Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 7:32am
Re: Re: Ideas
You should see his spiel when the issue is about people of color or HBTQ. Suffice to say the man's either a troll pretending to be a nazi or an actual nazi. By which I mean a bona fide adherent of those very fine people who marched swinging an odal banner in Charlottesville.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 7:30am
Re: Re: Ideas
"...because the way you are thinking leads to death camps for those who the people in charge deem as undesirable."
Restless94110 has made it abundantly clear in the past that such "undesirables" include black people and the jewish. One guess as to where he gets his ideas.
In case you need a hint for that guess...he's occasionally peppered his rhetoric with tropes like "lügenpresse" and implications towards racial and gender purity...
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 7:25am
Re:
"...surely the fact that anyone they stop could carry a weapon adds to their paranoia..."
That, right there. Unlike in europe US police do need to expect that there's a reasonable chance the guy they're pulling over is armed.
Add to that the mental health index of most of the US and they'll also be forced to assume the guy is less than stable.
Then finally add the all too prevailing US attitude that violence is the answer to all ills and you've got the perfect storm; Most cops, even the idealistic ones, learn to think of themselves as the random scrubs in a slasher movie.
This is where code blue comes from. The idea that your only way to live through the day rests on fellow officers having your back.
Doesn't excuse the high rate of police killing and overreach. US armed forces spend years walking through hostile cities where everyone really has a reason to hate them while killing far fewer civilians.
But it does explain why a bunch of people selected for not being too smart, with relatively low wages and minimal education in their job often end up adopting a "shoot first" mentality. Even before they get exposed to "warrior" training meant to turn ANY perceived danger into reflexively drawing and firing until the clip is empty.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 7:11am
Re: Re:
"it's possible to negotiate the use of something in Country A, then organize its use in Country B via a different mechanism"
Do you know the hourly bill of a skilled IP lawyer?
No? I'll give you a hint - it's pretty damn high. Trying to multiply that cost a hundred times or more to cover half the countries in the world is going to cost you so much it'll cut very hard into your expected margins. To the point where the law firms you've retained will earn more than you do.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 7:06am
Re: Re:
"Copyright maximalists themselves do the begging every other decade. Frankly it should be fair game for everyone else..."
It is. However, there is far more profit in keeping everything copyrighted forever than there is in widening the public sector. Hence it's a game of lobbying which the copyright maximalists always win.
That's why copyright, once seven years worth of protection, is now lifetime+70 years of protection.
Either copyright is abolished completely or we eventually end up with "forever less a day" becoming reality.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 6:52am
Re: Re: Re: Re: This made me audibly laugh out loud
"I still find it strange that IP lawyers use content moderation as a basis for denying someone's testimony in a counterfeiting case..."
You can, by now, assume that as a rule if it concerns either copyright or a trademark case on flimsy grounds the very first thing the plaintiff will do is to attempt to ban every possible actual expert from testifying.
Every copyright case and quite a lot of trademark cases depend on facts not being present at the ruling.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 6:43am
Re:
"How about outlawing monopolies entirely? They do nothing but harm."
Monopolies, with rare exceptions, are actually outlawed. The enforcement of this, in the US at least, is...lacking.
As a result of which the cost increase of just about everything in the US is a lot higher than inflation and supply cost increases can account for. The few major actors in each market raise their prices literally in lockstep and the antitrust legislation expressly prohibiting this type of behavior lies unused in some drawer in the capitol basement.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 6:35am
Re: Re: He was as full of shit then as you are now dot dot dot
"Remember when Jhon Boi Smith used to talk that same trash?"
Who can forget? I mean, Baghdad Bob in his self-cast role as "frothing maniac" delivering his trusty "The day will come when you filthy pirates are ALL paraded through the street in chains!! Gnrf!" monologue was memorable enough in all it's pants-shitting glory, but the same diatribe has been pushed hard by every copyright cult shill ever to disgrace the online forums.
Meanwhile what they have to show for that some thirty-odd years after they first started bringing out the tough talk is a long, long list of trying to sue innocent grandparents, laser printers and dead people. And their few public successes only ended up portraying the copyright adherents as the worst kind of scum no one would ever sympathize with, turning their would-be reign of "Shock and Awe" into a ridiculous "Flock and Squawk" dog and pony show only losing more credibility when the likes of Andrew Crossley/ACS:Law and Prenda saw fit to demonstrate in public just how low driven con men may sink when cornered by a sceptical judge.
tp at least once let slip that his participation around here was to troll - which is why he keeps right on cheerfully responding with one insanity after the other as saner commenters can't stop themselves from responding until the thread is pushing 300+ posts all iterated until they display as written a single character in width and scroll for a dozen pages on.
But whether he's a troll or not really doesn't matter. If he just brings what genuine copyright shills use to the table then Popehat's rule of goats applies.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 5:56am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The game customers didn'
"Context. Please factor in context. "
I suggest googling "Falkvinge History of Copyright, part 1: Black Death"
It's from the Pirate Party founder some years back - a longer but very well and interestingly written read on early examples of copyright and similar information monopoly initiatives before, during and after Queen Anne's Statute.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 5:52am
Re: Re:
"That's not anti-copyright, that's just being opposed to the mutated form it's taken in the last couple of decades."
The problem being that copyright keeps right on mutating - has from the start. The very second someone found there was money to be made, copyright started shifting. In the beginning, protection was seven years. Now it's life+70.
Get rid of it completely. Put the stuff an artist makes under trademark law instead, as part of their brand. The "right to copy" becomes irrelevant and is replaced by the "author's paternity", as it was once referred to in some european countries.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 5:45am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The game customers didn'
[edit for clarification]
"Under Trademark law I could use your "name" or brand in private conversation or publicly to refer to you. If I tried to use it against your wishes in commercial ventures, you could sue."
"Under copyright law you could sue me every time I spoke your "name" or brand, wrote it down, or typed it into an online textbox."
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 5:43am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The game customers didn't pa
"So, establish copyright but call it something different?"
By no means. Trademark law treats the ip to be protected as part of an identity. The law will punish anyone abusing that identity fraudulently in a public and/or commercial aspect.
Copyright law is something else entirely; it legislates ideas and concepts into properties to be perpetually owned and sanctioned against whenever a copy of that information is made.
Under Trademark law I could use your name in private conversation or publicly to refer to you. If I tried to use it against your wishes in commercial ventures, you could sue.
Under copyright law you could sue me every time I mentioned your name, wrote it down, or typed it into an online textbox.
One of the above is reasonable, the other flagrant insanity. And the insanity persists as long as it pertains the right to make a copy of information. Hence "Copyright" is pure rot right from the name on.
"Reversing Sonny Bono's bullshit and going back to the rules that boomers like him created their most successful works under."
I'm sure that was what was said when they changed the first seven years of protection as well.
As long as Copyright pertains to the right to make copies at all then the slider will keep getting pushed. Historically this conversation has been had too many times before for it to be acceptable that just pulling the sled halfway back up the steep slope it's been sliding down all this time will cut it.
Trademark and brand legislation, however, has managed, in it's various iterations, to retain more or less the exact same type of protection for at least as long back as mid-13th century.
Trademark is rooted in the natural state of identity and origin. It's easily understood and accepted by almost everyone. Because associating a meme with a face is second nature to us.
Copyright means some unaffiliated third party you never heard of gets to determine what you can do with the physical property you own, assuming it has a structure decipherable in an arbitrary manner sufficiently similar to whatever some oik anywhere decided they were the first to write.
Under Trademark law two seconds worth of generic industrial noise in a 5 minute soundtrack won't be enough to send Kraftverk a phat check. Under copyright, that will depend entirely on how good your lawyers are.
Copyright is irredeemable. Starting with the name itself and going on from there. None of its principles are salvageable.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 5:14am
Re: Pirates gonna pirate
Yup. And usually it only takes once; A paying customer spends the money, gets upset over the DRM breaking their game or cooking their PC...and from that moment on what you've got is a pirate.
The fact that everything about copyright is about making the paying consumer accept a far worse and more limited product than the pirate gets for free is really what makes it lose every battle where progress manages to happen.
Imagine if Ford tried to make a living selling model T's today if every bypasser had the ability to build a copy sans all the limiters and end up with a Fiesta instead?
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 2:44am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"I simply said - albeit in slightly different terms - that people who continue to support shitty DRM practices simply deserve what they get."
There's some truth to this...though there is a but here also; the time when you could vote with your wallet in the US is basically gone. DRM being built into everything digital as a matter of course increasingly means it's getting harder for developers to not use it. Pressure from shareholders rolled by the persistent nagging of copyright shills and lobbyist, your team of IP-specialist lawyers gleefully insisting you need to set them up for thousands of billable hours within their specialty, a toolset which includes key DRM components by default...
And then of course the fact that copyright is about monopolies. If what you want is a good car you've got plenty of choice; Ford, Volvo, Tesla, Skoda, etc. Same with everything else. Black & Decker, Bosch, or ATG?
You want Assassin's Creed? It's Ubisoft or bust and comes bundled with their bloody connect latching on to your game rig like a rotting barnacle. You want Dragon Age, almost any sports or FPS game? Congratulations, feel free to infest your poor rig with Origin, courtesy of EA.
It pays to note that some or all successful game manufacturers started out and grew popular with a non-intrusive DRM model - but as soon as the brand was strong enough, EA buys them up. And all the fans are left with the choice of dropping their favorite franchises like a sandwich someone just shat in, or hold their nose and keep eating in the hopes it won't be that bad.
Margins being what it is around the gaming industry and triple-A titles I'm fairly sure the likes of EA and Sony already made the calculation that their business will keep doing just fine as long as a fraction of the market will persistently agree to being the indentured serfs blindly paying good money for bad product.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 2:23am
Re:
Imagine, for one second, that because a number of states update the roadsigns on their highways, half of the Fords in the US stop working.
THAT is the insanity level of the crap described in the OP. And that people still accept DRM in the games they buy is beyond me.
I guess that's why quite a lot of them just choose to pirate a copy instead. Why buy the kool-aid containing poison when you can make a copy not containing that part?
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 2:19am
Re: No, it doesn't make technical sense
"...if you're hardcoding your software for specific CPUs I think the 1990s is calling on line #1 and would like you to stop being a Luddite."
The copyright cult is usually behind the times. The Sony rootkit, father of all modern-day DRM, struck in 2005. The methodology and mechanics seem not to have been fundamentally changed since.
The idea is to be intrusive. Every last component contributing to the PC working is to be infiltrated by the DRM. And if anything changes in any of these units which isn't specifically on the developer's whitelist...the deadman switch applies and the malware in question blocks whatever executable it's supposed to guard, an in all likelihood enough intrinsic OS processes to cause a CTD or hard freeze as collateral damage.
"Granted we are talking about DRM here and the end user experience is something no fucks were given towards at any stage in the development of the software."
This seems a recurring theme in every aspect of the church of copyright. Legislation is drafted in the same way as soon as it concerns copyright. As are the business models where the customer is considered a beholden serf rather than the king.
The harder part to swallow here is that this was all very predictable from the first time the guild of stationers tried to push the political-religious censorship tool they'd been responsible for maintaining into the private domain under Queen Anne. It's how this shit has to work.
And everyone just went along with it, leaving that monster to grow. Back then you could have taken it out and only lost a few disproportionately influential middlemen. Today a lot of industries would be left swaying if you eliminated the parasitical growths they've had to build themselves around...
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 1:09am
Re:
"But then, there's piracy! Pretty much every game is pirated, so you can blame piracy for any shortfall in sales. It's a fantastic scapegoat for any bad move on your part."
I think you may be on to something. Statistics speak for themselves, really - DRM does nothing of what the copyright cult envisions. It adds significantly to the game development cost, reduces performance - or breaks the damn thing completely, as in the OP...and most importantly, it means the pirates get a better version of the game than the paying consumer does.
But it's become the lucky charm. The ritual meant to appease the gods of the market. The cumbersome dressing up, chanting and smearing every product with goat's blood. The four-leaf clover which has to be attached to every item to be sold or disaster beckons.
And with that bullshit already accepted as "real" it's a very short step towards just pointing at the supposed evils the cumbersome mojo is supposed to ward off and exclaim "It's all their fault the <broken crock of shit> didn't sell like we thought it would! We need to start taping dead frogs to any future offers as well and hope that serves to deliver us from this eeeeevil!"
I mean, this is the normal spiel any old school shaman or priest used. It's just weird that we're still dumb enough to suffer that pseudo-religious ritual of grifting and blame projection to be built right into business models and law.
The copyright cult, ladies and gents. For when you want the medieval-style conmanship and graft in your future.
Scary Devil Monastery (profile), 15 Nov 2021 @ 12:51am
Re: Re:
"Steam does actually have a bolded colored warning box saying if the title has Denovu or other DRMs with known issues."
Yep. Steam may have a few issues but the fact that their own DRM is unintrusive and that they have a warning label on the stuff which might seriously impact your gaming...that just shows why they made it big.
On the post: Rupert Murdoch Spreads False Claim Biden FCC Nom Wants To 'Censor Conservatives.' NewsMax & OAN Immediately Prove Him Wrong.
Re: Re: Re:
"I honestly just wish some reporter would have replied with how Ms. Lindsey voted for Trumps nominees."
Not cool to compare Lindsey with a woman. Most women would take offense.
That said I think windsocks are genderless so men can probably safely disavow him as well...
On the post: Fifth Circuit Awards Immunity To Cop Who Thought It Would Be A Good Idea To Jump On A Moving Car And Kill The Driver
Re: Re: Ideas
You should see his spiel when the issue is about people of color or HBTQ. Suffice to say the man's either a troll pretending to be a nazi or an actual nazi. By which I mean a bona fide adherent of those very fine people who marched swinging an odal banner in Charlottesville.
On the post: Fifth Circuit Awards Immunity To Cop Who Thought It Would Be A Good Idea To Jump On A Moving Car And Kill The Driver
Re: Re: Ideas
"...because the way you are thinking leads to death camps for those who the people in charge deem as undesirable."
Restless94110 has made it abundantly clear in the past that such "undesirables" include black people and the jewish. One guess as to where he gets his ideas.
In case you need a hint for that guess...he's occasionally peppered his rhetoric with tropes like "lügenpresse" and implications towards racial and gender purity...
On the post: Fifth Circuit Awards Immunity To Cop Who Thought It Would Be A Good Idea To Jump On A Moving Car And Kill The Driver
Re:
"...surely the fact that anyone they stop could carry a weapon adds to their paranoia..."
That, right there. Unlike in europe US police do need to expect that there's a reasonable chance the guy they're pulling over is armed.
Add to that the mental health index of most of the US and they'll also be forced to assume the guy is less than stable.
Then finally add the all too prevailing US attitude that violence is the answer to all ills and you've got the perfect storm; Most cops, even the idealistic ones, learn to think of themselves as the random scrubs in a slasher movie.
This is where code blue comes from. The idea that your only way to live through the day rests on fellow officers having your back.
Doesn't excuse the high rate of police killing and overreach. US armed forces spend years walking through hostile cities where everyone really has a reason to hate them while killing far fewer civilians.
But it does explain why a bunch of people selected for not being too smart, with relatively low wages and minimal education in their job often end up adopting a "shoot first" mentality. Even before they get exposed to "warrior" training meant to turn ANY perceived danger into reflexively drawing and firing until the clip is empty.
On the post: Metal Gear Solid 2 And 3 Taken Off Digital Storefronts Over Licensing For Historical Videos
Re: Re:
"it's possible to negotiate the use of something in Country A, then organize its use in Country B via a different mechanism"
Do you know the hourly bill of a skilled IP lawyer?
No? I'll give you a hint - it's pretty damn high. Trying to multiply that cost a hundred times or more to cover half the countries in the world is going to cost you so much it'll cut very hard into your expected margins. To the point where the law firms you've retained will earn more than you do.
On the post: It's Time To End The Anti-Circumvention Exemption Circus
Re: Re:
"Copyright maximalists themselves do the begging every other decade. Frankly it should be fair game for everyone else..."
It is. However, there is far more profit in keeping everything copyrighted forever than there is in widening the public sector. Hence it's a game of lobbying which the copyright maximalists always win.
That's why copyright, once seven years worth of protection, is now lifetime+70 years of protection.
Either copyright is abolished completely or we eventually end up with "forever less a day" becoming reality.
On the post: Jury Correctly Recognizes That Print-On-Demand Website Isn't A 'Counterfeiting' Business Engaged In Infringement
Re: Re: Re: This made me audibly laugh out loud
"Something something haven't sucked enough dicks to rate if its a pretty penis or not?"
Sheesh, TAC. You're thinking about the Perfect 10 and Malibu Media shit-shows, not Atari.
Unless their portfolio includes hentai games?
On the post: Jury Correctly Recognizes That Print-On-Demand Website Isn't A 'Counterfeiting' Business Engaged In Infringement
Re: Re: Re: Re: This made me audibly laugh out loud
"I still find it strange that IP lawyers use content moderation as a basis for denying someone's testimony in a counterfeiting case..."
You can, by now, assume that as a rule if it concerns either copyright or a trademark case on flimsy grounds the very first thing the plaintiff will do is to attempt to ban every possible actual expert from testifying.
Every copyright case and quite a lot of trademark cases depend on facts not being present at the ruling.
On the post: Drug Price Negotiation Is A Second-Best Fix. Here's What Will Really Work
Re:
"How about outlawing monopolies entirely? They do nothing but harm."
Monopolies, with rare exceptions, are actually outlawed. The enforcement of this, in the US at least, is...lacking.
As a result of which the cost increase of just about everything in the US is a lot higher than inflation and supply cost increases can account for. The few major actors in each market raise their prices literally in lockstep and the antitrust legislation expressly prohibiting this type of behavior lies unused in some drawer in the capitol basement.
On the post: Denuvo Games Once Again Broken For Paying Customers Thanks To DRM Mishap
Re: Re: He was as full of shit then as you are now dot dot dot
"Remember when Jhon Boi Smith used to talk that same trash?"
Who can forget? I mean, Baghdad Bob in his self-cast role as "frothing maniac" delivering his trusty "The day will come when you filthy pirates are ALL paraded through the street in chains!! Gnrf!" monologue was memorable enough in all it's pants-shitting glory, but the same diatribe has been pushed hard by every copyright cult shill ever to disgrace the online forums.
Meanwhile what they have to show for that some thirty-odd years after they first started bringing out the tough talk is a long, long list of trying to sue innocent grandparents, laser printers and dead people. And their few public successes only ended up portraying the copyright adherents as the worst kind of scum no one would ever sympathize with, turning their would-be reign of "Shock and Awe" into a ridiculous "Flock and Squawk" dog and pony show only losing more credibility when the likes of Andrew Crossley/ACS:Law and Prenda saw fit to demonstrate in public just how low driven con men may sink when cornered by a sceptical judge.
tp at least once let slip that his participation around here was to troll - which is why he keeps right on cheerfully responding with one insanity after the other as saner commenters can't stop themselves from responding until the thread is pushing 300+ posts all iterated until they display as written a single character in width and scroll for a dozen pages on.
But whether he's a troll or not really doesn't matter. If he just brings what genuine copyright shills use to the table then Popehat's rule of goats applies.
On the post: Denuvo Games Once Again Broken For Paying Customers Thanks To DRM Mishap
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The game customers didn'
"Context. Please factor in context. "
I suggest googling "Falkvinge History of Copyright, part 1: Black Death"
It's from the Pirate Party founder some years back - a longer but very well and interestingly written read on early examples of copyright and similar information monopoly initiatives before, during and after Queen Anne's Statute.
On the post: Denuvo Games Once Again Broken For Paying Customers Thanks To DRM Mishap
Re: Re:
"That's not anti-copyright, that's just being opposed to the mutated form it's taken in the last couple of decades."
The problem being that copyright keeps right on mutating - has from the start. The very second someone found there was money to be made, copyright started shifting. In the beginning, protection was seven years. Now it's life+70.
Get rid of it completely. Put the stuff an artist makes under trademark law instead, as part of their brand. The "right to copy" becomes irrelevant and is replaced by the "author's paternity", as it was once referred to in some european countries.
On the post: Denuvo Games Once Again Broken For Paying Customers Thanks To DRM Mishap
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The game customers didn'
[edit for clarification]
"Under Trademark law I could use your "name" or brand in private conversation or publicly to refer to you. If I tried to use it against your wishes in commercial ventures, you could sue."
"Under copyright law you could sue me every time I spoke your "name" or brand, wrote it down, or typed it into an online textbox."
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
"So, establish copyright but call it something different?"
By no means. Trademark law treats the ip to be protected as part of an identity. The law will punish anyone abusing that identity fraudulently in a public and/or commercial aspect.
Copyright law is something else entirely; it legislates ideas and concepts into properties to be perpetually owned and sanctioned against whenever a copy of that information is made.
Under Trademark law I could use your name in private conversation or publicly to refer to you. If I tried to use it against your wishes in commercial ventures, you could sue.
Under copyright law you could sue me every time I mentioned your name, wrote it down, or typed it into an online textbox.
One of the above is reasonable, the other flagrant insanity. And the insanity persists as long as it pertains the right to make a copy of information. Hence "Copyright" is pure rot right from the name on.
"Reversing Sonny Bono's bullshit and going back to the rules that boomers like him created their most successful works under."
I'm sure that was what was said when they changed the first seven years of protection as well.
As long as Copyright pertains to the right to make copies at all then the slider will keep getting pushed. Historically this conversation has been had too many times before for it to be acceptable that just pulling the sled halfway back up the steep slope it's been sliding down all this time will cut it.
Trademark and brand legislation, however, has managed, in it's various iterations, to retain more or less the exact same type of protection for at least as long back as mid-13th century.
Trademark is rooted in the natural state of identity and origin. It's easily understood and accepted by almost everyone. Because associating a meme with a face is second nature to us.
Copyright means some unaffiliated third party you never heard of gets to determine what you can do with the physical property you own, assuming it has a structure decipherable in an arbitrary manner sufficiently similar to whatever some oik anywhere decided they were the first to write.
Under Trademark law two seconds worth of generic industrial noise in a 5 minute soundtrack won't be enough to send Kraftverk a phat check. Under copyright, that will depend entirely on how good your lawyers are.
Copyright is irredeemable. Starting with the name itself and going on from there. None of its principles are salvageable.
On the post: DRM Breaking Games Again, This Time Due To New Intel Chip Architecture
Re: Pirates gonna pirate
Yup. And usually it only takes once; A paying customer spends the money, gets upset over the DRM breaking their game or cooking their PC...and from that moment on what you've got is a pirate.
The fact that everything about copyright is about making the paying consumer accept a far worse and more limited product than the pirate gets for free is really what makes it lose every battle where progress manages to happen.
Imagine if Ford tried to make a living selling model T's today if every bypasser had the ability to build a copy sans all the limiters and end up with a Fiesta instead?
On the post: DRM Breaking Games Again, This Time Due To New Intel Chip Architecture
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
"I simply said - albeit in slightly different terms - that people who continue to support shitty DRM practices simply deserve what they get."
There's some truth to this...though there is a but here also; the time when you could vote with your wallet in the US is basically gone. DRM being built into everything digital as a matter of course increasingly means it's getting harder for developers to not use it. Pressure from shareholders rolled by the persistent nagging of copyright shills and lobbyist, your team of IP-specialist lawyers gleefully insisting you need to set them up for thousands of billable hours within their specialty, a toolset which includes key DRM components by default...
And then of course the fact that copyright is about monopolies. If what you want is a good car you've got plenty of choice; Ford, Volvo, Tesla, Skoda, etc. Same with everything else. Black & Decker, Bosch, or ATG?
You want Assassin's Creed? It's Ubisoft or bust and comes bundled with their bloody connect latching on to your game rig like a rotting barnacle. You want Dragon Age, almost any sports or FPS game? Congratulations, feel free to infest your poor rig with Origin, courtesy of EA.
It pays to note that some or all successful game manufacturers started out and grew popular with a non-intrusive DRM model - but as soon as the brand was strong enough, EA buys them up. And all the fans are left with the choice of dropping their favorite franchises like a sandwich someone just shat in, or hold their nose and keep eating in the hopes it won't be that bad.
Margins being what it is around the gaming industry and triple-A titles I'm fairly sure the likes of EA and Sony already made the calculation that their business will keep doing just fine as long as a fraction of the market will persistently agree to being the indentured serfs blindly paying good money for bad product.
On the post: DRM Breaking Games Again, This Time Due To New Intel Chip Architecture
Re:
Imagine, for one second, that because a number of states update the roadsigns on their highways, half of the Fords in the US stop working.
THAT is the insanity level of the crap described in the OP. And that people still accept DRM in the games they buy is beyond me.
I guess that's why quite a lot of them just choose to pirate a copy instead. Why buy the kool-aid containing poison when you can make a copy not containing that part?
On the post: DRM Breaking Games Again, This Time Due To New Intel Chip Architecture
Re: No, it doesn't make technical sense
"...if you're hardcoding your software for specific CPUs I think the 1990s is calling on line #1 and would like you to stop being a Luddite."
The copyright cult is usually behind the times. The Sony rootkit, father of all modern-day DRM, struck in 2005. The methodology and mechanics seem not to have been fundamentally changed since.
The idea is to be intrusive. Every last component contributing to the PC working is to be infiltrated by the DRM. And if anything changes in any of these units which isn't specifically on the developer's whitelist...the deadman switch applies and the malware in question blocks whatever executable it's supposed to guard, an in all likelihood enough intrinsic OS processes to cause a CTD or hard freeze as collateral damage.
"Granted we are talking about DRM here and the end user experience is something no fucks were given towards at any stage in the development of the software."
This seems a recurring theme in every aspect of the church of copyright. Legislation is drafted in the same way as soon as it concerns copyright. As are the business models where the customer is considered a beholden serf rather than the king.
The harder part to swallow here is that this was all very predictable from the first time the guild of stationers tried to push the political-religious censorship tool they'd been responsible for maintaining into the private domain under Queen Anne. It's how this shit has to work.
And everyone just went along with it, leaving that monster to grow. Back then you could have taken it out and only lost a few disproportionately influential middlemen. Today a lot of industries would be left swaying if you eliminated the parasitical growths they've had to build themselves around...
On the post: DRM Breaking Games Again, This Time Due To New Intel Chip Architecture
Re:
"But then, there's piracy! Pretty much every game is pirated, so you can blame piracy for any shortfall in sales. It's a fantastic scapegoat for any bad move on your part."
I think you may be on to something. Statistics speak for themselves, really - DRM does nothing of what the copyright cult envisions. It adds significantly to the game development cost, reduces performance - or breaks the damn thing completely, as in the OP...and most importantly, it means the pirates get a better version of the game than the paying consumer does.
But it's become the lucky charm. The ritual meant to appease the gods of the market. The cumbersome dressing up, chanting and smearing every product with goat's blood. The four-leaf clover which has to be attached to every item to be sold or disaster beckons.
And with that bullshit already accepted as "real" it's a very short step towards just pointing at the supposed evils the cumbersome mojo is supposed to ward off and exclaim "It's all their fault the <broken crock of shit> didn't sell like we thought it would! We need to start taping dead frogs to any future offers as well and hope that serves to deliver us from this eeeeevil!"
I mean, this is the normal spiel any old school shaman or priest used. It's just weird that we're still dumb enough to suffer that pseudo-religious ritual of grifting and blame projection to be built right into business models and law.
The copyright cult, ladies and gents. For when you want the medieval-style conmanship and graft in your future.
On the post: DRM Breaking Games Again, This Time Due To New Intel Chip Architecture
Re: Re:
"Steam does actually have a bolded colored warning box saying if the title has Denovu or other DRMs with known issues."
Yep. Steam may have a few issues but the fact that their own DRM is unintrusive and that they have a warning label on the stuff which might seriously impact your gaming...that just shows why they made it big.
Know Thy Customer.
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