Stop SOPA - USA members, please read

[jack_norton]

It's not even legal in Canada either

[Ramidel]

::checks::

My bad, that's music files (by statute in Russia and court decisions in Canada).

Gotta wonder if the Russian method for infosocialism, where they surtax certain goods and use the tax to comp creators for unauthorized downloads, would actually be workable for the gaming industry, though. If it would work, it'd be an elegant solution to piracy (especially if the "if you like it, buy it" meme survived), but I'm worried about the actual implementation.

[PyTom]

From what I understand, the problem with the Canadian and Russian scheme is that it compensates the creators (or at least their studios) while still keeping the downloading illegal. So from a consumer point of view, you're just having money taken for nothing.

What I suspect the solution will be is some sort of mandatory license. You pay $x a month, and get access to all of copyright, to do with as you please. (At least when it comes to playback/reading/etc.) Creators get compensated out of the fees you pay. (Trying to pick an x might be difficult, though - numbers like $10/mo are quite reasonable, but may not compensate people well enough.)

[Voight-Kampff]

From what I understand, the problem with the Canadian and Russian scheme is that it compensates the creators (or at least their studios) while still keeping the downloading illegal. So from a consumer point of view, you're just having money taken for nothing.

What I suspect the solution will be is some sort of mandatory license. You pay $x a month, and get access to all of copyright, to do with as you please. (At least when it comes to playback/reading/etc.) Creators get compensated out of the fees you pay. (Trying to pick an x might be difficult, though - numbers like $10/mo are quite reasonable, but may not compensate people well enough.)

*shudder* A licensing model is the holy grail for the large copyright holders. They'd love to charge users a monthly, recurring fee. Which intrinsically means that whoever utilizes their copyrighted material, doesn't own it. It eliminates the aspect of the first sale doctrine, destroys the second hand market, and eliminates the need for that pesky fair use concept.

I might be able to swallow such a concept, if—IF—these media companies had a new burden put upon them. That burden being the requirement to be at my beck and call for media. If this is going to be a Faustian bargain, and people give up their rights to own things, then the media companies need to be responsible for making sure the holders of the licenses always have access to said media.

Hard drive died and you lost your local copies of 100 archived, licensed movies? The copyright originator needs to give you new copies for free.

You purchased the right to play Dragon Age 8 and bought it on DVD, but it broke, and it's 30 years later? Well, MotherBrain Industries (which bought up EA after WWIII) will need to give you a free copy on holo-cube, or beam it straight to you cerebral trans-sat receiver from a geosynchronous download satellite.

But, we all know that the large copyright owners would never be so fair and even-handed. They'd do whatever they could to craft the licenses in such a way that would only benefit them. Thus, the concept doesn't even bear considering.

[Mghrabiya]

I think to government has enough power. Why should we give them more??? They have been screwing with us for a long time! They act like all they want is safety....But honestly what do they really want???? Just think about it...

[PyTom]

*shudder* A licensing model is the holy grail for the large copyright holders. They'd love to charge users a monthly, recurring fee. Which intrinsically means that whoever utilizes their copyrighted material, doesn't own it. It eliminates the aspect of the first sale doctrine, destroys the second hand market, and eliminates the need for that pesky fair use concept.

I might be able to swallow such a concept, if—IF—these media companies had a new burden put upon them. That burden being the requirement to be at my beck and call for media. If this is going to be a Faustian bargain, and people give up their rights to own things, then the media companies need to be responsible for making sure the holders of the licenses always have access to said media.

A mandatory licensing scheme is very different than the sort of licensing that we have now. Probably the best example of mandatory licensing is that for streaming radio on the internet - like Pandora. Pandora has to pay a fee per track played, and that fee gets distributed to the artists (or at least their intermediaries). What Pandora doesn't have to do is to ask permission to stream a song - if they have a copy, they can distribute it (subject to rules) to anyone they like, as long as they pay for that.

I'm thinking this could be expanded to all copyright. The idea is to replace copyright with post-copyright. Where copyright is the right to control copying, post-copyright is the right to be compensated for copying - with that compensation coming from the pool. Following the radio model, I'd think the compensation would be per-play, or per-time-spent-playing, or something like that. (Trying to balance out books, movies, games, software, etc could be interesting.)

In this model, you can download movies from friends, or stream them from netflix, or whatever. You might have to pay to download or stream, but that's up to you. The movie studio doesn't do anything besides making the movie - once it's out there, other people distribute it. It's up to you to make backups - but if your backups fail, you could always get the media from someone else. (In this model, p2p makes creators the same amount of money, so they no longer have motivation to stop it.)

Chance of this happening? Not very likely.

[Voight-Kampff]

Ah. I see what you're going for.

There's some new system out there that I thought attempted to do what you're espousing (at least for movies). Ultraviolet, I believe it's called. And I seem to recall that Disney is attempting something similar.

But yeah...without looking into either solution very closely, I can only imagine these systems bear no resemblance to the system you advocate. Distribution COMPLETELY out of the hands of the middle-men, or even the studios? P2P distribution? Madness. Madness I say!

[jack_norton]

Apple is doing something like that:
http://toucharcade.com/2011/11/22/apple ... app-store/
basically pay a monthly fee to play "as much as you can". I don't think the developers involved will see an increase of profits though, more like the opposite - when you flat all the prices and consider all games the same, the "niche games" lose all their potential.

[Ramidel]

I think to government has enough power. Why should we give them more??? They have been screwing with us for a long time! They act like all they want is safety....But honestly what do they really want???? Just think about it...

The government must regulate copyright, in some fashion, if copyright is to exist at all. In the absence of government regulations, anyone can do whatever they want, and fileshare without paying a dime to the creators. (Which is pretty much the situation as it exists today, since the internet and piracy are essentially unpoliceable, but replacing near anarchy with complete anarchy is not an improvement in this case.)

And if you're going to regulate something, the better way to do it is with a comprehensive and enforceable system instead of a patchwork backed by poorly-targeted lawsuits.

[Crocosquirrel]

The government must regulate copyright, in some fashion, if copyright is to exist at all. In the absence of government regulations, anyone can do whatever they want, and fileshare without paying a dime to the creators. (Which is pretty much the situation as it exists today, since the internet and piracy are essentially unpoliceable, but replacing near anarchy with complete anarchy is not an improvement in this case.)

And if you're going to regulate something, the better way to do it is with a comprehensive and enforceable system instead of a patchwork backed by poorly-targeted lawsuits.

On this, I have to agree. However, SOPA is not the way to accomplish it. Too much potential for extreme damage to people that have little or nothing to do with the ongoing conflict, particularly by way of exchange of information. Forums like this one are particularly vulnerable. I can't support that, even as a content creator and copyright holder.

[dott.Piergiorgio]

well, my personal opinion is starting from "calling the spades", that is, applying the correct IP to every aspect of a game; that is, the brevet is the proper IP for the codebase and copyright is the proper IP for content. then start to reform not only the IP laws, but also the business model. The console business model is hopelessy compressed between the increasing costs of development and the royalties of the hardware vendors (whose objectively recently misbehaves to the point of being of the receiving end of a massive "illegal" attack....) and I don't think the shift to digital distrubuition gives the same effects the shift to cart to the much cheaper optical disc more a decade ago. The second and greatest videogame market crash is always behind the corner, and if isn't happened is because of a increased reliance on marketing on one side, on another, that at least some game actually manage to deserve huge sellings (e.g. the Dragon Ages and Skyrim)

but in the end, looking in a larger perspective, we're at the dawn of a massive world fuckup, similiar to 1789 and 1917, and this says all....

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[jack_norton]

No no, the shift from retail to ESD was a massive difference for AAA companies. When I worked in a smaller company I remember we would get about 1-3 euros each copy sold at retail for 20+ eur (distributors were taking most of profits). Now Beteshda gets 30% of 49.99 eur from Steam, so "slightly more" and without any worry about warehouse space to stock returned copies and so on. It was an incredible revolution for the big companies, the main reason they didn't get there sooner was because indies used to make games under 40-50mb, while AAA companies even in the early years (2000-2005) had games of at least 500mb if not more and internet broadband wasn't so widespread as it is now.

[Kokoro Hane]

I do not like the sound of this, especially since I run my own forum, and have two blog sites. To me, it just seems like an excuse to take down what they want and just label it as "copyright infringement". Not everything is infringing copyright, this'll just cause chaos! No one will feel safe on the Internet anymore

[Sentou Gakuen]

nyaa.eu is down now,
horriblesubs too,

is the bill already signed?

[Funnyguts]

It's not signed. Nyaa just had server issues and is back up. (Dunno about Horrible.)