to get there.
What law would that be.
RTFA. There's a nice link at the top of the page for you.
They're suing for copyright infringement, and they are completely entitled to take them to court. Whether their arguments fly or not is completely different, but their suit is far from frivolous. So, as far as I'm concerned, they should have their day in court.
I mostly agree with you - especially the Architect-esque use of needless latin. Ergo, I respond, ex post.
Technically, the consumers are the ones violating their Terms of Service - but the deepest pockets principle applies. Do you go after the little guy, RIAA style, or the millionaire who's making it all possible? It may be legally more difficult, but it's far better to attack the source of the problem.
"Playing as dirty as the botters?" Somebody failed a hyperbole check.
This guy made millions; it's not like they're picking on Joe Shmo. Would you rather they sue individual subscribers? He's breaking the law, and going after him in civil court is the proper way to rectify the situation.
Don't be silly. If I write an application that requires Windows, I'm not making a derivative work, and Microsoft can't sue me for requiring windows.
That's a bad analogy; Microsoft releases and documents APIs just for that purpose - just look at MSDN sometime.
The equivalent to what you said would be Blizzard suing someone over writing a LUA script, which they aren't - somebody hijacked their entire program.
The "suing Apple and Microsoft because their operating systems copy the game to RAM" is a non sequitur. You bought the license to do that - run a copy in RAM. You did not buy a license to run two copies so you can cheat the game - on top of violate the EULA.
Granted, it would be easier to go after the individual players - but better to attack the problem at its source. I have zero sympathy for people who spend money to cheat at a game, nor do I have sympathy for the $millionaire who makes it all possible.
From Wikipedia, the infallable font of all wisdom: In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major, basic copyrighted aspects of an original, previously created first work.
WoW Glider works by copying the entire game into memory.
Also, it is after all, a mod for World of Warcraft. That means it's using an incredible amount of game code to interface with the game. May not be as obvious as a screen reproduction or a translation - BUT, WoW Glider definitely wouldn't work without WoW. Seems pretty derivative to me.
It's all how you look at it.
When the dollar is strong, zomg we have a trade deficit!
When the dollar is weak, zomg we're closing the trade deficit!
Abusing the legal system? Hardly. Blizzard has (or, more likely, could) suffer actual monetary losses from a bot destroying the playability of their game. The bot makes a duplicate copy of the game to defeat anti-bot checks, and is arguably a derivative work. I hope this guy gets run into the ground, and I hope Blizzard finds a better software check to block this.
If you're creating some legitimate program that requires WoW, you think you should have to request Blizzard's permission just to say on the packaging that you require World of Warcraft? Definitely not.
IANAL, but I belive that's called a "derivative work." That infringes copyright.
Fine, can I have all the taxes that I pay for your roads back? Or at the very least have all roads built and maintained exclusively by fuel taxes? Don't try to pretend that personal automobile transportation isn't subsidized.
Sure you can. I expect fuel taxes and users fees to pay for roads.
Actually, I expect pork-laden transportation bills to. I want fuel taxes to pay for maintenance - it's fairer to tax the people that use the roads, and in theory, a fuel tax does this.
But, while I'm dreaming, I want 90% of the federal government shut down. And a pony. Those get good gas mileage.
According to the Wikipedia entry on Hydrogen Sulfide, scientists did a study on mice in 2005 that came to the same conclusions as the summary. I hope this article isn't that old.
But, even more interestingly, good ol' Wikipedia links to a study done in 2008 on larger mammals (pigs). They could not reproduce the "suspended animation" effect - in fact, it seemed to do the opposite.
So - I guess no H2S administered in ambulances any time soon.
Possibly - but the article I read was printed on a dead tree.
I'm still waiting for the results of my http request for the other article to show up in Pine... Damn gophers.
we could invest in public transportation and abrogate people's stupid, life-risking civil liberties by takin' way their cars.
Ahh... the costs of personal freedom.
But... there's nothing stopping you from living out your dream of using only public transportation.
But wait - you want everyone else to stop what you're doing and guild a Futurama tube system for you? Wow. You better get crackin'.
Or better yet, buy a car.
Vlasic was, for lack of a better word, stupid in their dealings with Wal-Mart.
IIRC from an article I read a few years ago, they agreed to sell industrial-sized jars of pickles to Wal-Mart. For (figurative) peanuts, a few bucks a piece. They were making a loss on every picke sold.
Why'd they still go through with it even though they were taking a loss? 'Cuz they were selling a lot of them!
The English dubbing on the first intro song to Rurouni Kenshin was pretty funny, but because it was actually good.
The Trigun voices are painful - the villains sound badass in Japanese, flip the audio to English, and... it's just kinda sad.
The English dubs of Bleach are pretty bad, too.
There were some that were laugh-out-loud funny, but they escape me atm.
A multilingual Japanese once told me that Spanish is the easiest foreign language for Japanese speakers to learn. Its grammer is regular and it uses about the same set of sounds that Japanese does.
Makes sense - not that I speak or know a lick of Japanese, but I watch too many subtitled cartoons. And in Bleach, the characters all use Spanish for "technical" terminology - like "Hueco Mundo" for hollow world.
I don't like this trend. I speak Spanish, and their pronunciation is better than mine. It's funnier to hear Japanese characters pronounce English words. (And funnier to hear Japanese bastardized in English dubs!).
Maybe I should elaborate a bit more. I have a special grudge against these machines because these are always the machines I end up having to "support" for family and friends. They're always the ones that are painfully slow to work on and come pre-loaded with bloatware.
Computers aren't commodities. There is a huge difference between a $999 computer and a $399 computer, but the ones expecting free tech support known as "family" will invariably buy the $399 one, and then complain to me about it being "slow."
So, I have an irrational hatred of these machines. Nothing wrong with cheap computers - defective people still want me to make them fast, tho, and it's a pain explaining why their free tech support plan with me has "expired."
I built my own portable, too. I have a special backpack, a diesel generator...
Oh, laptop.
Y'know, it's not that hard to build your own computer. If you're not shooting for a bottom-of-the-barrel $399-plus-cheese-grater model (in which case, you should be shot) you can generally save money that way, too.
In this month's MaximumPC, for example, they have step-by-step instructions with pictures for building your own $1500 gaming rig. PDF Version You can spend considerably less if you don't plan on doing any gaming - cheaper video card, slower processor, and the like. And, it comes with any OS you want! ^.^
I'd say more correctly; "No one should be out to EXPLOIT art for a profit"
Again, why not? Far as I know, "exploting art for a profit" is just a negative, misleading, sophist way of saying "making art for a profit."
We wouldn't have many artists if art wasn't profitable.
My dad's not that cool - he rode a bicycle, human-powered, not a motorcycle ^.^
But, as far as I know, he's a safe rider. Though other than a guy who managed to break 3 ribs, puncture a lung, and bruise a kidney when a little girl on her own bicycle ran into him, most bicycle incidents that don't involve cars seem to be a lot less severe.
Good luck with the motorcycle thing!
For most kinds of product, a competing vendor could sell cheaper product that is adequately substitutable - due to copyright monopoly law, doing that is classed as "piracy" for some types of information pattern expressed in a physical substrate.
Whoah, whoah, whoah. You can sell a "competing product" all you want - go make your own band, record your own songs, and burn your own CDs, and put them on your own store shelves.
What? You were talking about buying one disc, and burning a thousand "competing" copies to re-sell? Then and only then is "copyright monopoly law" involved. The only "monopoly" involved is the right for the artist, or a label if the artist chooses to deal with them, to hold on to their own work.
Besides, I don't think "substrate" means what you think it means. Lern2chemistry.
I mess around on *nix because it's fun, not because ed is my way of sticking it to Microsoft.
But... they failures of human beings that can't figure out how to plug in the damn box? I get calls from them, too. If I don't want to help them, I tell them so - it's unreasonable to expect me to spend literally hours over the phone, or even worse, have to burn gas and be there in person to fix something they borked. I don't care if you're friends/family/friends of family - especially if I just fixed it for you a while ago.
My usual deal is "feed me." If some family member thinks I owe them tech support because they're too lazy to Google something, I'm expecting a meal. If I spend an afternoon removing a virus from your machine because you couldn't be bothered to let Windows or your virus scanner (that you uninstalled after I put it on!) automatically update itself... Well, I'm thinking Arby's. And it had better be hot and delicious.
So, I guess I never was in the "unpaid" computer support business. And it encourages people to learn a few things for themselves, too. People tend to treat their computers like their cars - they run them until they break, even if the "no oil" light is beeping away. (Heck, even I know how to fill and change the oil in my car.
I guess the point of my rant is: there's no need to be "unpaid." If they call you in the middle of the night, well, exact your vengeance. Blacklist their number if you can, or as I did, have my modem-equipped computer I used as an answering machine automatically call their house at that time the next night.
People still buy CDs?
I know there are people that absolutely adore them for some reason, that have collected hundreds over the years, that have bookshelves devoted to their "libary." In a blatant disregard for the definition of words, they consider it an "investment."
But, it's not like there are a dozen or so online stores where you can buy music from at $1 a track. Considering all I ever want off of a CD is the one good song anyway, the market has adjusted to provide me a net $14 savings of the physical disc.
It makes sense - not that a single CD costs all that much to produce, but there are shipping costs to move it to the store. Then the store suffers an opportunity cost due to limited shelf space - if they stock label x's CD, they can't stock label y's.
There isn't "infinite supply", either. For the armchair economists out there, yes, voltage differentials are "non-rival." But, bandwidth costs money - especially if you want to start your own iTunes competitor. Storage costs money.
And the labels and artists still want their cut. Supply is only "infinite" if, unlike the physical and online stores, you completely cut out the label and the artist and torrent everything.
You say that freely torrenting everything will benefit the artists (who are primarily performers), especially the lesser-known ones. Where were the well-known artists before the label adopted them? That's right, they were "lesser-known" - those evil Armani-suit-wearing villains do provide a service through all the legal manhandling.
If artists want their music to be freely available to everyone with a AOL free trial CD, they can - there's nothing stopping them. Radiohead and Dragonforce have experimented with this. But, for whatever reason, most artists have gone the record label route.
Perhaps there's value in having someone put your music on every store, radio, and television across American and the world that we're missing here, hm?
Very true. There seems to be a "lot" of activism around here, with most new roads having bike lanes. But, there was also an incident where a guy ran down a cyclist in his car just for fun...