Planetfurry BBS

[Frazikar]

Hmmmm - most adults have a kid filter which causes them to ignore most things kids say, parents are not excluded.

Most bullies have an 'adult radar system' that nearly equals 'mom sense' in avoiding adult vision/notice.

Of course, it doesn't help that most of of the supervision is overworked, underpaid and undermanaged giving near ideal conditions in which bullies can work...

[bastion]

Not a comment as such, but I just uploaded a pic that a mutual friend of ours did. You can find it in the posters section of the gallery.

[Tigermark]

Very cool pic! I love the attitude from both forms. the scars are pretty spot-on, too, I think.

TM

[Aslaug]

I love this picture. She's got the right build and everything down, perfectly. Aslaug is not this willowy thing out of a fifteen year old boy's wet dream. She's a two hundred percent pureblooded warrior, muscles, scars and all. And she's not particularly -pretty-. Just ... impressive. I think Michelle has captured that absolutely perfectly.

[Frazikar]

"Who's got my back on this..."

"She does..."

[Frazikar]

Computer games as art ... maybe

Now I have to admit that what I've heard of Dragon Age and Skyrim, there is a story attached that you (as the PC) have a direct input into, much like a book. But there are side quests that allow one to explore the world setting a bit more, letting you add more chapters as it were.

So yea, some games are going (being dragged?) into the literature realm, so that they are better than the 'dungeon crawl' games that are mainly larger versions of DnD sessions...

Of course, the main thing that video has over the written word is that adage of 'show, not tell' and the vitas shown can be very breathtaking .

[Aslaug]

That is correct. Furthermore, computers are already heavily used in other forms of accepted art, such as music, the film industry and even still pictures. This is not questioned, and I would like to submit, that if a beautifully rendered still landscape, created ons computer can be considered art ... Or a movie like "Avatar" (which I admit to not having seen myself) can be lauded as art, then it it silly to say, that games ate not, just because the user has a higher degree of interaction available to him or her ...

Just food for thought.

[Frazikar]

Thinking a bit more about this, when does a dungeon crawl become a story (or does a 'good' DC translate to an 'ok' story, or a 'great' DC to a 'decent' story)??

That may be the question on whether an 'art' is...or something...

[Latrans]

My honest opinion is that, yes, games are art. Just because something is terrible doesn't make it any less art. It just makes it less appealing. The bit with video games is that it takes art in numerous different forms. There's music. Many games are known very well for their superb use of music. Then there's visual. As processing power has grown, the ability to impress the audience with grand vistas has also grown. Lastly, there's story. There are games that have had nothing but story, yet that story was so great that the world would clamber to play it.

Not only are video games art, they are a whole MIX of art, and the very best games are the ones that can get that mix right.

[anthony]

Try tracking down the old Lucasart games, and especially 'Loom'...

Definitely art.

As for cubism, I still refuse to call that art...

[Aslaug]

I just realized, we're coming up on 5000 posts on this forum. That's pretty amazing, actually. Thanks for all sticking around all this time

[Frazikar]

Interesting thoughts there filly, but things are a bit fuzzy with the 'home use' clause in some of those packages...

The main problem with the internet is not 'rights' but 'access', after all you did pay your ISP to gain acess to the 'net and when using it to another site you got a download from that site, have you done anything illegal? This parallels the stolen goods (like purchased from a pawn shop)...

Napster was nailed becaused of the scale involved as most 'producers' won't go after the 'small' friend borrowing from a friend that goes on 'normally'.

Hmmm, who is responsible, the originator for not retricting the access or the person who downloads it from the origintor's site...

[Latrans]

First, to Frazikar. Unfortunately it's not a question of access. Yes, you paid your ISP for a net connection. This, however is all you've paid for. The service of data transfer. It is not implied what data is transferred and the ISP has (or at least should have) no responsibility for this data. They are no more liable for your use of their service than a road crew is for the person who gets a speeding ticket. You are not paying for the information, you are paying for the access to it.

Next is your parallel between Napster (and other file sharing services) and pawn shops, also extending to the provider and the receiver. To follow up on that, Napster got nailed not because it facilitated illegal file sharing, but because it did so knowingly. This is the same case with pawn shops that knowingly fence stolen goods.

Now to the end users, the providers and receivers. To answer your question directly, the provider is the one who is breaking the law, just as the person who sells stolen goods to a pawn shop is the one charged with a crime. The receiver, however, is considered to be an innocent party. The lawsuits brought against people for file sharing were exclusively against providers. The crime is not receiving a copy, but making that copy available to others.

Lastly, as a side note, the recording industry has spent a LOT of money going after the 'small guy' in the past and it generally fell into the realm of 'wasted effort'. Do you not remember the 'Don't copy that floppy!' or 'Home taping is killing movies!' campaigns? Building on that, their initial forays into anti-piracy on the internet were also targeted at individuals (late 1990's and early 2000's). Not only did this not work, it was actually amazingly detrimental due to the massive amounts of bad press it created.

Okay, having gotten that off my chest, time to address Ms. Aslaug's post. First off, I am a pirate. Second off, I *hate* the argument of 'well I wasn't going to pay for it anyways'. It has some serious holes in it. Here's a couple points I'd like to throw in the mix, however. Please feel free to poke holes in them. I can't promise that I'll agree, but I will promise to at least consider what you have to say.

First, I don't pirate software unless I've already paid for a copy. For example, I have legal keys to every Microsoft OS I use. I do NOT however, have disks. This is for a number of reasons, but the result is the same. When I wanted to burn a copy, I had to get a copy first. The other big one is games. I don't pirate those. For this very reason, the newest game I own is Halo 1 for PC. I simply can't afford new games. Last on the software list are programs (Office, Photoshop, antivirus, etc). I don't pirate these either since there are numerous free alternatives (OOo, GIMP, AVG Free, etc.). My primary drive behind not pirating software is two fold: effort to create and availability of alternatives.

Second, I do pirate music and movies. Lets start with movies. I don't watch very many movies. When I do want to watch a movie, the last thing I want to do is waste my money on something I won't like. My solution is to download a copy. Then I'll watch it. Then I delete it. Why? It's simple, if it's good enough for me to watch again, it's good enough for me to buy a copy and give back to the creator(s). Right now I have one movie saved to my storage drive and that is likely to get deleted. Next up is music. I'll admit to having a LOT of pirated music. A very large chunk of this is stuff that simply isn't for sale (video game sound tracks). Bluntly put, the only way to get this music is illegal. The rest of the music I have is available for purchase. Most of it I haven't purchased. I have to stress 'most' for a specific reason: cost. Given my very meager budget I can't afford to purchase even 1 CD a month. That's food money. However, I do (particularly in times of good fortune) purchase some and a large part of the decision of what gets purchased is based on what I've downloaded. The rest of it is based on how much my purchase is likely to affect the original artist (small/unknown/new bands before large, well known).

This brings me to my conclusion. It's no secret that the internet has had a truly massive effect on information distribution. With the advent of ready sharing of data, anybody can make information in their possession available to the masses. With the new convenience of sharing (compared against the old sneaker-net), copying of copyrighted information has reached new heights. However, due to the lack of monetary transfer involved with these exchanges, there has not been an equal drop in revenue to large labels. Was there a drop? Yes. This can be expected for any economy that gets flooded with cheep/free copies of an expensive product. Is it the millions (if not billions) of dollars claimed by the industry? No. It's not even possible because collectively we don't have that kind of money to spend. In the end, I honestly believe that content producers (both software and entertainment) will need to retool their business models to this new environment, rather than trying to squelch these technologies in an effort to force the new environment to fit their previous models. To be quite honest, I think that software producers are much further ahead than the entertainment industry in this respect, particularly in the face of free alternatives.

In closing, I don't think of myself being 'entitled' to these things. If I were to never have them, or were they to be taken away, I wouldn't complain. I have simply used the tools available to me. Given new, comparable, and legal tools, I would gladly switch to them.

As a side note, DRM (or rather the lack there-of) has also been a driving factor in my decision to pirate music and movies. Paying for something that has been functionally crippled does not make any sense to me and is the primary reason I avoid music services such as Rhapsody. The DRM on a number of games has also been a major deterrent. Prime example: I was all set to purchase Spore opening day until I heard about the install limit. I never did buy that game. I haven't even pirated it. Games that require 'phone home' functionality (such as Assassins Creed 2) are out for me as well. I pay to own a game, not rent it until the producer turns the verification server off.

Holy crap that was hella longer than I intended.

[Aslaug]

You didn't miss anything with Spore. It lost its appeal after a grand total of 8 hours of gametime. Worst money I ever spent on a game. Assassin's Creed 2? Sure I bought it, played it, loved it. Why? Because eventually, its true that the server will be turned off, but at that time I'm pretty sure there will be an alternative solution, and if there is not, it would be like going back to playing Baldur's Gate or, gods help me, Diablo I ... both of which I played ad nauseam when they first came out (I'm the kind of player who will happily play the same game from start to finish numerous times), but when I then tried to install them about a year ago, not long before I set off for Ireland, I took one look in disbelief, played for about ten minutes to TRY to recapture the magic, went "what in HEL's name was I thinking?" and promptly uninstalled them both.

At some point, games tend to lose their appeal, at least for me. I am not one of the purists who still insist that no game will ever be better that Civilization I and who still play it through on impossible levels, according to distinctly and pre-determined patterns where after so and so many turns you do this and that, to maximize your score, and so on.

As for making copies of things you have paid for, I am absolutely with you there, that it is strange, even wrong, to forbid people to make copies of objects they have LEGITIMATELY paid for, as long as these copies are for personal use only. I think the legislation in this area tends to be way too strict. But other than that, I am simply of the opinion that if you want to use something, you pay for it. I don't mind going online to find television documentaries on streaming sites. First of all, a lot of these are found on the TV-channel's own homepage, and secondly, if we are talking public service TV, then it should be free to begin with. What I protest against, and what I find morally deeply, deeply problematic, is the attempt to shove responsibility away from oneself when taking part in piracy.

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but that is the way I am and always have been, and I see that very thing constantly.

"It's not illegal to download, only to make it available for download" is simply way, way too far fetched for me. If you know you are downloading a copied program, you are voluntarily taking something without paying for it. If a thief went out in the streets and said "Look, I broke into that drugstore over there. I only need one of these things myself, the rest of you, come help yourself to a new powertool for free", it would still be wrong to avail oneself of that offer, both morally and legally.

Piracy is taking money out of the pockets of people who ALSO have bills to pay, families to feed and mortgages to handle. That is the bottom line of this. By taking part in piracy you are not hurting the CEO's, which is another BS line I hear from a lot of pirates all the time.

"Bill Gates has enough money as it is".

Sure he does. Do you REALLY think he's the one getting hurt by piracy? He's not, and this is said as someone who works in the Software business. The ones hurt are people like me, who will get laid off because sales are down. The ones hurt are ordinary men and women. The profit factor shrinks, and so does the amount of John and Jane D. Taxpayers employed to do the grunts work.

Modern pirates /love/ to style themselves as the equivalent of Robin Hood, taking from the obscenely rich. They don't. They take from people who find it hard enough to make ends meet as it is. The obscenely rich get richer anyway.

Telling oneself any different is not only a fallacy ... it is deliberate and willful naivete!

[Latrans]

My statement on DRM still stands. I was going to go point-by-point against it, but the post got obscenely long. Long story short, from my perspective, applying DRM to a product punishes those who pay for it, rather than deters people from copying it (as pirated copies generally come with cracks/patches). Adding DRM is a very hefty deterrent to me as a customer and that seems not just a little counterproductive.

Moving on, far fetched or not, that's the way most copyright law works. It's not illegal to purchase a bootleg book, but it is illegal to produce that bootleg. This has its roots far back before the digital age when burden of responsibility was on the person producing the copies since most times the person who received them had no realistic way of knowing if it was legitimate or not. Does this need to be re-worked? Absolutely. Copyright law needs a complete overhaul from top to bottom because in the information age, old standards simply don't fit any more. I was simply making a statement of how things are, not how they should be.

One of the major distinctions that has to be made is the difference between goods and information. To use your power tools example, the thief took goods. The store is now out the cost of those goods. Lets say, instead, that the thief purchased one tool. He then took it and made an exact copy. Hundreds of exact copies. Thousands, even. This thief then sets up a large stand on the street next to the store and gives them away. Here, the thief has stolen information.

The original store isn't actually at a loss, rather it's at an economic disadvantage. This is where the "I wasn't going to spend my money on that anyways" comes into play and also where it fails. The vast majority of people who take a power tool from the thief weren't going to spend that money, but since it's free, there's no real cost to them and thus no reason not to. Unfortunately, a number of people who would have otherwise spent the money now don't. This translates directly to lowered revenue for the original store.

Currently, content providers (the 'original store') claim losses for every single tool given away by pirates (the 'thief'). Unfortunately this logic is as fundamentally flawed as the "I wasn't going to spend money on that anyways" argument.

Lastly, I don't view myself as some kind of Robin Hood figure. I simply try to do my best with what money I have and the tools available. This is why I try to both use legal alternatives and focus what spending I do plan on towards those it will affect the most. As I stated in my previous post, what really needs to happen is a paradigm shift in the way these companies do business.

As for responsibility, I fully accept that what I'm doing is illegal. If I get caught, it's my own fault. Can you really tell me my philosophy on the matter is wrong, though? Yes, I get more than what I've paid for, but I do pay when I can, and having a greater selection to view helps me target just where I want that money to go.

Another side note: I do NOT buy bootlegs. If I'm going to spend money on something I'm going to spend money on something legitimate. Along those same lines, I do not pay for proxy services or other protection measures as I view that the same way as paying for the goods themselves. Bootleggers should go die in a fire.