I think there as a bit of reducing to the absurd there but honestly I wouldn't put it past them to try with "exceptions for legitimate use". It's increasingly clear they are simply ready to burn everything down around them rather than give up what they have or try to change. It's just sad that something that is a relatively minor part of the economy has powerful enough lobbies that it's already screwing up other sectors on the back of this.
This isn't about the Origin service, which I'd presume has an offline mode like steams.
What this is about is that this game in particular stores your saves online regardless of if you want to play online or not. Which you'd know if you'd bothered to read the article.
What EA is trying to do is put every city in a "region" next to other players cities and then have interplay between those cities. Which is a neat idea but they are forcing it on you, there is no real single player (you'd have to take up every city in the region to do that) and if you are not online you can't save your game and will in a "short" time not be allowed to keep playing.
It's an attempt, much like Diablo 3, to mask an always on DRM system behind a game play system that does nothing but remove choice from the player.
Also friends and family talk stupid meaningless crap all the time. What's said is often not as important of the act of saying and listening to it. It's a means of re-enforcing social bonds, monkeys groom each other we engage in small talk.
What's happened is that social media has abstracted that small talk some what. People post crap and other people read it, it's not exactly the same engagement as talking to each other in the same way but it has some of the same function.
So yes lots of it's meaningless crap but it's just the base level noise of our social bonding, a short broadcast to those we care about that we are here and maybe a little feedback that people are there.
It only get's silly when you have endless people you don't really know on your facebook or if you are attempting to use them as a public platform rather than a social tool.
You can not equate a body of work from one person or group with the nature of a person. Everything about a creative work is controlled but a person is can only be influenced. Even then understanding the way a girl was brought up and who are parents are can give you a better understanding of who she is which if you are romantically involved should deepen that connection.
It's not a case of deciding what to fall in love with (whole point is that you don't decided these things) but of being better able to understand what you love. I don't know about you but if I love something I want to know it better.
Let me give you an personal example, there is a band Streelight Manifesto who I fell in love with this year. The thing is that this is a band I've know about for years I've even seen live a number of times so what happen so that I love them now but not then?
Well firstly Streetlight was formed from some of the members of a band called Catch-22, a band I was utterly in love with at the time. I only pay attention to Streetlight because they'd play some of the Catch-22 song's and for what ever reason Streelights own stuff didn't click with me at the time.
Fastfoward a few years and some one introduces me to Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution. A short 4 track EP of folk ska style songs including a version of a Catch-22 song and I utterly adored it. Turns out it was a side project from the same song writer and it got me to thinking that I should give Streetlight another chance.
I did and I fell in love, so much so I have no idea at all how in hell I didn't understand the genius of the band in the first place. The point of all this? Thanks to the internet not only I was able to easily get hold of everything Streetlight had done in which I totally immerse my self (all I listened to for months) I was able to use the internet to better understand what had chanced in my tastes. Turns out Tomas Kalnoky, the main song writer, is heavily influenced by eastern folk music and it was that blend with ska that I realised I was reacting favourably too.
That made me realise that a lot of music that I was listening to at the time had a common link of this eastern influence. We are talking things as disparate as Caravan Palace (electro swing dance) and Gogo Bordello (folk punk) which had the same eastern/gypsy folk influence. By being able to better understand why I was falling in love with a given band (Streetlight sit firmly as my favourite) I was able to uncover a trend in my own taste I was not really aware was there and that's let me to looking for more music with that kind of influence.
I've not even gone in to how being able to consume a bands work, including side projects as well as re-listening to their old bands and being able to read up on endless interviews and talk to other fans gave me a much better understanding of their creative journey which I feel gave me a deeper connection to the music.
My point is simply this, none of that was why I fell in love with the band but by being able to understand that love better I was able to understand my own tastes better which has lead to me exploring (in all that abundance) a taste I may never have other wise identified.
51% not paying here is a bit of a pointless number because you have no idea how many of those people represent those who would have other wise paid or those that would never have. For example there are a good number of free ebooks I have and almost all of them are books I'd never have read if I'd had to pay for. (As a side note this has often lead to me buying other books from a series.)
Yep but that runs counter to the idea that play is about stamping out piracy.... but then again I can't actually find a source where google say that now I've gone looking. I was trying to find the context in which it was said but I can't find the quote.
The closet I can find is from the link
"I think that is something that is hopefully going to make piracy obsolete because it's so easy to operate within the bounds of the law that there is really no need to go beyond them"
Which is a very different thing and does not actually imply that the service is actively seeking to stop piracy when doing so would be harmful to the end goal of getting people to pay for music in the future.
Google Play Music is not a music streaming service in the sense that something like spotify is, well at lest not currently in the UK as far as I'm aware given I've only just started using it. You can only stream content you buy on play or upload your self and there is no resection on what you can upload.
I find it a bit odd that google would talk about this service as a way to wipe out piracy on their devices. Such a service is a perfect way to reduce piracy but offering an awesome legal service but so long as users can upload what they like people will just dump what every they have on there. Which for a lot of people will include some infringing content.
Thing is that google doesn't have to care about that since it's not making pirated music available to any one but the person who pirated it and is not doing anything with that music that the user couldn't easily do them self's.
So whats google going to do? A crap load of time and money trying to stop or track pirated content on the service, which it seems like they have no obligation to do?
Doing that would seem likely to turn people away exactly the kind of people that it would be in both googles and the recording industries interest to attract to the service.
3d printers can currently print out complex interlinked moving part objects. They can print in metal. They can print in conductive plastic ext ext ext.
Current home 3d printers are the very very thin end of a very large wedge and some of what you are claiming as it's limitations are already redundant in industrial 3d printing. Funny that.
"which means that you start paying for convenience"
Which would be true if legal offerings where actually more convenient. Once you know where and how to look, which really isn't hard to figure out, you can easily find everything you want in the quality you want with out any restriction.
The industry has to realise that they are competing not only with "free" but an unrestricted highly convenient service. You can compete with free but part of that is offering accesses to legal and convenient alternative.
As this generation grows older things like regional restrictions are going to seem more and more antiquated odd and frustrating so the industry better start adapting or they are going to lose out hugely.
The root of property is "to own". The legal use of property is generally to define the legal relationship between a person and "a thing". Copyright is a government granted monopoly on who can copy a work, as such "the thing" that is some one property is that right not the work it's self or in fact any given individual act of copying that work.
In that light calling copyright a property right is disingenuous, it implies that the copyright is a right about property rather than being a right that is property. In other words copyright is a government right that is covered by property rights not a right to or about property in and of it's self.
This is why copyright infringement has never been sent to trail as a case of theft and is almost always a civil not criminal matter.
I do think Mike should have been a lot more clear about that so it would have been clear that he was dealing with the false economic idea of content as property, which is was being implied in a twisted manner, rather than with the idea of right of copyright as property.
To be clear the content to which copyright is the right to copy is non-rivalrous and non-excludable but the right it's self is rivalrous and excludable. In economics terms you can't think of the content as a property and trying to falsely assign the idea that it is by talking about how copyright is a property right rather than a right that is property is applying a faulty and disingenuous legal definition to an economic argument.
In other words you are right in what you are saying but what you are saying does not actually mean what you think it does or in fact relate to the point Mike was trying to make.
This is the heart of what I find remarkable about this whole mess. The entertainment industry as a whole has kept growing through a horrid economic period, it's a classic case of while each person maybe forced to consume less the market (mostly thank to the internet) has actually grown.
Given the growing market but the tough times the money is going to flow to those parts of the industry that offer the best value for money and to forms of granular consumption that allow people to better pick and choose if when and where they want to spend their money. I feel the way that the mobile market has taken to free to play games with in app purchase is in part due to this trend.
Of course this means some people turn to piracy but what does that really mean? When people are turning to piracy to consume more than they can afford there is a point at which what they pirate becomes a null value. If I have a monthly budget for media but I turn to piracy for all my media instead then no matter how much media I pirate over a period the only thing the industry can thought of have lost (if you stretch it) is how ever many months budget make up that period. There is also no way of telling what that money may have been spent on, when you get everything for free you are not so worried about consuming things of low perceived value to you.
Truth is that for most people I know at the moment it's a mix of these things, people still spend money but they also pirate and while that pirating does no doubt cause harm I don't think it's nearly as great as it may seem in isolation.
The parts of the industry that are complaining about this stuff are the parts of the industry that are invested in a type of market that no logger exits both in cultural, economic and technological terms.
Thing is the copyright was never, ever, about the creators. It started out as a replacement to the publishing guild system in England after the civil war because the guild system was based on a monopoly granted by the crown in exchange for censorship.
Members of the guild used to simply sort out who would print want between them self's and any one who was not a member of the guild was shut down. Faced with the loss of the crown and the fact the new parliament wanted to do away with past censorship (shock!) the publishers in the guild lobbied for the idea of a publishers "right" to create copy. The idea that this right was inherent to the creator of a work was only really a way of making sure tat right could be transferred to the publishers who could then use those rights to stop just any one publishing what ever the hell they liked. The publishers who used to be in the guild then pretty much just carried on like they did.
When American set down the ability to create copyright laws it was with the intent of using limited protection as a incentive to help ensure a turn over of science (and later art) that could enter the public domain and enrich the society.
Protection of artists was always secondary but over time the means (that protection) has become the ends (to protect) at the expense of those the current raft of laws was actually produced to support (the public).
Law change to reflect the values of society so the change as change isn't automatically a bad thing but again it's a change that has been at the behest of publishers which is right in line with the history of the laws. Society did not come to think that people have a unending right to control the copying of their created works and move the laws to reflect that. Publishers have lobbied for laws that benefit them by selling that idea to the public. A lot of people now accept this view simply because the laws have been changed in a way they are told reflects that as a "truth".
The funny thing is that the industry has come to believe in it's own propaganda. You just have to look at the insidious way that "intellectual property" has wormed it's way in to law. It's a term that was first used by a pro copyright expansion groups that was adopted as a catch all term for a set of legal ideas, so when new wording in changed laws was put in place the term starts to be used even if there is no , as far as I know, place that Intellectual Property is legally defined as it's own term.
The use of IP was a way to frame the debate about copyright in a pro copyright manner and that term has now become a basic way in which we talk about these ideas.
Like you say copyright today has been expanded simply due to greed and not even on the part of the actual creators, creators have been conned in to thinking that industry is looking after their interests and so they stand and shout and fight to protect the people who most actively want to screw them. It's sad.
bugger submitted that instead of previewing it which means I didn't get a chance to adjust for the fact that my brain hates me (I'm hugely dyslexic) and makes getting what I actually mean to say out in a readable manner a pain in the ass. Excuse the mess :)
On the post: Swedish Pirate Party Sues Banks For 'Discriminating' Against Wikileaks
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On the post: China Tries To Block Encrypted Traffic
Re: Re: Google reptilians have been resisted, but for how long?
On the post: China Tries To Block Encrypted Traffic
Re: Re:
On the post: SimCity Developers' Reddit AMA Swiftly Turns Into WTF With The Online-Only DRM?
Re: Re:
What this is about is that this game in particular stores your saves online regardless of if you want to play online or not. Which you'd know if you'd bothered to read the article.
What EA is trying to do is put every city in a "region" next to other players cities and then have interplay between those cities. Which is a neat idea but they are forcing it on you, there is no real single player (you'd have to take up every city in the region to do that) and if you are not online you can't save your game and will in a "short" time not be allowed to keep playing.
It's an attempt, much like Diablo 3, to mask an always on DRM system behind a game play system that does nothing but remove choice from the player.
On the post: Julian Assange Moves Forward Plans To Run For Senate And Start A Wikileaks Political Party
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Nothing to hide nothing to fear then eh?
How utterly moronic.
On the post: NYTimes Columnist Proves That Among Billions Of Tweets Some People Say Stuff You Don't Care About
Re:
Also friends and family talk stupid meaningless crap all the time. What's said is often not as important of the act of saying and listening to it. It's a means of re-enforcing social bonds, monkeys groom each other we engage in small talk.
What's happened is that social media has abstracted that small talk some what. People post crap and other people read it, it's not exactly the same engagement as talking to each other in the same way but it has some of the same function.
So yes lots of it's meaningless crap but it's just the base level noise of our social bonding, a short broadcast to those we care about that we are here and maybe a little feedback that people are there.
It only get's silly when you have endless people you don't really know on your facebook or if you are attempting to use them as a public platform rather than a social tool.
On the post: The Complex Joys Of Music In The Age Of Digital Abundance
Re: Drowning in abundance
It's not a case of deciding what to fall in love with (whole point is that you don't decided these things) but of being better able to understand what you love. I don't know about you but if I love something I want to know it better.
Let me give you an personal example, there is a band Streelight Manifesto who I fell in love with this year. The thing is that this is a band I've know about for years I've even seen live a number of times so what happen so that I love them now but not then?
Well firstly Streetlight was formed from some of the members of a band called Catch-22, a band I was utterly in love with at the time. I only pay attention to Streetlight because they'd play some of the Catch-22 song's and for what ever reason Streelights own stuff didn't click with me at the time.
Fastfoward a few years and some one introduces me to Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution. A short 4 track EP of folk ska style songs including a version of a Catch-22 song and I utterly adored it. Turns out it was a side project from the same song writer and it got me to thinking that I should give Streetlight another chance.
I did and I fell in love, so much so I have no idea at all how in hell I didn't understand the genius of the band in the first place. The point of all this? Thanks to the internet not only I was able to easily get hold of everything Streetlight had done in which I totally immerse my self (all I listened to for months) I was able to use the internet to better understand what had chanced in my tastes. Turns out Tomas Kalnoky, the main song writer, is heavily influenced by eastern folk music and it was that blend with ska that I realised I was reacting favourably too.
That made me realise that a lot of music that I was listening to at the time had a common link of this eastern influence. We are talking things as disparate as Caravan Palace (electro swing dance) and Gogo Bordello (folk punk) which had the same eastern/gypsy folk influence. By being able to better understand why I was falling in love with a given band (Streetlight sit firmly as my favourite) I was able to uncover a trend in my own taste I was not really aware was there and that's let me to looking for more music with that kind of influence.
I've not even gone in to how being able to consume a bands work, including side projects as well as re-listening to their old bands and being able to read up on endless interviews and talk to other fans gave me a much better understanding of their creative journey which I feel gave me a deeper connection to the music.
My point is simply this, none of that was why I fell in love with the band but by being able to understand that love better I was able to understand my own tastes better which has lead to me exploring (in all that abundance) a taste I may never have other wise identified.
On the post: Infographic: People Will Pay To Support Creators, Even When Free Is An Option
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On the post: Corruption Laundering: The Art Of Manipulating Regulations To Block Innovation
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On the post: Italian Public Prosecutor Says File-Sharing Site Is 'Receiving Stolen Goods'
Re: Gee, is there NO way to avoid this risk?
Problem Solved.
Or not, given what you said is that if you don't want to be charged with doing something you legally have not done you should not break another law.
On the post: UK Recording Industry Doesn't Want Google To Reduce Piracy Until It Reduces Piracy
Re: Re: To be fair...
The closet I can find is from the link
"I think that is something that is hopefully going to make piracy obsolete because it's so easy to operate within the bounds of the law that there is really no need to go beyond them"
Which is a very different thing and does not actually imply that the service is actively seeking to stop piracy when doing so would be harmful to the end goal of getting people to pay for music in the future.
On the post: UK Recording Industry Doesn't Want Google To Reduce Piracy Until It Reduces Piracy
To be fair...
I find it a bit odd that google would talk about this service as a way to wipe out piracy on their devices. Such a service is a perfect way to reduce piracy but offering an awesome legal service but so long as users can upload what they like people will just dump what every they have on there. Which for a lot of people will include some infringing content.
Thing is that google doesn't have to care about that since it's not making pirated music available to any one but the person who pirated it and is not doing anything with that music that the user couldn't easily do them self's.
So whats google going to do? A crap load of time and money trying to stop or track pirated content on the service, which it seems like they have no obligation to do?
Doing that would seem likely to turn people away exactly the kind of people that it would be in both googles and the recording industries interest to attract to the service.
On the post: DailyDirt: 3D Printing Gone Wild
Re:
Current home 3d printers are the very very thin end of a very large wedge and some of what you are claiming as it's limitations are already redundant in industrial 3d printing. Funny that.
On the post: Dear RIAA: Pirates Buy More. Full Stop. Deal With It.
Re: Re: Logically then, if people were paid to consume, no one would.
On the post: Dear RIAA: Pirates Buy More. Full Stop. Deal With It.
Re:
Which would be true if legal offerings where actually more convenient. Once you know where and how to look, which really isn't hard to figure out, you can easily find everything you want in the quality you want with out any restriction.
The industry has to realise that they are competing not only with "free" but an unrestricted highly convenient service. You can compete with free but part of that is offering accesses to legal and convenient alternative.
As this generation grows older things like regional restrictions are going to seem more and more antiquated odd and frustrating so the industry better start adapting or they are going to lose out hugely.
On the post: Copyright Maximalists Attempt To Downplay Significance Of RSC Report By Chanting Their Mantra: Copyright Is Property
Re:
In that light calling copyright a property right is disingenuous, it implies that the copyright is a right about property rather than being a right that is property. In other words copyright is a government right that is covered by property rights not a right to or about property in and of it's self.
This is why copyright infringement has never been sent to trail as a case of theft and is almost always a civil not criminal matter.
I do think Mike should have been a lot more clear about that so it would have been clear that he was dealing with the false economic idea of content as property, which is was being implied in a twisted manner, rather than with the idea of right of copyright as property.
To be clear the content to which copyright is the right to copy is non-rivalrous and non-excludable but the right it's self is rivalrous and excludable. In economics terms you can't think of the content as a property and trying to falsely assign the idea that it is by talking about how copyright is a property right rather than a right that is property is applying a faulty and disingenuous legal definition to an economic argument.
In other words you are right in what you are saying but what you are saying does not actually mean what you think it does or in fact relate to the point Mike was trying to make.
On the post: Apple Gets Design Patent On... Page Turning
Re:
On the post: RIAA Prefers Customers Who Buy A Little To Pirates Who Buy A Lot
Re: And Throw in another Very Real Issue
Given the growing market but the tough times the money is going to flow to those parts of the industry that offer the best value for money and to forms of granular consumption that allow people to better pick and choose if when and where they want to spend their money. I feel the way that the mobile market has taken to free to play games with in app purchase is in part due to this trend.
Of course this means some people turn to piracy but what does that really mean? When people are turning to piracy to consume more than they can afford there is a point at which what they pirate becomes a null value. If I have a monthly budget for media but I turn to piracy for all my media instead then no matter how much media I pirate over a period the only thing the industry can thought of have lost (if you stretch it) is how ever many months budget make up that period. There is also no way of telling what that money may have been spent on, when you get everything for free you are not so worried about consuming things of low perceived value to you.
Truth is that for most people I know at the moment it's a mix of these things, people still spend money but they also pirate and while that pirating does no doubt cause harm I don't think it's nearly as great as it may seem in isolation.
The parts of the industry that are complaining about this stuff are the parts of the industry that are invested in a type of market that no logger exits both in cultural, economic and technological terms.
On the post: Confused Irish Newspaper Editorial Argues That Search Engines Need To Pay Newspapers
Re:
Members of the guild used to simply sort out who would print want between them self's and any one who was not a member of the guild was shut down. Faced with the loss of the crown and the fact the new parliament wanted to do away with past censorship (shock!) the publishers in the guild lobbied for the idea of a publishers "right" to create copy. The idea that this right was inherent to the creator of a work was only really a way of making sure tat right could be transferred to the publishers who could then use those rights to stop just any one publishing what ever the hell they liked. The publishers who used to be in the guild then pretty much just carried on like they did.
When American set down the ability to create copyright laws it was with the intent of using limited protection as a incentive to help ensure a turn over of science (and later art) that could enter the public domain and enrich the society.
Protection of artists was always secondary but over time the means (that protection) has become the ends (to protect) at the expense of those the current raft of laws was actually produced to support (the public).
Law change to reflect the values of society so the change as change isn't automatically a bad thing but again it's a change that has been at the behest of publishers which is right in line with the history of the laws. Society did not come to think that people have a unending right to control the copying of their created works and move the laws to reflect that. Publishers have lobbied for laws that benefit them by selling that idea to the public. A lot of people now accept this view simply because the laws have been changed in a way they are told reflects that as a "truth".
The funny thing is that the industry has come to believe in it's own propaganda. You just have to look at the insidious way that "intellectual property" has wormed it's way in to law. It's a term that was first used by a pro copyright expansion groups that was adopted as a catch all term for a set of legal ideas, so when new wording in changed laws was put in place the term starts to be used even if there is no , as far as I know, place that Intellectual Property is legally defined as it's own term.
The use of IP was a way to frame the debate about copyright in a pro copyright manner and that term has now become a basic way in which we talk about these ideas.
Like you say copyright today has been expanded simply due to greed and not even on the part of the actual creators, creators have been conned in to thinking that industry is looking after their interests and so they stand and shout and fight to protect the people who most actively want to screw them. It's sad.
On the post: UK Looking To Cement Its New Anti-Free Speech Reputation By Arresting Man For Posting Photo Of A Burning Poppy
Re: Re: Re: Re:
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