You misunderstand my point... I was not talking about indefinite copyright terms, I was talking about copyright itself as a concept. How many people would publish if no option to have a copyright existed at all? And what is the point of having a copyright in the first place if the creator isn't supposed to be permitted to try and exercise control over who may copy their works?

Requires windows..

Which is about as much of a selling point for people who don't use windows as saying that something requires an iphone for people only use Android. In other words, it's an anti-selling point.

That's all very well and good unless one doesn't own windows.

Creators have some natural control over their creations, which they could theoretically maintain indefinitely by keeping whatever they had created to themselves, and never allowing anyone else to see it in the first place. Barring independent invention, it's a fairly natural exclusivity that copyright is simply an extension of, and which coincidentally encourages a creator to publish, as long as society abides by the social contract that they will respect the creator's intentions.

Care to take a guess how many people would willfully publish their stuff if everything that they published had to become public domain? Sure, there'd be some... but anything of quality would certainly get lost in an endless ocean of tripe that nobody cared enough about to ever want to have a copyright in the first place.

If it were a harmless hack, perhaps... except it seems that the hackers are threatening the lives and safety of real people who happen to work for or be related to people who work for Sony. No matter how much one might dislike Sony for their practices, nobody deserves that.

[nt]

I'm wondering this as well... there's reference to requests or demands, but absolutely no indication of what they are.

I cannot for the life of me imagine what on earth an apparent terrorist organization would want from an entertainment company.

Yeah... and actually threatening people's lives is really such an effective way to accomplish that.

Or are you suggesting that computer piracy has much more in common with conventional piracy than most might think?

I'm saying that in my experience as a video game developer, the trend by companies that I've worked for seems to be to try to offer you a respectable salary in the first place to compensate to some degree for the times come that you *are* needed to put in a lot of extra hours. You aren't paid any extra for that time, but you aren't being paid too shabbily anyways... If such companies moved to paying overtime, then the base salary would need to be radically reduced, reducing it as an attractive choice for university graduates.

Pretty bad, perhaps. Being unemployed is worse. Clearly you've never been faced with having to accept a job for less than what you probably fairly deserved for that work or faced being homeless.

Hiring more people doesn't necessarily get the job done any faster. Especially in something like video game development.

The point of paying what is generally a respectable salary in the first place is to compensate the employee for the extra hours they will have to put in during crunch time, where the employee will not generally receive any additional income as a result of their additional efforts beyond a basic 40 hour work week. Ideally this wouldn't happen at all, but we don't live in an ideal world. Simply saying that is unacceptable will not change it any more than wishing on a star would.

I'm not saying that it's fair for video game studios to expect this from developers, but I'm saying that it *IS* something that is to be realistically expected, because without it, most game companies would just fold completely, or else game developers would either have to work almost entirely on commission, with a base salary comparable to that of a newly hired Walmart employee (and there wouldn't be any studios left at all capable of developing some of the really big titles). Why would anyone bother getting a degree in computer science for a career like that, exactly?

Considering there are no shortage of companies that won't even do *THAT* much, yes... that's nice.

And to be fair, the salary as a game developer isn't too shabby.... even after factoring the extra hours worked.

And of course, when the alternative is possible homelessness, nearly anything where you have a steady income is going to look pretty damn attractive.

However, with regards to the pretty much ubiquitous expectation by game studios, regardless of their size, that programmers be willing to work as long as it takes to get the job done without getting paid any more than whatever they had initially agreed to work for as a weekly or monthly salary, one could probably make a reasonable argument that game development may simply be an unhealthy, and possibly even toxic work environment.

Sure... and it's possible that any particular person might win a lottery someday. That doesn't mean it's likely to happen or something that is to be expected;.

Computer game development.

I've worked for several companies in this industry, and although certainly some are better than others, there's not one of them I've encountered that won't at least occasionally expect you to put in whatever extra unpaid time it takes to get the job completed on schedule. Ideally, such crunch scenarios wouldn't happen, but the reality is that estimating the time it will take to complete certain things is something as complex as a computer game is an art that even highly experienced developers in the industry will frequently flounder in. Some companies are a lot nicer about working overtime than others. The last two I worked for would at least buy the developers dinner to eat while they worked if they stayed past about 7:30 or so.... and people who really burned the midnight oil on a job were almost always given at least one paid day off afterwards.

Working what usually amounts for myself to no more than a dozen or so extra unpaid hours a week is more than worth being able to still live without resorting to begging on the street.