There's no reason a subscription model has to be equivalent to monthly payments. You can sell a lifetime* subscription just as well. (And as an uncle post says - subscriptions arent the only way..) Though realistically youd have to expect their servers to go down at some point - at which time - assuming the company is fair - they could offer the community to run the servers or even release the source code (such as id software's older titles).

Of course, you can assume bad faith on part of the companies as well if you like (the servers might just go down leaving your game unplayable) - but the fact is this is the way computer games as increasingly being sold, even in the absence of copyright reform. Keeping game copying illegal isn't going to change the economics of game development.

So, as it is, you seem to be argumenting against certain reforms of copyright law to protect a business model that isn't practically viable anyway - and still stifles creativity and innovation. Please correct me if you think I'm wrong.

* lifetime of the game servers, obviously ;-)

What is this alternate mechanism for funding a multi-million dollar game that won't make any money from distribution?

One example - MMOG's like World of Warcraft, Eve Online et cetera. As in - charge for the game service, not the game itself. People who play games like this will literally pay hundreds of euros in subscription fees over a long time, as long as the game offers enough replay value, and a good community. Which is plenty of money to run the servers and cover any cost of development.

In the case of MMOG's, content is even added on a regular basis.

A game doesn't need to be massively multiplayer for something like that. I always thought it was really backwards back when you paid for the game, but then people and random organisations or even ISPs were expected to run the servers for free, and enthusiasts were expected to fill the gap of user-created levels and mods - like it was for Quake for example.

It's all about adding value beyond the code that you ship to the end user.

Now, granted, I don't like the locked top-down model of World of Warcraft for example, for other reasons, that have nothing to do with how Blizzard funds its development - but that doesn't change the fact that it's a successful business model for creating a multi-million dollar game that does not rely on copyright law to work.

I should point out that there are in fact "private servers" where people can play World of Warcraft, for example, for free. (These servers usually aren't complete when it comes to game mechanics or quests etc.) But for some reason most players actually go on the official servers. I wonder why. Might it be Blizzard actually sells something people want to pay for? *gasp* What a novel concept.

Copyright is a lot more than criminalizing non-commercial copying.

It's about not having mere printers or publishers make a buck off you by selling copies just above cost - exploiting your work commercially.

It's about being recognised as the author of your work.

It's should be about being able to have a monopoly to exploit your work - in a commercial fashion - not as a license to dig into private communications to make sure that you're not swapping "the wrong bits".

You didn't answer my last question though. You think copyright law should be reformed. In what way?

Actually, people using peer-to-peer software to get their media impose more load on an Internet Service Provider's network than a customer using one of the official/legitimate download sites.

Of course, peer-to-peer also drives people to get faster Internet connections and pay more. But that's also a matter of competition which doesn't directly benefit the provider - they just need to stay at the same level as everyone else.

The Free Software Foundation's goals isn't to oppose copyright per se, it is to promote free software.

Anything that weakens the GPL may well weaken free software - in the way that code from free software could be used to create more non-free software. Under the PPUK proposed reform, it's not like you can take components from five-year old Windows and copy-paste them into Linux, and still have the result be free software. Binary blobs aren't free software, even if they're in the public domain, since there's no source code. This is the same reason freeware isn't the same thing as free software.

How would you suggest copyright be reformed?

This is the UK pirate party's stance on copyrights, as from their front page:

Reform copyright [...] law. We want to legalise non-commercial file sharing and reduce the excessive length of copyright protection, while ensuring that when creative works are sold, it's the artists who benefit, not monopoly rights holders. [...]

Do you have another suggestion as for how the copyright system should be reformed that would be more moderate and still effective? Or are you just agreeing with the UK PP without knowing that you are? :-)

The concept that the pirate party movement wants to dismantle any and all copyright law is a wide-spread misconception. The stance (at least for the UK and Swedish pirate parties) is more moderate than the name might suggest.

Most Germans I know would not want this AT ALL.

Indeed. It would seem 3 out of 4 Germans do not want this.

ATM machine, PIN number, IT technology, OS system, RAM memory. Oh my. Tell me you and gp did that intentionally. :-)

You also need to consider the time it takes for data communications over the WAN network (hey! there's another one) to verify that the machine should not - in fact - eat the card, because it's been marked as stolen or lost. Or, check if the card is actually valid. All that kind of stuff takes time when done over whatever ancient network for ATMs is in use in your country.

Besides: ATMs are booted all the time. It's not like they have a (user-accessible) power switch. You just stick your card in. So boot time is not an issue, except for impatient service personell.

I don't know, a couple of hearty men on a couple of random ships seems to be able to cut off most of the world from the Internet.

That might work well for some countries which are connected only with a small amount of cables. Not so much for the United States, probably the best-connected country in the world. I'd be incredibly surprised if anyone (that doesn't work at an ISP or a telco) would even notice if two or three cables connecting the united states to the world were severed. BGP will find another way. :-)

Except it probably won't be as simple as lots of evil malicious traffic originating from... say... the hypothetical Peoples Republic of Anich.

And then you can just block all of Anich and you won't be under attack any more.

The traffic of such a cyberattack could conceivably originate from all over the world, including from your own country - originating from compromised personal computers with fast broadband connections. Or even from the very modems or Internet sharing devices that connect their homes to the Internet.

All you'd have to do, from that point on, is to have some way to send command and control traffic to the botnet inside the borders of the country you're trying to attack. And even that traffic could conceivably be hosted by some country neutral in the conflict.

Why would somebody running a search engine in Italy lobby to get a precedent which basically make it impossible to run a search engine without operating in a legal minefield?

Well - maybe that hypothetical somebody is fucking stupid (which isn't that unlikely). Or... maybe some people are more equal than others in the Italian judicial system (also not very unlikely).

This is ridiculous.

If Youtube is illegal in Italy, maybe Google should just start blocking people from Italy from accessing the site. Maybe then people will care, when the people's bread and circuses are threatened.

Though, unfortunately, [no attention is paid] to the economic impact of making consumers pay roaming fees if they want to take a 60-mile train ride.)

Not true. The European Union has telecom regulation put in place, putting a maximum price on any international roaming costs. [citation, ho!]

I would agree however, that it would be nice if prices were cut even further, and the EU is working on this continuously. Especially mobile data roaming prices need to be cut considerabily - even though €1/MB is cheaper than what we're used to paying for *national* mobile data (in absence of a data plan) here in Sweden. I remember being quoted 15 kr (€1.44) per MB at one point, in the absence of a data plan.

Of course, €1/MB is still very high, but it's a step in the right direction. Roaming in Europe is now merely expensive, rather than ludicrously overpriced.

To clarify my own post,

It's useful to note, that changing the length of the meter would introduce all kinds of annoying changes into other kinds of units, such as the volt, the pascal, the lumen and the joule - and units further derived from those, such as the ohm, the lux, the watt and stuff like the sievert.

So not only is changing the length of the meter impractical, but now you also know why. :-)

The fact that you can divide 1 foot easilly by 2, 3, 6 and 12 is immaterial really.

The exact same convenience can be acheived in metric if the dimensions you're working with are a multiple of... say... 30 centimeters. (Very close to 1 foot.)

You might buy a length of 95x45 mm board (roughly equivalent to a 2-by-4), which is sold in a length like 120 cm, 180 cm, 240 cm, etc and beyond. Note how those lengths, too, are easilly divisible.

So, you don't need to use a system that makes unit conversion harder just so make dividing lengths easier. All you need to do is to work with lengths that are easilly divisible. And specifying material lengths even multiples of 30 centimeters is no harder than specifying them in lengths of 1 foot.

And I don't know about you, I'm not a pigeon. I'm capable with working with double-digit and even *gasp* triple-digit numbers. I don't think it's impractical to measure my length in a 3-digit number of centimeters.

In the end, though, I really think this whole feet/meters debate could have been neatly sidestepped if, at one time, 1 foot was declared to be equal to 30 centimeters (and 1 inch to be 25 millimeters), rather than 30.48 as is today.

Hell, if I had to do it all over again, I'd unify meters and inches into one single system, where 1 new inch = 25 new millimeters, and the length of the meter was defined as the length travelled in 1/300000000 seconds, conveniently making the speed of light 1000000000 new feet per second for those of you preferring to use the feet/inches system.

But that will probably never happen. There's just not enough value in introducing a *third* incompatible standard of measurement into the world.