The copyright statute of Slashdot's home country defines a "copy" as a physical object in which a work is embodied, such as a book, ROM cartridge, or optical disc. The statutory license associated with ownership of a copy of a computer program includes making intermediate copies "as an essential step" in the use of the program. Title 17, United States Code, section 117. Historically, console makers and game publishers have lacked power to revoke this license with respect to a particular copy of a game that isn't online-only. With the end of video game distribution on optical disc, this license becomes revocable, and that's the problem.

It's not anywhere near one step away. Designing the peptides and getting one or more candidates is the easy part. The next steps are the hard ones, the ones that make pharmaceutical chemists and drug researchers cry:

• Phase I trials to see if it even works as claimed. Expect a 95+% failure rate here. Note that this is where you're going to see the best results for your drug candidate, things never improve from here. The best you can hope for is that they don't get any worse. So if you don't get strong results here you're probably wasting your money.
• Phase II trials to determine the best dosage and pharmacokinetics. Again expect a 95+% failure rate here, and results showing less effectiveness than shown in Phase I.
• Phase III trials to determine behavior in a large sample representative of the target population. Expect a failure rate upwards of 99% here, and a major drop-off in effectiveness. This is where toxicity and serious negative side effects show up, and those can kill your trial dead even if your candidate is working.

Getting through this process will take multiple tries and years of work, assuming you succeed at all. There's a reason they say that the clinic (clinical trials) is where drug candidates go to die.

what do you expect when the costs to manufacture their products rises and they have such small profit margins?

as if all this vibe-AI coding, and what have you, wasn't lazy enough already, it was aparently still too much effort some for people.

He could get his Boring Company to lay the pipeline. I understand they are a very successful company when it comes to things like this.

I'll have to disagree with you on that. What matters for reproducible builds is that the person performing the build has power to set the seed.

"...shipping a product with a bug that breaks this functionality says more about Microsoft's approach to quality than anything else"

been like this for more than 40 years

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.

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 benefits are not the same if the publisher or the platform gatekeeper retains the ability to remotely disable licensed software.

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.

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?

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"?