Mod maker thinks he's the police
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@The_Quiet_One said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
You're using the software as it was designed.
I never said otherwise. I simply claimed that that particular design is inherently a violation of my rights.
Well, if you're so confident that it violates the constitution, as "innocent until proven guilty" is protected by, let's have the supreme court contest it. From what you apparently think, it should be a slam dunk.
It definitely should be, were it not for the unfortunate fact that we currently have the most extreme pro-corporatist Supreme Court composition in probably the entire history of the US.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@The_Quiet_One said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
You're using the software as it was designed.
I never said otherwise. I simply claimed that that particular design is inherently a violation of my rights.
Right, because verifying a purchase is unconstitutional.
One big problem I have with a law like this is, while there would be tons of obvious violations, there are a lot of ambiguous cases. For instance:
Where does SaaS come into play?
How about freemium models, where certain features in the software are locked out until I pay? How does freemium software that has a paywall differ from a license key popup?
What about software that turns your bullets into harmless chickens if you have a pirated copy?
What about If I lock someone out because they didn't pay a yearly license fee, did I just commit vigilantism? And, if so, does that mean I'm Batman?
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
all other factors are necessarily equal, and the only meaningful differentiating component is the presence or absence of DRM
software developers and publishers are purely rational
software buyers and users are purely rationalThose would be assumptions for one to one comparisons. When applied to the whole industry, however, they are not. If DRM did more harm than good on the whole to the companies, those that didn't use it would be better off on average. The fact is that most users don't know or care about it, so the lack of DRM doesn't actually result in a measurable benefit. GOG doesn't outperform Steam because people don't care about DRM all that much. Hard to make the argument that the government has to step in to prevent something that few people choose to avoid even when the choice exists. Unless your position is that you are enlightened beyond your peers and men with guns should enforce your ideals on everyone else.
@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
I own that copy of the software. Locking me out of it is obviously "action taken against me."
Which copy, the one on the installation media, the one on disk or the one on memory when the program is loaded? Or do you mean you own the idea of the program, and are entitled to make whatever copies are required for the program to be useful? Because with the last interpretation (the only one that makes sense for programs), you don't own it. You are entitled to running the program following the license agreement. And the license agreement probably implies or says there's some form of DRM (I don't really know, I've never read a license agreement before). Complaining that the program does what you agreed to seems silly.
@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
I simply claimed that that particular design is inherently a violation of my rights.
You chose to install software on your machine. It's not a violation if you agree to it. And you are not entitled to other people's work, so you can't demand that they provide software that behaves in a given manner. You can accept that that's the software they chose to make, or you can choose not to use it.
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@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
men with guns should enforce your ideals on everyone else.
Please take your libertarian nonsense elsewhere; this isn't the
garage and grown-ups are trying to have a serious conversation here.
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@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
If DRM served no purpose at all, companies that didn't use it should be able to outperform those that do and eventually it would fade out by itself. That this doesn't happens would indicate that it is serving some function. And your argument that the government has to step in to preserve your interests in the name of freedom is hypocritical. You just dislike the fact that evidence doesn't seem to support your idealized world, so you want to resort to violence to force everyone to pretend that it does.
Heh, interesting parallel to a popular misconception of evolution. In evolution, a simplistic understanding has it that everything is either selected for or selected against. Reality is more complex, and it's a combination of randomness and not being bad enough off to prevent success. Business seems the same way to me, and having even what appear to be significant detriments can still be overcome if you're good enough in other ways.
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@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Which copy, the one on the installation media, the one on disk or the one on memory when the program is loaded? Or do you mean you own the idea of the program, and are entitled to make whatever copies are required for the program to be useful? Because with the last interpretation (the only one that makes sense for programs), you don't own it. You are entitled to running the program following the license agreement. And the license agreement probably implies or says there's some form of DRM (I don't really know, I've never read a license agreement before). Complaining that the program does what you agreed to seems silly.
See, that's something I don't agree with. That is not the model that's most appropriate. Consumer digital products should be treated like consumer physical products with the added benefit of free personal copies (both for the practical purpose of what's needed to make use of them and the competitive and technological advantage that is gained by essentially free copies). The "licensing" business, as currently practiced, is trying to impose commercial-level legal arrangements on consumers, with the consumers not being able to derive any of the advantages a big corporation could from such an arrangement (such as custom contracts suited to their needs).
It's taking technological improvements and using them to hinder consumer rights.
@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
And you are not entitled to other people's work
You are if you paid for it. We have ways of dealing with that when it'd be immoral to force the issue, but that's the reason those alternate resolutions exist in the first place.
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@The_Quiet_One said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Where does SaaS come into play?
Legally speaking, SaaS is utterly clear: you're buying access to a service. It doesn't have any of the problems of DRM since you're not dealing with trying to secure hardware that the developer doesn't control. (Thought for the day: how do you distinguish DRM from a Trojan? There must be such a distinction…)
What about software that turns your bullets into harmless chickens if you have a pirated copy?
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@The_Quiet_One Yes it is, because the default state is "locked out." Therefore, I'm treated as a criminal by default until I can prove my innocence to the satisfaction of whatever arbitrary criteria some arbitrary person came up with.
The Law Does Not Work That Way.
When you're asked for a ticket to enter the cinema, do you also lash out how you should be presumed to have a ticket and if the cinema wants to accuse you of entering illegally (ie. without a ticket), they can't just kick you out, but have to wait for the court case to resolve?
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@Maciejasjmj Never in my entire life have I been asked for a ticket once I'm already inside the theater, nor have I seen that happen to anyone else. Quite simply put, you're presumed to be there legitimately.
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@GÄ…ska said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@masonwheeler if I drive a car that isn't mine and the owner neither knows about it nor agreed to it, do I break any contract between me and the owner?
If I use software that isn't mine and the owner neither knows about it nor agreed to it, do I break any license?
FYI, copyright does not need register or what. It's granted automatically upon creation of the software.
So yes, if you're not granted right to run software that your don't write, you're violating copyright and the software's owner can sue you.
That's why we need those "free software license" even when the creator of software just want to give it to public for use for free.
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@Dreikin said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@izzion said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Your position is, once something (someone's software) is in your physical property, regardless of how it got there, you have absolute right to do whatever you want with it.
That's actually somewhat true, within governmental regulations. Well, if we mean you bought it, not if you're just borrowing it or whatever.
It depends on where you live.
In Hong Kong, people knowingly buy stolen goods from thief will be prosecuted and given the same sentence as the thief.
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@cheong said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
FYI, copyright does not need register or what. It's granted automatically upon creation of the software.
So yes, if you're not granted right to run software that your don't write, you're violating copyright and the software's owner can sue you.
Yes, you're violating copyright. But not license.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@Maciejasjmj Never in my entire life have I been asked for a ticket once I'm already inside the theater, nor have I seen that happen to anyone else. Quite simply put, you're presumed to be there legitimately.
I have, incidentally. Then-girlfriend and I were sat in our (assigned) seats. Woman and her entitled brat of a kid came over, with an usher, to assert that we were, in fact, sitting in their seats.
The usher didn't check the date on the ticket - we had tickets for that showing, she had tickets for the following day, but he assumed she was in the right until I actually pointed out the day to him.
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@Arantor They have assigned seats at movie theaters where you are? :o
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@masonwheeler for big releases, sure, especially if you pay extra for the big, actually-comfortable seating at the back.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
grown-ups are trying to have a serious conversation here.
Sorry, I got confused when you likened a licensing page that refuses to advance if you fail a license check to a human rights violation.
@Dreikin said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Business seems the same way to me, and having even what appear to be significant detriments can still be overcome if you're good enough in other ways.
Granted. It could be that DRM is kind of like a peacock's tail display: an exceedingly expensive (in terms of resources needed to maintain it) feature that mostly gets in the way but is required to attract mates. Similarly, a CEO that didn't use DRM would get ousted by the directors, so DRM becomes required to even begin to compete in some positions. It'd be interesting to know if directors of DRM companies are also in the board of other software companies, or if they lobby them.
@Dreikin said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
See, that's something I don't agree with. That is not the model that's most appropriate. Consumer digital products should be treated like consumer physical products with the added benefit of free personal copies (both for the practical purpose of what's needed to make use of them and the competitive and technological advantage that is gained by essentially free copies).
We're not actually in disagreement. A license agreement just means the rules you have to follow. GPL is a license agreement that confers even more rights than consumer physical products offer. I prefer license agreements that attempt to mimic what a physical product would allow, or expand on them. Like a book or movie being made available on any platform you own in any format you favor under a single purchase, being able to make backup copies, being allowed to obtain new copies if you lose the original media (and can prove you purchased it), being able to resell your copy (really selling your license) like you can resell other property, and the like.
The resale clause, in particular, can't work without some form of DRM, since without it there's no way to make sure you don't retain access to the thing after you sell it, which means you didn't really sell it.
All those consumer rights are still part of a license agreement though, because you are dealing with copyrighted materials. You can't "purchase" copyrighted materials, short of buying the rights outright (in which case the original owner stops owning the rights). You license the rights, which means the original owner retains all rights but extends a subset of them to you.
@dkf said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
(Thought for the day: how do you distinguish DRM from a Trojan? There must be such a distinction…)
Depends on the kind of DRM. I already argued that some kinds of DRM are no different from hacking and should be ilegal (probably are ilegal, but enough lawyers means there are no consequences for the companies). The one in the OP definitely isn't one.
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@Kian Wow, got downvoted before I even finished re-reading my own post. Must be a fast reader.
Yes, I reread my own posts after posting. Helps me catch and edit silly spellaring mistakes that are apparently invisible in the compose field.
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@dkf This one from Spyro is even more evil - they had a defense in depth with the final layer being this:
Finally, when all previous issues had been properly patched and the hackers could actually make it to the end of the game, they found that attacking the final boss would immediately send them back to the beginning of the game, with all of their save files erased.
I also remember the first X-game (IIRC X: Beyond the Frontier) had an insidious copy protection where the game worked fine but you'd begin to hemmorhage money after a while at an increasing pace.
Which is slightly problematic in a game where trading is an important part.
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@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Yes, I reread my own posts after posting. Helps me catch and edit silly spellaring mistakes that are apparently invisible in the compose field.
Yes. Especially since dyslexia tends to do built-in autocorrections in my brain...
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@RaceProUK said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Because the modder is forcing his immoral standards onto others.
FTFY. There is no excuse for this. DRM is hacking, and it needs to be legally recognized as such and banned outright.
Huh? Whatever you think of DRM, I can't see how you get "hacking" in there.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
How is this situation (in this case, not talking about rootkits and such) anywhere close to hacking?
Well, I don't know what you call it when someone causes another person's computer to act against its owner's wishes and interests, but I call that hacking.
That is retarded. Like, seriously TDEMSYR territory.
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@Yamikuronue said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
it's just my user being ignorant of what my program does
Or you being ignorant of what your users want, I mean, the fault can be either side, but it's not hacking.
Or a bug in your software.
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@Dreikin said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@Dreikin Seems pretty much a case of sneaking into the computer, so hacking. There's no expectation of a music cd coming with software in the first place, nor a prompt warning that it would be installed, nor anything of the like. Sony sold the music, and the rootkit piggybacked on that.
And yet it's DRM, so part of the product.
Ugh. C'mon, I know you're smart enough to recognize this as sophistry, which I respect as a troll. Don't encourage @masonwheeler though, because I think he really believes what he said.
... to say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.
— William F. Buckley, Jr.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@Dreikin yeah, and that's exactly why it's so problematic. Like any other form of vigilantism, it flies in the face of our entire legal tradition.
ZOMG! See, @Dreikin! Look what you're encouraging!
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Put simply, my real property rights as owner of a computer trump all "intellectual property" rights of stuff that runs on it, and I firmly believe that nobody has any right to say otherwise without first applying due process of law.
So don't run it, you ninny.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
No one has yet given an answer to my fundamental question: given that it's completely non-controversial that this sort of behavior is entirely unacceptable in any other context, why should it be considered OK in the context of copyright? Until you can answer that, no other argument makes any sense.
No one needs to because your argument is ridiculous. It makes no sense.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
No, that's not my position. My position is that I have the absolute right to a fair trial, with the benefits of due process of law and the Presumption of Innocence, before anyone can take action against me for allegedly violating it. DRM throws our entire legal tradition out the window.
That makes no sense at all.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@izzion I didn't say that either. I said that violating Due Process and the Presumption of Innocence is unacceptable.
Like I said, piracy is not my problem, and no one has a right to make it my problem unless they can prove that I'm part of the problem. (Which would be rather difficult, as I'm not a pirate!) Why is this a controversial statement?
No one made it your problem.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
What does the first amendment have to do with extralegal enforcement of copyright law?!?
What does law enforcement have to do with DRM? You're skipping massive steps here and have failed to make a convincing argument.
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@boomzilla said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
No one made it your problem.
DRM is making it my problem by forcing me to prove my innocence before gaining access to my property.
It's the electronic equivalent of a fascist police state: the software asks to see your papers every time you try to use it. How is that not making piracy my problem?
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
How is locking me out of something that I presumptively own not "action taken against me"?!?
You have a license to use the software. The software includes the verification that you are the license owner.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
men with guns should enforce your ideals on everyone else.
Please take your libertarian nonsense elsewhere; this isn't the
garage and grown-ups are trying to have a serious conversation here.Oh, sure, just when someone talks about actually enforcing laws.
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@Rhywden said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
I also remember the first X-game (IIRC X: Beyond the Frontier) had an insidious copy protection where the game worked fine but you'd begin to hemmorhage money after a while at an increasing pace.
Which is slightly problematic in a game where trading is an important part.That game repeatedly kicked my ass on easy mode even without that. I subsequently decided that I'm not really interested in space games where I can't do a Kobayashi Maru manoeuvre.
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@Dreikin said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
See, that's something I don't agree with. That is not the model that's most appropriate. Consumer digital products should be treated like consumer physical products with the added benefit of free personal copies (both for the practical purpose of what's needed to make use of them and the competitive and technological advantage that is gained by essentially free copies). The "licensing" business, as currently practiced, is trying to impose commercial-level legal arrangements on consumers, with the consumers not being able to derive any of the advantages a big corporation could from such an arrangement (such as custom contracts suited to their needs).
That's a reasonable position to have. So long as you don't start raving about vigilantism, hacking, or gold fringed flags.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@Maciejasjmj Never in my entire life have I been asked for a ticket once I'm already inside the theater, nor have I seen that happen to anyone else. Quite simply put, you're presumed to be there legitimately.
Yeah, well, I haven't had the experiences you've had with UPS, but I have had my ticket stub checked.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@boomzilla said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
No one made it your problem.
DRM is making it my problem by forcing me to prove my innocence before gaining access to my property.
It's the electronic equivalent of a fascist police state: the software asks to see your papers every time you try to use it. How is that not making piracy my problem?
So don't buy that software. No one made you buy it! No one. And hyperventilating about fascism just makes you look foolish.
NB: This is separate from obviously illegal stuff like Sony rootkits.
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I still remember Game Dev Tycoon. The devs themselves put out a modified version of their game via BitTorrent that always kills your studio due to piracy. That, of course, being the ironic point, that pirates get the modified version that means no matter how well they play, they will always lose - and they went to the developers in numbers after release, to ask what went wrong.
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@dkf said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@The_Quiet_One said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Where does SaaS come into play?
Legally speaking, SaaS is utterly clear: you're buying access to a service. It doesn't have any of the problems of DRM since you're not dealing with trying to secure hardware that the developer doesn't control.
Its clear to you or to me, since we're engineers. The question is, are the dolts behind the bench and in Congress aware of this distinction?
To be honest, a lot of this discussion is moot because the industry is turning to SaaS anyways. It's only a matter of time before computers are thin clients in the cloud.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
the vast majority of pirates are people who cannot afford the software in question, and therefore would not have purchased it anyway if there was no pirate copy available
Do you have any sort of source on that or are you pulling it out of your arse? Even if most pirates are people who can't afford all the software they want to buy, do you think maybe they'd buy a small selection of what they currently pirate if they didn't get it all for free?
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@boomzilla said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@Kian said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
How is this situation (in this case, not talking about rootkits and such) anywhere close to hacking?
Well, I don't know what you call it when someone causes another person's computer to act against its owner's wishes and interests, but I call that hacking.
That is retarded. Like, seriously TDEMSYR territory.
I think it's quite clear that any misbehavior of any computer-related system is a coordinated attack by the Russian government.
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@Jaloopa said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Do you have any sort of source on that or are you pulling it out of your arse?
It's been extensively studied for years and years, and this is a pretty consistent finding. Not my fault if you're not familiar with the most basic research related to the topic at hand.
Even if most pirates are people who can't afford all the software they want to buy, do you think maybe they'd buy a small selection of what they currently pirate if they didn't get it all for free?
At the margins, yes, but generally speaking, no. Publishers--particularly the entertainment industry--love to manufacture the appearance of a "piracy crisis" by the simple expedient of claiming that a pirated copy is a lost sale, but they're off by orders of magnitude. Depending on which study you look at, it's somewhere in the 1,000-10,000 pirated copies = 1 lost sale range.
If anything, piracy is good for software developers overall--at least those whose products don't suck--as it provides free advertising for their product among those who aren't able to pay for it yet, who often do end up becoming paying customers down the road once they get out of college and get a source of income. But you never hear the publishers talking about that, because it doesn't fit the narrative they're trying to push.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
Not my fault if you're not familiar with the most basic research related to the topic at hand.
And yet you fail to provide a source for such basic research
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@The_Quiet_One said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
The question is, are the dolts behind the bench and in Congress aware of this distinction?
Actually, they find services easier to handle than software. There's many centuries of litigation involving services, so it is very settled. That they involve computers and programs and so on is just minor tweaks, just as accessing the service via post or telephone is essentially a minor tweak.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
If anything, piracy is good for software developers overall--at least those whose products don't suck--as it provides free advertising for their product among those who aren't able to pay for it yet, who often do end up becoming paying customers down the road once they get out of college and get a source of income. But you never hear the publishers talking about that, because it doesn't fit the narrative they're trying to push.
Ah yes the old I'm paying you in exposure bullshit.
And yeah I don't think in a few year's time, after the game has gotten old and overplayed, anyone comes back and paid for what they got for free. Sure, maybe a few isolated occurrences, but definitely not "often" as you claim.
Sounds like your so called sources are coming from the pirates themselves trying to pathetically justify what they are doing.
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@The_Quiet_One Yeah, you know what the difference is between going with your gut feeling and actually looking at the facts and studying the matter?
Pretty much everything, really.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
you know what the difference is between going with your gut feeling and actually looking at the facts and studying the matter?
Generally, citing sources. Oh wait...
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@masonwheeler At least you've put a fair amount of effort into your rationalizations.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@The_Quiet_One Yeah, you know what the difference is between going with your gut feeling and actually looking at the facts and studying the matter?
Pretty much everything, really.
You know the difference between doing the right thing and paying for stuff and downloading it without paying?
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@The_Quiet_One When did I say it's not doing the right thing?
I don't put words in your mouth; please afford me the same courtesy. This isn't the
garage.
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@masonwheeler said in Mod maker thinks he's the police:
@The_Quiet_One When did I say it's not doing the right thing?
I don't put words in your mouth; please afford me the same courtesy. This isn't the
garage.You are rationalizing and justifying pirating games, saying they're giving them "free advertising," and "will pay for it later." It sounds to me like you're saying it's okay.
