I'm putting this as part a top level comment as well, but I'm going to do this as a response here as well.
The FAA banned cell phones for decades on the very same "it interfere with da radios" premise. The FAA doesn't like anything other than planes communicating wirelessly. For some reason my CRT TV had to accept interference from my cell phone otherwise planes would be falling from the sky.
Its the same here. lots of FUD to justify their jobs and hidebound efforts to keep plane travel in the 50s while the airport lives in 1984.
you could easily see many Gyms rebrand as "Ultra exclusive, be really happy we took you" type places.
Planet fitness exists because that type of gym scared people away from gyms. and frankly, I'd love to see them make gyms "highly desirable" with 4 hours of paperwork and costing hundreds of dollars a month upfront when most of America can't be fucked to walk in the door for a free month.
I am struggling to understand the argument that goes:
A)Poorly Desirable goods/services make getting a subscription easy so they can rake in money.
B)Poorly Desirable goods/services use difficult-to-stop subscriptions to retain subscribers.
C)Let us force them to make unsubscription as easy as the subscription because they rely on easy subscriptions to get you in the door.
D) Highly desirable goods/services are often limited by demand
E) Highly desirable goods/services often use restrictions on access to manage limited supply
F) Per supply and demand this results in a premium price justified by the demand.
G)therefore we should be concerned Poorly Desirable goods/services will institute access restrictions and price increases?
Using Planet Fitness as a case study, Planet fitness doesn't make money on you using the gym. Gyms cost 100s a month per person and struggle to make ends meet because space and equipment maintenance is expensive. Old-school hyms seen in films are constantly on the brink for this reason, and they are always chasing membership dues because a lot of muscle dudes start blowing off work to train. PF makes money by you paying for a gym, but not actually using it. They do not have enough equipment for everyone to actually use it.
They care about bulk memberships.
A huge part of pulling that off is making signup seamless. You can do it online, They will give you several months free and a stack of goodies....all to get that membership. But you have to go in person to end the membership, playing on the guilt that generates, the gambler's sunk cost fallacy.
Making signup difficult kills the entire scam. Your dog eared copy of anti-regulation rhetoric for dummies is showing.
This doesn't make sense to me.....This sounds like it is about AT&T trying to stifle competition, not collect money from "big tech".
Perhaps you should try reading the article.
It's a tax on tech, proposed by telecom and media companies that want to punish their ad and data collection competitors in tech.
The FCC does desperately need to find more funding revenue to shore up programs like the Universal Service Fund (USF) and E-Rate, which help provide broadband access to schools and low income Americans. So it recently announced it would be considering a new tax on unlicensed spectrum. Pressured by NAB, the Biden FCC's plan would assess regulatory fees on “unlicensed spectrum users,” which would include users of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other consumer wireless devices.
I could at this point just say "Porque no los dos?", having pointed out that the article presents both the idea that AT&T is getting money and that its to punish competitors, but I am going to guess you still claim to not understand how money goes from the FCC to AT&T.
The taxes going to the FCC would fund subsidies, explicitly the USF and E-rate. Where do those subsidies go? How do the listed programs help provide broadband access? By giving money to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Et. Al. for providing service. You know, the people this tax "isn't going to". Its a tax on "tech", stifling competition by collecting money from successful tech companies and giving it to unsuccessful media and ad companies who own and build infrastructure on the taxpayers time.
Does this aid your understanding of how a tax collected by the FCC would be money given to AT&T?
It replaced it with Apple, Inc., which houses its engineers in Cupertino but the all the actual business side stuff is done in Texas. Private ad-hoc initiatives that hide the real problems is how Texas rolls.
The level of understated disinfo about the use of lawsuits to silence journalists is somewhat staggering. Like look at this line in the first quote here:
Today, I’m pleased to announce an initiative that responds to a request from a group of independent journalists I met with during my very first week at USAID. It turns out that autocrats and oligarchs often employ a crude but effective tactic to kill stories they don’t like: they sue reporters until those reporters abandon stories or go out of business.
The way Power phrases this here suggests this is new, something unknown. Rather than an obvious tactic so well known the US has responded to the threat of censorous lawsuits by implementing the SPEECH Act as well as a slew of state level Anti-SLAPP laws.
The honest phrasing would be to say "As legislators in the US have noticed and addressed with the SPEECH ACT....". Its still spin, but I feel its much less obvious about it. I guess it might expose the lack of federal Anti-SLAPP legislation too much, or possibly the abuse of the legal system enjoyed by the political elite in the US, but I still feel like there was a way to spin this that didn't imply censorious lawsuits didn't exist in America.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The game customers didn't pa
Context. Please factor in context. I was discussing pre-printing press, not pre-internet content. I should have said pre-copyright, but i was trying to make the point that to say more culture emerged completely without copyright is inaccurate, it suggests lots of these works aren’t influenced by the culture copyright produced in the decades before publishing gatekeepers started slipping away. Any work created after the dawn of copyright, using creative works as a proxy for culture vis a vis copyright, tropes, styles and genres are all influenced by what sells under copyright, which means even amateur and self published works are in some way influenced by copyright and it’s influence on creativity as a whole, and it would be decades before you could say otherwise. and, if created works are an effective proxy for popular culture, it’s quite possible more of our culture is influenced by copyright than not, and therefore inaccurate to say that “more of our culture was created without copyright” even when you just assume the poster was discussing influence rather than works literally created under copyright.
We’ve lost most of the culture that emerged before copyright.
So this is super late, but in another discussion I realized section 2(4)(C)(iv) might bar even maintaining a list of "friends/followed accounts/subscribed accounts/ect" with which to filter the millions of users down to the hundred you actually know. Like, RIP social media.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The game customers didn't pay enough
The irony is that some 99,99% of what we know as culture emerged completely without copyright yet the copyright cult preachers all keep trying to claim that if it didn't exist no one would ever write a good story ever again.
I'm not so sure. One of the points Techdirt regularly brings up is that more creative content is produced every day than was produced before the dawn of the printing press. And while sure, a lot of that content isn't going to hold a lot of cultural value, by sheer weight of mass I think we have produced more creative works and shared cultural experiences in the copyright era than the pitiful take of what has survived into the modern cultural consciousness.
That isn't down to copyright, and so that might still fulfill your condition as 'completely without copyright', but i'd highly dispute the 'completely'.
First off, liability does actually come from the section of the law that details liability. You wouldn't expect liability to flow directly from the title (section 1) or the definitions (section 2). But section 2, definitions, is the important section because you can't interpret section 3 without understanding the terms as defined in section two.
So, as far as remediating Mike's concerns, for one, nothing about that clause addresses issues with say facebook.com determining without your input that you are on a phone and format the page properly, or have the page remember that you are on mobile based on your last visit, or indeed remember what answers you have provided to any sorting choices from page to page, let alone visit to visit. The website, on a plain reading of the bill, can not ever save any choices you have previously made. As the article stated:
What's more, "inferences about the user's connected device" are explicitly excluded from being used even if they are based on data expressly provided by the user — so even allowing a user to set a preference for their device type, and serve optimized pages based on that preference, would appear to still count as an "opaque algorithm" under the bill's definitions.
Section 2(4)(C)(iv) details this concern, (can't copy paste from the actual text, is page 5, line 16 in the reader above). Data provided expressly by the user does not include any inferences about the device being used, even if based on preferences provided expressly by the user as allowed in section 2(4)(C)(i).
Mike's issues seem to be less about the specific provisions than the broad ambiguous provisions that will lead to significant uncertainty regarding when liability will apply. It is clear the author of the bill doesn't understand the options Facebook already provides, and the definitions portion is a word salad that is low on clarity and high on undermining the purpose of the bill.
I already want to nuke the cookie permission popup from orbit. Every. Single. Time. I visit a website my content is visually blocked by a dumb popup I've answered every time. Now, on every page i visit for news, my email, social media, shopping, and media streaming I also have to tell everyone of them to what sorting algorithm I want to use? And I can never delete my cache in a desperate attempt to keep those settings in place?
I understand you think passing bad laws and cramming our courts with spurious lawsuits to explore the boundaries of a law that really wasn't necessary and doesn't really do anything is a positive, but the rest of us prefer bills which actually serve to address the concerns they have.
It might make a bit more sense when you know that the ‘141’ dislikes is actually ‘141K’. It’s now at 158K dislikes to 18K likes. Nintendo is famous for its legion of tribally loyal vocal fans. They are not on board with this and that is dangerous for nintendo and might signal another bust cycle upcoming for them.
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 :
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
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.
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.
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.
Like perhaps a basic public education focused on critical thinking and problem solving instead of a focus on knowledge marketable to employers that are easily tested for?
Ii they can exercise no judgement as a "manager" position and don't have discretion then they should be paid minimum wage [sic].
If [a school's management team] can exercise no judgement as a manager and don't have discretion then they [should not be managers].
Cutting pay while maintaining the responsibility (you know, everything that isn't discipline that is the majority of their job?) is a shit take. If they don't want the responsibility (handling discipline), you take the responsibility (the job) away, not just the pay.
Re: apathetic local phone company that hasn't meaningfully upgra
congratulations. the full quote was:
Tens of millions more Americans only have the choice of their local cable company or an apathetic local phone company that hasn't meaningfully upgraded their aging DSL lines in twenty years.
Im glad you are not one of those tens of millions, but...
Consolidated Communications Holdings, Inc., doing business as Consolidated Communications, is an American broadband and business communications provider headquartered in Mattoon, Illinois. The company provides data, internet, voice, managed and hosted, cloud and IT services to business customers,[2] and internet, TV, phone and home security services to residential customers.[3] With 36,000 fiber route miles,[4] it is a top ten fiber provider in the U.S.,[5] serving customers in 23 states.[6]
Your ISP is not an local ISP. I don't see how your situation advances the conversation or applies to the article.
On the post: FAA Blocks 5G Deployments Over Safety Concerns Despite No Actual Evidence Of Harm
Re:
I'm putting this as part a top level comment as well, but I'm going to do this as a response here as well.
The FAA banned cell phones for decades on the very same "it interfere with da radios" premise. The FAA doesn't like anything other than planes communicating wirelessly. For some reason my CRT TV had to accept interference from my cell phone otherwise planes would be falling from the sky.
Its the same here. lots of FUD to justify their jobs and hidebound efforts to keep plane travel in the 50s while the airport lives in 1984.
On the post: Trump Announces His Own Social Network, 'Truth Social,' Which Says It Can Kick Off Users For Any Reason (And Already Is)
Re: Screen readers for the blind?
According to US law right now, a screen reader is a copyright violation. I'm not confident the ADA wins over copyright in this legal climate.
On the post: FTC To Crack Down On Companies That Make Cancelling Services A Pain In The Ass
Re: Re: Re: Gym Memberships
Planet fitness exists because that type of gym scared people away from gyms. and frankly, I'd love to see them make gyms "highly desirable" with 4 hours of paperwork and costing hundreds of dollars a month upfront when most of America can't be fucked to walk in the door for a free month.
I am struggling to understand the argument that goes:
A)Poorly Desirable goods/services make getting a subscription easy so they can rake in money.
B)Poorly Desirable goods/services use difficult-to-stop subscriptions to retain subscribers.
C)Let us force them to make unsubscription as easy as the subscription because they rely on easy subscriptions to get you in the door.
D) Highly desirable goods/services are often limited by demand
E) Highly desirable goods/services often use restrictions on access to manage limited supply
F) Per supply and demand this results in a premium price justified by the demand.
G)therefore we should be concerned Poorly Desirable goods/services will institute access restrictions and price increases?
On the post: FTC To Crack Down On Companies That Make Cancelling Services A Pain In The Ass
Re: Gym Memberships
Interesting note:
Using Planet Fitness as a case study, Planet fitness doesn't make money on you using the gym. Gyms cost 100s a month per person and struggle to make ends meet because space and equipment maintenance is expensive. Old-school hyms seen in films are constantly on the brink for this reason, and they are always chasing membership dues because a lot of muscle dudes start blowing off work to train. PF makes money by you paying for a gym, but not actually using it. They do not have enough equipment for everyone to actually use it.
They care about bulk memberships.
A huge part of pulling that off is making signup seamless. You can do it online, They will give you several months free and a stack of goodies....all to get that membership. But you have to go in person to end the membership, playing on the guilt that generates, the gambler's sunk cost fallacy.
Making signup difficult kills the entire scam. Your dog eared copy of anti-regulation rhetoric for dummies is showing.
On the post: The FCC Ponders A Hugely Problematic Tax On WiFi
Re:
Perhaps you should try reading the article.
I could at this point just say "Porque no los dos?", having pointed out that the article presents both the idea that AT&T is getting money and that its to punish competitors, but I am going to guess you still claim to not understand how money goes from the FCC to AT&T.
The taxes going to the FCC would fund subsidies, explicitly the USF and E-rate. Where do those subsidies go? How do the listed programs help provide broadband access? By giving money to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Et. Al. for providing service. You know, the people this tax "isn't going to". Its a tax on "tech", stifling competition by collecting money from successful tech companies and giving it to unsuccessful media and ad companies who own and build infrastructure on the taxpayers time.
Does this aid your understanding of how a tax collected by the FCC would be money given to AT&T?
On the post: In Big Shift For Apple, Company Makes It Easier For Users To Repair Phones
Re: Didn't see that one coming.
It replaced it with Apple, Inc., which houses its engineers in Cupertino but the all the actual business side stuff is done in Texas. Private ad-hoc initiatives that hide the real problems is how Texas rolls.
On the post: Federal Government Announces Legal Defense Fund For Journalists Facing Bogus Defamation Lawsuits From Government Officials
The level of understated disinfo about the use of lawsuits to silence journalists is somewhat staggering. Like look at this line in the first quote here:
The way Power phrases this here suggests this is new, something unknown. Rather than an obvious tactic so well known the US has responded to the threat of censorous lawsuits by implementing the SPEECH Act as well as a slew of state level Anti-SLAPP laws.
The honest phrasing would be to say "As legislators in the US have noticed and addressed with the SPEECH ACT....". Its still spin, but I feel its much less obvious about it. I guess it might expose the lack of federal Anti-SLAPP legislation too much, or possibly the abuse of the legal system enjoyed by the political elite in the US, but I still feel like there was a way to spin this that didn't imply censorious lawsuits didn't exist in America.
On the post: Denuvo Games Once Again Broken For Paying Customers Thanks To DRM Mishap
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The game customers didn't pa
Context. Please factor in context. I was discussing pre-printing press, not pre-internet content. I should have said pre-copyright, but i was trying to make the point that to say more culture emerged completely without copyright is inaccurate, it suggests lots of these works aren’t influenced by the culture copyright produced in the decades before publishing gatekeepers started slipping away. Any work created after the dawn of copyright, using creative works as a proxy for culture vis a vis copyright, tropes, styles and genres are all influenced by what sells under copyright, which means even amateur and self published works are in some way influenced by copyright and it’s influence on creativity as a whole, and it would be decades before you could say otherwise. and, if created works are an effective proxy for popular culture, it’s quite possible more of our culture is influenced by copyright than not, and therefore inaccurate to say that “more of our culture was created without copyright” even when you just assume the poster was discussing influence rather than works literally created under copyright.
We’ve lost most of the culture that emerged before copyright.
On the post: The Latest Version Of Congress's Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Based On Two Separate Debunked Myths & A Misunderstanding Of How Things Work
So this is super late, but in another discussion I realized section 2(4)(C)(iv) might bar even maintaining a list of "friends/followed accounts/subscribed accounts/ect" with which to filter the millions of users down to the hundred you actually know. Like, RIP social media.
On the post: Denuvo Games Once Again Broken For Paying Customers Thanks To DRM Mishap
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The game customers didn't pay enough
I'm not so sure. One of the points Techdirt regularly brings up is that more creative content is produced every day than was produced before the dawn of the printing press. And while sure, a lot of that content isn't going to hold a lot of cultural value, by sheer weight of mass I think we have produced more creative works and shared cultural experiences in the copyright era than the pitiful take of what has survived into the modern cultural consciousness.
That isn't down to copyright, and so that might still fulfill your condition as 'completely without copyright', but i'd highly dispute the 'completely'.
On the post: The Latest Version Of Congress's Anti-Algorithm Bill Is Based On Two Separate Debunked Myths & A Misunderstanding Of How Things Work
Re: What about Section 3?
First off, liability does actually come from the section of the law that details liability. You wouldn't expect liability to flow directly from the title (section 1) or the definitions (section 2). But section 2, definitions, is the important section because you can't interpret section 3 without understanding the terms as defined in section two.
So, as far as remediating Mike's concerns, for one, nothing about that clause addresses issues with say facebook.com determining without your input that you are on a phone and format the page properly, or have the page remember that you are on mobile based on your last visit, or indeed remember what answers you have provided to any sorting choices from page to page, let alone visit to visit. The website, on a plain reading of the bill, can not ever save any choices you have previously made. As the article stated:
Section 2(4)(C)(iv) details this concern, (can't copy paste from the actual text, is page 5, line 16 in the reader above). Data provided expressly by the user does not include any inferences about the device being used, even if based on preferences provided expressly by the user as allowed in section 2(4)(C)(i).
Mike's issues seem to be less about the specific provisions than the broad ambiguous provisions that will lead to significant uncertainty regarding when liability will apply. It is clear the author of the bill doesn't understand the options Facebook already provides, and the definitions portion is a word salad that is low on clarity and high on undermining the purpose of the bill.
I already want to nuke the cookie permission popup from orbit. Every. Single. Time. I visit a website my content is visually blocked by a dumb popup I've answered every time. Now, on every page i visit for news, my email, social media, shopping, and media streaming I also have to tell everyone of them to what sorting algorithm I want to use? And I can never delete my cache in a desperate attempt to keep those settings in place?
I understand you think passing bad laws and cramming our courts with spurious lawsuits to explore the boundaries of a law that really wasn't necessary and doesn't really do anything is a positive, but the rest of us prefer bills which actually serve to address the concerns they have.
On the post: Austin Homeowners Association Pitches In To Help Cops Kill A Guy Over Uncut Grass
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Legally, that is not warrant service. The warrant has not been served.
On the post: Nintendo's YouTube Video For Its Switch Online Upgrade Is Its Most Hated Video Ever
Re:
It might make a bit more sense when you know that the ‘141’ dislikes is actually ‘141K’. It’s now at 158K dislikes to 18K likes. Nintendo is famous for its legion of tribally loyal vocal fans. They are not on board with this and that is dangerous for nintendo and might signal another bust cycle upcoming for them.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
Re: Re: Re: Re:
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.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
Re:
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.
On the post: Nintendo Killed Emulation Sites Then Released Garbage N64 Games For The Switch
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.
On the post: The Internet Is Not Facebook; Regulating It As If It Were Will Fuck Things Up
Re: less offence, more defence
Like perhaps a basic public education focused on critical thinking and problem solving instead of a focus on knowledge marketable to employers that are easily tested for?
On the post: Hawaii School, Police Department On The Verge Of Being Sued For Arresting A Ten-Year-Old Girl Over A Drawing
Re: Cut their salaried
If [a school's management team] can exercise no judgement as a manager and don't have discretion then they [should not be managers].
Cutting pay while maintaining the responsibility (you know, everything that isn't discipline that is the majority of their job?) is a shit take. If they don't want the responsibility (handling discipline), you take the responsibility (the job) away, not just the pay.
On the post: As Prudes Drive Social Media Takedowns, Museums Embrace... OnlyFans?
Re: Impossibility Theorem Proof by counterexample.
The proof would read a lot cleaner if you didn’t lie and claim you were banned.
On the post: Tired Of Federal Apathy, Oakland Moves To Ban Anticompetitive Broadband Landlord Deals
Re: apathetic local phone company that hasn't meaningfully upgra
congratulations. the full quote was:
Im glad you are not one of those tens of millions, but...
Your ISP is not an local ISP. I don't see how your situation advances the conversation or applies to the article.
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