MudMan

We really don’t talk enough about how the worst rated game of the Tomb Raider reboot from the B studio for the series ended up being the default benchmark for gaming for the better part of a decade.

Good for Eidos Monteal. Guardians of the Galaxy deserved better, too.

It just sounds really dumb. The word “federation” was right there.

Well, for one, like the guy says below, it was often said to people as a means to explain how federation works, which immediately failed by way of people not thinking about or knowing how email works, either.

For another, my emails look like emails everywhere, both on source and destination. I don’t have a different character limit or feature set about what I can slap into my emails depending on what client I’m using, and I’m reasonably sure my email looks the same on the other end, no mater what client the recipient is using.

So the back end may work like email (not really, but it may approximate it), but the front end sure as hell doesn’t, so the explanation is more confusing than anything else.

Also, not the part of Mastodon specifically that people didn’t understand, they just tried to log in, were presented with a thousand instances, told choosing which one to use was super important but also that it didn’t matter and they should keep changing instances later, but also that migrating instances was not an easy process, but don’t worry, it’s just like email.

It was a hilarious endless loop of a conversation, like a Monty Python sketch. Or seeing people try to tell normies to use Linux.

Sale is the only issue because you’re talking about an exclusive right to profit for something. You can already copy a thing at any point for free. That technology is trivial, we just don’t allow it as a general rule. You’re fantasizing about creating an exception based on a thing not being widely available to purchase. If the thing is free, then there is no exception because… well, the thing is free. It’s a valid distinction in that yeah, it’d allow people to retain some control over free licenses, but it still wouldn’t fix what happens to things that haven’t been commercialized yet or that aren’t commercialized constantly.

TV shows that were aired once and aren’t available for purchase, private art that is not made freely available, one-off concerts or events, tools created for private use… there are so many things that would be severed from protections if that was the line.

And just to frame what you’re arguing regarding price control: the outlandish scenario people are trying to prevent with the price control here is one where, to prevent losing copyright under the weird “access” rule, someone keeps a game up for sale somewhwere at an inflated price because they don’t want to sell it otherwise. That is not why meida goes out of print or gets delisted, for one thing, and price control wouldn’t impact it much, for another. I mean, Starfox 64 was 80 USD in 1997, so you could sell it for like 200 bucks now, which doesn’t seem like it fixes the entirely imaginary problem that idea was trying to solve.

Meanwhile, what happens to all the games that depend on a server or that lose compatibility with modern platforms? Are you mandating people to sell iOS games that no longer work on modern phones? Movies in discontinued formats? Is Disney obligated to keep selling the VHS version of The Little Mermaid or to publish a new version of that cut? What about Star Wars, where the movie is actually different? What happens in scenarios like Apple removing the old 1080p cut of Alien and replacing it with a 4K that has different color grading that annoys purists? Are those the same thing or different? Can you take GTA San Andreas down if you sell the remaster?

This is not “easy”, and it doesn’t work the way people here seem to think it works. You’re just working backwards from a specific example that annoys you and not considering the wider context.

Oh, man, I hadn’t heard the “it’s like email” nonsense since I stopped daily driving Mastodon. Real nostalgia going on here.

A main driver of this was Mediaset, which is actually Italian. Seriously, the article is right there. I didn’t know about it before I read it, either.

I should hope so. If somebody shook my hand and, while maintaining eye contact, and confessed they’ve been free-willying every pee of their life, hands behand their head, I would have to seriously reconsider our relationship.

Is… this a thing?

I know who that was, it just… came and went, didn’t seem like anybody cared much.

Although I’m not American, maybe it was a bigger deal there?

Agreed, although apparently plenty of governments don’t think the same thing.

For them? Sure, maybe, although the top end of the fine bracket, as per the article, is 5000 eddies, so… probably won’t stay cost-effective long.

But the point is the headline suggests personal use of paid pirated media is legally supported in Italy, which it’s… not.

I still think the current system needs fundamental reform and while this whole ordeal doesn’t say much about what is and isn’t allowed in the current system, it does show what a clusterfuck of enforcement and regulation this is at the moment.

Because nobody will read the full report, they were all fined with 150 euros, which is the legal minimum. They were acquitted of criminal charges and related civil liability.

They were all paying a reseller, too, not just streaming or downloading freely available content.

I don’t know that I claimed it’d take power away from the privileged. If I had to make an educated guess, the idea that “it’s a social construct so we can change it” tends to lead to proposing easy solutions to complicated problems that only work if we all agree they work.

They normally don’t work.

And if the people proposing them are powerful enough to get convinced that all they need to do is force everybody to agree with them regardless it often ends in tears.

Hell, catch me in a good day I’ll tell you changing natural realities is easier than changing social constructs. On par at best, and nature at least won’t argue about it.

No it couldn’t “easily” do that because legislation can’t predict every single time a product is going to be brought to market and make exceptions for every time a sales person comes up with a way to license or sell a thing.

Laws work best when they are general principles that can be applied to a wide swath of scenarios via interpretation. People just look at a thing they don’t like and want laws to… you know, stop that kinda thing. But that’s not how it really works, at least when it’s working well. Even the current copyright is guilty of this to some extent, having been designed to effectively ensure that only the original author can profit from selling printed copies of their books and then being beaten into a bloody pulp by the realization that the content of a creative work and its medium are different things.

But at least the core principle behind it was workable initially, the idea of tying copyright to something being available for sale is fundamentally a nonstarter. I mean, I sure hope if I write a story and don’t make it widely available until I sell it to an editor it doesn’t mean that anybody with a copy of it could just share it or sell it themselves just because I’m not making it available. That doesn’t seem like a great idea, fundamentally.

It is, very much, not “an easy one”. You’re describing a regulated market, which is what I said above. Housing is regulated aggressively almost everywhere, and the scheme you describe would require a centralized control over how much people are allowed to raise prices to match inflation for games.

And, as mentioned many times already, it doesn’t work with microtransactions or free to play games and it incentivizes setting a very high launch price to work around the limitation of using launch pricing as a benchmark for a product’s entire lifetime.

Also, no, I don’t think I’m misunderstanding what people are saying. It’s definitely not easy to tie “availability” to copyright protection. Which is why in the real world the way copyrights sometimes get extinguished has more to do with enforcement than availability. People ARE arguing that something being up for sale should be the trigger instead, but this is very hard to manage, very hard to trigger and doesn’t come even close to fitting all the ways things are marketed.

I think this is a very, very hard problem to fix, but if you made me try, I’d argue that a deep reform should enable copyright exceptions regardless of whether something is up for sale. I don’t even know why people here are so fixated with that element. The exclusive right should not be about copying a thing, it should be about selling or profiting from a thing. Not copyright, but sale right.

Yeah, but that’s my point. There’s a tendency, particularly on STEM people, but also on your average normies, to think that “social constructs” aren’t “real”. This is a very bad take that often causes a lot of problems.

If this thread is proving something is that policymaking is very difficult.

That doesn’t work either, things don’t have a single price point in modern media, and it’d be easy to just do what some games are already doing where you give people early access for extra money and save yourself from being price locked later.

Plus, how do you price out subscriptions and free to play games with MTX? Not every individual piece of media has a price, but a lot of dead media comes from broadcast, subscriptions and other nonstandard arrangements.

You guys are too fixated in the scenario where publishers hike prices to retain copyright without actually distributing the content. It’s not as big of a loophole as you think and the idea of tying copyright to a thing being actively sold has bigger problems than that.

Been agreeing to disagree on this one for like 35 years, I’m good with that.

No, it’s definitely fine and possible. A thriving industry of Youtube reaction channels hinges on that plausibility. It’s just the concept of the OP’s headline implying it’s a generational thing when it definitely isn’t.

Do we? Could have fooled me. The games I played this week ranged from free to 90 bucks, including 5, 15, 20 and 39. And I used the 250 limited edition example because I had the Virtua Fighter collector’s edition they announced on the TGAs in a cart before I thought better of it.

So I have no idea what the “market price for new games” is supposed to be.

I mean, it was genuinely hard to avoid for a while there.

Gen Z, maybe.