There’s been a Dragon Age sequel in some form of development for a decade. It’s not that surprising, people are gonna churn. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t stuck around in a single job for 15 years ever.
I’m not her and I’m not there, but I’m not sure what “being pushed out by other employees” would even mean. That sounds like something that happens in a nature documentary about lions, not games studio.
Six plus always-on devices is rookie numbers. I’m in the twenties, in a house with a handful of people.
And yes, the router I’m currently using is faster than all my wired devices over wifi, save for the two that pair some form of 2.5/10Gb ports. Also yes, my 1Gbps WAN hits about 900-ish on the downstream, with the ISP guaranteeing at least 800 as a legal requirement. I don’t know if other regions allow ISPs to sell connections that run at 50% of the advertised speed, but… yeah, no, that’s illegal here.
Honestly, full home coverage is the biggest issue I have. If this was a new house I would have wired it as a solution, but as it is, I only got the whole home fully connected with reliable speeds by spending a bunch of money in wireless networking gear.
Agreed, although apparently plenty of governments don’t think the same thing.
For them? Sure, maybe, although the top end of the fine bracket, as per the article, is 5000 eddies, so… probably won’t stay cost-effective long.
But the point is the headline suggests personal use of paid pirated media is legally supported in Italy, which it’s… not.
I still think the current system needs fundamental reform and while this whole ordeal doesn’t say much about what is and isn’t allowed in the current system, it does show what a clusterfuck of enforcement and regulation this is at the moment.
Because nobody will read the full report, they were all fined with 150 euros, which is the legal minimum. They were acquitted of criminal charges and related civil liability.
They were all paying a reseller, too, not just streaming or downloading freely available content.
I don’t know that I claimed it’d take power away from the privileged. If I had to make an educated guess, the idea that “it’s a social construct so we can change it” tends to lead to proposing easy solutions to complicated problems that only work if we all agree they work.
They normally don’t work.
And if the people proposing them are powerful enough to get convinced that all they need to do is force everybody to agree with them regardless it often ends in tears.
Hell, catch me in a good day I’ll tell you changing natural realities is easier than changing social constructs. On par at best, and nature at least won’t argue about it.
No it couldn’t “easily” do that because legislation can’t predict every single time a product is going to be brought to market and make exceptions for every time a sales person comes up with a way to license or sell a thing.
Laws work best when they are general principles that can be applied to a wide swath of scenarios via interpretation. People just look at a thing they don’t like and want laws to… you know, stop that kinda thing. But that’s not how it really works, at least when it’s working well. Even the current copyright is guilty of this to some extent, having been designed to effectively ensure that only the original author can profit from selling printed copies of their books and then being beaten into a bloody pulp by the realization that the content of a creative work and its medium are different things.
But at least the core principle behind it was workable initially, the idea of tying copyright to something being available for sale is fundamentally a nonstarter. I mean, I sure hope if I write a story and don’t make it widely available until I sell it to an editor it doesn’t mean that anybody with a copy of it could just share it or sell it themselves just because I’m not making it available. That doesn’t seem like a great idea, fundamentally.
It is, very much, not “an easy one”. You’re describing a regulated market, which is what I said above. Housing is regulated aggressively almost everywhere, and the scheme you describe would require a centralized control over how much people are allowed to raise prices to match inflation for games.
And, as mentioned many times already, it doesn’t work with microtransactions or free to play games and it incentivizes setting a very high launch price to work around the limitation of using launch pricing as a benchmark for a product’s entire lifetime.
Also, no, I don’t think I’m misunderstanding what people are saying. It’s definitely not easy to tie “availability” to copyright protection. Which is why in the real world the way copyrights sometimes get extinguished has more to do with enforcement than availability. People ARE arguing that something being up for sale should be the trigger instead, but this is very hard to manage, very hard to trigger and doesn’t come even close to fitting all the ways things are marketed.
I think this is a very, very hard problem to fix, but if you made me try, I’d argue that a deep reform should enable copyright exceptions regardless of whether something is up for sale. I don’t even know why people here are so fixated with that element. The exclusive right should not be about copying a thing, it should be about selling or profiting from a thing. Not copyright, but sale right.
Yeah, but that’s my point. There’s a tendency, particularly on STEM people, but also on your average normies, to think that “social constructs” aren’t “real”. This is a very bad take that often causes a lot of problems.
If this thread is proving something is that policymaking is very difficult.
That doesn’t work either, things don’t have a single price point in modern media, and it’d be easy to just do what some games are already doing where you give people early access for extra money and save yourself from being price locked later.
Plus, how do you price out subscriptions and free to play games with MTX? Not every individual piece of media has a price, but a lot of dead media comes from broadcast, subscriptions and other nonstandard arrangements.
You guys are too fixated in the scenario where publishers hike prices to retain copyright without actually distributing the content. It’s not as big of a loophole as you think and the idea of tying copyright to a thing being actively sold has bigger problems than that.
Do we? Could have fooled me. The games I played this week ranged from free to 90 bucks, including 5, 15, 20 and 39. And I used the 250 limited edition example because I had the Virtua Fighter collector’s edition they announced on the TGAs in a cart before I thought better of it.
So I have no idea what the “market price for new games” is supposed to be.
Because it turns out sociology, anthropology and politics also exist.
If you were in space and looked at Earth you wouldn’t see any people.
EDIT: Crap, someone is going to point out that you can see lights at night, aren’t they? This thread is for pedants and now I’ve started a conversation about biomarkers you can see from orbit.
And you can, in fact, regulate market prices.
But that doesn’t make it feasible or convenient. Is a 250 USD collector’s edition from Limited Run on a game that originally cost 15 bucks “fair and reasonable”? I mean, they sell. People buy them. People buy them even when the cheaper option is still available.
Digital goods have wildly diverging prices. Laws take intent into account all the time, but how do you take intent into account on something that is agreed upon via supply and demand if your goal is to guarantee supply?
People are being too simplistic here and assuming that things are either copyrighted or on the public domain, which is already not how this works. You don’t need to set a killswitch for public domain transition based on whether something is being monetized, just a fair scenario for unmonetized redistribution. If you make it so people sharing and privately copying things at their own cost is fine but selling is reserved for the copyright holder it doesn’t matter how the holder prices things. Plus that’s in practice already how we all operate anyway.
No you couldn’t, unless you enact government controlled prices for all media.
Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.
You’re missing the point, though. The concern copyright has isn’t the physical book. If we were operating on physical books we would be fine with 20th century copyright.
The concern is the difference between the physical book and the contents of the book. You can make a book and send it off into the world as a physical object and have no new copies being printed while that book remains physically stocked in stores where you can go buy it.
What happens to that book in the interim? Is it okay to republish the contents of the book?
And yeah, sure, media that is constantly selling often has multiple prints. This scenario still happens when they stop making new prints, though, since some stock won’t have sold through. And plenty of media is made on limited runs, too. Monthly magazines, collector’s editions…
Hell, what happens to movies once they are out of cinemas and not printed in physical media or available for streaming in your scenario? Do you give up copyright if there isn’t an overlap? That seems harsh. TV shows that are broadcast once live but not available on streaming or physical media until the season is over?
Also, somebody below raises a great point: what happens to the copyright of things not commercialized by companies? If you make a picture and don’t sell it, does that mean I can use it? Sell it myself? Because people around here seem… not okay with that one.
Yeah, of course. Writing laws is hard.
Which is my point.
This one is way harder than average, if anything.
I don’t think you need to put something in the public domain immediately. And obviously that would immediately destroy any protections for physical media (in that the moment a physical book is published and sold through it immediately becomes “not available for sale”).
But you can make exceptions for free distribution that work both online and physically. Libraries existed long before the Internet did. You can enable private distribution of free copies without fully removing the right of the copyright holder to own an exclusive right to sell an item, which is fundamentally different than something being in the public domain.
I’m fine with you being able to sell a copy of the Iliad but not one of Metal Gear Solid 4. That’s not to say putting a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4 up for download should be illegal.
It’s hard to get this right, but I do think the system needs fundamental reform.
I think the principle that only the copyright holder is able to profit from the media for a period of time is pretty sound, although there are also questions about creatives having no say in the copyright of the things they create if they are working for a corporation, which I also think need adjustment.
The real issue is what happens to other types of distribution. In practice, private non-profit use of media is already commonplace and bans aren’t particularly enforceable. And then there is the derivative use, that is inconsistently supported and held to weird, arbitrary standards created ad-hoc for a handful of big platforms.
By the letter of the law, Google is by far the biggest pirate on the planet, it’s just so big that unwritten rules have been created about it and now effectively the global copyright law has more to do with Google’s detection algorithms than any kind of enforcement. We clearly need a better alternative.
Lots of impractical wishful thinking in this one. Laws don’t work very well when you have to add “but you need to be nice about it”.
This is a very hard problem to solve for that reason, but in fairness, it’s not like the current implementation tries very hard or is working very well. It’s just that finding a working solution would be hard even if that wasn’t the case.
I should hope so. If somebody shook my hand and, while maintaining eye contact, confessed they’ve been free-willying every pee of their life, hands behand their head, I would have to seriously reconsider our relationship.