Oolite Bulletins

Tichy wrote:

One method is to make the original copy much more interesting to the user.
Do you know the prog rock group Tool? Their CDs have always some special package making them much more interesting than every crappy copy you could find.
Add something.

Oh, the irony. Taking a prog rock group as an example, when the best and definitive example is the wonderful boxed version of a game called … Elite.

(Which only gives more weight to your point, of course.)

Commander McLane wrote:

... I find that sliced bread is actually not great at all?

I agree... one cannot make proper sandwiches with pre-sliced bread.

Commander McLane wrote:

Smithy2501 wrote:

Please don't think that this means that I feel DRM is the greatest thing since sliced bread …

<thread derailment imminent>Out of curiosity: am I the only person always wondering about this expression, because I find that sliced bread is actually not great at all? I prefer a whole loaf of bread from which I cut exactly as many slices as I'm needing right now, and keep the rest of it fresh and not drying out.

Gotta agree with you on that one! I tend to make my own bread anyway As far as the subject being derailed, I think it already has. All I was trying to say in my original post is that it's a shame that the features that made xbox 1 different have all been scrapped entirely.

Tichy wrote:

I think that they just have to reign ourselves to the exixtence of illegal copies. There have always been illegal copies and there will always be.
One method is to make the original copy much more interesting to the user.

I like this, and I like the fact that when I buy a game it has a nice big map or poster or something in the box. Unfortunately the existence of The Pirate Bay or Isohunt or other torrent sites prove that a lot of people don't care if they get crappy quality if they don't have to pay for it. One reason I am for DRM is the (hypothetical) potential to lower game prices. Here in Aus a lot of new AAA games release for between $100-$120 dollars and that's not always just for special editions. I see people in the US complain about paying $60 for a new game and every time i do, my heart bleeds a little more

Cheers,

Smithy

Smithy2501 wrote:

but how long is the game producer going to stay in business?

Well, they could consider a better pricing structure - if the thing is dirt cheap to buy people wouldn't have the 'incentive' to pirate copies. And particularly today where there doesn't even have to be a physical medium involved this is easy.
Selling one million copies at 1Cr will net the same as selling one copy for 1 million Cr.

Oh, and I don't get the 'sliced bread' thing either - horrible stuff!

Smithy2501 wrote:

I agree that this has always been the case, but that doesn't make it right!

Well, no, obviously - but I think there are things which make it less of a problem than it might appear.

Firstly, your banana analogy works both ways. If someone steals 5% of your bananas, you no longer have those bananas to sell. If 5% of the people obtaining your software do so by copying it, you still have the software and can sell it. So you're only actually losing money from the people who copy rather than buying: you're not losing money from the people who copy rather than not buying, because you'd never have got money from them anyway. (Similarly, if someone invents a matter replicator, and points it at your bananas, you might struggle to prove theft of bananas when you still possess the bananas)

Secondly, with physical items (books, say) you can share them freely. I can buy a book, think it's good, lend it to various friends, and ten or so people have all read the book but only purchased it once. This is considered perfectly legitimate and hasn't led to the demise of the book industry. The only constraint is that at most one person has the book at once. For multiplayer games that's an easy constraint to enforce, by only allowing one connection per license key [1]. For single-player games it's merely impractical to enforce technologically, but probably not worth doing either because of the first point.

[1] Back in the days when games came on CDs this was sometimes the other way round. I've got a few where you can only play single-player if you have the CD, but it'll install enough to the disk that you can run a big multiplayer game with just one CD (for the host). That's pretty much an expectation that you'll treat it like a book (and you can even get together and have a book club without having to buy multiple copies)

There are also some silly potential cases in copyright law in that digital data is essentially just a (very long) integer, but the copyright respects the work needed to construct it. But, of course, all integers should be considered to be public domain automatically since they've existed for centuries, and the algorithm to discover new ones is both trivial and also public domain. So, for instance, you could have a public domain algorithm, which when a well-known public domain number (such as 3) was entered into it gave the output as the binary representation of a piece of software. So have you then independently invented the software? What if you start with a 1-byte file containing the 0 byte, then increment it to a 1-byte file containing the 1 byte, and so on, until you get the binary representation of the software? Perfectly legal to do. (And a much slower way of copying software than any of the ones people actually use, of course).

cim wrote:

There are also some silly potential cases in copyright law in that digital data is essentially just a (very long) integer, but the copyright respects the work needed to construct it. But, of course, all integers should be considered to be public domain automatically since they've existed for centuries, and the algorithm to discover new ones is both trivial and also public domain. So, for instance, you could have a public domain algorithm, which when a well-known public domain number (such as 3) was entered into it gave the output as the binary representation of a piece of software. So have you then independently invented the software? What if you start with a 1-byte file containing the 0 byte, then increment it to a 1-byte file containing the 1 byte, and so on, until you get the binary representation of the software? Perfectly legal to do. (And a much slower way of copying software than any of the ones people actually use, of course).

Soooooo, what they are saying is that every piece of software exists "in potentia?" I wonder if they have been reading about Hex's "future computing" (where all books that could ever possibly be written exist "in potentia" and therefore should be avalible now!) in Terry Pratchett's Discworld I simply think that publishers have a right to protect there software, the same as I have a right to protect my house with a burglar alarm (neither of which work particularly well!)

Cheers,

Smithy

Smivs wrote:

Well, they could consider a better pricing structure - if the thing is dirt cheap to buy people wouldn't have the 'incentive' to pirate copies. And particularly today where there doesn't even have to be a physical medium involved this is easy.
Selling one million copies at 1Cr will net the same as selling one copy for 1 million Cr.

It's not always true that the lack of a physical product means that a huge chunk of production cost is eliminated: often (as with e.g. books) the cost of actually manufacturing the final physical object can be only a fraction (around 20%, in the case of books where an author is paid an advance) of the total production cost. With games, you've got all that art and sound and design and programming and testing: burning the CDs and making the packaging is probably a pretty tiny portion of the total cost.

I see that the manufacturers of the new X-COM game are going for a higher price (although by "higher price" they mean £13.99):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22978494
To be honest, that seems a good and reasonable price to me, for something that could provide tens or even hundreds of hours of entertainment ... The problem comes when manufacturers start gouging the market, and charging £40-£50 for reheated guff that lasts for a few hours, tops. It also comes when a whole generation is raised online, is used to getting incredible stuff completely buckshee, and expects to have what it wants, when it wants it, for no money. Now, Oolite is an amazing example of what you can get for free - but there are precious few games like it out there, and people need to eat ...

DRM is a dead letter, though, IMO: it inconveniences honest people and doesn't stop the crooks for more than 5 minutes. Stephen King's new book, Joyland, was released in print-only format (provoking a barrage of one-star reviews from annoyed Kindle owners who hadn't read it, but who objected to the fact that their plastic devices weren't going to get to run it ...). Within days of publication, though, someone had bought it, stripped it, scanned it and uploaded it. It's unlikely that this will damage sales much: it may even give them a boost, who knows? And for most authors (not King, though), the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity. And as Cim points out, the book market has survived for hundreds of years with lending and second-hand sales: in fact, the normal situation is for publishers (and authors) to receive money from only 25% of readers of a printed book (i.e. 3 out of every 4 readers have borrowed it from a friend or bought it second hand - or borrowed a second-hand copy, etc.).

I don't know what will happen: if people can't make a living producing creative stuff, then it'll have to become a hobby, and we'll all be the poorer for it. Maybe we need to get used to the whole idea of non-physical media, as a society, so that piracy becomes something shameful, that people in the main don't do because it's crass.

Oh, and I don't get the 'sliced bread' thing either - horrible stuff!

I think this originates from a time when the bar for technological wonderment was set a LOT lower than it is today ...

{{FLUSH}}
Woohoo! Ain't science somethin!

Disembodied wrote:

I don't know what will happen: if people can't make a living producing creative stuff, then it'll have to become a hobby, and we'll all be the poorer for it. Maybe we need to get used to the whole idea of non-physical media, as a society, so that piracy becomes something shameful, that people in the main don't do because it's crass.

I'd love to see this happen! I don't see how big, flashy AAA games can keep going the way they are going anyway, the labour and cost of producing games these days is just insane, particularly when you consider most games have a story line consisting of maybe 10-20hrs (don't quote me, i'm just guessing!) and a shelf life of maybe 6 months. Problem is, if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles and a graphical increase of three more lense flares per scene the game is considered crap and not worth buying.

Cheers,

Smithy

Smithy2501 wrote:

Soooooo, what they are saying is that every piece of software exists "in potentia?" I wonder if they have been reading about Hex's "future computing" (where all books that could ever possibly be written exist "in potentia" and therefore should be avalible now!) in Terry Pratchett's Discworld

Not merely in potentia. It already exists (because the integers already exist) - we just haven't completely discovered which ones correspond to interesting or useful programs. Take the language "Hello". This has one command 'h', which if used prints "Hello World". So the compiler takes the input number 0x68 and transforms it into another much longer number. If that longer number is then treated as code rather than data, and executed, the result is a piece of software which prints "Hello World".

So, to copyright the source code for that program, you would need to copyright the number 0x68 (decimal: 104). People are already using the number 104 for other purposes, however, so what if someone independently discovers this - perhaps by running an automated search over all numbers 1-1000 for ones with interesting results?

At the moment messing around with those concepts is mostly restricted to the modern art world of esoteric languages, but the point is that the baseline assumptions of copyright law only make sense for the analogue data which existed when the law was first developed. For digital data they don't. There's no law on those lines which can manage that without having very strange consequences. Similarly there's no real way to get around the technological fact that you can create a perfect copy of something in digital form extremely easily.

The problem with DRM as an attempted solution is that most people are mostly honest. The less convenient it is for them to obtain something the honest way, the more likely they are to obtain it a dishonest way. Making it so that if they pay to obtain it honestly, it's actually less usable than the version that they can obtain for free (which someone modified to remove the DRM code), is not a good business model.

Smithy2501 wrote:

I'd love to see this happen! I don't see how big, flashy AAA games can keep going the way they are going anyway, the labour and cost of producing games these days is just insane, particularly when you consider most games have a story line consisting of maybe 10-20hrs (don't quote me, i'm just guessing!) and a shelf life of maybe 6 months. Problem is, if it doesn't have all the bells and whistles and a graphical increase of three more lense flares per scene the game is considered crap and not worth buying.

Yeah, the lens flare thing is really odd, especially when you consider that, up until the 1970s, a lens flare was something that people desperately tried to avoid, in film-making: then along came TV and cheap production methods and possibly some sort of artistic sensibility about the reality of the medium or something and they became acceptable, then cool. And now games manufacturers add fake ones in to first-person games, so they can pretend that what your character is seeing is viewed through a camera ...

The problem, I suppose, is that better (or at least flashier) graphics are easier to do than better gameplay. This makes the market cynical, and more likely to try to rip off the manufacturers, because they perceive that the manufacturers are trying to rip them off too.

Smithy2501 wrote:

… the bells and whistles and a graphical increase of three more lense flares per scene the game is considered crap and not worth buying …

Link to the obligatory lens flare rant. (There is nothing new under the sun (or when simulating looking into the sun, for that matter).)

I confess that most of the copyright law goes straight over my head, as does most law for that matter (I ain't the sharpest spoon in the shed!). I agree that if something is more convenient, people will pay for it. The only times I have pirated things have been because they are more convenient to get. The thing is, I don't view authenticating my product all that inconvenient, its a lot easier for me to buy a game and have it authenticated than to download a pirated copy (I am on a mobile data plan with 3gb a month downloads). I realise that I am a special case and I am not saying "this is the way it must be" just putting forward my limited point of view

Disembodied wrote:

The problem, I suppose, is that better (or at least flashier) graphics are easier to do than better gameplay. This makes the market cynical, and more likely to try to rip off the manufacturers, because they perceive that the manufacturers are trying to rip them off too.

I agree totally, to model a 3D object from real life is easy, to make up a deep and compelling story out of your head is waaaaaaaaaaaay outta my league, thats why I have so much respect for authors that really grab my attention

Cheers,

Smithy

I think that the "one download = one unsold copy" equation that many people (and most vendors) do is wrong.
If I don't want, or can't spend my money for a game/movie/album/ebook, I'will not spend it, even if there's no other posibility to obtain it beside byuing it.
Now, I can download an illegal copy, if I want, of something that I would never have bought anyway. That doesn't harm the industry very much, imho.
On the opposite, I could even find that I like the thing that I downloaded illegaly so much, that it's worth buying.
This is what happens to many music enthusiasts. I would never have bought almost 20 CDs of Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh, or Stephan Micus if I hadn't had the possibility to download their albums. I would have never been interested in them.
So, "piracy" is also a very strong promotional activity.
The problem with piracy is that, with it, people are exposed to a very wide range of possibilities: many artists, many games, many movies. And the publisher doesn't have the resources to promote and produce that wide range of "products". Instead, they prefer to concentrare on a litte pool of artists and products, and promote them heavily.

So, the problem with "piracy", imho, is mostly an organizational and psychological problem. Not technlological.

Tichy wrote:

I think that the "one download = one unsold copy" equation that many people (and most vendors) do is wrong.
I would never have bought almost 20 CDs of Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh, or Stephan Micus if I hadn't had the possibility to download their album. I would have never been interested in them.

I agree, and it's why a lot of artists and authors release free versions alongside of there albums, books, whatever. I don't, however, believe that this is a reason for legitimizing piracy. I think most of the problem has to do with an over inflated sense of self entitlement. The same thing happens on the roads, people bitching and moaning and tailgating other drivers for sticking to the speed limit because they feel entitled to go faster, or watching pawn shows on T.V. where people go into the store demanding certain prices for their items then abusing the staff if they don't get it. I'm not saying that people have no rights, I just believe that there is a line that many people cross. I think that there are plenty of ways to promote free content without having to rely on piracy to get your product out there.

Cheers,

Smithy

Commander McLane wrote:

Smithy2501 wrote:

… the bells and whistles and a graphical increase of three more lense flares per scene the game is considered crap and not worth buying …

Link to the obligatory lens flare rant. (There is nothing new under the sun (or when simulating looking into the sun, for that matter).)

I don't know, the screen in my Adder flared pretty good the other day, course then I realised I was waaaaaaaaaaay to close to that sun! I'm still trying to get the smell of singed hair out of the cockpit!

Cheers,

Smithy