I and a large number of my friends are active in the music scene. Some in bands, some as promoters other who run labels and venues. The issues with collection societies, copyright and everything else are vastly more important to this group in this day and age then it ever has been before.
We actually now how grounds to operate outside of the walled garden tended by the gatekeepers in ways that can make us just as successful as those with in. So we have to understand our rights and we have to be able to argue correctly for changes that support and protect those rights and against the changes that legacy industry wants to see which is mostly aimed at retaining a monopoly and business model that no longer make sense.
When, as "that sky is rising crap" points out, there are more people than ever making more music and more money than ever the number of people who these issues effect and who need to have a educated voice in the debates is bigger than ever.
This is before we even start to consider that the laws the legacy industries are lobbying so hard to put in place spill over greatly from simply an issue that effects the creative industries. We are seeing laws being created to "protect content creators" that are treating the very basic structure of a free and open internet and that effects EVERYONE.
I have and will keep arguing that the defining act of our age will be if we keep the internet free and open or let it be restricted and censored. I don't think there are many such debates who's outcome will have such wide reaching effects. To me it is going to be the single biggest indicator of if our future is going to be a good or a bad one. Having a free and open internet will, in my view and that of many others, have a positive effect on almost every other major issue we face as a society. I strongly believe that open debate, open information and education are the keys to gaining positive out comes in everything from the fight against racism to solving or at lest dealing with problems like global warming.
In other words everybody and everything is in line to be effected by a small group of people who seem to be willing to burn the place down rather than face having to adapt to a world in which they are no longer as important as they were. It's in the best interests of everybody to be informed and aware of the battles going on over IP laws because how those laws effect the internet could have very dire outcomes.
We are told that we have entered the information age and it's with in the creative industries that we are having the first fight over what that actually means to us as society and how we are going to change our laws to face it.
So the labels saying "If we get any more it's not going to the artists we sued for damages to compensate in the first place." Does not matter so long as there is no money left after paying legal fees? I know this is just trolling but god lord man up your game, this is no fun other wise.
Their intent is meaningful regardless of if they can act on it.
It very much is. I don't think enough people really realise that and they are going to be caught flat footed because they did not bother to learn from it. The internet has changed how social groups and structures work but Anonymous is the biggest representative of major new type of social group and structure that simply couldn't have existed in exactly this way before. That alone makes it's worth paying attention to.
I may tank my creditability here but what's struck me most about the current state of Anonymous is that it's the first real world example of a effective Stand Alone Complex... a term coined by a the Ghost In the Shell anime series... ya ya I know know but read this and then hear me out.
Anonymo us is currently and effectively people copycating the behaviour that resulted from the scientology protests. But that behaviour was the emergent result of an action that was originally and largely motivated by different reasons. The ideals that got copied where the ideal that where perceived by the wider group and not as such the ideals that originally there. As such they can not be traced to one person or group, so there is no real originator for the current state of Anonymous that people are independently decided to act with in.
In other words people are acting in the name of a group ideal that has no real original source and is the result of a feedback loop based on an emergent set of group behaviour during the protests... and I honestly think the term stand alone complex is by far the best expression for what is happening with the group. It's effectively a subset of meem theory which is actually now a credible research area.
Anonymous actually was a stand alone complex from the start if you want to go back and look at it but the changes from the protests are some what easier to look at than the actual origins of the idea.
And now I'm going to shut up because I've not done near enough research in to this to actually be sure of any of the above... it's just been on my mind lately and I'm bored.
I think the term "intellectual disobedience" has started to be thrown around for this kind of active refusal to follow current IP laws. While most people may not think they are taking part in civil disobedience in regards to copyright laws and such a lot of people kinda are. Who actually refuses to break digital locks to legally copy content they own because it's illegal? We just need people to start understanding why they should be breaking that law and that they actively and knowingly are doing so.
I know a lot of people who don't see a problem with downloading a copy of content they've brought. A friend of mine pointed out that it's easier and quicker for him to go torrent a rip of old album his owns rather than go digging around to find the CD and to rip the content off it.
The way people live day to day is becoming more and more illegal and tipping point will be reached when we'll be faced with the question "Do we keep living as we feel we should and have a moral right to in the face of breaking the law and being taken to court for doing do?" That's when I think the term Intellectual Disobedience will actually start to become meaningful.
Wow you really don't understand the history of Anonymous do you? Hackers being jerks used to act as Anonymous all the time, this is a group that has ruin peoples lives far more often as they hunted down paedophiles. The only reason they really did anything was "because it was a laugh". You didn't really hear much about it because for the most part they didn't do anything news worthy. "Some stupid hacker" doing "Some stupid shit for the lolz" is effectively what Anonymous started out as.
That changed with the scientology protests. Those protests did not really start out because Anonymous had a fundamental political aim, scientology just offered a soft target. Anonymous could do what they do best, fuck with people for their own enjoyment, with out feeling guilty because scientlogly was such a awful fucking thing in the first place. Justified lolz in other words, which was often the driving force behind the "good" the group did. Either that or fucking with any one trying to fuck with them.
What no one expected lest of all Anonymous was just how far that movement would spread. It pulled in a wealth of people who were their more for the activism than for the lolz even if lolz were still being had. This actually caused a lot of tension with given old school groups who disliked this influx of effective newfags ext. But by the nature of what the group is there was nothing they could really do about it.
Given that Anonymous agenda is only a reflection of that which any one acting in their name is current doing and given that that agenda can draw or make more active people who agree with it we saw a real shift towards actual honest activism. The group has take as moral principle the ideals that have allowed it to operate.
No matter what you think of the how of what they've done here you would be very foolish to dismiss the why as just "hackers being assholes". 5 years ago I would have likely agreed with you but currently Anonymous is on a honest track of free web activism through what is effectively civil disobedience. That this may let them have lolz and be assholes is now an added extra rather than the main driving force.
A mod has just been realised for the game Knight Of the Old Republic 2. This mod restores a vast amount of cut content that was intended to be in the game but was dropped due to the game being forced out way before it was ready. The dev left all this content on the disk, some of it almost done including full voice work for dialogue trees, some of it hardly touched. One part was a whole planet that they had planned to include has so little content that the team is rebuilding that as an bolt on mod to their restoration mod because it's not technically a restoration.
Point being that this has been making the rounds as news and likely will drive new sales of a old game. And we get to see the game as it was intended to be. I always felt kotor2 was on the edge of greatness but was too much of a buggy unfinished mess to really get their so I'm very much looking forward to replaying it with the restored content.
Says the guy posting under the title "Anonymous Coward".
Anything that happens where an anonymous group claims to be working as part of Anonymous is an act of that group. Even if it's by a group of people who have no contact or relation to any one who has done anything before. That's what is unique about the whole thing and is something that the media has utterly failed to get it's head around.
Now there are some pretty core groups and circles that make up the meat of the current consistent agenda and most people who are serious about this stuff tend to fall in those circles as matter of course but if every single person involved in this current series of activism simply stopped... any other group could and likely would pick up the banner and carry it on. Any coherent action the group seems to take is an emergent response to who is claiming to do what for that group. Given that people who agree with the current direction are going to be attracted to the group it becomes a re-enforcing loop, the more they act like activists more activists will want to act as them.
No DRM is or ever can be fully effective at stopping piracy. Most people understand that. Hell even the MPAA understands that, they've made it illegal to break DRM locks even if you are going to do something you are other wise legally allowed to do. This exists purely because it gives them a veto on new products... if they don't like a product they stick a lock on their content that stops it working and the new product becomes illegal.
Most DRM is put in place these days by people who either don't understand that DRM can't be fully effective or are having to answer to backers who don't understand that. Like I was trying to point out steam wouldn't have ever gotten off the ground if it had built in DRM.
Most anti piracy measures as a whole are aimed at making it harder to do for most people. Take the resent take down of the youtube to mp3 site. Any one who's posting here likely has the knowledge to still easily to get a MP3 of a youtube video and hell a lot of people know enough to use a browser extension to do so. But taking down that site is not aimed at them, it's aimed at people who are being enabled by the site.
I know it can be hard to understand for those of us who are technically minded but downloading and cracking a game is actually a relatively high bar to have to pass. It's of course meaningless in the long term as not only is most of the target market perfectly technically minded but people are getting more competent on the whole and things are getting easier and easier to do.
The point is that you are insisting that DRM is simply there to stop piracy. It's not. As you point out DRM is utterly ineffective so you have to ask WHY it's used in products like steam and in context of the market steams DRM does exactly what it is meant to do. Stop early leaking of steamworks games and assure publishers (more the shareholders of those publishers) that steam does something to try and stop piracy so that those publishers can justify to their shareholders why it's ok to use the service.
DRM is at this point about far more than actually trying to stop piracy and "stopping" piracy has been downgrading to "doing something to try and limit it".
And what else during that whole thing had much to do with the olympics? It's not like they are tyring to induce 100m coding of a system that will change the world or some crap, they honoured a man who will go down as one of the important names of history let alone of British history and for something that is meant to show off the country while there is a spot light on it I think there is very little that was in it that was as true or valuable to us as that moment.
And let me clear I detest the olympics and have been mostly embarrassed by the whole mess so far and yet you are actually getting me to defend it... which is a hell of an achievement.
I'm pretty sure the steamworks makes it nearly imposable for a cracked version of a game to come out before it's realised on steam as game files are encrypted and key content is missing from preloads and game disks. Proof that the only effective DRM is DRM that makes a product unusable. I would need to look this up to be sure but that is my current understanding.
Once a game is available on steam it will most likely be cracked with in a day but at that point steam as done it's main job, to stop pirates getting their hands on a game before it's out. Which is actually a major thing in a world where not only can people get a game for free but they could be playing it before any one willing to pay would be able to do so.
DRM is not so much about actually stopping pirates but about the fact that publishers often have to ensure their shareholders that they are doing something about them there evil pirate types. Valve would never ever have gotten steam off of the ground if it hadn't come with a set of DRM. With out steam getting off the ground DRM free services like good old games wouldn't have had a look in and even then GOG is doing well more out of a the fact that the industry is very slowly being brought around to the idea that it's better to see pirate copies of the game then turn away consumers who might buy it.
The fact that people calling steams DRM one that works even when it's crackable is reflective of the fact that DRM is an issue of degrees. How much protection does it offer vs how much restriction does it impose and steam has struck a balance that works for most publishers and most gamers mainly by seeking to offset the problems of DRM through adding other value via the use of steam.
I actually think that valve would happily and effectively DRM free if they could but in the current clement it wouldn't go down well with a lot of publishers. Even if valve only went DRM on their own games it would require the ground work for such a system be put in place in steam and publishers would see that as a move by valve to pushing this issue in the market they currently dominate. Which would have publishers fighting back hugely and could easily sink steam.
Steam is proof that DRM that offers some effectiveness in publishers eyes can be accepted by a user base because it adds value. In fact people value steam as a service so much they are often willing to rebuy games on steam they already own in another format just to have them on the service.
It's not ideal but I firmly believe that if some one other than valve had pushed the DD market first we'd all be far worse off.
If this was not part of a DRM system then you wouldn't have been forced to install it. And while a lot of people may have installed it anyway for what ever reason the only reason every one who owns a ubisoft PC game has it installed is because of the systems role, as a whole, as acting as DRM.
The plugin and the hole it creates is not directly related to the DRM but it is a required feature of it.... take that as you will.
Steam. Steam is actually a very restrictive DRM system and actually I think still needs lots of improvements. I shouldn't for example still have issues with getting in to offline mode if I'm unexpectedly put offline.
Yet for the most part users view it as "fair" and any pain the DRM is causing is off set by the features and value that the client adds. Valve understands it's user base and does not have to answer to panicy share holders over "OMG PIRACY" while ubisoft have largely shown they have no idea what they where doing. It's only been through user back lash that we've seen any improvement from them lately.
Anyway, DRM is always a bad thing for the end user. Always. Yet so long as it's not awful and the DRM also comes with features we like then it's a trade off people can be willing to make.
In this case the plugin could exist with out the DRM and the DRM could exist with out the plug in but while it's unlikely the plugin as is would have been created if the DRM hadn't been it's the result of ubisoft trying to provide a DRM neutral feature.
You've got a valid point on this one. I love any chance to bash ubisoft, if you look at my post history I spent a while the other week trashing blizzard for the whole Diablo 3 always online mess and it's something I take very seriously. Yet the fact is this plug in could have been a feature of completely DRM free ubisoft store/social system. It's mind numbing that they let it happen and it calls in to question my willingness to have anything from them installed on my system, especially if it's something as intrusive as DRM can be.... but ya... not an case for "DRM IS EVIL" this time I feel.
What's funny is that I've avoided Uplay utterly until the steam sale the other week where I picked up an assassins creed game cheap enough that I was willing to write off the crappy DRM but only because it is no longer "always on" crap.
I was really enjoying the game too and now the first thing I have to do when I get home is uninstall it. On the bright side it will let me go on to play one of the stack of other games I also brought in the steam sale!
What do laws exist to do and how do they ultimately posses authority and legitimacy? The public. A law is only law so long as the public as a whole support it. If the public as a whole no longer support a law then that law will (should) change through both direct action (either through civil disobedience or political engagement) and the results of public elections favouring those who hold the same views as the majority.
Civil or gay rights are a very clear example of this fact. It's only a few years ago that the age of consent for sex between two men in the UK was lowered from 18 to 16 to match hetrosexual sex.
The law was changed because our social attitude to homosexuality had changed. So a few days before this law changed and two young men under 18 had sex they would be breaking the law and yet there was enough support for their moral right to do so that a few days later that law was changed. So was it wrong for them to have sex?
We are at the start of a fundamental change to our society brought about by the internet. There are going to be moral changes that place people in a situation where they are breaking the law while feeling like they are doing nothing wrong.
Digital locks are already an example of this, you can legally copy a CD you own but it's illegal to break the DRM on the disk to do so. Most people will simply break the law because they feel they should be allowed to do so. What this should mean is that such still pointless laws that exist purely to give the legacy industry a veto on the adoption of a new technology will be revoked.
Sadly our system is currently a mess and our laws far more often represent the views of a small number of business owners than the public at large.
Ya so you know how blizzard said always online had nothing to do with being DRM until they admitted it did? We are meant then just accept that they are "fixing" the loot drops that benefit the AH after the player base started to complain about it?
Given that loot drop tables are a vital part of the game they would have had to messed up rather badly to miss this issue in testing and even more so to not bother monitoring player progression and charting that against AH use.
The sad thing is that this might simply be the truth, that they didn't intend any of it but they have so completely lost the good faith they had with me that I simply do not trust a statement like that from them.
If they allowed offline play modders would quickly retune the loot drops to drop in a way that is best for game progression rather than in a way that's best for the AH.
What that means is that the offline game could, with a little modding, be the better version of the game.
In other words the AH has degraded the game play experiences for any one who does not just LOVE having to grind gold or pay real money for items in AH to progress in their game.
And this is meant to be a argument in favour of the game being online? how?
On the post: UK Government Censors Copyright Consultation Submission About How Awful Collection Societies Are
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: UK Government Censors Copyright Consultation Submission About How Awful Collection Societies Are
Re:
We actually now how grounds to operate outside of the walled garden tended by the gatekeepers in ways that can make us just as successful as those with in. So we have to understand our rights and we have to be able to argue correctly for changes that support and protect those rights and against the changes that legacy industry wants to see which is mostly aimed at retaining a monopoly and business model that no longer make sense.
When, as "that sky is rising crap" points out, there are more people than ever making more music and more money than ever the number of people who these issues effect and who need to have a educated voice in the debates is bigger than ever.
This is before we even start to consider that the laws the legacy industries are lobbying so hard to put in place spill over greatly from simply an issue that effects the creative industries. We are seeing laws being created to "protect content creators" that are treating the very basic structure of a free and open internet and that effects EVERYONE.
I have and will keep arguing that the defining act of our age will be if we keep the internet free and open or let it be restricted and censored. I don't think there are many such debates who's outcome will have such wide reaching effects. To me it is going to be the single biggest indicator of if our future is going to be a good or a bad one. Having a free and open internet will, in my view and that of many others, have a positive effect on almost every other major issue we face as a society. I strongly believe that open debate, open information and education are the keys to gaining positive out comes in everything from the fight against racism to solving or at lest dealing with problems like global warming.
In other words everybody and everything is in line to be effected by a small group of people who seem to be willing to burn the place down rather than face having to adapt to a world in which they are no longer as important as they were. It's in the best interests of everybody to be informed and aware of the battles going on over IP laws because how those laws effect the internet could have very dire outcomes.
We are told that we have entered the information age and it's with in the creative industries that we are having the first fight over what that actually means to us as society and how we are going to change our laws to face it.
On the post: Music Labels Have No Plans To Share Any Money They Get From The Pirate Bay With Artists
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Their intent is meaningful regardless of if they can act on it.
On the post: Hacktivism: Anonymous Breaches Australian ISP To Protests Data Retention
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Hacktivism: Anonymous Breaches Australian ISP To Protests Data Retention
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell#Stand_Alone_Complex
Anonymo us is currently and effectively people copycating the behaviour that resulted from the scientology protests. But that behaviour was the emergent result of an action that was originally and largely motivated by different reasons. The ideals that got copied where the ideal that where perceived by the wider group and not as such the ideals that originally there. As such they can not be traced to one person or group, so there is no real originator for the current state of Anonymous that people are independently decided to act with in.
In other words people are acting in the name of a group ideal that has no real original source and is the result of a feedback loop based on an emergent set of group behaviour during the protests... and I honestly think the term stand alone complex is by far the best expression for what is happening with the group. It's effectively a subset of meem theory which is actually now a credible research area.
Anonymous actually was a stand alone complex from the start if you want to go back and look at it but the changes from the protests are some what easier to look at than the actual origins of the idea.
And now I'm going to shut up because I've not done near enough research in to this to actually be sure of any of the above... it's just been on my mind lately and I'm bored.
On the post: Dear Permission Culture: This Is Why No One Wants To Ask For Your OK
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I know a lot of people who don't see a problem with downloading a copy of content they've brought. A friend of mine pointed out that it's easier and quicker for him to go torrent a rip of old album his owns rather than go digging around to find the CD and to rip the content off it.
The way people live day to day is becoming more and more illegal and tipping point will be reached when we'll be faced with the question "Do we keep living as we feel we should and have a moral right to in the face of breaking the law and being taken to court for doing do?" That's when I think the term Intellectual Disobedience will actually start to become meaningful.
On the post: Hacktivism: Anonymous Breaches Australian ISP To Protests Data Retention
Re: Re: Re:
That changed with the scientology protests. Those protests did not really start out because Anonymous had a fundamental political aim, scientology just offered a soft target. Anonymous could do what they do best, fuck with people for their own enjoyment, with out feeling guilty because scientlogly was such a awful fucking thing in the first place. Justified lolz in other words, which was often the driving force behind the "good" the group did. Either that or fucking with any one trying to fuck with them.
What no one expected lest of all Anonymous was just how far that movement would spread. It pulled in a wealth of people who were their more for the activism than for the lolz even if lolz were still being had. This actually caused a lot of tension with given old school groups who disliked this influx of effective newfags ext. But by the nature of what the group is there was nothing they could really do about it.
Given that Anonymous agenda is only a reflection of that which any one acting in their name is current doing and given that that agenda can draw or make more active people who agree with it we saw a real shift towards actual honest activism. The group has take as moral principle the ideals that have allowed it to operate.
No matter what you think of the how of what they've done here you would be very foolish to dismiss the why as just "hackers being assholes". 5 years ago I would have likely agreed with you but currently Anonymous is on a honest track of free web activism through what is effectively civil disobedience. That this may let them have lolz and be assholes is now an added extra rather than the main driving force.
On the post: MTV Europe Has Things To Say About Piracy And/Or Loading Bars Being Bad For Musicians
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On the post: Modding Video Games Is Good For The Original Game Creators And Future Game Developers
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/07/27/grey-skies-are-gonna-kreia-up-kotor-2-com pleted/#more-117715
Point being that this has been making the rounds as news and likely will drive new sales of a old game. And we get to see the game as it was intended to be. I always felt kotor2 was on the edge of greatness but was too much of a buggy unfinished mess to really get their so I'm very much looking forward to replaying it with the restored content.
On the post: Hacktivism: Anonymous Breaches Australian ISP To Protests Data Retention
Re:
Anything that happens where an anonymous group claims to be working as part of Anonymous is an act of that group. Even if it's by a group of people who have no contact or relation to any one who has done anything before. That's what is unique about the whole thing and is something that the media has utterly failed to get it's head around.
Now there are some pretty core groups and circles that make up the meat of the current consistent agenda and most people who are serious about this stuff tend to fall in those circles as matter of course but if every single person involved in this current series of activism simply stopped... any other group could and likely would pick up the banner and carry it on. Any coherent action the group seems to take is an emergent response to who is claiming to do what for that group. Given that people who agree with the current direction are going to be attracted to the group it becomes a re-enforcing loop, the more they act like activists more activists will want to act as them.
On the post: Ubisoft DRM Fiasco: Allows Any Website To Take Control Of Your Computer
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Not DRM...
Most DRM is put in place these days by people who either don't understand that DRM can't be fully effective or are having to answer to backers who don't understand that. Like I was trying to point out steam wouldn't have ever gotten off the ground if it had built in DRM.
Most anti piracy measures as a whole are aimed at making it harder to do for most people. Take the resent take down of the youtube to mp3 site. Any one who's posting here likely has the knowledge to still easily to get a MP3 of a youtube video and hell a lot of people know enough to use a browser extension to do so. But taking down that site is not aimed at them, it's aimed at people who are being enabled by the site.
I know it can be hard to understand for those of us who are technically minded but downloading and cracking a game is actually a relatively high bar to have to pass. It's of course meaningless in the long term as not only is most of the target market perfectly technically minded but people are getting more competent on the whole and things are getting easier and easier to do.
The point is that you are insisting that DRM is simply there to stop piracy. It's not. As you point out DRM is utterly ineffective so you have to ask WHY it's used in products like steam and in context of the market steams DRM does exactly what it is meant to do. Stop early leaking of steamworks games and assure publishers (more the shareholders of those publishers) that steam does something to try and stop piracy so that those publishers can justify to their shareholders why it's ok to use the service.
DRM is at this point about far more than actually trying to stop piracy and "stopping" piracy has been downgrading to "doing something to try and limit it".
On the post: NBC: We Have No Clue Who Tim Berners-Lee Is, But Without Our Commentary, You Wouldn't Understand The Olympics
Re: Re: Re: opening ceremonies sucked...
And let me clear I detest the olympics and have been mostly embarrassed by the whole mess so far and yet you are actually getting me to defend it... which is a hell of an achievement.
On the post: Ubisoft DRM Fiasco: Allows Any Website To Take Control Of Your Computer
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Not DRM...
Once a game is available on steam it will most likely be cracked with in a day but at that point steam as done it's main job, to stop pirates getting their hands on a game before it's out. Which is actually a major thing in a world where not only can people get a game for free but they could be playing it before any one willing to pay would be able to do so.
DRM is not so much about actually stopping pirates but about the fact that publishers often have to ensure their shareholders that they are doing something about them there evil pirate types. Valve would never ever have gotten steam off of the ground if it hadn't come with a set of DRM. With out steam getting off the ground DRM free services like good old games wouldn't have had a look in and even then GOG is doing well more out of a the fact that the industry is very slowly being brought around to the idea that it's better to see pirate copies of the game then turn away consumers who might buy it.
The fact that people calling steams DRM one that works even when it's crackable is reflective of the fact that DRM is an issue of degrees. How much protection does it offer vs how much restriction does it impose and steam has struck a balance that works for most publishers and most gamers mainly by seeking to offset the problems of DRM through adding other value via the use of steam.
I actually think that valve would happily and effectively DRM free if they could but in the current clement it wouldn't go down well with a lot of publishers. Even if valve only went DRM on their own games it would require the ground work for such a system be put in place in steam and publishers would see that as a move by valve to pushing this issue in the market they currently dominate. Which would have publishers fighting back hugely and could easily sink steam.
Steam is proof that DRM that offers some effectiveness in publishers eyes can be accepted by a user base because it adds value. In fact people value steam as a service so much they are often willing to rebuy games on steam they already own in another format just to have them on the service.
It's not ideal but I firmly believe that if some one other than valve had pushed the DD market first we'd all be far worse off.
On the post: Ubisoft DRM Fiasco: Allows Any Website To Take Control Of Your Computer
Re: Re: Re: Not DRM...
If this was not part of a DRM system then you wouldn't have been forced to install it. And while a lot of people may have installed it anyway for what ever reason the only reason every one who owns a ubisoft PC game has it installed is because of the systems role, as a whole, as acting as DRM.
The plugin and the hole it creates is not directly related to the DRM but it is a required feature of it.... take that as you will.
On the post: Ubisoft DRM Fiasco: Allows Any Website To Take Control Of Your Computer
Re: Re: Re: Re: Not DRM...
Yet for the most part users view it as "fair" and any pain the DRM is causing is off set by the features and value that the client adds. Valve understands it's user base and does not have to answer to panicy share holders over "OMG PIRACY" while ubisoft have largely shown they have no idea what they where doing. It's only been through user back lash that we've seen any improvement from them lately.
Anyway, DRM is always a bad thing for the end user. Always. Yet so long as it's not awful and the DRM also comes with features we like then it's a trade off people can be willing to make.
On the post: Ubisoft DRM Fiasco: Allows Any Website To Take Control Of Your Computer
Re: Re: Not DRM...
You've got a valid point on this one. I love any chance to bash ubisoft, if you look at my post history I spent a while the other week trashing blizzard for the whole Diablo 3 always online mess and it's something I take very seriously. Yet the fact is this plug in could have been a feature of completely DRM free ubisoft store/social system. It's mind numbing that they let it happen and it calls in to question my willingness to have anything from them installed on my system, especially if it's something as intrusive as DRM can be.... but ya... not an case for "DRM IS EVIL" this time I feel.
On the post: Ubisoft DRM Fiasco: Allows Any Website To Take Control Of Your Computer
Re: STOP BUYING
I was really enjoying the game too and now the first thing I have to do when I get home is uninstall it. On the bright side it will let me go on to play one of the stack of other games I also brought in the steam sale!
On the post: NZ Copyright Industry Claims New 'Three Strikes' Law Halved Movie Infringements After One Month: So What?
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Civil or gay rights are a very clear example of this fact. It's only a few years ago that the age of consent for sex between two men in the UK was lowered from 18 to 16 to match hetrosexual sex.
The law was changed because our social attitude to homosexuality had changed. So a few days before this law changed and two young men under 18 had sex they would be breaking the law and yet there was enough support for their moral right to do so that a few days later that law was changed. So was it wrong for them to have sex?
We are at the start of a fundamental change to our society brought about by the internet. There are going to be moral changes that place people in a situation where they are breaking the law while feeling like they are doing nothing wrong.
Digital locks are already an example of this, you can legally copy a CD you own but it's illegal to break the DRM on the disk to do so. Most people will simply break the law because they feel they should be allowed to do so. What this should mean is that such still pointless laws that exist purely to give the legacy industry a veto on the adoption of a new technology will be revoked.
Sadly our system is currently a mess and our laws far more often represent the views of a small number of business owners than the public at large.
On the post: German Consumer Group Not Happy With Diablo 3 Internet Requirements
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Given that loot drop tables are a vital part of the game they would have had to messed up rather badly to miss this issue in testing and even more so to not bother monitoring player progression and charting that against AH use.
The sad thing is that this might simply be the truth, that they didn't intend any of it but they have so completely lost the good faith they had with me that I simply do not trust a statement like that from them.
On the post: German Consumer Group Not Happy With Diablo 3 Internet Requirements
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What that means is that the offline game could, with a little modding, be the better version of the game.
In other words the AH has degraded the game play experiences for any one who does not just LOVE having to grind gold or pay real money for items in AH to progress in their game.
And this is meant to be a argument in favour of the game being online? how?
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