Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
from the Nintendon't dept
So, here's the thing: I get accused of picking on Nintendo a whole lot. But please know, it's not that I want to pick on them, it's just that they make it so damned easy to. I'm a golfer, okay? If I have a club in my hand and suddenly a ball on a tee appears before me, I'm going to hit that ball every time without hesitation. You will recall that a couple of years back, Nintendo opened up a new front on its constant IP wars by going after ROM and emulation sites. That caused plenty of sites to simply shut themselves down, but Nintendo also made a point of getting some scalps to hang on its belt, most famously in the form of RomUniverse. That site, which very clearly had infringing material not only on the site but promoted by the site's ownership, got slapped around in the courts to the tune of a huge judgement against, which the site owners simply cannot pay.
But all of those are details and don't answer the real question: why did Nintendo do this? Well, as many expected from the beginning, it did this because the company was planning to release a series of classic consoles, namely the NES mini and SNES mini. But, of course, what about later consoles? Such as the Nintendo 64?
Well, the answer to that is that Nintendo has offered a Nintendo Switch Online service uplift that includes some N64 games that you can play there instead.
After years of "N64 mini" rumors (which have yet to come to fruition), Nintendo announced plans to honor its first fully 3D gaming system late last month in the form of the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack. Pay a bit extra, the company said, and you'd get a select library of N64 classics, emulated by the company that made them, on Switch consoles as part of an active NSO subscription.
One month later, however, Nintendo's sales proposition grew more sour. That "bit extra" ballooned to $30 more per year, on top of the existing $20/year fee—a 150 percent jump in annual price. Never mind that the price also included an Animal Crossing expansion pack (which retro gaming fans may not want) and Sega Genesis games (which have been mostly released ad nauseam on every gaming system of the past decade). For many interested fans, that price jump was about the N64 collection.
So, a bit of a big price tag and a bunch of extras that are mostly besides the point from the perspective of the buyer. Buy, hey, at least Nintendo fans will finally get some N64 games to play on their Switch consoles, right?
Well, it turns out that Nintendo's offering cannot come close to matching the quality of the very emulators and ROMs that Nintendo has worked so hard to disappear. The Ars Technica post linked above goes into excruciating details, some of which we'll discuss for the purpose of giving examples, but here are the categories that Nintendo's product does worse than an emulator on a PC.
- Game options, such as visual settings for resolution to fit modern screens
- Visuals, such as N64's famous blur settings, and visual changes that expose outdated graphical sprites
- Controller input lag
- Controller configuration options
- Multiplayer lag/stutter
If that seems like a lot of problems compared with emulators that have been around for quite a while, well, ding ding ding! We'll get into some examples briefly below, but I'll stipulate that none of the issues in the categories above are incredibly bad. But there are so many of them that they all add up to bad!
Let's take the problems around how N64's blur is used, or not used in this case.
This issue rears its head much more often in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which avid speedrunner ZFG1 detailed at length in a seven-hour stream shortly after the NSO Expansion Pack went live. The pack's issues with inaccurate blur become immediately evident in that classic game's opening zone of Kakariko Village. In that zone, the looming Deku Tree normally hides in a massive field of fog above hero Link's head. In the current NSO version, on the other hand, the blur is absent, revealing an unseemly low-resolution sprite. Worse, Nintendo originally used selective fog placement as a way to guide players' attention towards points of interest in the village, yet these fogs have now been erased.
Anyone who's looked into the NSO Expansion Pack's launch has almost certainly seen ZFG1's most glaring discovery, as well: the game's Water Temple battle against a "shadow" version of Link, which takes place in a foggy, open-air zone surrounded by reflective water. On Switch, this room pares back the fog effect almost entirely. Worse, it fails to properly cast reflections on the water's surface, which changes the aesthetic tone of the subsequent, harrowing battle.
This sort of thing breaks immersion and the overall feel and flow of a game. And the Legend of Zelda example is not isolated.
As to the way controls are handled, well...
In Ocarina of Time and Star Fox 64, constant C-button access is imperative for proper control in ways that don't suit removing your fingers from the primary A and B action buttons. Yet instead of making those crucial C buttons available at all times, Nintendo bolts only two of them on the ABXY array. Players are then required to use an awkward shortcut system to access those buttons: hold the "ZR" button, which temporarily "shifts" the ABXY array to become the four C-button directions.
If this all strikes you as minor details not worth being upset over, I have two responses. First, you are probably not a huge fan of these classic Nintendo titles and systems, because these "minor" things represent a massive break from the experience you have in your head playing these games. Given that the sales pitch for this NSO uplift is all about nostalgia, that freaking matters!
And second, fans of these titles had a better product to give them what they wanted: the emulation sites Nintendo shut down. Granted, getting ROMs from those sites without owning the original certainly was/is infringing activity... but if Nintendo was going to slay the piracy dragon in favor of its own offering, that offering should at least be on par with the emulators, no?
Because in the end, here's the reality: Nintendo worked hard to prevent fans of antiquated games and systems from enjoying those games in order to get them to buy an inferior product. Love Nintendo, hate Nintendo, that's the stark reality. And it's a shitty look for a company.
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Filed Under: emulation, n64, nintendo switch, retro games, video games
Companies: nintendo
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Pirates yet again have the superior version
It all makes sense now, it wasn't so much that the ROM sites were providing competition in the available games so much as they'd allow people to see just how terrible the official offerings were compared to the unofficial ones and might have forced Nintendo to do more than the absolute bare minimum.
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Re: Pirates yet again have the superior version
"...it wasn't so much that the ROM sites were providing competition in the available games so much as they'd allow people to see just how terrible the official offerings were compared to the unofficial ones..."
...and that the happy amateur using the equivalent of spit and wire still presents a more functional version than the professionals who built the damn thing in the first place.
It really shouldn't come as a surprise. We should know by now that Copyright makes everything worse - like every other Red Flag Act designed to protect an industry from the hazards of competition.
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Re: Pirates yet again have the superior version
See, re, grand theft auto trilogy?
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Re: Re: Pirates yet again have the superior version
Ironic mention given the way the Red Flag Act did indeed "steal" the market from automotive manufacturers by protectionist legislation.
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One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
Why is zophar's domain still up? They don't distribute ROMs, they only distribute emulators and music from the games, yet Nintendo's Donkey-Kong-rampage against ROM sites didn't target them (despite them going after people who uploaded their music in the past; I'm not sure there's a good control case with emulators, though).
Why is that? Is Zophar next on the chopping block? Should they be worried?
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Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
To clarify:
means
as if that weren't painfully obvious.
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Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
SHH!!! Don't give them any ideas, damnit!
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Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
Because much as Nintendo blusters about emulators being illegal, their lawyers know they aren't.
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Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
Emulators are, under the betamax and Atari V Nintendo rulings, facially legal.
So long as the developers properly reverse engineered their codebase (unlike Atari which got ahold of the 10NES lockout chip object code illicitly), which emulators have, the emulator itself is not copyright infringement. It also presents significant legal uses for homebrew, and seemingly under various rulings so long as you legally own a copy of game, you are legally allowed to create a digital backup (absent a DRM-induced super copyright)
By not hosting ROMs or links to roms, (and probably enforcing a ban on the discussion of where to find ROMs on forums, if any, its been a while) Zophar's Domain doesn't provide the Nintendo had against RomUniverse. As I said, under a number of legal rulings, emulation is legal. And even if Nintendo thought they had a chance, Fighting Zophar's Domain would likely inspire the EFF or other interest group to provide legal defenses, and the last thing Nintendo wants is to push the point in court and lose in a clear case.
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Re: Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
Thank you for your explanation! Also, Emulators are good for my music, as they allow people to play back some of the songs I compose on the original hardware without actually owning the original hardware. So one doesn't need to sail the copyright infringement seas to have a reason to want emulators to exist. 😉
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Re: Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
"It also presents significant legal uses for homebrew"
Yeah, one thing that people always seem to forget is that people still develop for these platforms. They are naturally niche hobbyist markets aimed at a tiny fanbase, but they still exist, and you really don't want to start basing laws on mainstream fashions.
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Re: Re: Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
This is too often a problem with legislation these days, such as the rush to legislate targeting Facebook but would end up affecting the entire internet making Facebook the de facto internet as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Re: Re: Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
Hey, I buy a new Genesis FPS or RPG homebrew every few months. They come in real cartridges in real cases with real art and all.
And many are quite good!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
Have you heard of Tanglewood? I backed it on Kickstarter and it lived up to expectations! I even got a for-real Genesis cartridge that can play back on any Genesis or Mega Drive!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though
I prefer retrofreak. It allows me to use my real carts. It’s got firmer sockets than the original systems.
Yes, I know it’s a super micro android system.
Like I said it’s the best built cartridge ports I’ve come across.
Takes care to push them in perfect vertical, but there is no play in the connection like you have on consumer sockets.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, th
You can also purchase and then download the ROM from Steam. It'll play on any Sega Genesis/Mega Drive emulator as well as the Sega Genesis or Mega Drive itself with the help of a multi-cart.
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Re: One thing confuses me about Nintendo, though.
Likewise, RetroArch is still going strong, and is even available via Steam. And there's multiple front ends for libretro, and multiple back end cores feeding into libretro that provide N64 emulation such as paraLLEl N64 and Mupen64Plus, both of which run circles around what Nintendo has attempted to do -- and yes, they're available for use in RetroArch on the Switch for a direct comparison to Nintendo's own offering.
A neat thing about RetroArch is that someone's published the designs for producing your own N64 cartridge reader that plugs directly into RetroArch, so you can create the reader, plug it into a RetroPi, and immediately have a legal, sub-$100 console that'll play all your legitimate N64 cartridges, on a modern screen, properly upscaled with modern visual effects.
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Emulators are legal. It's been true for years the best way to play older classic Nintendo games is on a pc, you get a choice of resolution. Graphics options, also you can change the control button settings to buttons you prefer , most switch nes, n64 games have a limited control scheme which may not suit many gamers
And the emulators keep getting better all the time
Nintendo does not seem to like offering options to
Change remap buttons in games
And soon there will be a steam deck handheld console out which plays all steam games and
will compete with the switch
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The ‘work’ that Nintendo did on the N64 emulation and atuff was garbo, yes. But the continued revisionism of ROMUniverse as some innocent site is silly. The site had current Switch games, recent movies, and also eBooks for some reason, alongside a premium subscription option for unlimited downloads. To answer “why did Nintendo do this?” to ROMUniverse, it’s because the site was selling access to their recent games from their most recent console.
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What are you talking about, revisionism? Did you miss the bit of the article that said:
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Nobody here has ever acted like ROM Universe was “some innocent site”. Even back when that saga first began, numerous commenters (including myself) were showing little-to-no mercy to the site precisely because of its profit scheme. Those of us who knew the full details of the situation had no illusions of the site being “some innocent” ROM archive or whatever.
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"But the continued revisionism of ROMUniverse as some innocent site is silly."
Where in the sweet hell did you see THAT? I have a series of post on this very site slamming RomUniverse for being infringing d-bags....
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ROMUniverse is the well-known example, but Nintendo shut down more than RomUniverse. Indeed, most of the sites shut down were much more responsive to Nintendo's legal missives for over a decade. Journalists and opinion writers can never provide full context to years-long legal debates in a single article. They will reference an event and expect the reader to remember or look up the context that reference provides. So when Techdirt references "That caused plenty of sites to simply shut themselves down, but Nintendo also made a point of getting some scalps to hang on its belt, most famously in the form of RomUniverse." They use RomUniverse as a landmark for the events in question and expect you to take phrases like "That caused plenty of sites to simply shut themselves down" or "Nintendo also made a point of getting some scalps to hang on its belt" to remember all of the sites that shut down and the various discussions from the time. To position your complaints as though RomUniverse was the only site being discussed, and then to misrepresent what the article said about RomUniverse (which the article vary clearly positions in the legal wrong) is highly manipulative.
As I keep finding myself saying: you are discussing the legal argument, "Can Nintendo shut down ROMUniverse?" Of course they had the legal basis to do so.
Nintendo was perfectly happy to let rom sites stay up, sending occasional threats or DMCA claims for 1st party titles, but couldn't be bothered. ROMs didn't really threaten their business model. Despite the claims of switch piracy, 1st party Nintendo titles were breaking sales records for their series left and right. And it wasn't switch piracy that motivated this move. Switch piracy is an issue, but they didn't shut down switch piracy, they shut down any rom hosting at all, to the point sites that did not host switch content were shut down by notices or by the owners when Nintendo started going scorched earth.
This leads to the "should they" argument. The timing of the move and product releases suggests the big concern is emulation cannibalizing the subscription service. And now that we see the subscription service, it suggests they have long known they can't compete with the amateur emulation market. The drip of content on NES and SNES has already turned off some, and the horrible lag and visuals on the "expansion pack" makes NSO+ an objectively bad purchase (switch has every single sega game on offer in one retro release, and buying DLC outright is more cost effective than renting it for the 1 year minimum NSO+ buy in. Without N64, there is no good reason to purchase NSO+.)
Having engaged in the war with their fans, Nintendo may find the perennial fanbase doesn't renew the next time. Emulation provides an 'in' to the hobby that NSO+ can not provide. Emulation provides an easy way to capture gameplay and has helped the retro review, speedrun, and game design discussion communities thrive. Fighting game tournaments won't host Super Smash Brothers Ultimate because of Nintendo being overly litigious, which has hurt the excellent fighting game's presence. I wonder if I'll hear about it in the news now that all the fighters have been released.
This is about more than RomUniverse. As noted at the time, RomUniverse was upsetting because it was such an obviously bad set of facts that would set bad precedent. No, that case is just a guidepost. This is about the fanbase turning on nintendo (look at the NSO+ direct and the ratio), and a cornerstone of Nintendo's ongoing popularity and recent sales records (retro gaming) being eroded with seemingly no concern for the damage it might cause Nintendo itself.
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Re: Re:
RIP Vimm's Lair.
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Re: Re:
Which explains why I haven't gotten it yet. Fortunately, I have an N64 (as in the real thing) which I never gave up or sold, so at least I have some legal alternatives.
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Given the state of the emulation, one could argue that even with N64 games, no one has a good reason to purchase NSO+.
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Re:
I would indeed be one to make that argument. NSO is worth it. NSO+? Not so much.
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Re: Re:
? Title?
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Re:
Who's revising? This very fine article pointed out that they had it coming and were doing obviously illegal things -- and that they've been punished by fines the people involved will never be able to pay off in their lifetimes.
Your point is good though: ROMUniverse went further than other sites by distributing Nintendo's currently for-sale properties for personal gain. I can't really see how they expected to AVOID being taken down.
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Well I guess the "common wisdom" that Nintendo locks things down so they can offer the best versions can finally get a pin stuck in it.
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If only Nintendo had worked as hard on their in-house emu...
Just saying, Nintendo's legal side should not be the part where they dump the most effort. People might be generally dumb but most will still notice when product is THIS bad even if they snuff out emulation.
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Pirates can always offer better product than what you can create yourself, since they can pick the best products from the market. Whoever creates his own content is always locked to one product only, and if it turns out to be poor quality, jumping to another product simply isn't possible.... Pirates not only are doing this illegally, but they can always produce better product than those who are actually paying proper price... I.e. the price of genuine product is always higher too.
So choosing genuine product, you get poor quality and higher price.
But that's what you pay for not having to become criminal.
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Re:
Expected to see the Finnish failure foam at the mouth to defend screwing over customers, was not disappointed.
So if pirates can always offer the better product why isn't there a better version of Meshpage?
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Re: Re:
In order for a product to be pirated, there first has to be an unfulfilled demand for the product.
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Re: Re: Re:
This statistics from itch.io shows strong demand for my product:
https://tpgames.org/itch_statistics.png
Someone actually viewed the page every day, and then finally downloaded it.
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
Tero, Tero, Tero. Here is a link to my latest EP Tomoyo-San in Another World on bandcamp. It came out last October with a preorder five months before that. So far, I made six US dollars on that EP which had three extremely short tracks. The EP is also licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license. I'd be kidding if I said I'm raking in the dough, yet to my knowledge, you're making a serious argument that your product has "high demand" that one person downloaded your program which has DRM which made fewer sales than my EP which has a sharable creative commons license.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
This statistics only show what happened this week...
Obviously I have total of 2189 views and 413 downloads, but the trend is downward for older products. $6 is the total revenue.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Obviously I have total of 2189 views and 413 downloads, but the trend is downward for older products. $6 is the total revenue.
So you've made the same amount of money for DRM'd Meshpage as I did for a CC-licensed 3-song EP I released 33 days ago? Okay.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Yes, all the money I received for it, came during first 30 days of operation.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Then isn't this a confession that © is irrelevant to one's success if I could do the same with my works, which are shareable?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
No, I still have option to sue the pirates. You left out that option.
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By your own admission, your software has no users. We can thus safely assume nobody has pirated your software. That means you have no one to sue, since no infringement has occured and you lack standing to sue for any other reason (including your imagined right to a mansion paid for by your government).
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Re:
Copyright owners need to prepare for all the possible alternatives, including copyright infringements. Even if it doesn't happen today, the situation could be different in 3 years or something.
I can always sue the neighbours for loud noises, or shopkeeper for not providing magic wands, or restaurant for selling steak with a fly in it, or tier/voi scooters for making their scooters not survive stone impacts.
This is a long term project. I only expect this plan to activate when I get retired, so there's still like 20 years of time left before that plan is relevant. But proper beforehand preparation is the key to getting plans up and running.
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Re: Re:
Like your friends at Malibu Media, whose principals recently were at risk of being arrested for refusing to pay lawyer's fees for a defendant they lost against?
None of this actually helps you sell your software, mind you. I would actually like to see you sue a shop for not having imaginary wands.
If your plan only starts to make you money after you retire, i.e. you stop working at all, why are you angry that we're not giving you money now, when that's literally your intended plan?
What you have is not nearly what anyone would call "proper beforehand preparation".
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Lawsuits cost legal fees. Besides, as Stephen pointed out, if you only made $6, how can you prove in a court of law that people are pirating your work?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
If someone actually pirated my work, proving it for a court is very trivial operation. You can do it in many ways:
1) file names
2) screen shots
3) videos of animations
4) script format
5) displayed logos/progressbars
6) distributed zip files
etc. tons of different ways to prove copyright infringement.
The $6 money amount is not an issue, it can even be used to prove damages of their piracy operation.
It's known fact that settlements are bringing in like 100 times more money than actually licensing copyrighted works to actual clients.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Have you ever done any of this in a court of law? Or are you speculating and hypothesizing?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
No. All my information comes from reading other people's experiences/riaa-related-paperwork with suing pirates... But you can't be a master of content creation, if you don't have an option to sue pirates.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
There's a ginormous gap in demand between the music sold on major labels and meshpage. I mean, you can measure it in light years.
So, Jonathan Coulton and Cory Doctorow are terrible? Fuck you. They're awesome.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
They're probably using millions of dollars for marketing their product to real customers. My marketing budget is a little bit smaller than that.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Now you're getting it. See, that has more to do with how successful a product is rather than ©.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Marketing budget does not have anything to do with how successful the product is among customers.
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Good thing you don’t have customers to worry about.
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This very same thread has proof available that at least one end user downloaded the product.
So there's at least one customer to worry about, so your statement is just broken.
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You know how I said that I made $6 on bandcamp from one album? 0% of them downloaded the album (I assume they will listen on Spotify or wherever). So that means I have 100% less customers to worry about. I also upload my album to the internet archive, and people can share as they please. I would only be concerned if
And yet I made as much money as you did. Fancy that!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"My marketing budget is a little bit smaller than that"
Well, it would have been much higher if you'd have consulted anyone with an ounce of sanity before you wasted it all on a campaign that people are still laughing about here years later. But, alas...
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Sorry to double post, but…
this really bugs me because Anamanaguchi are fantastic and beloved by the likes of Porter Robinson, Herman Li, Rivers Cuomo, and Flux Pavilion (and they're friends of mine), and most of their music is Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives.
Then there's Trent Reznor, who is now doing music for Hollywood movies and TV shows. Seriously, TP (for my bunghole), not even Hollywood agrees with that statement, which shows how delusional you are.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Having an "option" to sue is always a good thing. It remains to be seen if its ever necessary to use that option.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I disrespecfully disagree. Suing people for sharing my copyrighted work creates ill will among fans, who will then pirate out of spite. Waiving that part of © for my work is a genuine sign of good will towards people who like my work. Not only that, but the fact that I made the same amount of money giving that up on my work (for that particular work) that you made on Meshpage shows that maybe I don't need litigation to make money.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I used to have my work available for free with permissible licenses, but sadly internet misuses the trust that I can provide. When they misuse the github availability of the software source code, these miuses cause them to lose ability to see the github repo. And since they were not careful enough to limit their misuse to reasonable area, the world lost permissible license too. It took a while to get content inserted by Stallman removed from the project, but the end result more accurately reflects the current reality in the internet.
Basically when internet misuses the provided features, they're going to lose access to them.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Two things.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"If what was being done with your work was permissible within the license, then what's the problem?"
This seems to be where part of his disconnect is. His initial success appears to have been with some kind of embedded code where he was the master of his domain and he controlled the entire pipeline without collaboration. He's found it extraordinarily difficult to move to a domain where collaboration is key, and he has to consider the requirements of end users above and beyond his own desires.
Basically, he wants to be able to create his code, and then control both what other people do with the code and how people use the complied utility. Then, blames everyone else for this being impossible in modern reality.
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"Basically, he wants to be able to create his code, and then control both what other people do with the code and how people use the complied utility. Then, blames everyone else for this being impossible in modern reality."
Mmmh, yeah, tp is just that sort of guy. Logic and causal reality don't agree with him and so he tries to argue them into obedience by shitposting on tech forums.
Or we could look back to the bit where he admitted to being a troll and realize his only motive around here is to spam the thread asunder. Arguably that does do more towards shutting our side of the debate up than trying to argue in good faith given that every fact keeps backing us.
At this point I wish people would just realize that tp is that guy you give a total of three replies at most, then just flag and ignore for the troll he is - because scrolling down five pages of spam is annoying even if all his comments have become flagged into hiding.
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He's the sort of guy I like poking at because even within his own invented reality there's no logical consistency. It makes a change from other arguments where people really have drunk the Trump / QAnon kool aid and think that a failed con artist is going to solve all their problems just so long as we destroy the foundations of democracy to give them what they want, that people can be truly free so long as we hold social media platforms responsible for things other people do, that climate change will go away if we just ignore it, or various other political issues.
Sad to say, the mocking of someone whose online persona is of someone who cannot deal with verifiable reality is a nice break.
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basically using github repo to bash the product isn't technically against the license, but its also not valid use case for github repo that was publicly available for purposes of customization, modification or recompiling the binaries for multiple platforms etc... Basically misuse in a github repo for undeserved critique is not acceptable use of the feature. If they want to publish critique, they should write articles about the features that are included in the product, not take the source code and boast about indentation practices.
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So nothing they did was actually illegal. You're just angry because it's not.
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"I used to have my work available for free with permissible licenses"
Depending on what those licences were, it's likely that anyone who was interested in any of your code could have legally forked it and continued working on it under a different project. It's really not a good sign of the quality of the code if nobody wanted to do that.
"these miuses cause them to lose ability to see the github repo"
You... do realise that doing that didn't revoke the licences, right? As in, anyone who cloned the repo before you locked it up but hasn't deleted it yet can probably push it to a new repo and there's nothing you can do about it? because you gave them permission to do it under the terms of the original licence that was granted at the time?
"It took a while to get content inserted by Stallman removed from the project"
Translation: you've spent so much time pointlessly rewriting the functionality of the FOSS code you originally based your project on that it's now hilariously dated, and pointless in comparison to the original projects, that have been fully maintained and updated by thousands of people in the meantime?
"Basically when internet misuses the provided features, they're going to lose access to them."
OK, then they will move to programs with those features available according to their needs. You might, at a long stretch, manage to get away with this stuff with your games, but there's no chance it will happen when the supposed reason for your utility software is to allow others to create.
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Target market for the software (for creating new stuff) is children smaller than high school level, so I don't really expect the target group participants care much about which license I offer the material. Basically the license issues and free software and all the riaa/mpaa horror comes afterwards.
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Wait, elementary to junior high children is your target demographic? They'd be more interested in Roblox or Minecraft (and can create awesome stuff therein). You're bonkers if you think you can compete with them out of all companies.
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Well, i just offered the product to some mom of children who wanted ps5 for birthday, and they received links to meshpage and builder, but then didn't forget ps5 either. Guess we'll see soon which one stays longer, ps5 or urls to my website.
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I'm not a betting man, but this time...
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The PS5 may not be around as long as your website, but it will certainly be far more successful than you and your website have ever been or ever will be.
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"will"? I'd say it already is telling by how much it's out of stock!
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This is, of course, ignoring the fact that copyright fans like Tero Pulkinnen and out_of_the_blue have such distaste for games and gamers, they regularly complain that gamers would be vandalizing public property if copyright and coding didn't exist. They want stronger copyright enforcement for games, but they absolutely don't want games to be developed.
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"Guess we'll see soon which one stays longer, ps5 or urls to my website."
The ps5 is likely to generate hundreds of millions in margins before it is supplanted by a ps6 which will continue to generate hundreds of millions in margins.
You, on the other hand, measure "success" by for how long something is around? If that's your kpi for the success of a venture may I suggest you take up rock carving?
But take that suggestion with a grain of salt. There may be runestones and steles still standing a millennium or more after creation but in your case pot odds are your contemporaries will make sure they're buried or broken up as the neolithic equivalent of spammy shitposting.
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Remember that Tero has also stated that in order for new products to make it to market, older products need to be destroyed along with the public domain so tech support doesn't have to be provided for older products.
So based on his logic, the more "successful" Meshpage is, the more it deserves to be destroyed. I have to say, it's funny as fuck when copyright trolls do my work for me by shooting their own arguments.
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That old version of the repo is still available in sourceforge. But its several years old wth noone updating the code, so its hopelessly outdated compared to the current github version.
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The fact that no one has touched your code in years despite its availability should tell you something—and it’s not “my product is so good that no one wants to mess with perfection”.
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yes, it tells me that the people are lazy. Just like you are. You didn't even pass the very basic tests I had designed for high school level children. Basically you couldn't even get a cube to the screen with my technology, and as such, you're unable to place valid critique to the technology. Basically all your messages are not worth a damn, because you fail to do proper research on the subject before spouting your opinion.
the capablities of the technology are way beyond displaying a cube, but still techdirt has noone who is able to get cube done.
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U Mad bro?
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you can always prove me wrong by gettng a cube done
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that is easily solved by downloading blender.
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There is a requirement to do it with the meshpage and gameapi builder. Otherwise your submission isn't acceptable.
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Um, why would I want to use your shitty program when I could do it much more efficiently in Blender which–unlike Meshpage–is free both as in speech and beer?
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Well, f you use my program, you gain ability to send real critique of the technology. If you only use blender, your critique must target only blender and you cannot say anything about how bad my technology is. This kind of ability to send real critique should be extreamly valuable for your trolling...
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The fact that someone would prefer to use Blender rather than Meshpage is, itself, a critique of Meshpage. If you could demonstrate that your program is better than (or at least as good as) Blender, you wouldn’t get “I’d rather use Blender” comments—you’d get an actual userbase.
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When they haven't tried the technology, their critique has no teeth.
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How about a demonstration, then? If you can prove that Meshpage does a better job than blender, you'll prove yourself, get a userbase and the people currently making fun of you will owe you huge apologies for doubting you.
Now? My magic 8-ball says "Outlook not so good", and I doubt it's referring to the Microsoft email program.
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my tech demonstration is always available at https://tpgames.org/builder_green4_example.webm
you can find it from faq if needed.
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Congratulations, you made CGI that would look out of place even in the early 1990s. Bra-fucking-vo.
Now make something that looks like it came from 2021, why don’tcha.
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yeah, but you cant do the same thing with blender...
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One could do that, if they were so inclined. That most Blender users aren’t inclined to do that isn’t an indictment of Blender, but an acknowledgement that the average Blender user wants to make something more advanced than the CGI found in the first Golgo 13 animated feature.
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If you spent a tenth as much time working as you do bitching. People might actually want to use whatever stupid bullshit it is, that you keep complaining no one wants to use.
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I actually did the work before arriving to this place. Now I just sell air to people who doesn't bother to check the featuresets that are available. All the extra work is not really helping since YOU as users don't even bother to check them out. How is that "working" actually contributing to the end result, if users don't even bother to check out the existing features?
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"I actually did the work before arriving to this place"
Strange, since that implies you haven't done any work on it for years.
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I don't know where you get your implications from, but the statement doesn't seem to hold. Maybe check your logic rules.
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What it means is that you haven't worked at developing Meshpage further since you decided that trolling a website by defending convicted felons abusing copyright law was a great career move.
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Now, let's be fair. When he first decided coming here it was to whine that notch had made a lot of money selling Minecraft to Microsoft and that the government owed him a similar sized mansion because he thought that it was unfair that his bus adverts failed to produce sales.
The defending copyright abusers and inventing his own parameters for what he thought copyright should be came after everyone laughed at him, or at least that's my recollection.
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The admitting that he was a "professional troll" like Malibu Media was something he'd only done after he was dumb enough to create a user account, true. He'd already been here around... 2015? Trying to shill his product using the url field of the "Add a Reply" function with his brand of non-comprehension.
Funnily enough, Malibu Media themselves came very close to being arrested about a week ago. One can dream.
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[Projects facts not in evidence]
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A few things:
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oh, I almost forgot:
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My own experience is that 10-15 year olds can read "amiga hardware reference manuals" and write assembler code and high school level kids can write compete computer games released in real publisher (with amiga)... While the tech environment has slightly changed after amiga times, I simply cannot assume that high school level kids are alot more stupider than what we did when we were young. If you have trouble understanding meshpage, then maybe you're not in correct area of expertise.
I used to be young too. And whlie I understand that young people have challenges with learning all the necessary technologies, I simply cannot declare them idiots simply because internet thinks the technologies are not suitable for that young people.
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"While the tech environment has slightly changed after amiga times"
That's one hell of an understatement, but I understand your insanity slightly more now that you're revealed that you think the game industry is the same as it was 30 years ago.
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Your experience is not universal.
That you still think Amiga is a worthwhile reference point for any reasonable benchmark of modern technology is…well, it’s a laughable idea, which is the kindest statement I can make on that matter. (It might also explain why you think late ’80s/early ’90s CGI is the highest possible achievement for Meshpage.)
Didn’t you say you were marketing Meshpage towards preteens now? 🤔
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Hey! Amiga OS final was updated THIS YEAR and WB4v8 came out last December
Poke the troll, not hardware people still love!
Lol 🤪
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When people have seen what Meshpage is capable of compared to Blender, they don’t need to try Meshpage to know Blender is better.
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Blender is also significantly more expensive, given that they had a whole team writing software for over 15 years...
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It’s literally free to download and modify, as it is an open source program.
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I allow downloading freely too. And you're not able to do any meaningful modifications given that you cannot even get a cube done with the technology.
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Blender is open source and has a large community base for support. Meshpage is essentially closed source and has one singular dickhead for support.
Try and guess which program the average person would use. (Here's a small hint: IT'S NOT MESHPAGE.)
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It doesnt help at all when those people are lazy ones who cannot get cube done...
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You’re obsessed with cubes in a world where people are using Blender to render full-body character models. Grow the fuck up, Tero.
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I don't care what "people" can do. It's YOU who is unable to get simple cube done.
You probably cant even get cube done with blender, given that you're lazy even after blender team spent 15 years with optimizing their technology.
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If I downloaded Blender right now and started using it with little-to-no prior training, I probably could get a cube done. But I’m not going to do that, because:
I have no interest in 3D modeling, either as a hobby or a career; and
Insulting me as a way of goading me into doing something that you apparently can’t get done won’t make me do it for you. You want a cube done in Blender? Do it yourself. I’m not your slave, your employee, or your bitch.
Grow the fuck up, Tero.
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yes, you're just lazy like I predicted at the beginning of the thread... we could have saved tons of internet social space if you had admitted from the beginning that you're just lazy.
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Calling me “lazy” isn’t going to make me download Blender and render a cube for you, asshole. Grow the fuck up.
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This kind of stuff just leads to the obvious conclusion is that you're all hot air. Your critique has no teeth, because you don't bother to test the technologies that you talk about. You don't even know how blender works even though you have been praising it like its 2nd coming of jesus. But given that you haven't tested either of the technologies, anything you say about them can be dismissed as just false statements lacking any ground truths.
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No, I haven’t. I’ve been calling it “better than Meshpage”, which is true. Comparisons between the output you’ve made in Meshpage and the output others have made in Blender—numerous examples of which are all over the Internet—back up my opinion.
Before what you’re doing was called “negging”, it was called “reverse psychology”, and incels didn’t invent it, Bugs Bunny did. You’re not going to make me use Meshpage or Blender by insulting me, Tero. Grow the fuck up.
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It's better to compare output of one person to output of another "one person"... Basically comparing output of one person to output of whole country or whole community is just showing your reasonablessness.. Basically what makes you do it is google's search. They made their technology work in such way that people need to "find technologies" and "reject large number of them" by "comparing their output to the output of the whole country"....
Basically I could claim that blender cannot do a real tank, even though finnish army has several real tanks available. And that would be always true statement recardless of the features that blender has. I don't even need to look at blenders featureset to know that it cannot simply create a real tank.
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Er, um, actually…!
By exporting blender renderings as a series of abstract grid coordinates via a modified svg collection rather than video, you could feed those into a CAM system capable of translating it to physical grid points for 3D manufacturing.
Now if you did that via a small scrypt using a macro or key binding within blender…
Blender makes a real tank.
I’m not taking sides here. Btw. But you may want to think through your argument a bit better.
On my he other hand, has anyone seen a rotating cube produced with blender? Just asking.
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Your process has a magic box in it which does something magical which you haven't told what it actually does or who can manufacture such boxes. And even if someone could manufacture such a magic box, that's anyway outside of blender. I.e. blender cannot do it.
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?
Huh?
I figured someone capable of co-writing software would understand what CAD/CAM/CAP was.
There’s no “magic” here.
Note: your program could do this too!
Without getting too technical, and admitting this is outside my area so I’ll probably miss something.
3D animation is no different then 2D other than adding the appearance of depth. So moving from blender to a tank has a few extra steps. After which the process is the same as CAD to CAP. And ultimately CAM.
Step one. Using secondary model abstraction we request the absolute grid points based on a pre fed set of dimensions. Then we render the model component within those dimensional points.
We export each of those design parts as tagged SVGx.
We use the machine’s (your OS of choice, Win in your case), PS driver to then translate those SVGx to PSPC and output it over serial to the production processor, which is part of a manufacturing system.
Now, we can head over to a scrypt program, I like Martin but that’s Mac/BSD, or notepad++ in your case and write up a command operation for export location and sort order. A standard TDV table should work well.
We then create a load, print (send) operation. Called print. That will send the data to the serial output.
Now we create a master scrypt to run those two scrypts in order.
We can then use an interjection in the source of blender to call the master script when choosing a predefined output option.
So blender, via Save As, would directly be the source for creating a tank.
You could even get fancy and send operation instructions to the assembly system if it supports aHO.
But personally I’d prefer to walk down to the factory floor and push the start button.
Thing is I’ve seen demos of people using blender to make 3D printed objects. And just about every other 3DAni program.
Now you could argue that it’s not accurate in that the “printer” is not part of the program. But then I’d argue the program itself is not a single item but a large collection of of individual actions combined to make a usable “machine” and thus your software, and blender, are nothing more than someone else’s work. High level activities translated into low level translated into binary commands.
But that would be just as much an arse argument as a “printer” output not being part of the program’s design.
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See, if you were the one who programmed Meshpage, I'd download it on the spot. Hell, I'd even pay money for it. Why? Because you sound like you know your stuff and don't present yourself like an arrogant dickhead (at least not in this context). TP, however, thinks he's entitled to money.
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Funny thing with that, I don’t. See. I bug hunt. Occasionally I fix other peoples’ errors.
Sure, I’ve CIS and ITS education. But I couldn’t begin to tell you crap about how CAM and CAP work.
What I can do is tell you how to take five minutes in a format-free text editor to type up a few command line entries, make a quick scrypt, throw it in an automated Xcode builder and have an active module you can call in with a key binding. Or a plug in. Or a command replacement.
I question, now: how do you, TP, get stumped on a simple relocation directive? So stumped as to pull out the 1992 “magic box” card?!!!!??
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"Sure, I’ve CIS and ITS education."
Which is arguably better than what tp appears to possess given that his technical explanation emerge from a mix of 30+ years old "state of the art" computer understanding and, apparently, one of Hogwarts less successful curriculums on defense against the dark arts.
Then again we also have tp freely admitting once or twice that he's around here only for the trolling. Which is why every thread featuring him tends to end up with some 300 comments worth of bullshit and people lured into countering that bullshit.
I have a rule. More than two or three comments on a tp thread is the limit. After that it's just flag & ignore.
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Let me be clear: the only way TP is going to stop what he/she wants to stop is to block system calls.
To do that you need to self host your program in a sandbox. And with modern OSs not allowing that:
You need to place your sandboxed program in a sandbox launcher. Wrapped in a to memory emulated OS, in a standalone binary or package. And since you can’t lock any of the Unix decedents, or Unix, you’d need to supply a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows with each sale, as your guest.
so adding an extra $100+ to the sale price.
Plus the $1200 annual redistribution fee to Microsoft.
Ouch.
See, using Unix et all you can simply use the TE to brew or bld another unrestricted TE via live translation. Called CLinCL or TnT. And then SUDo your way around restrictions of the guest.
I’ve done just that to demonstrate how to break a sandbox. In more than one case.
Locking your doors doesn’t help when there’s a tunnel to the middle.
This isn’t BlackHat level stuff either. My BFF’s daughter used this method when she was 9! To bypass a restriction setting on an iPAD! Using iSH!
Sure, she’s a little hacking goddess genius: But the point is you don’t have to hack it.
You simply look at HOW it’s restricted and walk around it.
And keep in mind you can still tunnel in power shell in a fully locked instance of windows.
Just use PS to Regedt Recovery = on
Crash the system by scrypting enough devide by 0 operations in sequence to fill the memory with errors. The guest will restart to the recovery service, which allows a command line! Create a new user, set them to Admin, and restart with user switching turned on.
I just screwed your security lockout plan.
And here’s biggest problem TP has. Nobody wants to take the effort to do any of that because we can just download blender. And I’d just fire up my LeadingEdge 486 DX4 and load TurboCad and be done in a fraction of the time.
It’s a lost cause! You can’t stop me from building a tank with your software. I’m now dedicated to doing that.
so anything you can think of to stop me, I’ll tell you exactly how to get around it.
And I spend my life finding ways to get around Software and hardware restrictions. It’s called bug hunting.
I find ways to break things. For fun 🤩
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And he thinks that by enforcing copyright law to the extreme, it'll eventually pay off by restricting what everyone else wants to do. TP's entire gimmick is to pray that each and every one of his competitors gets destroyed for alleged copyright infringement.
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This is true. We expect criminals to disappear from the market at some point. Then there will be freedom to tinker and develop technologies without competing against people who do not follow the copyright rules. And money will flow to the people who deserve it, not just those who bend the rules the most.
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Photoshop has been “allowing” people to infringe copyrights since the ’90s. Adobe hasn’t been destroyed because of that. Why don’t you get to work on doing that, champ? It’d be a better use of your time than continuing to make Meshpage, that’s for damn sure.
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And that's your tough sell: You can't convince everyone that Blender, 3dsmax, Maya, AutoCAD and all the other modeling software that exists in the market are criminals. They simply don't fit any definition of criminal copyright infringement. Not even in the RIAA's fevered dreams.
Meanwhile, you know who else has disappeared from the market for being criminals? Your copyright enforcement heroes at Prenda Law. Malibu Media is going to join them soon. At this rate, Meshpage is likely to follow. Soon you'll be marketing to prisoners, not preteens. :)
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Stephen just mentioned that photoshop might be next...
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"Next" implies you've already destroyed companies based on copyright infringement claims, champ. Get on it already if you're so confident.
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No he didn't. He mentioned that if there were any truth to your hallucinations, they would have been first. Since they're still around, what you say is not true.
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This is kinda bad argument, given that stephen's exact words are "Photoshop has been “allowing” people to infringe copyrights since the ’90s.". This pretty much implies that they should be next in line for copyright witch hunt.
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"This pretty much implies that they should be next in line for copyright witch hunt."
No, it implies that if there were some fundamental reason for them to have been held liable, it would have happened by now. It's true that there's nothing to avoid a witch hunt if some failure wished to launch one against them, but it will be hard to convince anyone of a legal basis for one at this point given the huge level of non-infringing uses for both Photoshop and its many competitors.
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Except that stephen gave the legal basis in a golden plate, served directly to emphasize that their business has been based on "allowing people to infringe". There's only very small step from this flexibility, to the act of encouraging infringement to happen. And when they instruct their followers to commit copyright infringement, it's at least secondary infringement. It's simply not acceptable that companies actively encourage their user base to commit copyright infringements, even if there was significant demand for such activity.
Basically we could find that any company that builds a system that relies on user's illegal activity, i.e. company implements all legal modules, but leaves illegal pieces for end users to fill, is guilty of secondary infringement, because customers of such company often has no other choice than commit direct copyright infringement. It's either that, or their valuable gadgets will not work properly as the vendor company has designed it to work. This is why requiring end users to fill in known-to-be-illegal-blocks is considered secondary infringement. The product has been configured for piracy, and thus the product itself is illegal and users who opt to purchase such product will be in big legal trouble.
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No, I didn’t, and I’ll thank you to stop shoving words down my throat that didn’t first come from it, you son of a bitch.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
So you didn't even look at the technical superiority of the product? Tell me exactly why are software developers developing technologies for your use? Shouldn't you be happy if the tech just disappears? You don't seem to value the technical aspects enough, so we could sell you air and you wouldn't be any wiser?
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No offence. Seriously. This is a moment for you to reflect on things a bit.
Your design immediately reminded me of Fast Cad on the IBM 360 platform.
Specifically on the 360 302
You know what else hat shite implementation and went on to greatness? Multiplan. Which they merged under a third party front end to create excel!
You may or may not have something there. I will download and look tomorrow/today and try it out. But… your webm demo shows a design layout late 90s that is neither retro nor modern. Rather the best forgotten era.
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This will be appreciated. Let me know if the tech fails in some way, maybe there's easy fixes available.
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"So you didn't even look at the technical superiority of the product?"
That doesn't matter as to whether or not you get paid. Plenty of superior tech has lost out in the marketplace to stuff that people think is inferior, and that's why you have to deal with the market instead of your own twisted ego.
You could have created the greatest software known to mankind. However, because you refuse to collaborate with others, demand that people use it in the way you want to and actively try and stop uses that customers actually want, you failed.
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This isn't true.
Yes, my way or the high way.
If they wanted piracy use-cases, those were rejected.
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By your own admission, you literally closed off the source code of Meshpage because other people tried to edit it.
This is why only a handful of people, at best, will ever use Meshpage: Nobody wants you telling them exactly what they can do with an application meant to help them unleash their own imagination.
If they wanted legitimate cases, you’d still reject them because of the potential of copyright infringement. After all, you’ve said before that you would intentionally sabotage your own software to prevent any input from being entered into it to prevent copyright infringement. (Don’t say otherwise; we can look at your comment history.)
Given how you’d basically be saying “fuck you if you try to use this like Blender” to anyone who uses Meshpage, for what reason would anyone in their right mind use Meshpage and deal with a complete asshole like you when both Blender and its diverse support community are available to them?
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Re:
No, the decision to close the source code stems from several aspects:
1) there was new management available (called qtamo)
2) stallman didn't contribute enough to the project
3) it was developed on windows systems for several years
4) it was gaming, which is not critical to behaviour of linux systems
5) it was preparation for steam release (which is known to be against free software)
6) the github repository was being misused by internet community
=> and thus we wanted source code hidden and free software licenses do not like source code hidden
7) the web is using different rules than free software, i.e. the server-side source code is usually not public, and commercial/proprietary entities are welcome
Basically the decision is a combination of all these aspects.
Their requirements are stuff like:
a) mp4 file support, so that hollywood movie clips can be used with the animations
b) mp3 file support, so that RIAA's music files can be used with the animations. (this was actually approved, even though it's dubious; given that I have no other way to get sounds done)
c) text support, so that pirates can implement localised texts/subtitles for pirated movies (this was implemented, but in a way that prevents large scale operations handling whole movies)
d) taking screenshots and screen grabbing of builder window (this was approved because youtube is significant non-infringing use case, but it's still dubious since screen grabbing video files allows our animations to be used as "logos" of pirate groups and mere aggregation is then needed to include it to pirated hollywood movies)
Which one would you prefer that definitely needs to be implemented?
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Re: Re:
"1) there was new management available (called qtamo)"
QTamo appears to be a proprietary software with the same marketing talent that you possess. Maybe there's something about Finnish software developers that prevents them from explaining what their software does or why they should use it? Even so, your decision to arbitrarily block everyone from working on a project because there's something shiny that caught your eye elsewhere explains why you found it hand to get people to work with you.
"2) stallman didn't contribute enough to the project"
Your idea of free software development that attracts millions of people across the world to collaborate with each other is that Richard Stallman has to personally contribute to every project personally?
"3) it was developed on windows systems for several years"
Many projects that are currently cross-platform were, including some of your major competitors.
"7) the web is using different rules than free software, i.e. the server-side source code is usually not public, and commercial/proprietary entities are welcome"
You should try using the same web the rest of us use, it's amazing how much is open source. Especially server side stuff.
"Their requirements are stuff like"
Things that make it useful. Wow, I wonder why your refusal to offer that stuff has crippled your mainstream ambitions...
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explain it more carefully, why would allowing pirating hollywood movies somehow make it useful?
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You can pirate Hollywood movies using all sorts of things given the time and inclination and available materials - a video camera, a still shot camera and tape recorder, a USB stick. That doesn't mean you get to outlaw all the tech and the vast amount of extra value they give to everybody just because you couldn't work out how to get people to pay for the rancid piece of shit you directed instead of the superior competing products.
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Vendors of the hardware like video cameras, still shot cameras, tape recorders, usb sticks, ssd disks, hard disks, etc need to look for illegal uses of their hardware and actively prevent misuses. This means examining the technology environment where the products will be used, and prevent combinations that are likely to be used for piracy. This applies to vendors of larger than usual hard disks, video/webcam vendors, audio vendors, dvd recorders, browsers, protocol developers, router vendors, kernel developers, etc... Anything that can handle pirated data/streams. The vendors need to work together to actively prevent misuses of their gadgets.
Simply sticking your head to sand is not acceptable.
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Technology doesn’t do context. You can’t make a camera that can differentiate between a legal use (filming your own movie) and an illegal use (filming someone else’s movie in a theater)—it’s so technically improbable as to be practically impossible. Hell, for all your crowing about Meshpage being able to suss out infringing works from legal ones, you still didn’t catch how you ripped off Scott Cawthon until I informed you that you had done an infringement. (Congrats, Tero, you’re as much a criminal as you think every other infringer is.)
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Re:
Technical solution to this is shorten your video camera shutter speed enough that the frame rate of the movie theater causes huge flickering when stored to the camera. This makes all pirated filming in theater impossible to watch. Unfortunately this practice with causing camera to record flickering output was declared illegal at some point, because some people get real medical problems with watching flickering lights/screens. This is why some star wars movies have warnings about flicker. So basically context isn't needed, there's always tech solutions like this available if you truly want to prevent these use case. Another problem with this solution is that all cameras in the world need to be modified for it to be effective, so they're always looking for stuff that doesn't really require such big changes.
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But unlike you, who has no problem with hurting other people for fun, companies don’t tend to sabotage their own hardware for the sake of copyright. That would make them bleed customers, who will happily go find non-sabotaged tech from competitors and use that instead.
Again: Technology and context don’t really blend well together. Shooting part of your own movie in a dimly lit room and filming a movie off a screen in a dark theater can look similar through the lens of a camera. How could that camera ever tell the difference between those contexts without being supernaturally aware of the context in which it’s being used?
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Re:
They do, when the other alternative is that they pay 250k copyright damage awards and be dragged to court for 5 years.
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Have the developers of programs such as Photoshop, Blender, Notepad++, and the web browser you’re using to view this site intentionally sabotaged those programs in a way that limits their core functionality (e.g., image editing, 3D modelling, text editing, browsing/interacting with the Internet) for the sake of preserving copyright? Remember: The functionality must provably be sabotaged (or removed) only for the sake of preventing copyright infringement to count as a proper example.
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Web browser is easiest example. Main functionality of web browser is downloading data from the internet. Sadly browser developers managed to ruin their download feature, by limiting the user interface of download manager which requires multiple steps by the end user per file... Hard core internet users would never accept that manual work is required per file, when best download managers can download gigabytes and large directory structures with one command, but browsers require user interaction per file.
This download manager limitation is clearly based on copyright law.
Basically only way to avoid this limitation is via zip files, and that brings you outside of web browser.
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Re: Re:
"Sadly browser developers managed to ruin their download feature, by limiting the user interface of download manager which requires multiple steps by the end user per file"
I'm not sure which browser you use, but it seems you might need to upgrade at some point.
"This download manager limitation is clearly based on copyright law."
You should always check the distance in front of you before making leaps like that, you always seem to land somewhere other than reality.
"Basically only way to avoid this limitation is via zip files, and that brings you outside of web browser"
So do the majority of other files. Is your bullshit position now that if you download a PSD file and it opens in Photoshop, then some other copyright exists than if you downloaded the GIF format of the same image that opens natively? Do file associations have some random relationship in your insane mind now?
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In-browser download managers are used to keep track of downloads, not to download files themselves. That’s how they’ve always worked, in my experience. Whatever limitations in-browser download managers may have, they are not the result of copyright law and you can’t even come close to proving otherwise in a way that matters to people who live outside of your alternative reality.
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Re:
so when the truth stares at you straight in the face, you simply reject the reality and substitute your own?
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You can claim anything you want. Proving that claim true requires more than “because I said so”.
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Re:
I have already provided enough details to identify the location at issue, so you can verify it yourself. But since you were known to be lazy, I don't expect your verification results anytime soon.
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No, you haven’t. You have offered no proof to back up your claim that download managers in modern web browsers function the way they do because of copyright law.
I don’t have to prove a negative and I don’t have to do your work for you. You made the claim, so the burden of proving its truthfulness lies with you. Prove your claim is factual or shut the fuck up forever.
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Re:
Would you consider that a feature where browsers actively prevented users from downloading large amount of data from the internet, would prevent significant amount of copyright infringements if browser vendors managed to get the technology adopted as widely as web browsers have been?
Basically this is the case currently, i.e. browser features are preventing large scale download operations and are actively replacing them with downloads from known legal areas of the world. Basically browser's sandbox protects http/https transfers, actively making them (more) legal(because it's not distribute, but only display), while download manager encourages people to use
more convinient http/https download feature instead of the more cumbersome download manager which allows saving the data to local hard disk.
This kind of gimmick has no other purpose than prevent copyright infringement.
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Re: Re:
Try presenting something truthful then we might have a chance of finding out. That's not happened yet...
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If you can’t stand having your work compared to the work of one person or the work of one hundred thousand other people, don’t put your work out there for everyone to judge.
Also grow the fuck up.
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Re:
I'm always up for fair comparision, but your attempts at comparing products seem kinda shortsighted:
1) you don't bother to look at the featuresets of the products
2) you don't bother to check the price of the product
3) you're only comparing humans. I'm not selling a human, I already know you wouldn't pay anything to get access to this particular human, so I just write technologies and sell you tech. If that isn't acceptable, I sell you air in a convinient can of fresh air taken from english countryside.
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I don’t need to look at the feature sets when I know Blender has been around for far longer than your shit-ass software—and when I know Blender is more developed, more supported, and more widely used than Meshpage will ever be.
I don’t need to check the price of the product when I know Blender is free and open source; that fact makes the price of your product irrelevant.
And I’m “comparing humans” because—and I know you’re going to hate hearing this, so please get a fainting couch ready for yourself—people are the ones using Blender. (And they’d be the ones using Meshpage if both it and you didn’t suck more than a black hole.) You invited comparisons between the output potential of both Meshpage and Blender; your throwing of a temper tantrum because such comparisons don’t flatter you is not my problem.
Also not my problem: you taking offense to being reminded that Blender was developed by multiple people. Don’t like that? Let other people help you develop Meshpage. Or shut the fuck up—whichever one you want to do, so long as you stop whining like an entitled two-year-old who thinks they’re owed the world because they exist.
Grow the fuck up, Tero.
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Re:
So featuresets do not matter, only development time? Maybe we should drop the features and just idle during the development, so that we gain dev time without actually implementing features?
You're not calculating the full price of the software. The price isn't about money amount in free software projects. But it's how much annoying operations developers of such software will need to endure to get the project up and running. The money (as you mentioned) is zero, but on those kind of products, different metrics are needed which captures the full impact of the development to the world. This means that if some poor developer used 15 years of his life to make blender reality, then that's the true cost of blender, not your sucky 0 money amount.
Count the real impact to the world, do not look just the money.
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Re: Re:
If "real impact to the world" is your metric by which you want Meshpage to be judged, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
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Otherwording aside: Excluding claims of theoretical functionality like being able to stop copyright infringement (which you couldn’t even stop yourself from committing with Meshpage!) what can Meshpage do right now that Blender can’t do? Because from where I sit, Blender can do far more than Meshpage will ever be able to do.
And you called me lazy for not falling for your negging…
There may be at least one developer that has been developing Blender since the beginning. But unlike you, they didn’t mind working with other people—which means they weren’t alone across that span of development time.
I’m sorry your efforts with Meshpage have amounted to nothing, but projecting your failure onto others by acting like someone being part of a development team for a successful piece of software has wasted their life by working with others for years is…well, it’d be hilarious if it weren’t so goddamned depressing to see you hate yourself this much.
And really, all the bitching about Blender is ultimately projection on your part. You couldn’t hack it as a developer, so rather than admit the truth, you shittalk your “competition” and claim shit like “they wasted years of their life developing this thing” or whatever. You say your program can make a cube easier than Blender, but when confronted with the fact that Blender gives you a cube right out of the gate, you go eerily silent. Everything you keep saying as a criticism of Blender and its development team is an indictment of yourself—of your failures, your hatred for other people, your self-loathing. I mean, my God, would you even be trolling people on Techdirt right now if you didn’t hate yourself to the point where you thought trolling people on Techdirt was a good use of your time? (I hate myself, too, but at least I’m self-aware of the damage I’m doing to myself by continuing to argue with you.)
Okay:
Blender is a well-known, widely used, inconceivably powerful piece of software that anyone interested in 3D graphics can legally download and modify without financial cost.
Far more creative works—more tangible additions to culture and society, for better or for worse—have been made and will be made with Blender than with Meshpage. When the history of 3D graphics is written, Blender will have at least one full chapter, but Meshpage won’t even warrant a one-line footnote in an appendix. If and when development on Blender stops, that software will be long remembered as a useful program; when you die, nobody will even think once about Meshpage.
How’s that for some real world impact?
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Re:
I look at engaging with trolls the same way I look at Kitboga, Pierogi and Jim Browning. In the long term they are probably not contributing much more than wasting the time of a scam artist. But the process and results are funny as fuck.
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Re: Re: It's a chicken and egg thing
Let me ask you a question?
Are you a bitter bitch because no bought your work, or did no one buy your work because you are a bitter bitch?
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Re: Re: Re: It's a chicken and egg thing
If you're looking value from actual humans, you should go to some other shop. We're not trafficing humans. We only sell technology. We never considered nerds like Bill Gates to be good salespeople, so the human aspect you need to find from some other shop. Come back when you've fulfilled your human requirements, our technology will help once you get your bricks in order.
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And you absolutely suck at it.
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Re:
I never claimed that I'm good at handling humans or sales activities.
Technology is our speciality, and unless you can turn humans into robots, we cannot really debug them.
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Re: Re:
Then stop trying to market your software to human children if you loathe humans so much.
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Re: Re: Re:
^^^^^^^^
THIS RIGHT FUCKING HERE
Someone get the lights
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Re: Re:
[Projects facts not in evidence]
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Re: Re:
When you open up a new project in Blender, the first thing it provides you is a cube. Meanwhile, you have to do a lot of work in Meshpage as per your demo.
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if you need 2 cubes, you still need to figure out how to create or clone one.
yes, my tool still doesnt have 15 years of development behnd it.
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That’s why tutorials and online support exist: If someone can’t figure it out on their own, they can find help from people willing to help. (Unlike you, who would apparently kill people over TCP/IP if you could if they ever asked you for any help with Meshpage.)
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Re: Tiny lawsuit only driven on Sundays to curch and back
Sound like you got a lawfare brochure from a guy named Liebowitz...
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Bring it.
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Re: Re:
My copy-protection actually works?
Either way, it's kinda telling that the pirates chose the exact same nintendo product than what nintendo was releasing to the public. I.e. if pirates can easily jump from one product to another in search of best user experience, why would they choose nintendo's products for their pirated warez? Shouldn't they just jump to another (better quality) product?
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LOL no. It's that your product is so worthless people don't even want to pirate your shitty software.
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That's part of the copy protection.
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You don’t need “copy protection” if nobody is ever going to copy your product in the first place.
Please seek professional medical help for your early onset dementia.
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Re:
With copy-protection, I don't need to:
1) compete against my own work
2) watch my user base disappear when pirate version of the same
product becomes available in pirate sites
3) deal with the maintainance of users who didn't contribute anything to the bottom line
4) translate the product to languages that the pirates use
5) include large font files supporting chinese glyphs
6) make the product follow laws of arabic muslim countries, including harrassment of women
7) customize the product to different geographic areas, like time zones or city maps
8) setup 24h product support web sites/phone lines/facebook pages/chat rooms
See, there's huge amount of burden that the copy-protection technology saves.
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Again: You don’t need “copy protection” if nobody is ever going to copy your product in the first place.
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Re: Re:
"With copy-protection, I don't need to:
4) translate the product to languages that the pirates use"
Then why is available in English? I mean, it's clearly not your native language so why do you choose to operate in a language that is mainly useful to you for people to laugh at your incompetence?
"See, there's huge amount of burden that the copy-protection technology saves"
Most of the burdens you just stated were "providing support for your user base". That's nothing to do with piracy, but it's obvious why you fail constantly to attract such a thing if you think that offering i8n and time zone support are bad things.
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Why would original authors of some technology need to support people who fails to properly license the software that they're using?
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Re: Re: Re: Re:
I was talking about legal end users. I know that confuses you since you haven't been able to find any, but most companies are built around supporting many thousands of them, and adjust their roadmaps to fit their demands.
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One of the fun parts of software is that support for legitimate users is support for illegitimate users.
3) deal with the maintainance of users who didn't contribute anything to the bottom line
A system of registering purchases to gain support is a well-known way to provide support for a product while locking out support for illegitimate copies without the downsides to copy-protection. You can do this without copy protection.
4) translate the product to languages that the pirates use
Do the priates use different priate languages than your 3 users? No one requires you to localize your product. But you won't make as many sales if your software isn't localized. I doubt you plan to localize after you already have my money, so pirates likely pirate such a program because if the program isn't localized, its value is much lower. Not localizing encourages piracy outside the default languages.
And, again, even if it non-localization discouraged piracy, you don't need copy protection to not localize your product. Copy protection has nothing to do with whether or not you are required to localize.
5) include large font files supporting chinese glyphs
So #4 is repeated here. I am unsure what your claim here is, but your statement seems to be that that by putting copy protection you don't need to localize for chinese users or account for those with vision imparement.
Again, you don't need copy protection to do without these things. Software developers love to not factor in accessibilty or chinese language support regardless of DRM use. so WTF does this have to do with copy protection?
6) make the product follow laws of arabic muslim countries, including harrassment of women
Copy protection does not protect you against legal action for violating laws. Id be very intersted which laws you are concerned about though and how copy protection defends against those laws.
7) customize the product to different geographic areas, like time zones or city maps
Again, you can ignore localization without copy protection. WTF are you on about?
8) setup 24h product support web sites/phone lines/facebook pages/chat rooms
Or, set up one free discord or a basic forum widget. you are a single developer with under 500 users. So long as you set expectations most users will accept a single developer not having the time to do 24 hour support, as you must know since you don't provide it now. If pirate support requests are really that bad, require accounts be verified. But a lot of those pirate support requests can help fix legit user issues if you keep them somewhere public like a forum (google will even index you and direct people to your support pages over time, reducing the support burden as you grow). Whether you do so or not, copy protection doesn't make the issue of user support better.
You seem to not want to localize your product. You have produced an under-developed product. You seem to believe that large masses of pirates really want your software, but your software is not localized and is therefore not worth its cost to the majority of your userbase. So much so that there is an army of pirates representing a fraction of your untapped userbase is stealing it and patching in localization themselves.
As Techdirt has noted, Piracy is often an issue of service and convenience. If your software is truly as good as you claim, and you have the pirate user base you do, it sounds like localization is a major hurdle for the majority of your customers.
Your first 2 benefits of copy protection are :
but that only works if your copy-protection is airtight. And unfortunately, benefits 3-8 are impairments of the usefulness of your software. 3-8 encourage piracy as they impact the value of your software to any user that needs the localization. Thats why they are a benefit of copy protection, absent copy protection you need those localizations to access your audience or compete with pirates who have improved your software.
and thats the problem. you don't care about competing with your own software. You care about competing with an objectively better version of what used to be your software.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I have english terms used in the builder. But sadly the technical terms are pretty much impossible to translate to finnish. Other languages (which I don't know) are even worse than finnish. Are you going to translate m_phong to finnish for me? Basically it's impossible task.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
So, you are using a highly technical vocabulary in a program aimed at kids, I wonder why you have so few users?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
But sadly the technical terms are pretty much impossible to translate to finnish.
If finns do not have equivalent "technical terms," then that can only mean finns just don't do those things at all. Now, I personally find it pretty unlikely that there is any field which exists only outside of Finland, but I'll concede to your knowledge of the subject.
Regardless, finns are are certainly not pirating software which they don't have any use for. So either there is a translation of all your technical terms into finnish... or you don't need copy protection from the finns.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"But sadly the technical terms are pretty much impossible to translate to finnish"
OK. I thought that one of your regularly bullshit claims when people were laughing at you for failing to compete with any similar product is that it was really aimed as kids and other non-technical users. Are you admitting another of the many reasons you're failing - that you're using technical terms in the UI of a product aimed at the people who don't understand technical terms? Or, are you so much of an idiot that you think that presenting different UI options to different i8n regions requires you to translate the source code that's not presented to users as well?
"Are you going to translate m_phong to finnish for me?"
I'm not sure what m_phong is due to the fact that you closed your source code in a tantrum when people tried to build on it, but a quick search suggests that it's a code function you built that would never be presented to an end user during the operation of the UI. Why would that need to be translated?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
It's available in the builder's user interface as a graph node which you can use to compose your 3d models and scenes.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
So, you don't offer anything that your claimed target audience of children would understand?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I'm sure that children will find some of the 600 features useful for creating cool 3d graphics and animations. They don't need to use all of them, but if they explore just the first 30 of them, they'll already feel like they'd get something useful done.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"I'm sure that children will find some of the 600 features useful for creating cool 3d graphics and animations"
I'm sure that they'd find way more useful from your many competitors. Which is your problem.
"if they explore just the first 30 of them, they'll already feel like they'd get something useful done"
If they explored writing on the wall with their own feces they might get some interesting art done, but their parents and anyone wanting to employ their talents in later life would rather they explored the other options available to them instead.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Sadly the competitors are all targeting to the professional graphics design market, which is completely broken for 15 years old children.
This is exactly why target groups are important to identify properly, otherwise you'd enter the same market where your competitors are already popular.
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"Sadly the competitors are all targeting to the professional graphics design market, which is completely broken for 15 years old children."
A faulty assertion on multiple levels.- First of all, a 15 year old is hardly a child in the way that needs a dumbed-down interface to get to grips with a concept. In fact, by that point a teenager wishing to pursue a career in design would be way better off using industry standard tools, rather than learning an interface that nobody uses professionally then having to move their skills to the software that's used in industry. In fact, by that age they might already be taking specific courses aimed at giving them those skills, especially summer courses -and exactly zero of those courses will be taught using Meshpage.
So, then what about younger children? For some the niche is already filled by the likes of Minecraft and programs that might get them thinking about design in certain ways before they take the next step. There's certainly choice in alternate tools if you want them using more general purpose tools, a quick Google on 3D modelling for children suggests tools like TinkerCAD and Solidworks also offers apps specifically aimed at kids. There are of course plenty of tutorials out there aimed at beginners, including kids, and while some of them might require an actively participating adult to help learn the tools correctly, it's not impossible for a younger child to learn the professional tools, even if they might find it hard if you do nothing but sit them in front of the tool and tell them to use it with no instruction.
The further problem is your overall attitude to the person using the program. If anyone is going to exercise their creativity by infringing copyright, it will be children. Kids learn by imitating what they see around them, and most young artists will initially explore by copying what they see. The average 8 year old isn't going to come up with something completely original off the bat, they will learn by imitating their heroes, by trying to work out how they can create a version of their favourite Disney or videogame characters before moving on to new ideas. Given that you state that the purpose of your software is to block this type of creativity, it's not a good tool for this type of learning.
"This is exactly why target groups are important to identify properly"
You're correct in that if you're unable to market your product to a mainstream professional market then finding a niche area that's currently underserved might be a good way to go. But, I'm not sure if its the product from the guy who originally claimed he was trying to beat Pixar, then changed to claim it was aimed at kids, then even more recently it was intended for mobile icon displays, all while being completely hostile to the way most users would want to use such a product.
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It's worth recalling all of TP's statements on what he thinks of professionals and 15 year olds. Apparently professionals are all too dumb to use his software, and 15 year olds are such geniuses that you have to artificially complicate software UI in order to make it suitable for them, because they'll supposedly boycott your tech if they think they're being "underestimated", according to TP a few comments down. While also dumbing down the UI.
If that statement makes absolutely no fucking sense it's because TP has consistently made no fucking sense.
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This is exactly why my software is better for this use case. Children will have safe environment where copyright infringement isn't possible. You wouldn't want your kid to learn copyright infringement practices and get sued for 300k euros before even learning to walk...
We'd trust RIAA/MPAA to sue your kid to get his weekly allowance to increase the cash register of entertainment companies. They simply don't care if he's 8 years old or not, the copyright industry need to get the money they deserve.
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Children learn by copying. But you’d rather treat them as potential criminals and either prevent them from doing anything that would help them learn how to express themselves creatively or subject them to insane punishments, and all because you believe all copying (regardless of context) is copyright infringement.
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jello:
A message that is excessively cross-posted
too frequently posted,
too frequently replied to
as opposed to spam (which is merely too frequently posted)”
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This is what the law says. Basically there's only 2 alternative ways to get permission to use some copyrighted work: either you created the material yourself, or you properly licensed the material. Any other context dependent crap is just illegal. The law has declared these two alternatives to be the complete list of possible ways how to get permission, so that any further context is not required when doing legal determination of copyright infringement. The law explicitly says that your "context dependent" ideas are some bullshit that you invented from your ass.
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No, it doesn’t. But hey, you keep telling yourself that a 6-year-old kid who traces a Disney character out of a coloring book or a YouTuber who makes a movie review using clips from the movie itself needs to be punished with massive life-destroying fines and/or jail sentences. Ain’t like you can make your reputation any worse, after all.
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Well, the solution to this problem is to obtain the actual licenses. Keeping the brand identity up and running might have some costs involved, to the tune of millions, so it's just fair that the people who benefit from the brand will pay license fees for using the brand to sell products to children. Basically you get access to millions of investments with a small license fee (usually 10k or something), so the companies who are building bigger brand identity can divide the 1 million investment between 100 shops that carry the products containing the brand.
This "divide costs between users" is what you copyright infringers never understand properly. If there's significant number of freeriders in the system, the legal shops that actually take licenses will need to pay significantly more and then pirates will be complaining that the license fees are too large, even when there's someone paying 1 million bucks for the priviledge of providing brand identity products for your shops.
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I bet you’d kill a kid for tracing Mickey Mouse out of a coloring book.
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This has happened in finland recently. Some company called "marimekko" carbon-copied some paintings from a gallery's painting display book, and created curtains from the outlines. The model was significantly recognizable and the artist who painted the paintings sued marimekko in court for plagiarism and copyright infringement. The company got bad reputation as a result.
So your supposed situation isn't that some young kid does it from colouring book, but instead commercial companies with millions in sales does it and get sued for it.
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I love that your response to "I bet you'd kill a kid for tracing" was "This happened in Finland recently" as if it was a good thing. But, after a little research and. application of facts and common sense, what a surprise - nothing remotely happened like that.
First of all, the case happened in 2013. That being recent to you might help explain your laughably outdated design and development techniques, but it's not really that recent for most people.
The actual story appears to be that the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Art complained that Marimekko was publishing a design that appeared to have been plagiarised. The company confirmed this, the artist Kristina Isola issued a public apology and was fired from the company. There was some problems with the design having been used on Finair aircraft as a tail design, and that was to be replaced.
English language sources may be a little thin on the ground, but from what I can see it was a sane, amicable response with very little of your drooling insanity. Oh, and that "bad reputation" doesn't seem to have had much affect since on the date the plagiarism was admitted stock in the company were worth around €10, today's price is €92.30. You might claim that's down to further plagiarism, but that doesn't seem to be in evidence, and in fact one of the biggest stories you can see when searching for the company was about them settling with Dolce & Gabbana for ripping of one of their designs.
"get sued for it"
One day you might also learn that getting sued doesn't actually mean all that much. Depending on the legal system, I can sue you for whatever the hell I want to. The question is whether the court finds in my favour and issue damages. If they don't, then "getting sued" just means "some asshole said something", which is not relevant to anyone except failed Finnish developers.
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The claim that 24h support is a necessary component of any software product is a key part of Tero's recurring arguments. He claims that developers can't be expected to provide ongoing support for older products, because setting that up and maintaining it would increase costs to the point of impossibility. Therefore older products have to be purged from the market so developers can exclusively provide support for their newer products - and according to Tero, the way that this can be achieved is the destruction of the public domain and strict enforcement of copyright via exclusive control from the copyright holders.
It's an absolutely bizarre argument premised on a mistaken understanding of how IP law works and the RIAA's wet dream of copyright, but when you consider we live in an age where content creators regularly use copyright law as a hammer to shut down critiques of their work, copyright is simply a beast that has evolved into a monster that gets its grubby fingers in every damn pie.
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Actually, you're focusing on slightly wrong area of the market, when you consider only single vendor's products in this... This applies to all products in the world. I.e. if vcr video recorders are being dumped, then it gives space for dvd players and cd-roms, i.e. old products are being purged and new ones replace them. But the vcr's and dvd's do not need to come from the same vendor. I.e. the market as a whole is constantly purging old products and replacing them with new ones.
vcr's and dvd players are not copyrighted works, because they have hardware component also included. But the same needs to work also with copyrighted works, i.e. old books are being dumped to trashcan, and newer books and voice books replace them. Copyrighted works also need to get products disappear from the market so that new products have a chance to shine. This cannot happen if copyright rules allows people to use very old works. Only the most popular ones are required to survive, not all works like some anti-copyright people think about 70 year copyright duration.
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Except that when DVDs started appearing on the market, there were no companies or governments suddenly ruling that VCDs were illegal. There was no initiatives or movements to "disappear" them from the market. The products simply became obsolete over time. Copyrighted works like books and movies on the other hand don't do this. This is a distinction you consistently ignore because somehow it fits your "I hate the public domain with the ferocity of a thousand suns" worldview.
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That’s just not going to happen. Not completely. In audio phonograph still makes up 10-17% of music sales. More than CDs today.
In video VHS releases still come out regularly enough. A few each month.
Some formats are so good at some specific aspect they never will disappear.
Just look at computing? LTO is still the choice for high-latency long term storage. LTO8 puts 30TB on a $50-$100 tape.
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This is a big part of tp's playbook - he's not failed because he's incompetently marketed a product that has no real benefit against his competitors, it's because it's unfair that he has to compete against things that were available before e released his product. If only the competition could be destroyed then people would be forced to use his product...
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You do not know what a user base is. Hint is is related to properly licensed.
You also do not know what:
A permissive license is.
What creativity is.
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Please seek professional medical help for your early onset dementia.
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Your rambling idiocy is even more off point than normal it seems.
The discussion at hand is Nintendo dealing with its own products. Your claim is that copyright is so insanely messed up that they are legally prevented from selling a version of its own games emulated from hardware they designed that are as good as pirated versions.
If this is true, I can't find any better reason for the insane versions of copyright that you and Nintendo demand to be abolished.
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Pirate sites can offer:
1) large content collections
2) always chosen from best products from the market
3) with zero or low price
4) before the original content is released to public
5) in channels where ordinary content creators are not allowed to access
6) delivered by criminals instead of respectable vendors
7) and did I mention that money doesn't need to be passed to the vendor at all
8) and license requirements do not need to be followed
9) and it's fun to track the location of piratebay when content owners ban/block their ip address
10) and avoiding police cars and RIAA's lawyer's emails/snail mail legal demands is supposedly fun activity too
11) and we definitely wouldn't be able to create this kind of content ourselves, so copying it is just all ok
12) oh, there's also requirement to use VPN to protect our own IP from evil content owners/corporations
13) and no, we never found any viruses or ransomware from pirate sites
14) etc.. the reasons to use pirate sites keep piling up...
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You’re literally making the best case possible for destroying copyright. Which is weird, since you go through so much trouble to kiss copyright maximalist ass in nearly every other comment you make.
Please seek professional medical help for your early onset dementia.
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Just a reminder that your list of idiocy is even less relevant than normal. We're talking about 20-25 year old games built and designed by Nintendo being emulated on Nintendo hardware that's been out for 4 years.
If the law is stopping Nintendo from doing this properly themselves, the problem isn't pirates.
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It isn't the "law" that is stopping Nintendo to do this properly.
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It isn’t piracy, either.
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Then why did you claim it was?
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Nintendo cannot do proper emulation of their own work, simply because it would require them to move to a product different from what they have available. Pirates can jump from one product to another, but respectable companies cannot do that. Once they create the product, the invested work amount (to that product) is large enough that throwing away all that work is not an option. Failure is not an option.(check this quote from nasa) They need to succeed, even though criminals are using the same digital assets and software code.
That's the price of success. Pirates will use your work in ways that kills your business. This is why all businesses need to invest significant amount of money building copy-protection schemes. Bundling your software with the hardware is the ultimate copy-protection scheme, since end users cannot avoid purchasing the hardware. But bunding software with hardware means that you need to cover the cost of software development from the money you are able to extract from the market by selling hardware. So your hardware product will be more expensive than what competitors can do.
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"Nintendo cannot do proper emulation of their own work, simply because it would require them to move to a product different from what they have available."
Like what? They're emulating N64 hardware on a Switch, and they designed and built both fucking systems, along with the games. What can't they do?
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Once they have some piece of code available, they simply cannot switch to another code piece that does the exact same functionality. Basically only never-ending software development projects are swapping the dependencies in middle of development cycle. Once the dependency (to emulation software or games or whatever) exists, swapping it to something more robust isn't any longer possible.
People who create actual products have this kind of limitations -- they cannot throw away the whole project without killing their own market, and they cannot keep invested work amount without staying on a failure train long after clients have declared it unsuccessful and fleed from the market.
It just depends on how much work was invested to the product that determines how long your need to stay within product that is no longer cool. Every project meets this end at some point, end users gets frustrated with quirks of the product very quickly, and familiar products are always declared boring or not interesting. Even after this happens, the products still need to be maintained and kept available until the developers of next product line will appear. The time how long unsuccessful products need to be maintained is longer than you expect. You think it just disappears when the cool factor is no longer available, but this isn't the case.
I'm sure nintendo has this exact problem with the games that was built in 1980s. in 1990s they lost the coolness of the product. And now when market starts to think the product might again has a chance of next wave of success, the pirates have already filled the market with illegal copies of the previous wave of success story. New children who have not seen the 1980s product might still accept the old software, even if it looks lower quality. But sadly pirates already filled the market with bootleg copies. So they simply have no other choice than send DMCA notices to the emulator/rom sites and hope they disappear before next wave of children will get access to the old nintendo games.
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So after you created a piece of code, you can't reuse it in your own projects. Starting to see why you keep thinking Oracle should have won the ridiculous $2 billion claim, because you consistently demonstrate a goldfish's understanding of how things work.
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You simply have no idea how much effort it takes to get a virtual goldfish to behave correctly in 3d modelling world. Goldfish are actually pretty smart and simulating the behavior with software is more tricky than you think. If you put a goldfish to a torus, and let it swim endlessly forward, you'll get a nice demo effect from 1990s.
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Pixar animators would disagree. Oh, but that's right, you hate the fact that you think you have to compete with Pixar.
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"Once they have some piece of code available, they simply cannot switch to another code piece that does the exact same functionality."
Why? It's their code? It's completely proprietary (unless they're violating some FOSS licences somewhere), so anything they wanted to switch to is also theirs.
"they cannot throw away the whole project without killing their own market"
Why would anyone throw away an entire project? Legacy code is still very much a thing in most companies, and most companies would leap at a chance to re-release it with minimal changes over and over again. There's an entire industry out there based around allowing people to buy games they already own that have been modified to run on new hardware - entire companies have been built on this concept.
"in 1990s they lost the coolness of the product"
No, they didn't. They lost the ability to sell it on a single cartridge at the same price as the older copies, but there's always been a market. In fact, if you want to talk about games going out of fashion, first-party Nintendo games are probably the single worst example you can give.
"Even after this happens, the products still need to be maintained"
Again, you prove that you don't know what you're talking about. The codebase was complete, because it was developed before aftermarket patching was even possible. The code that ran on the original NES cartridge is the code people wish to play - and that code has never been updated or maintained on those cartridges since they were manufactured.
"hope they disappear before next wave of children will get access to the old nintendo games"
You are an extraordinarily poor businessman, but we knew that.
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Nintendo’s issue isn’t with the age of the games in question or piracy/emulation; neither one affects the market for people who want to play older games but don’t want the hassle of setting up emulators. It’s with Nintendo’s “homegrown” emulation being worse than emulators developed by other people—which is rightfully fucked up.
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This is always the case. Any one entity cannot compete against the whole world. If they try, they will get burned out like crazy. And if they don't, there will always be rough edges in the product that they can offer to customers.
Note that it's only pirates that can avoid this problem. Pirates are doing this with "mere aggregationi" by choosing any product available in the market. It's completely different situation when you have implemented the product from scratch yourself and have invested time and money to get the features done. Dropping existing features when you have money invested in the product isn't what you normally do. But pirates can (and do) reject large number of products (just like ordinary users do). This rejection pattern isn't available if you create the product yourself.
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Nintendo literally owns the source code for the N64; that it can’t create a functional emulator for the N64 that is at least on par with the best non-Nintendo emulators is less an indictment of…whatever gobbledygook you just said and more an indictment of Nintendo perpetually half-assing its approach to handling older games. Piracy isn’t an excuse for that.
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Who are you to demand that they offer "best" quality for their product? Maybe customers are not willing to pay real money for that feature, so the product vendors are not willng to invest their hard-earned cash to create "best" product in the world. Cheap products are never going to be the best products in the world, whether you like it or not.
It is within nntendo's right to DMCA those emulators and rom sites which are designed for pirated roms. The pirates simply have no right to use nintendo's intellectual property to compete against nintendo. Why cant they build their own games and make them successful and then build emulators?
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People paying US$30 extra, for starters.
Good point. That's why I haven't purchased Nintendo Switch Online Plus and I assume a lot of other people have not either.
I don't think anyone here suggested otherwise. They just think it's a bad idea that hurts Nintendo long-term and causes ill-will towards them.
You're acting like people don't do this already, such as Toby Fox or every creator of a Legend of Zelda clone or a Metroidvania, among many, many others. Not only that, some developers make games that are similar to Nintendo games and then Nintendo licenses them on their own system!
It's just that Nintendo's constant litigation against their fans and then delivering a substandard product is a PR nightmare, to put it lightly.
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PR catastrophy is the only way nintendo can get the message across to young people that a new product s available for purchase. The kids will forget the whole spectacle after forcing their parents to purchase the product. Large amount of discussion about how evil nintendo is on the marketplace is just large marketng operation designed to make kids realize that there's a product available.
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No. No, it is not.
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When you're dealing with this, you cannot jump from one person to another with the evaluation. RomUniverse authors need to do these "games" themselves. Author of a Legend of Zelda (or even clones) is not creating RomUniverse. Basically this jumping from one entity to another needs to stop. Nintendo can demand these people to create their own games instead of ripping off nintendos intellectual property.
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Nintendo usually does exactly that: When someone uses Nintendo IP for their own games, Nintendo shuts that shit down. Exceptions exist—primarily ROM hacks, including randomizers for games like Super Metroid—but anyone making a standalone game using Nintendo IP tends to get stomped on like a Goomba more often than not. The most enterprising creators can (and sometimes do) pivot to using original IP after getting stomped.
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Toby Fox is a great example, having made Undertale after making an Earthbound ROM-hack.
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He didn’t get stomped by Nintendo, though—so far as I know. Hell, he went from making an Earthbound ROM hack to having a new arrangement of a song he made for that hack featured in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Toby Fox rules.
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Indeed. And my favorite song of his (Hopes And Dreams) was inspired my best buds Anamanaguchi. It truly is a small world.
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That’s…sort of the complaint about Nintendo’s N64 emulation: It isn’t willing to put in the work for the sake of making a quality emulator—even though it could—but it’s also asking people to pay real money for that feature. The fact that Nintendo owns the source code to the Switch and the N64 makes the failure to craft a quality emulator all the more ridiculous.
Piracy wouldn’t be nearly as big an issue if Nintendo would release more of its classic library to the Switch. When the only way to legally play Metroid Fusion (the direct predecessor to Metroid Dread) is to find a Game Boy Advance and a physical copy of the game, piracy begins to look a lot more enticing.
If they’re building their own games, they don’t need to build emulators for them. Please seek professional medical help for your early onset dementia.
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This basically is an admission that emulators do not have legal use-cases available, and all of them should be illegal to develop or distribute on internet.
The main point countering this admission was that homebrew games could be developed for the emulators. But this doesn't seem to be the case, given that emulator is not required at all, if you write your own game. So long for that argument and we can get back to the real issue, i.e. building and distributing emulators is actually illegal activity.
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No, it isn’t.
The point of making a “homebrew” game for a specific system is to work within the limits of that system, regardless of the reason why one does that. Sure, such games could be made to work as standalone applications (as the NES homebrew game Micro Mages was). But part of the fun of making such games work on a given system is how people can play it on the actual native hardware (e.g., Micro Mages was released on a physical NES cart that works with an actual NES). Emulators can also have filters such as scanline/CRT filters that emulate the look of old-school TV screens, which is important when considering how pre-HDTV 2D games were originally made with scanlines in mind.
Emulators have a legal use case. You have no room for a proper counterargument.
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Yes it is. The logic goes like this:
1) developing a game does not need emulator
2) Thus the only reason why emulator exist is to run existing copyrighted games illegally
3) instead of running homebrew games, the key element in emulator ecosystem is the pirated game roms
4) given that the emulators were designed for piracy, they're illegal to develop or distribute over internet.
This logic is watertight. It all stems from your admission that game developers do not need the emulator at all.
Note that there are emulators which are legal. But those do not have large collection of pirate games available as rom files which emulator enables users to play.
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Note that meshpage/gameapi builder is struggling with the same problem, given that .obj and .gltf files are standard file format which could possibly enable pirated 3d objects to be used with the tooling. But we've decided that the piracy ecosystem with .obj files isn't significant enough (and it isn't the only alternative source of models) that it's still legal to develop the technology. But if the situation changes, we might need to change our position of supporting those file formats.
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Format-shifting is legal in my neck of the woods (so far as I know), so if someone has the tech to dump the ROM of an NES game they own to their computer, they can use an emulator to play that legally obtained ROM. That the vast majority of people use emulators to play illegally obtained games is irrelevant. Even if I were to grant that format-shifting is or should be illegal (and I don’t), emulation and ROM distribution is still the best way of keeping alive thousands of games from decades past.
A tool can have uses both legal and illegal, but those illegal uses don’t make the tool itself illegal per se. Someone can use a DVD/Blu-ray ripper, which technically has to break copy protection for the sake of ripping content, to legally format shift the content of a given disc into a digital form for storage in a non-distributed personal media collection. A hammer can be used to hammer nails or people’s skulls; that people use it as a weapon doesn’t invalidate its use as a tool for carpentry/furniture assembly.
If they’re developing a game for an older system or a ROM hack for an older game, they do need an emulator. (ROM hacks are questionably legal, but I’d argue that they fall under either the parody or criticism/critique exceptions of Fair Use.) I wouldn’t be surprised if the Micro Mages crew used an NES emulator to make sure their game would work within all the limitations of the NES before they tested the game on an actual NES.
No emulator does. Unless they’re distributed with ROM packs, emulators don’t come pre-loaded or pre-packaged with ROM collections regardless of the system. RetroArch, for example, is a front-end for multiple emulators—but it doesn’t come with, and doesn’t have an option to help people find, actual ROMs for any of the systems it can emulate.
It already did, in your case. Or do you not remember how you ripped off someone who ripped off Scott Cawthon’s work, despite your insistence that your program would prevent all infringement and you yourself were so opposed to infringement that you would prevent all input to your program to prevent any possible infringement?
So, what you’re saying is that even though the tool has an illegal use case, it also has a legal use case that justifies its continued existence? 🤔
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I think this is the first time that you admit that my software has a use case that justifies its continued existence. Usually its just bashing and not admittng usefulness of the software.
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Your software having a legal use doesn’t make it a good piece of software.
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[Citation needed]
I don’t think that’s accurate. Even if limited to game emulators.
But mind you just a few posts up I pointed out how to use TPs application to build a weapon of war. And I don’t need the source code to do it.
Just because you can do something bad doesn’t override the good.
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What do you think people generally use emulators for, playing only homebrew games? 👀
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Well, no. In general emulation is used to allow one operating systems to run on another. Allowing for the forward use of older and/or incompatible programs.
In terms of video games? Well, homebrew is a big one.
And playing your own games on new equipment. Via either legally acquired/dumped Rome or yes, someone else’s dump.
Or with a cartridge reader to play original cartridge or card on modern systems.
Piracy is just one aspect of emulators.
And a valid use outweighs the criminal aspect.
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Our position is that the criminal aspect needs to be removed completely by product vendors. It is always technically possible, and thus its just about whether the tech developer wants to support piracy ecosystem or not. Thus tech devs can be sued when there is proof of illegal activity happening anywhere in their systems.
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No. No, it isn’t.
Let’s say I purchase and legally download a PDF copy of an ebook that has no DRM. Now let’s say I download an illicit copy of the same ebook in the same format. How can a computer magically know which copy is legal if both copies are the exact same file and neither copy has any DRM?
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Step #1: Remove both copies and make them impossible to obtain
Step #2: Allow only the legal case.
Step #3: Done.
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Again: How could a computer know, absent any DRM attached to either file, which file is the legal copy? You’re doing that thing again where your solution to copyright infringement is “intentionally sabotage all legal uses of technology so no one can infringe upon anything ever, not even by accident”—and that isn’t a viable strategy for anyone. Find a different strategy or shut the fuck up.
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Mind you removing drm is in most countries illegal, but not impossible.
And again I showed hi I could youse your, TP, program to not just make a copy of a film, or other copyright issue, but how to make a weapon of war.
You didn’t intend it but you supplied the tool to do so.
With no programming at all: I could still pull it off with your software. Just using screen shot saves.
I use your software to render a model. Save the screenshots. Send them to the printer.
Sure I need another program to make the measurements. Sure I need a full CAP/CAM facility.
But you gave me the tools to do it.
So what: add AI to censor out anything that may be illegal?
Because we all know just how reliable AI content moderation is. I mean, tumbler took down a photo of a statue of Libertana. A Roman Demigod(dess)!
You know, it’s not the breast, it’s the nipple.
We’ll ignore the fact that her nipple wore off like 1000 years ago. The shadow is still there. Or whatever.
You’re fighting a battle you lost when you picked up your sword.
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There's a solution called "web server", which only allows transferring the file to specially marked browser sandbox. Then your client-side web browser implements sandbox and marks it with some key. Then server verifies the key before sending the file to the sandbox, and the allowed sandbox keeps the files tightly locked inside that sandbox, never giving a copy of the file to the user.
This is exactly what youtube does with youtube videos. And then youtube-dl which can bypass this process and give copies of the files to the user's control, can be sued out of existence.
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One problem with your “solution”: When the server dies, the content dies with it—and people don’t generally like being told they don’t own things they’ve purchased with the intent of owning.
Your solution also doesn’t account for files downloaded from, say, a USB thumb drive. So again, I ask: Without resorting to supernatural magic, technological self-sabotage, or other such wishful thinking, how could a computer possibly know which one of two files was downloaded illicitly if neither file has DRM and both files are exactly the same?
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"There's a solution called "web server", which only allows transferring the file to specially marked browser sandbox."
Yes, and it stays there because nobody wants to visit your failure of a server.
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Sure, but now you can't claim that there isn't any technical solutions that are able to solve the problem. So we can go back to the suing those vendors whose systems have copyright infringing activity happening.
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By all means, please go ahead. Watching you squander what little money you have on a misguided copyright war chest is going to be fascinating.
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"Sure, but now you can't claim that there isn't any technical solutions that are able to solve the problem"
I can because I have visited your shitshow of a site and I can verify that it does nothing that you claim it to do. Since it also doesn't do anything else of value, your claims can be ignored.
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Well, you didn’t download it.
He can start by fixing his memory leak.
I’m so done.
Good luck out there. You’ve got a bit of a mess.
Have you done anything in the 6 years since your first YouTube video upload?
I understand what your trying to do, and that’s your right. All power to you for following your beliefs with dedication. But even so, you’ve got a long way to go before it becomes something usable.
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You might have some explaining to do, given that I don't understand what exactly did you verify and what was the outcome? This kind of "generalized accusations" without anything specific has never been accepted in a court of law. You need to put meat to the bones, or your message will just be ignored, "failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted"...
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This kind of "generalized accusations" is what your friends at Malibu Media regularly gave to the court and demanded that they be taken as gospel truth.
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Do you actually remember how far this line of questioning went before judge put a stop to it? Given that Malibu's attempts at this failed miserably, why do you think you can do it better than what Malibu's professional lawyer trolls are able to do?
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Malibu Media got one bellwether trial out of the thousands of cases they attempted to file, which didn't set any meaningful precedents after they bribed one of the defendants to take a dive. They're now running out of money and resources because even the scummiest of lawyers aren't willing to martyr themselves in Malibu Media's name for free.
If your point is that "generalized accusations" are poor and weak, it's a solid damning affirmation that your entire spiel on copyright enforcement is poor and weak. Then again, anyone with a functioning brain already knew that.
I don't think I'm better at "generalized accusations". What I do think is that I'm not the kind of immoral scum like the copyright trolls you worship.
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Give someone a means of making marks, and something on which to place those marks, and they have the technology needed to copy someone else's work if it is marks on a medium. In other words a pencil and paper can be used to copy a printed book, and therefore infringe on copyright. In general you cannot stop illegal uses of legal to own technology.
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you should not focus on "what you cannot do", but you should be thinking "what can be done"... There's plenty of stuff that actually makes copyrights easier to control that are easy to do technically.
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That “stuff” also intentionally sabotages software, and once people find out the software has been sabotaged, they won’t want to keep using it. Your master plan has a flaw the size of the Grand Canyon, and it’s called “you don’t think about other people”.
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So how you go from "preventing copyright infringement" to "sabotaging software"? When it's clearly stated in the law that copyright infringement is illegal, technology vendors will need to do all they can to prevent those misuses. Otherwise you're supporting illegal activity? The people you're talking about do not start avoiding your software once they find out that you're supporting terrorists and copyright infringers?
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"So how you go from "preventing copyright infringement" to "sabotaging software"?"
You create a supposedly creative piece of software that the author has decided to cripple to the point that nobody uses it, so he's reduces to whining online to a group of people who laugh at him.
"When it's clearly stated in the law that copyright infringement is illegal, technology vendors will need to do all they can to prevent those misuses"
No technology can prevent copyright infringement. Even if your insane ramblings because reality and lead to the inevitable result of banning the internet entirely, you can still infringe using a stick and some sand.
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This was already proven false, but you said that the people will just avoid my web server. Technology can prevent copyright infringement.
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"Technology can prevent copyright infringement."
No, it really can't. Even if you magically prevent all infringement on copyrighted materials that exist at the moment of creation and do so without sacrificing all functionality (impossible), you still can't avoid infringement on something the program is not aware of. Since thousands of new copyrighted works are being created every second, due to the automatic nature of copyright, and there's no central register to query, if your software can crate something it's capable of infringement.
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I don't need to preserve "all functionality"... Just my 600 features.
There's plenty of things to explore in the 600 features, so anything beyond those features do not need to be preserved.
Especially anything relating to pirated materials do not need to be preserved.
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Yes or no: Can every single one of those features all prevent any infringement on every bit of copyrighted material that exists anywhere in the world at the moment of input without sacrificing any functionality to do so?
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"This was already proven false,"
No matter how much you repeat this, it does not become true just because you say so.
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If there's 600 features available, noone will notice if one of the features is missing or not. You didn't even bother to check the features, so if I hadn't told you how the software works, you wouldn't have the information that it uses some kind of copy-protection stuff.
And maybe I just implemented my copy-protection correctly, in such way that it doesn't limit the behavior of the other 600 features.
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That would be literally impossible.
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My favourite part of this argument is that in other comments in this thread he's claiming that his competitors are too complicated for children, but he's also boasting about sheer number of features here.
I mean, which is it? Even if he could actually block all infringement while making a tool useful, there's no way a UI could present 600 different functions but remain friendly to small children...
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This is exactly why I can do it properly while other people will fail in the task. Basically I don't underestimate the children's skills. The child will notice it immediately when you try to offer a tool that was meant to be "simple" and "easy-to-use-so-that-child-can-use-it-too"... And once they notice that you underestimated their skills, the tool will go to trashcan immediately. I simply didn't want that outcome.
Underestimating children's skills is the biggest mistake tech vendors can do. I simply didn't go to that trap.
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"This is exactly why I can do it properly while other people will fail in the task."
Weird, I've seen your UI and it does nothing of the sort.
"Underestimating children's skills is the biggest mistake tech vendors can do"
You literally just said that your professional competitors fail because they don't dumb it down enough for 15 year olds...
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You do have something there. The fastest way to piss off a young technoid is simping.
I remember ole via stacks. BOB would have been great for my grandmother, not school kids. HyperCard? Seriously people.
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How do you expect the pre-teens you want using your program to keep track of those “600 functions”? If they can do it for your program, for what reason can’t they do the same for Blender? And even if they can keep track of those functions, what use would your program be to them if they can’t actually save their output thanks to ridiculously strict copyright restrictions you yourself have bragged at length about installing into your program?
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Consider that Tero Pulkinnen has made it known, and at length, his distaste for humans that don't behave like simplistic robots for him to manipulate.
The idea that his software is engineered to account for even the whimsical behaviors of adolescents is a blatant red herring for him to insist on using the strictest definitions of copyright that would make the RIAA jizz their pants.
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Every blender feature has different user interface and key bindings. Which means that every feature looks different to the user in blender.
I instead did the same user interface for all the features, and once you learn small core user interface, the whole tool will be available as a reward.
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When two or more functions within the same program need to stand out from one another, their UIs looking different and requiring more than a single keyboard shortcut tends to happen, yes. Or do you think the marquee select tool in Photoshop should have the exact same settings UI as the paintbrush tool?
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It's obvious that you haven't tried the builder tool that I'm offering. If you had spent even 20 minutes with the tool, you wouldn't be spouting this kind of nonsense. (it doesn't need to have the same settings, as long as you don't invent new key bindings and dialogs every time)
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Different tools should have different key bindings and dialogs. The marquee selection tool shouldn’t (and doesn’t need to) share settings with the paintbrush tool.
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I never said anything about sharing the settings.
I said sharing the settings dialogs.
That's significantly different message, when the settings itself can vary, while the dialog key bindings and user interface remains the same.
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To-may-to, to-mah-to.
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If you get your way with copyright protection, you would create a world in which the only way to express creativity would be as an employee of a corporation, producing works for hire. In that would you would now be able to create Meshpages, or run your own web site, but only use your skills to make the corporations rich.
Your Ideas on copyright protection would only work to help enable the 1% to turn everybody else into serfs.
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Notepad++ and other text editors allow for the free and unfettered input of text. To prevent any and all copyright infringement from happening in those programs, the devs of such programs would have to intentionally sabotage the functionality of said programs. How they do so is irrelevant; that they would have to do so is important.
Your entire plan for making software devs responsible for infringement hinges on the idea that those devs should do anything and everything they can to prevent infringement from even being possible with their programs. But in doing that, the functionality of those programs becomes limited at best and non-existent at worst. After all, who the hell would use a text editor that won’t let them type anything into it or a graphics editor that won’t let them draw anything on a digital canvas?
Outside of supernatural magic, willful sabotage, or any other form of wishful thinking, how can Notepad++ tell if what I’m typing into it is an infringing use of someone else’s work or a Fair Use–protected quote within a larger original work?
You keep saying that people need to prevent “misuses” of their tech. But the only way to do that for certain is to prevent user input of any kind—at which point the tech becomes useless. You wouldn’t even be able to develop Meshpage if the editors you use for that job were sabotaged to prevent user input for the sake of pleasing the Copyright God.
No. No, I am not.
Someone who makes a text editor doesn’t “support[ ]terrorists and copyright infringement” if terrorists and pirates use that text editor as part of their unlawful acts. I mean, the manufacturer of the car that killed Heather Heyer didn’t support her murderer by making the car in the first place. You and I both know that is a bullshit argument meant to inflame emotions and make people ignore the underlying faulty logic of the claim. I know you’re a troll, but fuck, you could at least try to be less transparent about it.
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There's significant conflict in your message.
there's 3 elements in the conflict:
1) "Intentionally sabotage the functionality of said programs"
2) "once people find out the software has been sabotaged, they won’t want to keep using it"
3) "Someone who makes a text editor doesn't support pirates.
But you didn't bother to check the functionality of meshpage/builder at all, so the point (1) and (2) isn't actually important. Then you need to use (3) to avoid the question why your users don't flee from your offering when you support pirates (and terrorists).
Basically you're in logical conflict and you should fix your logic.
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Not really. There's several comment threads where you boasted about your ability to instantly remove features if someone claimed they were used for copyright infringement, such as modeling circles or publishing to servers. This isn't hard. Anyone reading your comment history will realize that.
What proof do you have that text editor developers support pirates and terrorists? For that matter, what proof do you have that non-Meshpage developers support pirates and terrorists? If someone chooses to abstain from patronizing a product or service, what convinces them is substantial proof. Not the ramblings of a jealous Scandinavian whackjob.
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Actually, I have the opposite proof, i.e. that text editor authors sabotaged their product, when they introduced "quote marks" and "copyright symbol" to their font files and text editor key bindings and ruined their product with additional features whose only purpose is to harrass pirates and make copyright owners life easier by making it easy to identify quoted text and copyright notices. This feature is clearly only for copyright purpose, and as you promised to avoid sabotaged products, you now need to stop using all text editors that support quote marks and copyright symbol.
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The ability to type out the copyright symbol in a font or on a text document is not, by itself, anti-piracy protection. It's not pro-copyright sabotage. The same thing goes for quote marks. People put quote marks around cited text to quote it, not out of some deep-seated worship of copyright law.
You were not given any such promise. You were given an explanation for why making your own software less intuitive and accessible would discourage users. But if you've got the balls to, you're more than welcome to sue everyone else for using quote marks.
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By that logic, you committed copyright infringement when you used quotation marks in that paragraph.
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The ability to use a copyright symbol is irrelevant if you're working in a copyright system where you don't need to register copyright for it to apply.
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A text editor can’t know if someone typing a terrorist screed into said editor is an actual terrorist or an author (fiction or non-fiction).
A pirate or a terrorist using a given piece of software for their own illicit acts does not mean the developers of that software support those acts (or those people). Trying to prevent such acts from being done in, say, a text editor like Notepad++ would require such a deep sabotaging of the program itself that said sabotaging would render the program useless to everyone.
That a text editor allows someone to use it for writing terrorist screeds—legitimate or fictional—does not inherently mean the developers of that program support terrorism. To believe otherwise is to believe in a leap of logic that defies all reason and sanity, especially when applied to meatspace tools that have a legal use but can also be used to commit unlawful acts (e.g., hammers).
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As my quote marks and copyright synbol example shows, the copyright protection features do not need to break the other features of the said text editor.
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Quotation marks are not an anti-piracy tool, no matter how much you want to delude yourself into thinking otherwise.
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Still you should think of any anti-piracy technologies as if they were just another version of quotation marks. Basically you should consider the positive change those technologies can do to the world, instead of focusing on the negative. Your pessimistic attitude is what is causing all the horror, when you should be focusing your efforts to finding positive change that these anti-piracy technologies can bring to the world.
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Saying “quotation marks are an anti-piracy technology” doesn’t make it true. Anti-piracy technology can’t bring any good to the world when such technology can’t tell on its own whether someone used a copyrighted work under Fair Use principles. Your desire to snuff out the public domain, Fair Use, and humanity in general has been noted.
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Basic first step is to follow the copyright's default behaviour, i.e. forbid all copying.
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Everything we make is built on the works of those who came before us. To forbid all copying is to bring culture to a standstill. Do you really want to prevent the creation of any new cultural works?
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If you forbid copying, it does not prevent creation of new cultural works. Instead of replicating the same spam 100 million times, you'd have many different kinds of products available.
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If you made Meshpage without having first programmed both the operating system for your computer and the programming language under which Meshpage would run, you would technically be guilty of infringement under your “all copying is infringement and must be stopped” logic, since you failed to make a wholly unique product that doesn’t build on works that came before yours. Yes or no: Are you guilty of infringement under the logic you’ve presented?
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I don't need to copy the operating system or the programming language... They're used as a tool that does not get included to the distributed product.
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They’re still works that came before yours. The question still stands.
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Nazi propaganda also came before my product. That doesn't mean I need to worship hitler.
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Irrelevant (and inflammatory). My One Simple Question to you remains unanswered: Under the “all copying is infringement” logic you’ve presented here, are you guilty of copyright infringement?
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I'm the owner of the material, so I can copy my own content as much as I like.
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You built your program on the backs of what came before you—not just in 3D modeling programs, but in computing in general. You had to copy at least some portion of that prior work, even if by accident. Under the “all copying is infringement” logic you’ve presented, if you’ve copied even one small part of someone else’s prior work regardless of the context of that copying, are you guilty of copyright infringement?
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It doesn't work like that. There's 3 levels of content items:
1) stuff which you've written yourself and you own the copyright
2) stuff that you've licensed which you can use
3) stuff that you don't have a license
Basically all my work is based on (1) or worst case (2). I very strictly avoid (3).
Note that even (2) is very bad situation, given that you're slave of someone else.
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Thanks for admitting to being the worst case (2), because it means you're guilty of stricter copyright infringement.
Blender will be here shortly to DMCA your website to oblivion. I'm sure as an advocate of strict copyright, you won't object or complain about having your website destroyed from the public domain.
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The licensing status of the prior work is irrelevant. You’re still building upon prior work. Under the “all copying is infringement” logic you’ve presented, if you’ve copied even one small part of someone else’s prior work regardless of the context of that copying, are you guilty of copyright infringement?
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This isn't true. It's not illegal to license (and then use) prior work.
You're very confused about what exactly is illegal activity. With this kind of messages, I wouldn't be surprised if we found large pirate collection from your apartment.
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This is a quote from you a few comments up in this particular discussion: “Basic first step is to follow the copyright's default behaviour, i.e. forbid all copying.” You’re expressing the idea that any and all copying, regardless of context, is always copyright infringement.
You’ve admitted that you built Meshpage on the backs of works that came before your own—at a minimum, we’re talking about other 3D modeling programs, operating systems such as Windows, and the programming languages that run them both. That you would’ve copied something from any of those works, even accidentally, is an inevitability. Both the licensing of such prior works and the context of your having copied from those works is ultimately irrelevant to the “all copying is infringement” logic you expressed earlier in this discussion.
Based on your admissions and the logic you’ve presented, I must ask the question again because you have refused to provide a direct answer. Yes or no: Under the “all copying is infringement” logic you’ve presented, if you’ve copied even one small part of someone else’s prior work regardless of the context of that copying, are you guilty of copyright infringement?
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There's two ways to avoid this outcome:
1) you created the material yourself
or
2) you licensed the material
Those are the only possible solutions to the problem. Any other bullshit explanation about context and stuff like that are indicating that it's really copyright infringement. So basically "fair use" is just synonym for copyright infringement, because it doesn't use either (1) or (2), but still copies the content.
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You can create the material yourself, but you won’t be able to make anything wholly original because you’d still be working off the inspiration you gained from the works of others—i.e., you’d still be capable of infringing by accident. You can license material, but under your logic, copying even licensed material is still infringement because it’s still copying the material.
Yes or no: Under the “all copying is infringement” logic you’ve presented, if you’ve copied even one small part of someone else’s prior work regardless of the context of that copying, are you guilty of copyright infringement?
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Yes: I thought that belief was obvious.
See, TP could probably fix that memory bug for free, thanks to the MSDN servers, which are still up.
But that involves using someone else’s work.
But patching requires cooperation.
Using someone else’s stuff. Even using someone else’s knowledge is a copyright violation.
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You can solve this level problems by enforcing strict NDA's for your employees. The NDA can put a information flow barrier around your company in such way that nothing escapes the walled garden. You will have some people quitting because of draconian practices, but at least your information will be safe.
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Holding your employees responsible for letting the world know that you're breaking the law is not considered a solution. It's considered abusive business practice. And you don't have to use employees as an excuse. At this point everyone knows you loathe humans with the ferocity of a thousand dying suns.
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This is already better position to be in, given that innocent infringement only gathers damage awards of 300 euros, when willful infringement is around 200 keuros...
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You’d still be a criminal, though. You’d be an infringer, a copier, a filthy motherfucking pirate.
Yes or no: Under the “all copying is infringement” logic you’ve presented, if you’ve copied even one small part of someone else’s prior work regardless of the context of that copying, are you guilty of copyright infringement?
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This kind of issues can be resolved by providing significant value. For example my meshpage.org site and gameapi builder tool is providing this significant value in form of "combinatory explosion" instead of "mere aggregation" of tools in the builder. This kind of ability to actively combine different tools together to form larger logical constructs is more valuable activity than if pirates just aggregated the pirated material in a corner of their hard disk.
Basically every failure in copyright area can simply cancel one of the useful bits that you created yourself.
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Value is irrelevant. Copying is copying, no matter how accidental or how little.
Yes or no: Under the “all copying is infringement” logic you’ve presented, if you’ve copied even one small part of someone else’s prior work regardless of the context of that copying, are you guilty of copyright infringement?
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Your position has been always that our web site doesn't provide value to customers? Are you after all that trolling, going with the position that value is irrelevant?
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The value of what an act of copying produces is irrelevant to the fact that the act of copying has taken place.
Yes or no: Under the “all copying is infringement” logic you’ve presented, if you’ve copied even one small part of someone else’s prior work regardless of the context of that copying, are you guilty of copyright infringement?
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That hasn't changed.
Providing value does not immunize you from being sued for copyright infringement. In fact, a plaintiff would argue that the value you provide was built upon the copyright you infringed, and thus they are owed some of the benefits you derived from the value you provided.
Really, about the only value you provided was using someone else's model in your tech demo.
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Your inexperience with builder is kinda glowing brightly, and everyone but you can see the problem.
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Leaving aside the fact that your count of copyright infringement should have, by your stricter copyright rules, already seen your project taken off the web via "notice and staydown"... Name something that was created with your builder that wasn't created by you.
We'll wait.
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You should be asking if builder is available for other people to use, not whether the lazy people actually bothered to look into it.
If builder is available but noone bothers to look into it, you can only prove your own laziness. You cannot say anything about the technology that I have available.
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If it is available, you would be able to point to something made with your program that wasn’t made by you.
If it isn’t available, you wouldn’t be able to do that.
Yes or no: Can you point to something made with your program that wasn’t made by you?
I’ve seen what your program is capable of. I can absolutely say that your program is so far behind the times that you come as if you’re trying to rebuild the first-ever printing press from scratch while everyone else is using laser printers.
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That's what you call software development. At first you'll be behind the times. Your competition is building significant functionality and their software stacks are getting bloated. Once it's bloated, customers start to avoid it because it's just too heavy for the job they have. Soon you'll find out that customer's of your competition is queueing your product, because it isn't so bloated.
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And yet, people are still using Blender instead of scrambling to kiss your ass.
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You can always choose otherwise -- to show off your determination and go against the flow. Next week you'll just download builder and create some 3d models.
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And how's that "going against the flow" working out for you so far? By your own assumptions you should have thousands of users, and as of 2021 your proudest accomplishment is to have zero user-reported errors because zero users is what you have.
You're a joke, Tero, and not even a fresh one.
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"At first you'll be behind the times"
If you insist on trying to reinvent everything from scratch instead of utilising accepted standards, sure. That's fairly dumb in a market as mature and expansive as the one you've chosen to address, but for the sake of argument I'd imagine Linus Torvalds faced the same criticism when he decided to build his own operating system.
But, after this many years most people would have at least been able to catch up. Yet, not only have you clearly not caught up, you're unable to provide a single example of someone other than you having used the software to create something when asked. People can point to a huge number of things built with your more direct claimed competitors.
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This depends heavily what exactly you consider to be direct competitors of my software.
Basically if you count only 4 most popular works, your statement might be true.
But my real competition can be found from ludumdare, where there's 4500 gaming projects which are trying to create technologies that can compete in the marketplace.
Noone really cares about the top 4 players, it's the large mass of gaming projects that you need to compete against.
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…except the millions of people who are using those programs instead of yours.
Yes or no: Can you show us anything made by your program that wasn’t made by you?
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reinventing everything from scratch is necessary evil. Promoting the progress of science and useful arts. Without reinvention the project would simply be too easy for experienced developer like myself. First step at the beginning of the project is to peel layers of onion until the project size is correct. The level of investment you can expect for your project is related to how many technology layers you removed at the beginning of the project.
Linus Torvalds killed his whole computer system with this layer peeling, and he had to build operating system from scratch. Now you claim he's some kind of hero, because he reinvented software that was already available (implemented by unix and windows and macs already)... Linus is just a master of removing unnecessary software layers.
I didn't go that far, I consider programming languages and operating systems to be outside the scope of my projects. Instead I stopped at the opengl layer, that seemed to have enough low level stuff available that there's plenty of fun reinventing the technology. And I was right. The level of reinvention was placed just correctly, given that I managed to implement full system in just 8 years.
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"reinventing everything from scratch is necessary evil"
It's not, but you chose the path that you failed on.
"Without reinvention the project would simply be too easy for experienced developer like myself"
That's a new one. You failed because you decided that doing things the sensible way was too easy?
"Now you claim he's some kind of hero, because he reinvented software that was already available (implemented by unix and windows and macs already)"
I'd ask if you knew how much all of those have changed since Linux was first announced and how little of the codebase is remotely like the versions that existed when he started. Maybe this is another reason you fail - you don't recognise that all these things grow and evolve over time and you need to hit requirements and technology goals that weren't dreamt of when you started the project, at least if you expect anyone else to want to use it.
"there's plenty of fun reinventing the technology."
The criticism you receive here is not because you decided it would be fun to do unnecessary work. It's because you whine that you weren't paid magic money because you decided to do such a thing. Doing something for fun is fine, but if you want to get paid for it, you have to do more to make it something people want to pay for.
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How did you plan to publish software that you spent less than 2 weeks writing? Basically such small effort will be rejected because they're too easy tasks. Proper way to do this is to create something larger. To get it larger, you need to reinvent something that already exist.
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Only if you think all copying is a criminal act that needs to be punished harshly. (Which you do.)
Speaking of copying and criminal acts: Didn’t you rip off Scott Cawthon once?
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No, I actually licensed it from some internet vendor. You cannot consider proper licensing activity as "rip off" or any other illegal stuff.
Your Cawthon accusation is in very shaky grounds since you need to assume that the original developer of the 3d model actually 1) does not have license to do it, 2) and that they used enough of Cawthon's material that it crosses the illegal line. I don't think you have either of those proven when you have been focusing on TP's actions, and not considered what other people need to do to get the result that you want. Basically your primary infringer is missing, and you can only claim secondary hot air claims.
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Did they have the rights to use Cawthon’s work? If not, you still ripped off Scott Cawthon and you’re as much a criminal as everyone you want to fine/jail/execute for infringement.
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I dunno why someone like Cawthon would be involved at all in this? Basically I have insufficient information to admit or deny the allegations in the paragraph and the claims are therefore denied.
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The model you ripped off came from his work. Did the person you licensed the model from have the right to use Cawthon’s work in that way? If not, by your “all copying is infringement” logic, you’re as much of a criminal as the person who licensed to you a work they didn’t have a right to license.
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To me it looked like the model was independently created. There probably wasn't any game or product that has the exact same model available. A real game would have fixed some of the bugs from the model.
So this looks like similar situation than what happened with angry birds knitting instructions my mom found from a shop. We still don't know if the shop had a license from Rovio to sell stuffed toys plans with that branding...
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It wasn’t, and you’re still a criminal under your “all copying is infringement” logic.
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How do you know? We have no idea what kind of clean room techniques these people were employing to get this product done. We shouldn't assume that other people creating products are some kind of idiots who cannot understand copyright's fine details. This kind of assumption is always going wrong. It's better to trust the shops, shopkeepers and product developers who you rely on. You wouldn't purchase their product, if you didn't trust them to do good product, so the fact that we actually licensed the product from these people means that we actually trust them to be valid product developers.
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Lol, you just get better and better.
So, you think that creative artists need to be isolated in "clean room" environments and never use any kind of artistic influence or inspiration they had before embarking on a specific project?
I'm glad this nonsense is completely impossible, because the output would be extraordinarily boring. Sorry dude, I like the art I pay for to be entertaining and history shows that all the greatest art "homages" in some way.
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Well, every time this "greatest art" homages something, they just lose ownership of their own work. Today's news item is the Quentin Tarantino is being sued for selling NFT of his own work. So even if you actually created the material yourself, these sales activities might not be allowed.
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I'm not sure exactly how to take what you're saying here. You appear to be holding Tarantino up as someone who doesn't "own" his own work because he homaged things in the process. But, if so, by your own standards Miramax wouldn't own a frame of the movie either, it would be the people who he was homaging. Yet, the reason why Pulp Fiction is so beloved and successful is largely because of Tarantino's own original input into the product, not the fact that he drew inspiration from some old film noirs.
Again, culture would be very poor if homage was not allowed, and the fact that Miramax's history suggests they wouldn't exist in order to sue Tarantino in the first place under your regime is very much noted.
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Because unlike you, I’m aware of Scott Cawthon’s work and familiar with the design of the Springtrap character you ripped off. You’re still a criminal under your logic.
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that doesn't matter one bit. You simply cannot know what kind of contracts Cawthon did or how they're selling rights to the characters. You just assume that the guy who created the 3d model has no permission to the model he created. Your assumptions are (as always) broken.
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According to your version of reality, it's up to you to prove you had bought a licence before using the material.
Well...?
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Yes, and I can show that by referring to the license that sketchfab offered to me when I licensed the material from sketchfab. Sketchfab's shop decides under what conditions the material can be licensed even though the licensing contract is between me and the author of the model. Note that I wouldn't have information at that point, how the model was created or what copyright issues are involved in creation of the model. It's only techdirt who revealed that there might be more copyright issues involved, and when that was revealed, I immediately removed the model from my web site. Thus all damages are limited and it's at worst innocent infringement. And that worst case even assumes that the creator of the model committed direct copyright infringement (which you still haven't proved). You should move your trolling to sketchfab or the author of the model, not towards tp.
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Months into the thread and you consistently refused to prove your licensing was up to snuff. It's fair to assume that this "license" doesn't exist, or doesn't provide the immunity you claim it gives you.
Stricter copyright rules, which you insisted is how the world should operate, doesn't care. It doesn't care if you were the recipient of stolen goods. Possession automatically makes you liable even if you were sold the content under false pretenses.
Stricter copyright doesn't care. That's why you vehemently defend copyright trolls who pursue innocent people. Taking down infringing material does not grant you protection from copyright enforcement.
Here's the beauty of copyright trolling, which you support - it enables copyright enforcers to go after the loser who's least capable of fighting back. Which in this case, would be you. Nice going, genius. Maybe next time find some better initiative to place your bets on.
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Do you know for a fact that he did? If not, you’re still a criminal under your “all copying is infringement” logic.
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I'm of course relying on the license received from sketchfab. Basically after I can show valid licensing activity, the burden of proving copyright infringement moves to the other side and it's YOUR responsibility to prove that copyright infringement happened. And you're seriously lacking with your responsibility.
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You can show that you bought a license; you haven’t proven that the license was legally valid. You’re still a criminal under your “all copying is infringement” logic, and you should burn alongside all the other sinners you want burned in your holy crusade, you son of a bitch.
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That's why there needs to be practices available where content is taken offline whenever there's doubt about the content's license validity. DMCA's notice and takedown is supposedly teaching vendors to do license activity properly, once they learn DMCA stuff, the copyright's same system shouldn't be too difficult.
My pattern is still tons better than your average pirate's.
Even our local tram needs to have officers checking tram tickets. They checked, found no problems. Which means I'm actually buying proper tickets. If I had significant copyright problems, wouldn't you think I would also skip tram tickets?
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Only your insane mind would consider copyright when talking about public transport...
But, again, you accidentally exposed the entire problem here. Tram tickets are easy - there's a single operator, a single set of fares, a single set of destinations, a single set of rules for the ticket to be valid, and a single standard for the ticket you have in your hand that can be checked if needed.
None of this applies to copyright. The potential operators are everybody on the planet, there's no single set of fares or payments, there's a huge number of things that are open to opinion rather than verifiable fact, there's no central authority where you can check the validity and the form and number of works changes constantly.
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This isn't true. The law explicitly gives comprehensive list of things to check when checking copyright. 1) if you're the owner of the copyright 2) if not, check if you have license 3) or check that the material is not being used at all.
There's no opinion in this pattern, only verifiable facts available. Every failure in the pattern is clear problem.
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It is true, you just don't like the real world complications that come in to play when you have to deal with reality. I know that you dearly wish that every case of potential infringement was obvious and not open to interpretation, that fair use didn't exist, that the public domain didn't exist, that transformative uses are allowed, and so on. But this is again why you fail - the fictional universe you invented to pretend that everything is simple does not exist. When you deal with reality, most of your arguments immediately fall apart.
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It doesn't really matter. I released new version of builder on friday and noone here even noticed the big news. You would notice if blender releases their half year of coding, so why would you ignore it when I release a new version?
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We already established a long time ago that you're absolutely atrocious at marketing things yourself, and Blender have a strong enough community that news is discussed even among people who missed the initial announcement.
But, how have you advertised the new version? You don't appear to have mailing list or social media presence to spread the word, and you've blocked the public from GitHub. A quick glance at the download links on your site doesn't indicate that there's a new version, and the front page doesn't contain any announcements, changelogs, etc.
What strategy do you have to advertise your new version, other than whining here when people haven't stumbled across your site and noticed.a change in the version number?
For reference, this is how Blender advertise their new public release on their site (and they have many other channels outside of their site to do the same): https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-93/
Now, compare that to... whatever you have as an announcement. Yours is somewhat less informative, right?
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there's a devlog in itch.io about it.
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Lol, is there? You linked to the front page rather than the actual blog, there's no indication on your own homepage about the information, nor any indication that people might want to visit wherever you post on itch.io. So, in order to know about the update, someone would already have to already subscribe to a totally unrelated external provider and follow you on there, and nobody who doesn't already do that would know even if they visit your website?
Again, you seem to be depending on magic and random chance that someone who is already interested in your product would know about any updates - then you come in here and whine like the deluded fool you are when your incompetent failure leads to less interest than your competitors.
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well i haven't developed messaging system to my web page. What you request would require availability of some kind of messaging channel between development team and end users. Such system does not exist.
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Once again, I'm glad I live in the real world where these exist and not the hellscape that exists in your head where even the most basic convenience of real life is either inaccessible or illegal.
Fortunately, all of your competent competitors live in the same real world I do, and can communicate with their customers and developers quite easily.
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It's not competent to do copyright infringement and download some crappy communication platform made by someone else. Basically if you're not paying for it, it's either created by slaves or it's illegal.
All the cool people create these services themselves. It's just ok to reject service because the feature has not been developed yet.
Internet also exists, it's just too bad that all the content available in internet is also illegal to use. It just shows lack of morals if you use internet's content that some other people created, instead of creating the content yourself.
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That's funny. I pointed out that developers who aren't incompetent dickheads have ways to communicate with each other and their customers quite easily, something you claimed didn't exist, and you responded with another irrelevant rant about copyright infringement.
You you have anything else in that empty head of yours, or is every aspect of your incompetence related to phantom pirates somehow, even the things that can't possibly be related to it?
"Internet also exists, it's just too bad that all the content available in internet is also illegal to use"
Including yours, by your own definition. How does it feel to live in a world you invented where you made yourself the criminal? Maybe you'd be better not being on the internet...
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This is true. But I have a good trick for it. I don't offer licenses to the content I create. Download links are available, but no licenses are offered. I'll have to see how many people will illegally use the product.
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That's the fun part - thanks to copyright being automatically registered, if you don't specify a different licence to release under then you get it handled by the default one - which includes all kinds of fun stuff like fair use.
By offering the download links, you have made the product available to the public under this licence. Don't like it? Either choose a licence or don't offer it to the public. You don't get to offer something then tell people they're using it illegally because you disagree with the standard licence you opted to offer it under.
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Is there url for the conditions that the default one places?
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The time spent writing software (or creating any product) has no direct correlation to its usefulness or value.
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This might be slightly inaccurate. Basically time spent is tightly linked to quality of the product. More rough edges have been smoothened out when lots of time was spent on the product. Thus quality is important aspect relative to time spent.
But popular products have another strange feature. The popularity requires high quality. It's not so that high quality products get more popular, but it's other way around. The globe and the government requires that popular products are of high quality and no company is able to bypass that regulation. Basically when popular products gets significant amount of failures, the end users polling the support phone lines will increase to the level that is unmanageable. And government has seen this many times, so they try to prevent it from happening again.
So popularity and high quality are linked. Thus (by composition) popular products have a requirement to spend large amount of time in their creation. Thus only large teams can create popular products.
Thus if you want to create popular products, you need to spend significant amount of time in the creation process. Small teams are heavily struggling with this requirement. Thus also meshpage and gameapi builder are struggling with this requirement.
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"Basically time spent is tightly linked to quality of the product."
No, it's not. Some of the greatest songs ever were recorded in a single afternoon, some of the greatest movies shot in a weekend, some of the greatest novels in days. Some of the greatest games ever made took weeks, not years. I all depends on what it is.
There can be some correlation, but some terrible art has taken decades to complete, while other creators barely blinked as they created a masterpiece.
"The globe and the government requires that popular products are of high quality"
Oh fuck no they don't, you only have to look at some of what's popular to see that.
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"Still you should think of any anti-piracy technologies as if they were just another version of quotation marks."
People do. Quotation marks are a tool that are used for a lot of things that have nothing to do with copyright - where I just quoted you, for example. If I'm writing a novel, the quotation marks are used merely to indicate the points where a fictional character is talking - they don't indicate that the words within are copyrighted outside of the current work. If I'm coding, the quotation marks are used to specify the value of a variable, which is purely functional and not something that can be copyrighted on its own. In the latter two cases, they do not indicate that copyright is remotely involved at all, and it's not present if I were to release the end result as public domain.
If we follow your argument here, you're demanding that we treat all technology as being as context and usage dependent as quotation marks when it comes to copyright enforcement. Which I would agree with, but I doubt for the same reasons as you're dreaming up, because they don't apply to the realities of the world.
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Man, you love making lists, don't you?
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Yes.
1) std::vector provides the feature in c++
2) you just push_back the data to the container
3) then you have magical iterators to access the data
4) and then you can pass the container to every place where the data is needed
5) and then your software can actually use the data for displaying it to the screen
6) then even this nice list is available for your consumption...
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Oh, I forgot this part:
7) then there's 850 million copies of it available on the planet earth
8) when there's one pixel broken in it, 850 million times that small error will cause problems to real humans
9) fixing the bug once it's distributed to all the people means duplicating the work 150 million times
10) so better stay within the deadline (that was 10 years ago)...
11) so deadlines are pretty important where I come from.
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Man, I never thought I would meet somebody who would make Donald Trump seem less delusional by comparison.
850,000,000? SERIOUSLY?!?!?
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Yes. It's called planet earth. More specifically, european market for digital products called phones.
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You're seriously extremely deluded if you think everybody in Europe or everyone who has a smartphone is going to want to download your software. You're not google.
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They don't need to download it, when the software is included with the same package where they got their hardware from. It's called "a list user interface component". Someone had to build it or else you wouldn't be using phones at all. That someone just happens to be me.
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Wait, what? Unless your delusions of grandeur have gotten so big that you think you're going to replace GOOGLE I don't know what you're on about.
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We just did it before google got their operation up and running.
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IIRC, our insane friend here claims to have worked in embedded systems for (I believe) Ericsson or some other similar manufacturer during some previous term of employment, and whatever it was that he did was adopted as part of a standard that's still used.
If true, that handily explains why he believes he's a good coder despite all the evidence to the contrary, and why he had hilarious amounts of money to piss away on buses. He's not saying his software is more popular than Google, he's saying that a small piece of code you will never directly see has been sold by actual successful people within their products. He's just not yet understood the hilariously clear reasons why that success hasn't translated into riches when he doesn't depend on those other co-workers to manufacturer and market the product.
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Okay, thanks. That makes sense.
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The fact that Sony Ericsson fucked right out of the phone market should give you a good idea of Tero Pulkinnen's relevance.
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too bad it's not actually ericsson...
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Name the last time in the past 10 years where people queued on the street for hours for an Ericsson phone with your tech in it. I imagine you're going to come up with the same non-answer just like your threat to sue the non-existent Meshpage pirates.
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Check miraculous failure called ngage. It kinda explains the situation.
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Let me get this straight:
Seriously, You're giving the NGAGE as an example that people lined up on the street for? I remember it in NYC, where there were tons of boxes on launch day and nobody wanted to get it. It was a pathetic piece of shit that couldn't compete in the marketplace like your software. Their manufacturers waaaaayyy overvalued it like you do with your software. Oh, and it was manufactured by NOKIA, not Ericsson.
Is there anything that you can get right?
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The one review that Tero Pulkinnen touted on his website - as a positive review, at that - was a teenager complaining about how shitty his original Meshpage webpage looked and how incomprehensible his "tech demo" ad was on a random London bus that Pukeface somehow managed to convince to give him ad space instead of literally any other competitor. Did I also mention that said teenager posted on a blog that has been dead for years?
When you consider all of this it's not surprising that Tero considers the NGAGE to be a crowning achievement. A mobile phone that literally failed to ride on the wave of modern mobile gaming. Tero finds kindred spirits in plenty of failed attempts.
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Yes, it's nice that it arrived so early in the process. It was only our 3rd or 4th phone model we implemented and it still managed to break the bank. Tech people didn't like it much, but the general public just loved it.
After ngage we just implemented all the other s60 phones, but ngage with their mickey mouse ears-calling feature just made our day and thus we still remember it fondly years after it arrived.
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"but ngage with their mickey mouse ears-calling feature just made our day"
Fuck me, you're actually picking the main reason why it was laughed at as it's best feature? The main reason why people didn't want to buy it is the thing you're proud of?
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Its just hilarious. If you want real blunders, check batman phone, it had some nice black colour that made users drop the ball after 15 minutes of watching the desktop background image with horrible headache.
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When your one saving grace is the fact that someone else fucked up harder than you, that's not something to be proud of. It simply cements the impression - nay, the fact - that you're angry and bitter that someone else had a runaway success that far exceeds what you could have ever accomplished.
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I actually did the blunder myself. Someone else did the mickey mouse ears feature.
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And how is this supposed to a defense in your favor? In what dimension do you think admitting that you did the blunder yourself would result in people taking your claims seriously?
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"check batman phone"
I don't even know what you're talking about here, but pointing out something else you consider to be a failure does not absolve the thing you're defending of failure. There's a lot of failures out there, as you well know.
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No. No, they did not.
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😢
So much hate for a system so many didn’t try.
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Hey! No hatred for the N-Gage now!
Crap phone but a few good lasting games.
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I have no objection to the software, but the hardware was laughable - especially the Mickey Mouse form factor that tp seems to be saying was its strength. The fact you had to put it against your head like that was almost certainly why people I knew were against buying it.
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…for a phone. FTFY
As a game system it proved quite robust.
It still has a loyal fan base for that cause, obviously I’m one of them.
And has a small but healthy homebrew market.
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Yeah, that's true but when your hook is that it's a combination phone/handheld and the phone makes you look like an idiot, the system will fail.
As I said, I have no real problems with the software / gaming side of things but the reason nobody was interested was the phone part. A shame, but that's how these things so. History is littered with great idea that got killed by the way they were implemented, and I say that as someone who loved the Atari Lynx.
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For sure.
Or the TXP.
Kind of funny someone who worked on the system didn’t know the company that made it though. 🤔
As said before here I was a non-employee beta tester for Sega, and others, for well over a decade. And the N-Gage was one of the products that wound up in my hands.
The focus on the phone aspect killed a mighty powerful handheld. And I reviewed it for Power Games.
My closing? “7/10. Games rock and controls are responsive but don’t call home about it.”
Now I know who to blame directly. 🧻
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Here’s the thing though. TP: this wasn’t a success.
A quality product that fails at its primary function is not a success.
It’s a fluke.
And what made the second version work as a phone killed the game aspect.
So both failed to do what they set up it to do.
And that still hasn’t been done today. The most-standard games on phones are generally used in a dock with a Bluetooth controller.
Everything else is tailored to a phone one way or another.
And that’s what you have to do.
If you put out a product for you, don’t expect everyone else to bend over for it.
I’ve had 17 downloads on my Plextor patch. Why? Because in order to play the bizarre track layout of the non-standard discs like HVD (high, not holo) and TLCD and GDR it borks the ability to play normal discs and DVDs and Blu-ray. I’ve had hundreds of comments saying you should add support for this or that. Not happening. Can’t be done. Feel free to try, here’s the source. FYI: notice you waive all rights to sue by using it. Trying to do that will destroy the drive. Have fun.
If you build a program and don’t want to implement this or that: that’s your right. And if people want something they will add it (as I showed how to) or they will go somewhere else.
I’m stubborn and don’t give a..: but that’s why I use the IDGAF license.
It worked for me. If it doesn’t work for you fix it yourself.
But I don’t expect to get paid.
My code is messy. Sloppy. Full of holes. Probably a security nightmare.
Memory leaks? Check. Disk hammer? Check. Memory high? Check.
Works? Check mate.
I’m too busy hunting out other peoples’ bugs to be concerned with my own.
The chances of a random hacker getting into my system are nil. And a targeted attack would take long enough that I’d likely notice.
So I simply don’t put the effort in.
Your app is missing standard features included in others. By choice or not.
Your interface is dated. Of the 4 designs in common use today: CL, Classic, Tool Bar/ribbon, and modern…
You chose cludge. It reminds me of WinAmp and NuCad. And SharkWare.
And that’s not bad on its own. But when you add it to missing features you have a no go for most people.
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It’s a Gish Gallop. He wants you to hit back at every point he makes, all so he can dismiss it with a paragraph or two of more inane bullshit, another list, or both.
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And yet people keep falling for it/them...
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I do it because it's fun. I'm sorry. I know I'm feeding the troll, but I've grown fond of cooking troll food as long as the restaurant is the TechDirt Comment Café.
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When the comment count is high, it indicates the original Usenet spirit of holy flame wars still alive and well at Techdirt... There's even the occasional peat fire going on, what was the article again that never stopped garnering comments?
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The TLDR answer to that is that Tero Pulkkinnen thinks he's hot shit when he's really just TP.
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There's a few that come to mind. These days it's usually because Tero Pulkinnen thinks that the world owes him a blowjob for coming up with a 3dsmax knockoff you can use online (for the fuckall that's worth).
If we're going by "never stopped garnering comments" for an extended period of time, there's the "Devin Nunes memo" thread where out_of_the_blue kept copypasting pro-Trump blogposts as if they were some kind of damning indictment, which he attempted turning into a personal project to be the largest comment thread on Techdirt. Mind you, he petered out after the mid-500s, at which point it was the "content moderation for vaccines" article that far and away ran with that championship, because nurglers would simply not shut the fuck up despite the planet being in the throes of a global pandemic.
Come to think of it, Tero Pukeface would fit right in with the Republicans.
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Nah it's your inability to acknowledge when the companies you furiously lick the boots of (mostly Bethesda) are doing the same thing as Nintendo that's annoying and kills your credibility.
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Where's your proof of your assertions?
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why did i even wonder how this topic had over 150 comments inside a day?
ffs.
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The comment section was clogged with TP, and I attempted to take one of the Mario Bros' plungers to unplug it.
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The Problem Is Not Being Able to Buy Nintendo Games
I don't know if this was mentioned on here or not, but the pirated games not only offer the possibility of superior quality, but it's also possible to preserve the actual games alone. Nintendo doesn't let people actually buy a lot of their old N64 games and only offers it to an indefinite rental system that ends whenever Nintendo pulls the plug to it.
I honestly hope people don't forget the number one problem here, so I wanted to mention it here. Nintendo even once offered the Super Mario 3D All-Stars, and they gave the middle finger to consumers by no longer offering it even digitally likely showing they hate the idea of consumers actually being able to preserve these games after a one time payment. If Nintendo keeps acting like this, then I will always probably find certain cases of "piracy" that already happened to their games morally justified alone and that Nintendo is solely more responsible for why some people illegally downloaded Nintendo ROMs.
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I look at how Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all handle their consoles.
Nintendo says "OUR Way or NO way."
Sony says "Same."
Microsoft says "We let you do Homebrew if you pay us once. And we let you have most of the console's hardware for yourself with some limits."
Microsoft says "Spend $15 get GOOD online play, and all the games you can handle."
Nintendo says "LOL. Our Online is ATROCIOUS but you pay for it because you have no other option."
I, don't know what Sony's Online is like.
Piracy on Switch and PS4 is HEAVY.
There is Almost no piracy on the Xbox One/Series S/X.
"Either We service our customers, or our competitors will."
Rare Replay is a GREAT example of how good the Emulation can be/is. Seeing Perfect Dark running at nearly 60 FPS at ALL times vs the N64's "Frames Per Second" shows that Emulation CAN be done right. That you can make retro games WORK on new hardware, IF you care. Nintendo, does not. They know the fans WILL buy whatever they put out.
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Anyone else surprised that Tero Pulkinnen has continued to be an utter fucking tool and waste of Finnish government resources?
One upside to all this is that his troll friends at Malibu Media have been punished by a judge to pay even more settlement fees for copyright law abuse. With a bit of luck Tero will be staring down similar penalties in the future.
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