GP wasn't defending copyright, he was stating that some facilities are so useful we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water by closing them down just to prevent those who chose to misuse them.
This is exactly the point. The pirate might not buy the game after playing it for free - but then he might never have played it at all if he couldn't get it free. There's now an increased chance that he'll buy the sequel, or buy some of the massive range of merchandise, or just enthuse about the game to his friends and family, or just tell people in general that Rovio are a pretty cool company. That's all about winning "mindshare" - companies will happily spend millions advertising their products to people who have never given them a penny, but then they'll balk over a copied $0.99 download - it's just incredibly short sighted.
So the answer to making yourself attractive to large business investment only to have the business later move away is to just not make yourself attractive to large business at all? Sure it's a risk, but Facebook aren't the only company in the world that could make use of such a data centre, and if they're already in your back yard that gives you a massive advantage in trying to keep them there versus some other county/country trying to lure them away.
How is being able to update everyone you know about the banal activities of your average day any less economical than having to go visit them individually to do the same thing (when you factor in transport, etc)? It's only a waste of energy if you assume people not using Facebook sit alone at home in quiet contemplation.
What do you think all those people would do if they weren't using Facebook? It's not like we'd turn off Facebook and everyone then goes out and plants trees as an alternative. As a means for keeping in touch with friends and family I'd say a site like Facebook has got to be more energy efficient than, say, driving or flying out to visit people on a regular basis.
Xs4all didn't really have a choice, now did they? Disobeying a court order is not a smart move, and if you keep disobeying, you lose.
I wonder if ISPs realise, collectively, how much power they do have. What if they all banded together and agreed they would not obey these ridiculous court orders? Would the government order the entire internet of its country closed down? Highly unlikely. Maybe it's time ISPs took a stand and told these jokers where to go. Imagine, if the internet for an entire country went on strike for a day, how much that would cost the nation in lost business, etc - maybe that's how they need to drive home the message.
I don't know where you've been buying games the last 20+ years, but the way they increased cost during that time is by increasing the cost. A music album back then would have cost me about £7 - £10. Guess what, it costs the same today. A video of a Hollywood blockbuster would cost me around £10, the same as the DVD today. Meanwhile a triple A game title back then would have cost me about £10, today it's closer to £40. On top of that, the market is now huge compared to what it was back then, so not only is that 400% inflation, it's 400% inflation multiplied by a hell of a lot more expected unit sales. This is nothing to do with the poor game studio struggling to make a small profit in the face of rising costs - this is a greedy studio wanting two bites of the cherry. It's exactly the same greed the RIAA exhibit when they try to fight format shifting because they want to sell you the CD copy AND the digital copy as two separate transactions in order to get paid twice for the same content.
I'd be fine with a system whereby the person selling this to the customer in the gameshop has to verbally explain and the website selling this online has to prominently explain that this game has a significantly reduced resale value.
The alternative that gets around this is that you actively seek out and support the games studios that aren't using these tactics. Then, overall, the size of the market is consistent from year to year, but the bottom feeders in the market get a sharp wake-up call about how they need to do business. The difficulty is finding games that don't rely on these tactics. I'd love to see a webservice that provides just this kind of information to help inform customers when buying games (with filters - "show me: only games that don't have one-time use, point of sale DLC, DRM, etc").
Not necessarily. It's nice to get official support and to be able to install patches and updates that might not work with a pirate edition (it's also nice to know that there's less chance of malicious code being bundled with the game - although DRM rules out that argument). There are plenty of ways game studios can compete with free - devaluing their products (because who will want to pay full price for these games when it becomes clear you can't sell them on) is a stupid, short sighted move and we can only hope it comes back to bite them. Interestingly, even though pretty much all content is already out there for free, the entertainment industries still make billions annually. This is a clear indication that people do want to buy their products, they should focus more on finding the sweet spot that represents value for money and less time coming up with schemes to penny pinch their paying customers.
Because the consumer is always fully educated about the limitations of the game when they go into their local game shop and grab it off the shelf... Since when did we start saying customers need to make themselves aware of the intricacies of various licensing models just to go buy a game, and if they don't then they deserve whatever they get? Especially when there's nothing (aside from maybe some smallprint buried on the back of the box) to indicate that this is anything other than a standard game with all inherent first sale rights included. It's fine for game studios to deliberately mislead customers, but customers can't complain, they either have to become amateur lawyers or just suck it up, right?
When my local Game store has a section for "PC games" and a section for "PC non-transferable licenses to temporarily play games at the rightsholders' sufferance" your argument will be more valid. In the meantime the vast majority of customers aren't going to be sufficiently aware of the issues until it's too late.
That's all well and good - the problem comes when they box it to look like a regular buy-to-own physical product and sell it alongside such products without making it abundantly clear to the customer that what they're buying is a very different beast. I can't create a smartphone and call it an iPhone and sell it alongside real iPhones and use the argument "it's my phone, if you don't like it don't buy it". There are very strict rules in place to avoid customer confusion, yet people (aside from a few well informed people who follow these topics online) are clearly going to just buy this as they would buy any other game without realising the restriction on their right to resale. I'm all for game studios playing around with the payment format to find the one that works but they need to be more than transparent, they need to make a concerted effort to inform customers what they're getting that's different - that way they don't skew the market by hiding in a herd of real physical products (since, if sufficient number of informed customers decided they didn't want to lease when they could buy that would affect the price, and that's what they're hoping to avoid - they want to keep the high price but remove the option for resale, when they always claimed resale was one of the reasons for the high price).
Never played Pac-Land but there were a ton of cheap shot deaths in Wonderboy. The game consisted mostly of replaying levels and getting a little further each time and memorising which cheap shot killed you last time and what you need to do to avoid it this time. That's not to say I didn't love it back in the day (and could make it all the way through on one shiny 10 pence piece), but it deliberately was difficult to extract as many replays as possible from what was ultimately quite a short experience.
The biggest factor for me (and I'd guess a lot of other gamers) is having the spare time for games. The average gamer age is now mid thirties. When we were all kids it was easy to spend countless hours replaying the same games to perfect our speed runs etc. These days, even replaying the last ten minutes due to a stupid mistake seems like a massive chore when you can only manage to grab a spare hour here and there when work/real life isn't getting in the way. That, to me, is the obvious root of why people don't want games that need weeks of practice to beat; why they will make more frequent use of save games; why they get frustrated with games that don't help you get back into the experience after a prolonged period away (through lack of objectives or no timeline to remind you what you were doing); why they will move onto another game if they're not enjoying the experience or don't feel they're making progress in the game.
That's like me saying the small hill I go up on the way home from work is a harder climb than Everest, then piling it a mile high with junk to prove it and when someone calls me on it responding with "I have to build it up this way, otherwise it's an extremely easy climb". You can't say "Pac-Man is X" then change the nature of Pac-Man to make it X as your proof, because at that point it is definitely X but it's no longer Pac-Man.
This is/. so nobody reads TFA but the quote GP highlights should be in the summary - it's almost the most important part of the story, telling people about censorship of tweets is a whole different ball game than just "blocking" tweets. The fact that it's been left out of the summary is probably a calculated move to provoke just the kind of reaction you're seeing from a community of people who are largely against censorship. If some guy pokes a big stick in a beehive causing the bees to come out and ruin your picnic, do you get mad with the bees, who are merely reacting to a perceived threat, or the guy with the stick?
Maybe not spoilers but I'm surprised they haven't used it against bad reviews. After all, it's basically exactly the same argument as piracy. We have no way of proving people who downloaded the movie otherwise would have paid to see it, just as we have no way of proving people who read a bad review of a movie otherwise would have paid to see it. If the former is a valid reason to instigate laws to prevent piracy how far a step is it for the latter to be used to justify laws against bad reviews?
It's the same with the 2nd Amendment really -- you can regulate weapons all you want but people can still obtain and use them. Doubt this? Ask the guy who just got shanked in prison if the person who stabbed him didn't keep and bear arms.
That's the worst argument I've ever heard. We also regulate murder, go ask the family of someone who just got murdered how effective the law against murder is. That doesn't mean we shouldn't still try to lay down a framework of law to prevent it happening.
A better solution (and I don't know, maybe this is what they're going to do) would be to not silently kill the tweets but to indicate that there is a censored tweet. They'd be complying with the letter of the law but still letting people know this was going on (and people would find other ways to track down and publicise the censored content).
Yup, if the limits of copyright are "common scene" (a london bus in front of Big Ben is such a cliche) + "common post processing technique" (selective colouring of the object in this case) then we're in big trouble. Cameras (and even phones) are starting to come with this kind of post-processing built into the device. Pretty soon you won't be able to take holiday snaps without infringing copyright. This needs to be nipped in the bud right now.
I agree that he did nothing to help his case, he seems to have acted in quite an underhand manner, but you can't wield the law in this way, as a mallet to punish him for a previous transgression. If that unfluenced the judge's decision then the judge was wrong.
Indeed - it's ironic that if he'd used a London black cab instead of a London red bus he'd probably have been okay, even though the thing the judge seems to be claiming he copied would be fundamentally the same. Combination of a bad defence and a clueless judge, I'd hope this would be appealed and reversed because I don't want to have to pay a professional photographer next time I want to bring home some holiday snaps with me and put them online.
Slashdot Mirror
GP wasn't defending copyright, he was stating that some facilities are so useful we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water by closing them down just to prevent those who chose to misuse them.
If we're going to address misuse of language to disguise your motives, let's first discuss "piracy"...
This is exactly the point. The pirate might not buy the game after playing it for free - but then he might never have played it at all if he couldn't get it free. There's now an increased chance that he'll buy the sequel, or buy some of the massive range of merchandise, or just enthuse about the game to his friends and family, or just tell people in general that Rovio are a pretty cool company. That's all about winning "mindshare" - companies will happily spend millions advertising their products to people who have never given them a penny, but then they'll balk over a copied $0.99 download - it's just incredibly short sighted.
So the answer to making yourself attractive to large business investment only to have the business later move away is to just not make yourself attractive to large business at all? Sure it's a risk, but Facebook aren't the only company in the world that could make use of such a data centre, and if they're already in your back yard that gives you a massive advantage in trying to keep them there versus some other county/country trying to lure them away.
How is being able to update everyone you know about the banal activities of your average day any less economical than having to go visit them individually to do the same thing (when you factor in transport, etc)? It's only a waste of energy if you assume people not using Facebook sit alone at home in quiet contemplation.
What do you think all those people would do if they weren't using Facebook? It's not like we'd turn off Facebook and everyone then goes out and plants trees as an alternative. As a means for keeping in touch with friends and family I'd say a site like Facebook has got to be more energy efficient than, say, driving or flying out to visit people on a regular basis.
Xs4all didn't really have a choice, now did they? Disobeying a court order is not a smart move, and if you keep disobeying, you lose.
I wonder if ISPs realise, collectively, how much power they do have. What if they all banded together and agreed they would not obey these ridiculous court orders? Would the government order the entire internet of its country closed down? Highly unlikely. Maybe it's time ISPs took a stand and told these jokers where to go. Imagine, if the internet for an entire country went on strike for a day, how much that would cost the nation in lost business, etc - maybe that's how they need to drive home the message.
I don't know where you've been buying games the last 20+ years, but the way they increased cost during that time is by increasing the cost. A music album back then would have cost me about £7 - £10. Guess what, it costs the same today. A video of a Hollywood blockbuster would cost me around £10, the same as the DVD today. Meanwhile a triple A game title back then would have cost me about £10, today it's closer to £40. On top of that, the market is now huge compared to what it was back then, so not only is that 400% inflation, it's 400% inflation multiplied by a hell of a lot more expected unit sales. This is nothing to do with the poor game studio struggling to make a small profit in the face of rising costs - this is a greedy studio wanting two bites of the cherry. It's exactly the same greed the RIAA exhibit when they try to fight format shifting because they want to sell you the CD copy AND the digital copy as two separate transactions in order to get paid twice for the same content.
I'd be fine with a system whereby the person selling this to the customer in the gameshop has to verbally explain and the website selling this online has to prominently explain that this game has a significantly reduced resale value.
The alternative that gets around this is that you actively seek out and support the games studios that aren't using these tactics. Then, overall, the size of the market is consistent from year to year, but the bottom feeders in the market get a sharp wake-up call about how they need to do business. The difficulty is finding games that don't rely on these tactics. I'd love to see a webservice that provides just this kind of information to help inform customers when buying games (with filters - "show me: only games that don't have one-time use, point of sale DLC, DRM, etc").
Not necessarily. It's nice to get official support and to be able to install patches and updates that might not work with a pirate edition (it's also nice to know that there's less chance of malicious code being bundled with the game - although DRM rules out that argument). There are plenty of ways game studios can compete with free - devaluing their products (because who will want to pay full price for these games when it becomes clear you can't sell them on) is a stupid, short sighted move and we can only hope it comes back to bite them. Interestingly, even though pretty much all content is already out there for free, the entertainment industries still make billions annually. This is a clear indication that people do want to buy their products, they should focus more on finding the sweet spot that represents value for money and less time coming up with schemes to penny pinch their paying customers.
Because the consumer is always fully educated about the limitations of the game when they go into their local game shop and grab it off the shelf... Since when did we start saying customers need to make themselves aware of the intricacies of various licensing models just to go buy a game, and if they don't then they deserve whatever they get? Especially when there's nothing (aside from maybe some smallprint buried on the back of the box) to indicate that this is anything other than a standard game with all inherent first sale rights included. It's fine for game studios to deliberately mislead customers, but customers can't complain, they either have to become amateur lawyers or just suck it up, right?
When my local Game store has a section for "PC games" and a section for "PC non-transferable licenses to temporarily play games at the rightsholders' sufferance" your argument will be more valid. In the meantime the vast majority of customers aren't going to be sufficiently aware of the issues until it's too late.
That's all well and good - the problem comes when they box it to look like a regular buy-to-own physical product and sell it alongside such products without making it abundantly clear to the customer that what they're buying is a very different beast. I can't create a smartphone and call it an iPhone and sell it alongside real iPhones and use the argument "it's my phone, if you don't like it don't buy it". There are very strict rules in place to avoid customer confusion, yet people (aside from a few well informed people who follow these topics online) are clearly going to just buy this as they would buy any other game without realising the restriction on their right to resale. I'm all for game studios playing around with the payment format to find the one that works but they need to be more than transparent, they need to make a concerted effort to inform customers what they're getting that's different - that way they don't skew the market by hiding in a herd of real physical products (since, if sufficient number of informed customers decided they didn't want to lease when they could buy that would affect the price, and that's what they're hoping to avoid - they want to keep the high price but remove the option for resale, when they always claimed resale was one of the reasons for the high price).
Never played Pac-Land but there were a ton of cheap shot deaths in Wonderboy. The game consisted mostly of replaying levels and getting a little further each time and memorising which cheap shot killed you last time and what you need to do to avoid it this time. That's not to say I didn't love it back in the day (and could make it all the way through on one shiny 10 pence piece), but it deliberately was difficult to extract as many replays as possible from what was ultimately quite a short experience.
The biggest factor for me (and I'd guess a lot of other gamers) is having the spare time for games. The average gamer age is now mid thirties. When we were all kids it was easy to spend countless hours replaying the same games to perfect our speed runs etc. These days, even replaying the last ten minutes due to a stupid mistake seems like a massive chore when you can only manage to grab a spare hour here and there when work/real life isn't getting in the way. That, to me, is the obvious root of why people don't want games that need weeks of practice to beat; why they will make more frequent use of save games; why they get frustrated with games that don't help you get back into the experience after a prolonged period away (through lack of objectives or no timeline to remind you what you were doing); why they will move onto another game if they're not enjoying the experience or don't feel they're making progress in the game.
That's like me saying the small hill I go up on the way home from work is a harder climb than Everest, then piling it a mile high with junk to prove it and when someone calls me on it responding with "I have to build it up this way, otherwise it's an extremely easy climb". You can't say "Pac-Man is X" then change the nature of Pac-Man to make it X as your proof, because at that point it is definitely X but it's no longer Pac-Man.
Fast is nothing. Now fast with invisible tetrominoes... that is impressive (skip to 5:10, but really the whole thing blows my mind).
This is /. so nobody reads TFA but the quote GP highlights should be in the summary - it's almost the most important part of the story, telling people about censorship of tweets is a whole different ball game than just "blocking" tweets. The fact that it's been left out of the summary is probably a calculated move to provoke just the kind of reaction you're seeing from a community of people who are largely against censorship. If some guy pokes a big stick in a beehive causing the bees to come out and ruin your picnic, do you get mad with the bees, who are merely reacting to a perceived threat, or the guy with the stick?
Maybe not spoilers but I'm surprised they haven't used it against bad reviews. After all, it's basically exactly the same argument as piracy. We have no way of proving people who downloaded the movie otherwise would have paid to see it, just as we have no way of proving people who read a bad review of a movie otherwise would have paid to see it. If the former is a valid reason to instigate laws to prevent piracy how far a step is it for the latter to be used to justify laws against bad reviews?
It's the same with the 2nd Amendment really -- you can regulate weapons all you want but people can still obtain and use them. Doubt this? Ask the guy who just got shanked in prison if the person who stabbed him didn't keep and bear arms.
That's the worst argument I've ever heard. We also regulate murder, go ask the family of someone who just got murdered how effective the law against murder is. That doesn't mean we shouldn't still try to lay down a framework of law to prevent it happening.
A better solution (and I don't know, maybe this is what they're going to do) would be to not silently kill the tweets but to indicate that there is a censored tweet. They'd be complying with the letter of the law but still letting people know this was going on (and people would find other ways to track down and publicise the censored content).
Yup, if the limits of copyright are "common scene" (a london bus in front of Big Ben is such a cliche) + "common post processing technique" (selective colouring of the object in this case) then we're in big trouble. Cameras (and even phones) are starting to come with this kind of post-processing built into the device. Pretty soon you won't be able to take holiday snaps without infringing copyright. This needs to be nipped in the bud right now.
I agree that he did nothing to help his case, he seems to have acted in quite an underhand manner, but you can't wield the law in this way, as a mallet to punish him for a previous transgression. If that unfluenced the judge's decision then the judge was wrong.
Indeed - it's ironic that if he'd used a London black cab instead of a London red bus he'd probably have been okay, even though the thing the judge seems to be claiming he copied would be fundamentally the same. Combination of a bad defence and a clueless judge, I'd hope this would be appealed and reversed because I don't want to have to pay a professional photographer next time I want to bring home some holiday snaps with me and put them online.