Steam Still Can't Seem To Keep Its Hands Off Some 'Sex Games' Despite Hands Off Policy
from the pron-store dept
It's been three or so years since Valve announced a new "hands off" approach towards approvals for games on its dominant Steam storefront. This new "policy" was unfortunately rolled out in an extremely Steam-like manner: vague and largely indecipherable, full of holes, and all with a caveat baked in that Steam could still do basically whatever it wants. Later, the company clarified that the chief goal with all of this was to allow for more adult-oriented games while still giving Steam the ability to disallow "troll games", as though that actually clarified anything. Predictably, this new policy set off confusion all over the place, and even years into the change its application appears to be aggressively inconsistent.
Three years in and it's still a problem. The developers of Holodexxx, a VR sex game featuring VR-rendered real-life porn stars, has expended thousands of dollars to try to comply with Steam's policies only to find the game banned from the platform. Interestingly, the developers of the game appear to have intended this to be less of a gross or trollish look at a sex video game and more as something that is both adult-oriented but a "sex positive" experience.
Holodexxx is a game in which simulated versions of real adult performers interact with the player in virtual reality, with AI guiding elements of the performance. Its creators bill it as an ethical, sex-positive game being made in conjunction with and featuring real sex workers. Steam, at this point, carries a plethora of games that include adult content—some of which venture into much dicier thematic territory than Holodexxx. But that didn’t stop Valve from chasing Holodexxx off its holodeck.
On pre-2018 Steam, this is a game that would absolutely not be allowed on the platform. But the whole point of the change in policy was supposed to be to allow for more content of this nature, so long as it didn't dive into "troll" territory. And, to some extent, that policy shift achieved its goal. There are a great many adult sex games on Steam these days, with the level of raunchiness in those games playing across a spectrum for that sort of thing. But in this case, the game has been rejected several times, no matter what the developer tries to do to comply with Steam's policy.
In a recent lengthy blog, the game’s developers outlined everything they’ve tried over the course of multiple months. To begin, they submitted a “PG-13 experience” to Steam starring a clothed version of adult film actress Riley Reid, along with a censored video of live adult stars. Valve, say Holodexxx’s developers, blocked the submission “with a boiler-plate explanation that video pornography was not allowed on Steam.” So then the developers spent additional time creating a new demo without video of adult stars, in which the player could instead look at a model of adult film actress Marley Brinx in a virtual environment. Again, Valve blocked it on the basis that it was “pornography.”
At that point, Holodexxx’s developers went back to the drawing board and spent “months” on Holodexxx Home, a more elaborate interactive experience with dialogue systems and direct physical interactions. It involves undressing a character, but so do other games on Steam, so in theory, it doesn’t necessarily activate any of Valve’s tripwires. However, you can probably guess what happened next.
“We submitted Home and waited a few weeks,” wrote Holodexxx’s developers. “After poking Steam via help tickets, our build was reviewed two days later... and banned. The explanation was again, that Steam does not allow ‘pornography’ on their platform.”
In all, the developer claims that it has spent something like $20,000 just trying to get a version in place that would meet Steam's guidelines. Unfortunately, that effort appears to have failed as that last rejection once again simply regurgitated the anti-pornography stance previously iterated.
Now, let's be clear on a couple of things. First, you may not like the idea of adult games showing up on Steam. That doesn't really matter for this story. Steam shifted policies to allow for more of them and they can run their platform as they choose. Secondly, I'll reiterate that point: Steam can block this game from its platform if it wants.
But the problem here is the lack of clarity in the policy and the inconsistency with which it is applied. If you need this broken down further, I'll put it this way: when a developer can spend five-figures trying to comply with a platform's policy and can't manage to do so, the problem is on the platform's end. Either the policy isn't clear enough for developers (check!), hasn't been applied in a way that's consistent enough to allow it to be interpreted (check!), or the communication in feedback to developers about the policy as it applies to their specific games hasn't been handled well (check!).
In this case, Steam has failed at all three levels. Again, the platform can do as it pleases with its property, but if the platform is going to have a policy, it might as well make it one that actually works.
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Filed Under: adult content, content moderation, holodexx, steam
Companies: valve
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Look, I don't blame Steam at all for this.
In the US you can't release sex games, the culture punishes it heavily.
The puritanical Americans make a really big stink about sex stuff, and it's more trouble than it (and the revenue) are worth.
If you release sex games in the US you can very rapidly be turned into a platform that only releases sex stuff as your non-sex stuff jumps ship, and as parents stop allowing kids to use your platform. It's ugly and terrible, but that's American Cancel Culture.
Ask the CIA about what happened when they had a sexy art exhibit, and why they shifted to funding abstract art and weird avante-guard art to fight Russia after their sex exhibit fell through.
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We can't tell you what pornography is, but we know it when we fap to it.
One does wonder how many other games are being denied a spot 'because reasons'.
We're going to use a secret measuring standard & never ever tell you what the standard is.
We're hoping you won't hold us to our decision to allow adult content, because then we'll have to decide what the line for boobs being to big is & everytime the staff tries to have a meeting about this all the tissues & lotion in the building go missing.
"Adult" things are a lightening rod for stupidity because so many people believe their morals should apply to everyone if they share them or not.
That even the glimpse of to much of a sideboob will turn a 10yr old boy into a sex maniac.
Its easy enough to put a gate in the way of kids getting access to the adult section (but as someone who knows what happens when you tell a teenager no) there is no 100% way. We need to stop pretending that sex is not fun & only should be used for procreation after marriage to an opposite sex partner or you're going to hell. An actual/VR sex worker explaining to an incel that he isn't entitled to get laid because he thinks so & that if you treat people better they treat you better would be amazing. But then this is a nation where women don't understand what can get them pregnant & men say stupid things like I can't make girls.
Yet we're still terrified if we explain sex to them, they might have sex... because no teenager has ever had sex without instruction on how to not get an STI. rolls his eyes
But then these moral upright people might not be able to enjoy Teen Mom or 147 Kids and Counting reality shows.
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Ellarvarkum avarudethaya service cheyyan anuvadham kodukanam
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Steam has history of rejecting valid games....
There exists some game developers who waited for 2 years for their voting system to decide that the game is acceptable to steam, only to be offered a unworkable licensing agreement with steam. => basically it takes 2 years of waiting time to get access to the "negotiated" license agreements, and if that's not ok for you, you can wait another 2 years for next chance...
greenlight process was never very friendly to game developers. There's tons of finished games which never was published on steam simply because of their draconian system of how the games are being accepted.
Their theory that game developers need to wait 2 years is simply so that the devs supposedly will be tweaking the game to better quality and then steam would receive the end result. Guess what? It doesn't work like that. The whole activity is not profitable at all, if we need to spend two years of work to get some steam door opened every time we want to release some products to the market.
we simply published our games in itch.io, their publishing agreements are significantly better shape than steam's. Basically steam is always getting outdated games with 2 years of idle time/product waiting idle for steam to open their release door. Basically after 2 years of waiting, the market opportunity for the material was already gone, and we didn't publish it at steam at all.
The players do not want outdated games anyway -> the computer hardware evolves enough in 2 years that the tweaks that made the game work on the gpu cards of the yesturday are no longer valid after 2 years of finished products waiting in the shelf for steam's permission to access the store.
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Your valid criticism of Valve aside... why do you even need to rely on Valve and Steam to start with? Wasn't your technology capable of teleporting animations to computer screens without third-party intervention?
And seriously, who is this "we"? You've made it clear, countless times, that you don't believe in working with a team.
Also if you think players don't want "outdated games", there's a strong playerbase of Team Fortress 2 - I'm sorry, Garry's Mod - who'd disagree with you.
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Sure, that feature is available in 2021. But I'm talking about 2014, when my first game was ready to be published. Steam simply put it to a dummy delay queue that did nothing else than make the technology obsolete.
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Oh. I actually thought you had a legitimate grievance there, instead it's yet another entry in Tero Pulkinnen's endless diary of his rants and ravings about why nobody will suck his cock.
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That will fit nicely to the topic at hand.
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Thanks for admitting that you're a pervert, on top of the other idiotic traits that you've confessed to.
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Well, you decided to quit posting anything thoughtful real quick.
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People have tried engaging with tp to the tune of 300 posts on a topic. None of that good faith effort has got him to believe anything outside his own fantasy, such as subway maps subsidizing the entire costs of running a metro system. Look, if someone's going to shit on me, I'm going to shit in his mouth at least once.
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Plenty of games on Steam use “obsolete” graphics technology — e.g., pixel art or low-poly/PlayStation One–esque aesthetics. Try another argument.
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Not to mention that some of the games on Steam are re-releases of old games (like Sega actually selling their old Genesis/Mega Drive ROMs with an emulator they made themselves) as well as recent games that could be played on the actual hardware themselves.
So once again, TP (for my bunghole!) comes up with these BS excuses as why the deck is stacked against him when there is ample evidence that other people and organizations are doing a better job than him at things he said could not be done.
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Look, i know how he is, but that doesn't ruin the argument about ridiculous waiting times for Steam to respond to submissions or whatever. I also get that it's part of his grievance train, but it also demonstrates the same behaviors that the article does. And as for games aging out while one waits, 2-5 year old graphics and engines don't have the same draw as vintage games. Anything neat might have a market somewhere regardless of all sorts of shortcomings, but it will be a) a small market, b) if anyone ever finds it.
Yes, there are other ways to market, and yes this guy is like the opposite of Perttu Ahola, and yes he is not 100% directly on point, and yes he has a ... history lol. But if he isn't just totes making up this specific shit, it seems like it is a relatively on-topic anecdotal criticism of Steam Valve?
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Have you actually seen the stuff Tero puts on his site? They're the kind of minigames that makes Limbo of the Lost look like Dark Souls 3. They make Newgrounds shitposting look like the next Monster Hunter. A visually mediocre game not making it onto Steam is... not the most credible criticism of Steam's policies.
But sure, let's actually examine his claims, and correspond them with stuff he's actually said before. Like how he teamed up with a publisher 7 years ago, and signed a slew of NDAs which is why nobody has heard anything about his game development work. He's also mentioned that the "animation teleporting" technology only started working this year as a result of this 7-year partnership... somehow. So by his own evidence, during the time which Steam supposedly overlooked or rejected his content, the tech wasn't even working.
Even if your criticism of something is anecdotal, you're still expected to actually have some degree of credible proof. Tero's history indicates he has none.
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For game development practises to be profitable, there should be constant income stream coming from gaming activities... When steam tries to find income streams for game developers, but then ignoring the newbie/beginner game developers completely, they're basically saying that doing game development at al loss is acceptable, as long as it's someone else that pays the development costs. This is why the steam's delay is evil. It increases the development cost of the games, but in return it has nothing. Basically people who develop games are investing their own money and resources to the activity, but steam's system forces everyone to work at a loss. Steam just collects raisins from the bun, or wipes cream and discards the lower quality works.
This kind of activity isn't acceptable in my books. Free software and many other software area projects are in big trouble because this "developer subsidies the development activity" -mentality in the markets.
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Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Valve has no obligation to fund the development of any game placed on Steam. No publisher or storefront has an obligation to fund third party content without a contract in place. Toby Fox didn’t beg any publisher or storefront for the money he needed to finish developing Undertale — and now he can do whatever the fuck he wants thanks to the overwhelming success of that game.
Development of a game will always have a cost, both monetary and chronological. Blame no one but yourself if you can’t raise the money to fund development of what you charitably call “games”. Valve and itch.io aren’t going to help you; you’re not entitled to make them help you.
Nobody has to go through Steam. They can publish their game through itch.io, strike a deal with GOG or Epic, or self-publish through their own website. Steam may offer the easiest way to reach a mass audience, but that doesn’t make Steam the only way for a game to reach people.
Unless the developer has an active contract with a funding source, developers always subsidize development. And even if they have the money, they still put in the time that the funding source may not. Everything has a price, and that includes software development.
I mean, how many years have you wasted on a program nobody either wants or needs?
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All creative endeavours, like developing games, writing books, making videos, have such a low percentage of acceptance by the various publishers that those activities should be labelled as very high risk of not making any money.
The internet, for those able to build a fan base, has enabled more creatives to make a living, but you will find that those who have succeeded spent four or five years of producing content that they distributed for free, and who were and are capable of engaging with people offering constructive criticism. Note also that they are not so much paid for existing content, but rather to produce more content.
Given what you have demonstrated in the comments on this site, your chances of making it as a self publisher on the Internet are slim to none, and would have to produce something that looks like it might be a runaway success for a publisher to entertain taking it on. When comes to making money from a creative endeavour, you are your own worse enemy.
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"Operating at a loss" is standard practice in plenty of industries. I'm not saying it's ideal, hell I'm not even saying it should be standard practice. The game development industry in particular is very scummy when it comes to crunch culture. But here's the thing... you know why nobody believes you when you talk about these issues? Because of your blind faith and support of the RIAA and MPAA, who regularly report that their studio associates produce movies at a loss, so they don't have to pay the grassroots-level workers that much while their executives make all the money.
Again... that's standard practice in any industry. I'm frankly more amused that you openly admit that your stuff is mediocre, while demanding that it be put on a pedestal on par with the more expensive stuff that's had more money and resources sunk into it.
It's quite clear that the market doesn't care what you think.
And yet, they compete quite regularly with paid products. Like Blender, your apparent nemesis. Which you've always claimed must be destroyed so your joke of a 3D engine can take its place. If Blender is in that much trouble why should we elevate your product if your competition is doomed to fail?
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The pattern that elevates blender is something like this:
1) pick some popular and already successful product from the world
2) claim that your own product cannot compete against the popular stuff
3) quit developing anything at all, since it's not possible to compete against
the pattern that "picks" popular works from the internet
Basically the problem is that there exists grassroots movement of over 10000 works that are competing against blender. There's always a question why should we pick this 1 project instead of these 9999 other projects.
I think the pattern above is broken. The advantage of these developments for the society is not coming from the pattern of picking the most popular ones and highlighting them. It's the whole 10000 grassroot works and the investments that these game developers are doing to create the works in question. The investment activity is sometimes working at a loss, but the advantage to society is not coming from a few popular works, but from the whole 10000 works available on the market. Just 2 days to go for getting results from ludumdare and eurovision song contest. So we'll see who comes out from the top. But the whole community is what contributes to the development of the industry, not just the top-graded ones.
Development activity is kinda nice, since once the product has been created, its not possible to remove it from the world. The investment have been done and results are available, so the advantages to the society are actually realized. This is why we do game development, even thnough there's no compensation for the activity. Society benefits from the efforts, even thnough compensation aspect is lagging behind.
For internet to bash those people who are doing hard work without compensation, its kind of activity that does not benefit society. Worst case would be if some developers of lower quality works would stop the activity and start idling or turn to evil masterminds and spraypainted the neighbours garage walls. This is what your activity might cause, and I'm very happy that I'm not in that camp.
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Blender and its competitors appear to do their jobs well enough that nobody sees a need to further compete. That is a recognition of facts — not a “pattern that elevates Blender”.
[citation needed]
Blender is a matured, feature-rich application and something of a standard in 3D modelling/rendering. Those “other projects” are not.
Someone who uses Blender has no obligation to use Meshpage. You have no right to make them use it. Your application lives and dies on its merits, not on the amount of time you spent making it.
In re: 3D modelling, “the whole community” has generally decided which programs work best for the needs of said community. Blender is one of them. Meshpage isn’t.
I don’t bash people who work on programs without being paid for it. Open source devs do good work.
I point out how people with entitlement complexes — e.g., you — think publishing an app, game, book, etc. means they deserve money and fame and mansions only for the fact that they published it. The world doesn’t (and shouldn’t) work that way.
The problem you want to solve lies within you if all that stands between you and breaking the law is hurt feelings. Nobody was, is, or ever will be required to metaphorically (or literally) suck your dick.
Your entire screed comes off as the whining of an entitled ass who thinks the world owes him a mansion because he developed an application. The world owes you nothing; it was here first. Meshpage is obviously a bust for you — seven years of development and not a single user! — so maybe find a new road to travel. After all, the only person keeping you stuck on the road you’re on right now is you.
Does that make you angry? Does what I say piss you off? If so: Good. But stop using your anger as a means of attacking others. Instead, use it as a means to examine why you’re mad, why you’re letting me (and others like me) get to you so badly that you’re spending shitloads of time here, and why you’re not trying harder to make something that people will want to use/experience.
Start where you are; use what you have; do what you can. What can you make that isn’t Meshpage but could capture the attention of others for reasons other than ridicule? Figure out the answer, then make that your goal. But make that thing for the sake of making it. Something created only to make money will lack a soul, and you’ll never be satisfied with what you’ve made. To quote Kid Rock:
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Is it too much to ask that other people also contributes to the development of 3d technology. Supporting the whole industry all by me alone isn't too fun. What would happen if I was run over by a bus or truck? The truck number is the amount of people that needs to be killed for the project to die, and if it's just number 1, it's very bad kind of project. To increase the number, I just ask that other people participate in the process, by creating mansion plans with my tool. The tool is available and ready for use, but the community doesn't seem to be interested that significant projects are being run by too small teams, and when the actual technology matures enough to gain popularity, the maintainance of the technology will not be possible.
There is good plans for mansions and community involvement is needed. If community is not interested in the activity, then it's for them to blame if signifncant technologies are disappearing from the market.
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Wrong question, what you need to ask yourself, and answer yourself honestly, is why you cannot gain support and users. As i said somewhere above, you are your own worse enemy.
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I refuse to setup a mailing list where its impossible to remove yourself from the list and the automatic spamming bot keeps activating the community all the time. All popular projects have this kind of mailing list...
I simply refuse to do it because I think it causes more damage than its worth...
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[citation needed]
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facebook -- check
blender -- check
sketchfab -- check
chess.com -- check
netflix -- check
shytterstock -- check (i don't even know what this bullshit is about)
linkedin -- check
slack -- check
academia -- check
itch.io -- check
lunarg/vulkan -- check
wtsocial -- check
disqus -- check
dreamhost -- check
pohjola vakuutus -- check
takk -- check
assembly -- check
tier -- check
wolt -- check
helsingin sanomat -- check
these all i found from my spam folder...
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That you redirected those emails to your spam folder doesn’t make them spam for everyone else. Try harder.
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It still qualifies as evil spam which has only the purpose of activating their communities. The companies position for sending millions of emails is that they gained the subscriptions before the unsolicidated spamming operations become illegal and thus they can keep spamming those same people over and over again, since the bots in 2003 forced them to subscribe to some services...
facebook et al are still sending millions of activation email spams every day.
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How is “activating a community” an inherently bad thing?
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It causes more damage than it's worth. The products do not any longer compete who is more popular among the users, but instead who will be sending more activation email spams...
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You have no idea what you’re even saying any more, do you.
Nothing you’re saying here makes any sense in any context.
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Most, if bot all the email sources you name only send emails to subscribers, and enable unsubscribe. So either you are trying to make a point by deception, or are ignorant of how communities work.
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yes, that's their current justification why this spamming operation is legal... "we have a list of subscribers and we keep activating them all the time"...
are you claiming this isn't the reason why those projects are more popular among users than my meshpage?
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Your program isn’t “popular” because other programs do what it does (and they do it better) while you yourself seem dedicated to treating other people like they’re nothing but ants to be sunburnt with a magnifying glass. Email updates and “activated communities” (regardless of whatever the fuck you think that means and whatever is supposedly so bad about an “activated community”) have no impact in this regard. Someone can use Blender without ever signing up for a single email update from the devs/community — and I’m sure a bunch of people already do.
You can whine about external factors outside of your control all you want. They’re irrelevant. If your program was good, people would want to use it. If you were a good person, people would want to support you. But you and your program are both a giant load of horseshit. The only person unwilling to accept that fact is the only person who can do anything about that fact: You.
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You didn't answer the question. Are you actually claiming that this mailing list -spamming operation that the "competition" is using has no whatsoever reason why those projects are popular?
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Last time I checked, the most popular google search terms included "How to remove facebook" and "how to unsubscribe from facebook email mailing list"....
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In what context?
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A program being popular because of email updates is possible, but statistically unlikely. I mean, I can’t think of a single program which bet its success on email updates.
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This is the reason why meshpage isn't popular. I just refuse to use illegal spamming practices where email servers are sending millions of spam emails faster than humans can dismiss them. And every time users read that service name, they think about the service. And more people thinking about certain keywords means some small percentage of the people will try to learn the tools and practices. And popularity comes when more people learn those tools. Sending millions of emails means that there will be thousands of people who will learn the tools, and then they can claim large user bases.
note that this whole thing doesn't even require building a working tool. All you need is some way to extract value from the spam emails.
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Meshpage is unpopular because it doesn’t do anything equally as well as, or better than, any program you claim it can outperform — and because you’re a humanity-hating asshole who thinks blaming everything but himself for his own failures is anything but pathetic. Stop making excuses for your personal shortcomings as a programmer and a person. Other people didn’t make you or your program unpopular. You did that on your own.
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Even if this was true, you do not have correct information to decide this aspect. You didn't even download the builder tool and thus you have no idea what it can do and what it cannot do. Every tool has its own limitations and obviously competing on areas where competition is strong is a losing battle. But this is why I don't even attempt to implement the same features than where competitors are conquering the world. It's different.
Just how different it is, noone but myself can know because they didn't bother to learn the material offered.
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No one with any serious interest in 3D modelling would ever use a program with no other users, inferior output compared to the “industry standard” programs already in use, and non-existent support from a developer who would likely tell anyone emailing him to fuck off before ever helping someone. Meshpage is unpopular because it can’t do anything better than Blender and you’re an asshole. Stop making excuses for your personal shortcomings and professional failures.
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The email spamming operation solves this problem.
Like ability to place the output to a web page? The industry standard programs do not have this ability.
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You may not like that people still think of “antiquated” technology such as still images and video files as output, but it is. And Blender can output still images and video files. And no, spamming emails would not make you or Meshpage popular. Stop making excuses for your professional failures.
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Using the email spam feature would be impossible for meshpage, because they made the practice illegal before meshpage/my 3d engine was ready for publication. So obviously illegal stuff shouldn't be implemented.
Its just amazing how many entities are still using those illegal practices even though it has been illegal for over 10 years now...
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Then stop whining about email spamming. It isn’t the cause of your failures — you are.
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So this means that they cannot yet even get ordinary hello world done for 3d models, i.e. draw an opengl triangle to the screen. You should send the developers of blender some opengl beginner tutorials so that they can copy-paste the code.
Meshpage is way more advanced than whatever you're describing above.
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Stop lying — to me, and to yourself.
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lol, this is your whole argument?
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Your argument is that Meshpage is a failure because:
other developers/companies using illegal email spamming practices that somehow keep being used despite being illegal
popular programs using “antiquated” technology like video formats that everyone else already uses
And I’m sure you’ve used other ones besides those.
You put responsibility for your failures on an external factor every time you talk. Something or someone else is always to blame, no matter what. It’s not true and you know it.
Blender devs didn’t make you a humanity-hating asshole; you did that yourself. Blender users didn’t make your program so behind the times that it can barely make anything more complex than an Amiga demo animation; you did that yourself. Nobody and nothing else is responsible for your failures but you.
Your failures: Own them. Your shortcomings: Acknowledge them. Only when you do those things will you find it in yourself to find a new path other than the one you keep travelling that, for some reason, keeps leading you back here to spend hours at a time defending a program no one uses to people who think you’re an asshole in ways that make clear why nobody uses your program and how big of an asshole you are.
Find a new hobby, man. This one is fucking you up on every level.
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I didn't say anything about being a failure or not. I only talked about popularity.
This email spamming practices are just the scientifically the only way to get popularity.
My real position is that it is not a failure to have a program that is not popular.
It's your stupidity to call finished programs that just happens to be not too popular as failures. You need to change your viewpoint slightly to remove that idea from your vocabulary.
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You know that is a lie. Stop lying.
And I call Meshpage a failure because it has no users, it will never have any meaningful userbase, and every program you believe it competes with outshines your program in every area. You have failed at making Meshpage a program people would want to use for any reason — or seek support for it if they did.
Emails have nothing to do with the failures of Meshpage. You are the sole cause for its failure.
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this is not true. the beginner opengl tutorial cannot compete against meshpage in any reasonable way, so the above statement is a lie...
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And yet, OpenGL is the standard while your program languishes in obscurity. Nobody uses Meshpage. Lots of people use OpenGL.
Your program is a failure and you alone are responsible for its failure.
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beginner opengl tutorial != OpenGL
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Irrelevant. That tutorial teaches people to use OpenGL, not Meshpage.
Your program is a failure for which you alone are responsible.
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Still a tutorial program that can draw one triangle to the screen cannot compete against meshpage which has multiple triangles available.
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Irrelevant. The tutorial teaches people to use OpenGL, not Meshpage — and OpenGL is in far wider use than Meshpage. Your program is a failure for which you alone are responsible. Accept your failure with some goddamned dignity.
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Let's not forget that he's already made it clear that if someone uses Meshpage's circle capability to make the Mickey Mouse symbol, he's more than willing to delete that capability.
So no, his "multiple triangles available" technology doesn't matter. Making something using triangles that infringes on someone else's copyright is laughably trivial. If someone made a Meshpage Bill Cipher, Tero Pukeface is obliged by his own rules to delete the "multiple triangles" capability of Meshpage, thereby making his shit even weaker than OpenGL.
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This would require that there is actually real users using the site. With users, comes responsibility to filter out illegal practices. Since you've said that it's impossible that anyone would be willing to use meshpage, you don't need to be afraid of features disappearing.
Also there's this strange pattern that users could try to follow the law instead of breaking it? Wouldn't that also solve the problem?
Yes, if the features are being misused in the marketplace, some drastic actions need to be taken to prevent those misuses in the future. But again, your theory of 0 users using the site, there's no actual chance of that happening...
Also building some different kinds of limitations to the software might prevent the misuses without breaking the offered functionality. Then the potential users can feel safe and protected.
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Again you try to market your complete lack of a user base as an advantage. You don't need users to violate copyright infringement; you proved that yourself by using someone else's animatronic model as a part of your demo. Had Stephen T. Stone not pointed this out, you'd still be violating copyright.
This is a rich bullshit argument coming from someone who regularly praises copyright enforcement lawyers for breaking the law.
Funny thing about copyright enforcement: they don't wait for people to break the law. Everything about them is preemptive, Minority Report style law enforcement. Their modus operandi is to sue people into the ground like you before there's a "chance of that happening". You'd realize this if you weren't so busy kissing the teeth of the dog biting your own hand.
Bro you literally said you would remove the circles functionality from your software if someone was caught doing copyright infringement with it. Limitations don't assure potential users of jack shit. Then again, it's not as though you're interested in potential users beyond threatening to sue them for not funding your mansion.
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You as a product manufacturer can safely assume that the users are idiots, criminals, trying to find ways to burn neighbour's house with your product, are trying to test if the product survives lightning strikes, are harrassing a goldfish with your gadgets or that the product needs to survive ran over by a roller, or pirate groups are trying to use your products for distribution of hollywood movies..
These kind of assumptions are perfectly valid when designing products for the end users. This really needs to be done preemptive manner, so that the product is already safe to use by users when end users opens the box for the first time. It wouldn't be acceptable if 4 year old children who got our software for xmas present would accidentally commit copyright infringement with the product simply for not understanding that the "publish" button can only be pressed when you actually have permission to publish the material. The publish button design must not allow copyright infringement use cases. This is especially important when designing products for children or teenagers, who still haven't mastered the fine art of copyright checking and effort calculation.
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Go ahead, then - tell everyone how your "publish button", your "animation teleportation" tech preemptively prevents this copyright infringement. It doesn't. You, yourself, had to be told that you were ripping off someone else's 3D model before you manually took it offline. That indicates that whatever tech you think people need to have in place before a product gets released, your tech didn't have it.
Frankly this would have made you eligible for prison and a fine under copyright infringement hellscape rules, but luckily for you we don't live in the dimension of your horrific imagination.
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Well, I moved the publish button to a page which is slightly more difficult to find from the web site. Ordinary children or even teenagers are not able to find the button. When they cannot find the button, they cannot make the mistake of accidentally doing copyright infringement with the button.
It also has additional safeguards. For example the file format required by the button for the actual content items need to be created with the builder tool. Nothing else in the world can create that file format. So this ensures that user have created the node graph himself, instead of cloning someone elses work.
Then the web site uses a thing called "domain check" for ensuring that only content from allowed domains are being published to the site.
If someone manages to go through all these steps and accidentally still do copyright infringement with the technology, then there is manual review of all the published content and the content can be removed if DMCA notices or other hints about illegal content is being detected.
As you can see, there's multiple levels of protection against accidents.
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Congratulations, you created a 3D engine that can't publish anything. Now answer the question: why would a 3D artist or modeler want to give you money for a product that doesn't publish anything?
So this all sounds like you manually reviewing everything before it's allowed. Which isn't by itself the problem. The problem lies in the fact that none of this is actually revolutionary or noteworthy. Nobody's going to pay for tech that has to be manually reviewed, when all other tech besides Meshpage already has to go through that by RIAA standards.
lol what? Stephen T. Stone had to literally tell you that you were infringing on copyright before you took any action. Your multiple levels of protection failed.
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Well, to you it seems to be revolutionary, given that you have argued strongly that any copyright checking is impossible to do. Now that I've proven that the checking is possible and it actually helps with the actual copyright problem, you claim that it wasn't revolutionary after all. Why all the complaints that the checking is impossible?
As far as I know, my checks are not hurting the actually useful features of the library/related technologies one bit, but still solves significant copyright problems. So all this complaints that all copyright checks are impossible to do was just bullshit.
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Reading comprehension sure is hard for you ain't it Tero? I don't know what the hell they pump into the water systems in Finland, but if there's one accomplishment you've actually done, it's to convince people that copyright supporters are, by and large, the same color of fucked in the head.
Copyright checking isn't revolutionary because it's impossible to do, it's impossible to do because the requirements by your heroes at the RIAA and MPAA require copyright infringement not happening to begin with. They want software to instantly detect infringement and penalize the perceived guilty party by any means, whether it's a temporary or permanent ban or the destruction of physical hardware. They think algorithms and software are the solution, and they believe that the only reason why these checks aren't already implemented is because "big tech supports piracy" or similar nonsense.
Except that people actually in tech, far more qualified than me, have already explained why the RIAA demands of "notice and staydown", among other copyright proposals, are fundamentally unworkable. Because algorithms and software on their own have a consistent history of flagging innocent user-generated content, and regularly overlook actual instances of copyright infringement.
Once again, let's go back to your example. You used a 3D model of a character somebody else created as part of your visible demos. You kept it online for a notable amount of time, which by copyright rules means you cost Scott Cawthon money due to infringement. (How much value is unknown but based on copyright supporters' arguments of "making available", we can easily assume that it's a non-zero amount that justifies legal pursuit in court.) Not only did your software fail to take it down, you personally kept it available until someone else told you. And even then, you had to manually take it down yourself. Just like any webhost or site owner would do, with existing technology. There's nothing revolutionary about your checking, because not only does your checking not rely on anything brand new, but it flat out didn't work until one of your harshest critics pointed it out.
You promised to remove features from your technologies, fam. Including the ability to publish anything. Nobody's going to use a 3D modeling software that doesn't let the user publish or release anything.
Complaints about copyright checks are due to the impossibility of meeting RIAA standards. Which, as I've pointed out, you've already failed. If you had any principles about sticking to the stand you chose to take, you'd have taken down the Meshpage project - but everyone else here knows you're a lying, gutless coward who thinks that pointing directions to the subway requires a copyright fine.
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You don't really understand any of this. RIAA standards are funny deal, since RIAA MUST FULLFILL THOSE STANDARDS THEMSELVES in order to require other people to follow the same standards.
It may be that it is FOR YOU impossible to fullfill RIAA standards. But the requirements generally are not impossible to fullfill, and to prove that, you just need to look at RIAA's own copyright status.
RIAA has large organisation and getting the whole org to follow some onerous rules is significantly bigger problem than getting ONE PERSON to follow those same rules. So when RIAA gets their own requirements implemented themselves, what they gain while doing that operation is a permission to require other people to follow those same rules.
This is what you pirates do not understand. The authors who are requiring other people to follow some sloppy standards, have been following significantly stricter standards for long time before getting permission to impose those standards to everyone else.
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We'll get to this remark later in the comment but I'd like to highlight this allcaps piece of laughably hypocritical garbage to point out how fucked in the head you are.
To "prove"? If you're trying to say that the RIAA has an "ideal" copyright status, you've got your head shoved up your own ass. The RIAA has been caught, multiple times, infringing on the copyrights of others. Using images from photographers for their websites without proper attribution, for one. Hell, even as early as 2004, the then CEO of Warner Music admitted his son downloaded music.
This is the problem with content moderation. Any time your organization or community gets big enough, content moderation becomes much harder and much less efficient - but you copyright fanatics seem to think it's easy.
We've already established that even the RIAA can't meet their own requirements.
So you're saying that in order to set their own standards the RIAA has to seek permission from everyone else to follow the same rules? Nonsense. The RIAA has never sought permission. Unless you call political donations "permission".
You didn't get permission from anyone, bro. You didn't get permission to use that model from Friday Nights at Freddy's. What you "do not understand" is that even as a one-man "team", you couldn't detect copyright infringement that you yourself committed. And you expect everyone to kiss your ass and suck your cock because you think you worked hard enough, when you can't even meet the standards imposed by your heroes. Fuck that.
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This is why the copyright enforcement is a responsibility of the whole community. I.e. you actually need to help copyright owners to enforce and collect the money from the marketplace. One important task that community needs to do themselves, is find ways how to obtain those licenses to the material that copyright owners have made available. While copyright owners cannot reach the whole world, there still is significant amount of copyrighted works available for consumption. You just need to pick those works which have valid licenses distributed in your neigbourhood. Using works where licenses are not available (like region coded stuff) is illegal by the copyright laws.
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Unfortunately for you, that's not how copyright law works. And not just because it's easier for pirates, but because it's easier for copyright enforcement. If anyone accused of copyright infringement could just shrug and say "It's the responsibility of the whole community", no one would ever be nailed for copyright infringement.
Bottom line is, your tech failed to do what you claim it does. Nobody is giving you money for that. And we know for a fact that your tech is still a failure, because you're still here pissing and moaning that the government still isn't using your tech.
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It just requires one person to actually fix the problem. Anyone from the society is acceptable for this role. They just need to pick the tool and try to create some 3d models. Preferably plans for mansions. Then we can try to create real-world house from the plans.
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And seeing that you can't even achieve that, it speaks volumes about your failure, doesn't it? But it's really not a surprise when you literally boasted above how the lack of a publish button makes your tech better.
Always got to come back to the free government-sponsored mansion with you, doesn't it Pukeinnen? Never mind the fact that we're in a pandemic that just all but scuppered the construction industry due to a reliance on cheap labor and raw materials, some fucknugget in Scandinavia thinks that just because he loves copyright so much he'd have babies with it, he's entitled to a mansion.
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Lack of publish button is somehow associated with actually following the law... Guess all web pages that don't have publish button are in much better shape recarding law following than the user-generated content sites where random pirates are publishing their piracy collections to the service for other pirates to access the data...
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OpenGL is a library available and used by those developing 3d cad and modelling packages. It is not an end user application. Stop comparing application with libraries to try and denigrate the competition.
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Nah, mate, your issues about being a failure extend to more than just having a graphics engine that isn't popular.
You're a failure because your "technology" doesn't do what you claim it does. You're a failure because your "technology" doesn't outcompete other solutions in the market like you claim it does. You're a failure because you're here bitching about Steam's policies disagreeing with you at a point in time where you didn't even have a proper working prototype. You're a failure because you think that people who make underaged pornography should be allowed to sue grandmothers for copyright infringement that didn't happen. You're a failure because you constantly complain that the government doesn't give you the respect and money you think you deserve. You're a failure because you think everyone else not using your trash-level tech must be a vandal that spraypaints the neighbor's house because clearly there isn't anything else we'd do with our lives. You're a failure because your only review on your website to date is a teenage wordpress blog calling you an idiot.
Frankly I could go on, because it's impressive how you've been here for over half a decade and wander into these threads to get a thorough ass whuppin' and still manage to get things wrong, like when you thought that subway maps are what subsidize underground metro operations instead of the actual subway tickets.
As for the email spamming practice, I'll speak from experience that conversion funnels are absolutely terrible for winning over market leads, unless you've been targeting specific audiences with your emails and lead-gen forms. Which I can imagine that 1: you've not been doing, and 2: you have consistently failed to convince anyone that your "animation teleporting" tech is worthwhile of anything but derision. Sending out emails by itself isn't illegal, it's just cumbersome, ineffective and annoying to most recipients. But considering how mangled your thought processes are, I'm not surprised that you think that the only way to reach out to your customers is to piss them off.
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This is still better than what you have managed to implement.
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I'm not the one boasting that his stuff is good enough to replace the technology Pixar and Blender use, genius.
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I've never claimed that it'd replace their technology. meshpage is just slightly different area, so that there is room for the technology to exist in the marketplace. I.e. blender and pixar didn't eat my end users.
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in fact, I'm surprised that none of you noticed when I implemented 520 more animations. My tech is in such a good shape that it only took half hour to implement 520 new animations to meshpage.org, bringing the total number of animations at 600.
How this magic implementation works is that it chooses randomly existing animations and offers them in different order in the web page. This approach allows that I don't actually need to create 520 different animations, but instead I can keep impression that my site has large amount of content, even though the real situation is slightly worse than that.
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In other words, you exaggerate and lie. And you expect the government to reward you for this?
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It's still better than the illegal alternative that you're proposing.
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And what illegal alternative am I proposing? All I've been saying is that nobody's going to use Meshpage. You don't nearly have the economic or political clout to make not using Meshpage illegal, sweet cheeks.
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Large content collections, like youtube's and wikipedia's content collections. They're all illegal since they forgot to pay minimum wage for the authors.
Basically when the number of offered products is too large, the activity becomes illegal. Different web sites are falling to different traps, but generally they all forget to pay salaries to the authors. Instead they think they end users are simultaniously users of the material and creators of the material. That approach was declared illegal some time ago.
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No. No, it doesn’t. Quit trying to fuck up the lives of other people by claiming their stuff is illegal so they’ll be fined/jailed and you’ll be left with no competition. That isn’t victory — that’s cultural genocide.
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Ah, so your usual rantings about why you hate the guts of people who'd rather use YouTube and Wikipedia instead of your Unreal ripoff, with the typical bizarre claim that anyone who runs something "free" must have stolen money from somewhere.
Your declaration of "illegal" is a tired old trope at this point, hawked by people angry that Wikipedia's blackout led to the death of SOPA. If Wikipedia's approach was so "illegal" the government would have closed it down faster than Megaupload. But unfortunately for you, Wikipedia's illegality is nothing more than the fevered wet dream from your wretched imagination.
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Think of for example litium-ion batteries. They're everywhere, even though they are known to explode when short-circuited. So it doesn't survive the gold fish test. But manufacturer's of the products have decided that advantages of that technology are greater than the disadvantages. But if their safety electronics which protects the battery from explosions are somehow bypassed or malfunctions, then burns and explosions can really happen with litium-ion batteries. And I don't even need to remind that a fire in an airplane is not very good thing.
Every technology has some issues like this. Wikipedia included. The developers have just decided to go with the advantages and minimizing the disadvantages. All technologies can be sued when their product choices are not surviving the test of whatever people in real world manage to throw at the product.
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Not what you said the last time, bro. You claimed, and I quote:
You stated clearly that you considered Wikipedia to be illegal because their "catalog" was too big. Advantages and disadvantages have nothing to do with it. Your entire premise is that Wikipedia gets away with free labor, and that somehow results in you not being paid what you think you should be paid, therefore you consider Wikipedia, Blender, and all other Open Source software to be based on illegal business models.
Hell, you're the one who's been boasting that he's made many, many animations and models available. Hmmm, sounds like you're offering a lot of products, doesn't it? Doesn't that make your activity illegal? And you haven't been paid at all for this... that must make Meshpage illegal!
I swear, you copyright fucktards are something else. I'd measure your IQ but numbers don't go that low.
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Yes, when their catalog is large, they had huge community creating the material. The whole community is waiting for their minimum wage.
Advantage=wikipedia gets lots of content
disadvantage=wikipedia contributors are not getting salary
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I made it for myself instead of using someone elses time.
Why should wikipedia get the content if other people did all the work? The illegal part is happening when there's slaves working for you for aggregate of millions of hours, but no salaries whatsoever have been paid to the contributors. If the usa had proper unions actively looking for misuses of the legal frameworks, then they would find this kind of problems and forbid the practices which are not according to established laws.
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Voluntary work. Unpaid internships. Pro bono legal representation. Wikipedia is hardly the first or only organization, product or entity that makes use of work that isn't directly paid for, champ. And Wikipedia is hardly the worst of these examples.
Right, workers' unions... you know who's been actively working against the formation of unions? The RIAA and MPAA, along with all the major corporations you copyright fanatics shill for.
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If they did this for 1 or 2 people, it would be just ok. But doing that for thousands of people and millions of work hours makes it ridiculous waste of people's time. It's the scale of the operation that makes it illegal.
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You keep desperately wanting to paint everyone else's Open Source projects as illegal. Unfortunately for you the real world doesn't work that way. Any task or project becomes much more efficient divided between an increased pool of volunteers. How you get volunteers is another question altogether, but suffice to say, thousands of people clearly don't think it's a "waste of people's time" contributing to a free resource with the goal of helping others.
The fact that they'd rather curate Wikipedia articles than contribute to Meshpage is not illegal, no matter how much you want it to be. On the off chance that Meshpage gets actual users, numbering into the thousands, you'd qualify as illegal too by your own metrics.
Seriously, if Wikipedia pisses you off that much, why don't you sue them? You copyright types can always come up with some nonsense excuse.
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Efficient? You gotta be kidding us. When you increase the team size, the efficiency drops dramatically... Efficiency == (work actually finished) / ((time spent on getting the result) * (number of people involved))...
I.e. when number of people grows, the efficiency drops dramatically. Unless you can get multipliers to the "work actually finished", then the efficiency of large teams is significantly worse than efficiency of small teams or single person teams.
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Just insisted that they have to make space for your "teleporting" tech in the market. Multiple times. During which you claimed professionals were too dumb to use your children-aimed tech.
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Yes, the grownups have lost their ability to experiment and try out different alternatives. Obviously that's significant issue with learning new technologies like meshpage's 3d modelling.
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When a possible alternative produces output that is inferior to a program they already use, they don’t need to experiment with it.
You alone are responsible for the failure that is Meshpage. Quit blaming other people for that.
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This just isn't true. The meshpage's output is better because it can be made available in the web. All the other tech that deals with 3d stuff needs to be converted to other formats before pushing it to web pages. So there's significant improvement in quality of the end result when the number of conversions required is smaller.
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Irrelevant. Everyone who uses Blender is fine with “antiquated” technology such as still image files, video files, and file formats that can export Blender data for the sake of sharing models. Nobody cares about your “teleporting” functionality.
Which is an incredibly minor hassle at worst. Nobody cares about that.
The modelling/rendering output of Meshpage is inherently inferior to what can be done in Blender. Whether you can “teleport” that output directly to the web is irrelevant. Nobody cares about that.
You alone are responsible for your failures. Stop blaming others for your shortcomings.
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The quality of the modelling and rendering in both blender and meshpage are related to the quality of the datasets that you're going to render. If the dataset sucks, then will also your rendering. Basically the "automatic" conversions from one data structure to another cannot increase the dataset quality. It can only decrease the quality. Thus the only way to get hígh-quality datasets is via importing external data or via input devices such as mouse/tablet etc. And generally it takes significant amount of work to get high quality datasets.
My claim is that builder tool is easier to use than blender and thus easier to get high-quality datasets.
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And since you've got zero users you've got no proof that this is "easier" to use than Blender. Hell, you even have to use an algorithm to make it look like you've produced more animations than you've actually made. By your own admission. If I have to do something extra just to make it look like I've done more work, how is that "easier"? Your arguments just don't hold water.
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Blender has whole community helping them create the stuff. I'm just one person. This means that my stuff easier to use by factor 1/N, where N is blender's community size.
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Well, your pathetic attempt to use corporate gobbledygook aside, are you seriously attempting to claim that your stuff is easier to use because you're the only one using it? Your basis is that Blender has a larger community of users? In that case, if we were to say that Blender's community size is 10,000 strong, Meshpage is... one ten-thousandth easier to use than Blender. That makes it harder to use than Blender, not the other way round. Fam, a programmer who doesn't know how math works is not the best look for you.
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Yes, I working alone can get 170 animations done, but average blender user cannot get a 3d model to the screen yet... clearly easier to use.
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Nah, the average Blender user can export their demo reels to places where people care. While you still have to struggle to get one user that's not yourself. Again, a programmer with terrible math skills like yours is a pathetic look.
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Can your program produce the likes of Big Buck Bunny at 4K resolution? or Sintel here in 1080p?
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Nobody's going to waste time on a tech offering that even the creator himself admits is mediocre.
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You still haven't shown what is your alternative solution to getting 3d models to a web page...
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A person doesn't need to be a Michelin-starred chef to say a meal tastes terrible. A person doesn't need to be a lawyer to point out that a cop who shoots someone fleeing while unarmed committed a crime. A person doesn't need to be a brain surgeon to suggest that an open wound that's large enough will lead to a high chance of dying.
Seriously, you're so allergic to criticism and feedback that the only thing you can do in the face of critique is to deflect, run, and desperately pray that everyone who criticizes you gets arrested for crimes that you imagined. That's not an accomplishment. That's sad.
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You still didn't mention what is your alternative solution to getting 3d models to a web page...
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You can keep repeating this sad little insecure mantra, Tero. It's not going to help you corner the market away from Blender, or get your government to pay you. Other people have plenty of experience, skill, and resources to get 3d models to a webpage, without your intervention.
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Why is it then so difficult to mention which solution you'd use if you wanted 3d models to a web page? It would help me compare my solution to the "established" and other available competitors, if you'd actually provide the information which solution works for that purpose.
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Try Thangs for 3d printable models. What to do is easily discoverable as it is the standard left mouse.
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A couple reasons:
It's not my responsibility to do your homework for you. If you want to find out why 3D modelers and artists aren't using your software, go to an actual community and get their feedback instead of shitposting here every time a game developer makes an openly bad decision. Though I doubt you'll find many friends once it's clear that you think porn producers should sue grandmothers because they think they're not rich enough.
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The value is not coming from "what you add" to the product. The value comes from "what you remove"...
If you remove ways to break copyright with the product, the product will be more robust as a result.
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I can violate copyright with Notepad++. How would that application be “more robust” if its core functionality — word processing — was stripped out because said functionality could allow someone to violate copyright? Please note that “it could have a copyright database” or anything along those lines is not an answer.
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Well, if pirates are the only people using your word processor, maybe the design of the application was broken. Every feature has "advantages" and "disadvantages". Word processor have advantages that "you can edit text files", and disadvantages "copy-paste allows taking someone else's work without paying for it".... Then word processor developers just need to provide easy way to attach money to the copy-pasted text, and build a system to pass along those money amounts to the actual authors of the material.
But would you trust the money to a middleman? If text editor requires every copy-paste operation to move money around, would you trust the middleman to actually pay the author, or is it going to endless chest of the middleman?
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You made two mistakes here:
You assume only pirates use Notepad++; and
Neither is true. You, of all people — who had to be told you were violating copyright! — should know how easy one can violate copyright via unintentional ignorance.
Modern word processors live and die on the functionality you would turn into a goddamned microtransaction. Being able to copy-paste text, regardless of the source, is what keeps people from having to re-type entire parts of a document in a different place. Remove that functionality and “pirates” won’t suffer…but ordinary people will.
As others have pointed out, your proposals for copyright checks are a logistical impossibility. Here, your proposal becomes outright insanity. A full-text database of every written work still under copyright somewhere in the world that could be checked in the blink of an eye is an impossibility. A microtransaction version of copy-paste that functions as a collection agency, with no guarantee that the payments will be given to the appropriate parties? That is so far beyond impossible that you’re getting into “you would need all six Infinity Stones to make this a thing” territory.
Oh, and one more mistake you made: If copy-paste functions were to become a microtransaction, you would’ve needed to pay me for copy-pasting part of my comment into yours. For all your handwringing about “pirates” and stopping copyright infringement, even you couldn’t resist infringing on the automatic copyright granted to my comment by the Berne Convention. (Fair Use is a defense, not a right.) You’re no better than the “pirates” you decry, save for the fact that you have a defense for your infringement.
And since you failed to directly answer the question, I’m going to copy-paste myself (and pay myself for the privilege): How would a word processor application be “more robust” if its core functionality — word processing — was stripped out because said functionality could allow someone to violate copyright?
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If the middleman is not able to collect the money and pass it to appropriate parties, then it's responsibility of YOU to find the original author of the material and pass the money to them. Copyright law requires this pattern, by requiring that the copyrighted material is not copied without permission to do so. When you used your text editor and the author of the editor application is not ready to collect the money, it is your responsibility to find a way to pass the money to the original author.
Sometimes doing this operation is more burdensome than you're willing to spend for it. But then you're not allowed to use the piece of text at all. The usage of the text piece outside of the area where proper licensing has been arranged, is forbidden by the copyright laws.
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Still not an answer to my question, but when have you ever directly answered a question I’ve posed with an answer that is wholly on-point.
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No, it's not. It's truly, genuinely not.
I'd recommend looking up collection societies for musicians, but everyone here already knows you're fucking terrible at doing your own research, so I'll just provide a summary. Even the middlemen you consider responsible for distributing money to artists can't be bothered most of the time. At best they'll give money to the Top 10% of artists and keep the rest for themselves. Or in some examples, they'll happily spend that money on prostitutes.
That's never bothered your copyright heroes, like the Icelandic MPAA who ran pirated software on their systems.
Seriously, Tero, this shit isn't hard. You're picking a scummy hill to die on.
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Obviously all the scumbags gather in techdirt.
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Richard Bennett, John Smith, out_of_the_blue, Technopolitical, antidirt, darryl, Lostinlodos, Seedeevee, Restless94110, Tero Pulkinnen... copyright certainly generates no shortage of scumbags like you.
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You do not need copy/paste for infringement, it is possible to copy other peoples works using a pen.
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Same way, you do not need to build automated system for checking for infringements, when you can do the checking manually using old fashioned hard labor... Hiring some cheap mexicans to do your dirty work is perfectly viable plan.
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500 hours plus a minute of videos released to YouTube, which is only a fraction of the new content released per minute on the Internet. Manual checking is just not possible, especially as the type of work does not divide up copyrighted works in that any type or work, video/audio/image/written, can infringe on any other type of work. Throw in translations between languages, and you should see the impossibility of checking or copyright infringement.
Only the labels/ studios and other old school publishers would consider checking to be possible, but then they only ever publish a small fraction of works, and only consider checking against the works that they have the copyright on.
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Of course manual checking is possible. They can always cut down the amount of material they publish. In fact, our position is that publishing large amount of material is equivalent of copyright infringements, because lack of checking means that infringing material slips past the publish-gate. Basically the platform is taking unnecessary risk of copyright infringement when they let large amount of material flow past publish-gate without proper manual checking of the material. Suing them is possible with this level of risk in the operation, even if there wasn't any real proof of actual infringement happening.
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That is you once again claiming that the only way you can have success is by stopping others, and ignoring the rules you would apply to others as you self check you own output.
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This is how copyright and markets work. Basically copyright law requires that authors try to reach their audience by making works available for consumption and offering them in various places. The audience need to reach authors by finding legal ways to purchase the content. I.e. both sides of the equation need to ensure that copyrighted works are properly consumed, and pirate sites/vendors do not get large foothold from the world.
What you call "stopping others", actually means "reaching authors from the world".. Basically you need to think that there's a minefield of pirated content between you and the owners of the copyright, and you need to avoid the mines to reach the authors. Make it a game of minesweeper. At every content item, you need to evaluate the copyright status of that work, and reject the work if it is infinging someone elses rights. Then move to next location, until you reach the authors.
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This all sounds like an actual argument until you consider what Tero Pulkinnen has proposed in the past: he wants older legal products to be destroyed because his stuff can't survive the standards of the free market. Nobody believes the kind of lies you peddle, Pukeface.
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Is that why both you and your tech failed to check that you were using someone else's 3D model as a part of your tech reel?
Sadly for your wet dreams that's not how the law works. But let's say it did, in which case you'd be a prime target for Unreal to sue you over copying their interface without actually needing to prove that you did.
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At least my tech survived even while it failed. I.e. I managed to fix the problem immediately after the problem was found, and it wouldn't cause big problems for content owners.
Well, unreal happens to be one of the main players who actually have good chance of suing our ass. This is because both my tech and their tech is using some c++ feature designed for enabling node graphs to control how the software works. How copyright handles this situation is that there's requirements for originality before copyright is allowed, and in this case the space where solutions are found is too limited that copyright simply does not apply for it. Same way, two subway maps might look similar if they both represent the same underlying subway system, even if the maps were independently created.
In this case, the software was independently created, but in such way that the end result still cannot survive the regular comparision tests of the copyright laws.
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Nothing you’ve developed is important to either the broader 3D modelling/rendering community or building designers. They all have programs for their given trades. Many of those programs existed before you ever thought of yours. Those communities don’t need you to help them; if anything, they probably don’t even know you exist.
Everything you said in that comment makes you sound like you’re the only person standing between 3D modelling/rendering programs and the nonexistence thereof. You’re not. Teams of people — some small, some large — work on those programs. You don’t, and your death wouldn’t affect their work.
The world will keep going after you die, even if you think it shouldn’t. The same goes for me — at least I have the courage to say that. So stop complaining that nobody is giving you a mansion and a blowjob for making something nobody uses/needs to use. Nothing makes a person look worse than wondering why the world isn’t kissing their ass.
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Ah, the usual "if it wasn't for my work nobody cares about, all of you would be criminals" excuse. Because Tero Pulkinnen simply cannot fathom any scenario where people would do anything besides use his outdated tech or resort to vandalism.
I'll just say that Blender is still being developed, benefits more people than you could ever hope to, and frankly if you actually became a spray-painting vandal that might actually be an improvement.
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Well, I have friends in irc who are not very interested in developing games. Since I'm the only one around that has any gaming related assets available, I can use "we" (the people) as a group-think kind of feature.
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Or people can simply regard you as having a deluded god complex instead as a more accurate representation of reality.
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Using “we” to represent a group of people who aren’t doing anything to help you develop games is delusional. Also I’m surprised — IRC? I would’ve thought you would’ve developed your own method of “teleporting alphabets”.
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Nah, he probably talks to himself. That way he can claim that there's zero users and thus there are no bug reports to make.
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You are using it as what I think people should think, and as usual you are largely wrong.
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Re: Steam has history of rejecting valid games....
Is this really relevant anymore with Steam Direct, Valve's replacement for Greenlight, which probably doesn't have this "waiting period" due to it's nature as a "direct" process. Mind you, they still probably give you a similar contract, but I assume you can disclose your specific grievances because you have no plains to release games on Steam at all in the future.
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That $20k could've paid for systems to sell the game from their own website, where they could include the content they wanted without bending to the whim of capricious censors.
Wouldn't have to give Valve a 30% cut of revenue, either.
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Pornography isn't allowed on Steam they say, forgetting pages of listings for games that are exactly that...and in some cases little more.
I wonder what the devs of Huniepop had to go through, since they were pretty clear about the second installment being uncensored everywhere except GOG for which there is a "patch".
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Yet another reason why we need more competition in the online application market. Not that I expect Epic or Apple to allow pornographic games ever, but Steam is supposed to be the gold standard of openness and yet even they cannot be consistent.
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Wait...
They don't allow pornography?
pulls up his own steam library
we have two games from the Taimanin series, Breeders of the Nephelym, pact with a witch, spiral clicker, yes master, Crush Crush, Hunnie Pop. Hunnie Pop 2, HunnieCam Studio... but the one that is most telling? SinVR exists. Which is basically a VR bordello.
This isn't just uneven enforcement, this is litterally either such under-enforcement as to be useless, or, such singled out enforcement that they would be more honest to say 'we don't want you in particular on our platform.'
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Reading comprehension my friend. As stated in the article, Steam used to ban porn. (context you might be familiar with: Hunnie pop used to be censored to lewds and still is on GOG, and you had to restore the nudes content by modding for this reason) Steam supposedly took a hands off approach a few years ago. Steam is defining this game as porn without nude content at this point, which is why this is getting written up.
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Steam doesn't allow porn games involving real people
The game was dead on Steam from the get-go. Steam doesn't allow nude depictions of real people.
My guess would be to prevent lawsuits when actors/actresses change their minds later, or revenge porn accusations.
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The section is called "rules and guidelines", but doesn't include a single rule that I can see. The list is of things that one "shouldn't publish", not things one is forbidden to publish. Are they in fact rules, or are there unlisted circumstances in which it's okay to violate the guidelines?
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Clarity is truly needed.
As the article states clearly, Valve is free to run its platform however they see fit. But the problem here is one of clarity. If you are a developer and want to get your game on steam, (Steam being THE dominant platform on the PC market makes it basically a necessity for having any chance at success.) Their guidelines MUST be clear enough to prevent cases like this to happen.
More importantly a functioning mechanism for working with developers to either bring the game to compliance. Absent this they need to be far less opaque and clearly explain WHY a game will never be accepted beyond a generic "its pornography" so devs can know where they stand. (Ideally early enough in development to prevent devs from spending a small fortune trying to comply with a platform that never intended to allow them anyway.
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Techdirt on Big Tech: "Banning anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky is good an proper."
Techdirt on companies refusing to host porn: "Noooooo!!!!"
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I wonder if Steam's thinking is that "this particular game is more likely to be noticed by the wider public and garner for us some politically convenient opprobrium which will cause us large headaches". I wouldn't know how one decides such things, but could it be that this is a motivation, or is it just your average inconsistent bureaucratic capriciousness?
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