Comment How long can Meta survive...? (Score 3, Funny) 28
How long can Meta survive without shipping a product people actually want?
How long can Meta survive without shipping a product people actually want?
Developers can make the license whatever they want including on consoles.
Not once the console maker shuts down the platform's reactivation servers.
Or say the publisher wants to publish a multiplayer game where players 2 through 4 can download a limited-functionality version of the game without charge so long as player 1 is a paying licensee and on their mutual contacts list. This resembles the model used by StarCraft spawned installations, single-Pak multiplayer on Game Boy Advance, and DS Download Play on Nintendo DS. I don't think all consoles support this sort of game sharing.
Which is not an ownership issue, it's a DRM/license enforcement issue.
Correct. The digital restrictions management regime on paid downloads from PlayStation Store doesn't grant rights to a licensee that are equivalent to those that the law reserves for the owner of a copy. The complaint, as I understand it, is that the required notice of inequivalence is not conspicuous enough.
The plaintiffs can still get the same benefits of the product even if their purchase is just for a license.
The benefits are not the same if the publisher or the platform gatekeeper retains the ability to remotely disable licensed software.
The only thing you really lose is the ability to resell your license easily.
Or, in the case of certain failure modes of PlayStation Store (such as end of support for a particular platform), the ability to restore your license to replacement hardware.
printed books, zines, and newspapers
You are allowed to copy these for your friends (but not for selling or public sharing).
I never heard of that being the case in the United States, where the lawsuit described in the featured article was filed.
That's like saying publishers of printed books, zines, and newspapers never sold books, zines, and newspapers.
Narrowing:
1. The right answer in the case of games with a substantial offline experience is to not make the license for the offline portion revocable.
2. The right answer in the case of games without a substantial offline experience is to describe the license as a rental at all times.
All three major console makers require all customers to "agree[] to let them change the terms when you signed up." If a game developer wants to sell a customer an indefinite license that the console maker can't revoke, the developer has no way to do so. This appears to be evidence of a cartel to me. How is it not?
You don't respect the time and effort that went into creating your enjoyment
Say I buy an indefinite license to use a video game. Then the game's publisher or the platform's owner unilaterally revokes that license. What do I have to show for having "respect[ed] the time and effort that went into creating your enjoyment"?
Title 17, United States Code, reserves specific rights to the owner of a copy. It defines a copy as a physical object in which a work is fixed (17 USC 101).
Licensed for how long?
The owner of a copy of a computer program retains the right to use that copy, including the right to make essential ephemeral copies in RAM, as long as the copy remains readable (17 USC 117).
And how do you obtain a copy of the software to exercise your licensed rights?
As I understand it, ownership of a physical object is defined by the personal property laws of the several states.
You've have never owned a copy of a game
A "copy" under United States copyright law is any physical object in which a work of authorship is fixed, such as a game cartridge or game disc. The owner of a lawfully made copy of a work enjoys two carveouts, or uses deemed noninfringing. One is reselling that copy (17 USC 109). Another is making private copies essential to the use of a computer program (17 USC 117). These carveouts subsist as long as the copy remains readable. A license through PlayStation Store does not.
Even in the time of picking up PS2 discs at GameStop you were only buying a license to run those games on your console
This license consists of uses carved out as noninfringing in the copyright law. For video games distributed in physical copies, two carveouts are most salient: exhaustion of the exclusive distribution right with respect to a particular copy after the first sale, and making private copies required to use a computer program, such as ephemerally reproducing the program in RAM. (Under US law, these are 17 USC 109 and 17 USC 117. Feel free to describe analogous carveouts in other countries' copyright law.)
What these carveouts have in common is that neither the copyright owner nor a platform gatekeeper can remotely make copies unusable. PlayStation Store doesn't give licensees even this assurance.
"Please protect us from child-harm lawsuits since child harm is pretty much our business model."
And before you complain about LPCAMM2 being much slower than the high-bandwidth RAM on the CPU package: It's perfectly fine to design a system with a non-uniform memory access paradigm, treating the memory behind the LPCAMM2 interface as a RAM disk. That way you have 8 GB of high-bandwidth DRAM swapping to 16+ GB of somewhat lower-bandwidth DRAM, and the soldered-in SSD lasts longer because it doesn't have to (ab)use its intake buffer to hold the swap file.
This is very important. There's a light-year of difference among a typical scholarly article, a physics paper, a math paper, or some kind of incomprehensible humanities bafflegab that no sane person could comprehend. The former, if it's not too technical, should be readable to the average undergrad. The second and third might not be because there are so many specialized concepts and so much specialized language. The latter (and I'm not indicting everything coming out of the humanities, but a lot of it) is incomprehensible because it literally doesn't make sense.
Bus error -- driver executed.