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Copyright was invented so artists would be able to sell their art, and more art would be made.
When copyright is protected on a product that's no longer sold, less art is made.
When a copyright holder stops selling their art, copyright protections should immediately cease, and they should be responsible for copyright obligations - releasing the source code to the public. Use it or lose it!
This is the most level headed approach to IP I've seen. If you're not willing to use the property you forfeit it. It's a common contact for licensing rights for movies that forces a studio to make a movie or lose rights. That way people can't squat on a licence to prevent others using it.
Sony has to make a Spiderman movie every few years even though DVDs of the old ones are still being sold, but Ubisoft can just delete games forever and they can never be played again.
A good book on this is: Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
The same thing should apply to private property, especially in cities.
Pretty sure it was so publishers (printing press owners) could have a guaranteed profit. Those two things (publisher and artist profits) were correlated at the time. Not so much anymore. Streaming/subscription mentality is like planned obsolescence for IP.
Anti-murder laws are cuttailing my choice! What if I someday would like to make a choice to murder someone?
Yes! When I read that, I immediately thought "curtailing developer choice is exactly the point."
"... curtail developer choice" - This from a bunch of people for whom the term 'executive meddling' was created.
Sounds like they just put together a bunch of meaningful sounding words. I know what they want to say though: "Noooo! But mah freedumbs! NOOOO 😭 "
Well when the choice is anti consumer, too fucking bad.
It needs way more people, because I guess a lot of people from all over the world used VPNs to sign the petition and will get nullified.
So if you planned to do it, don't, you will hurt your goals more than you're doing an good.
I think people are overestimating what this petition is going to do. It will likely just end up in a response from the EU listing pros and cons but effectively saying "can't really do anything about it, sorry!". It's still good, even MMOs have server software gaming companies could release if legislation forced them instead of causing fandoms to die. Games are culture. They may also be entertainment, but that's culture as well. But I wouldn't hold out hope.
I think forcing MMOs to release software is a bit much.
Opted for large scaled systems. It's more than just simple software. There is a ton of infrastructure and proprietary solutioning that goes into it. That's likely used for other games as well.
It may not even be possible to release the software because it is not just software and the resources to prepare it for releasing may not be available.
However, if a game company shut down their servers, they should not be allowed to prevent other people from try to reverse engineer and make their own servers.
Single player and local games 100% though should not be allowed to be killed.
Opted for large scaled systems. It’s more than just simple software. There is a ton of infrastructure and proprietary solutioning that goes into it. That’s likely used for other games as well.
Doesn't mean it can't be released, just that it might be difficult to reproduce. It would still be much, much easier to reverse engineer that than to reverse engineer everything from the client and network communication captures.
It may not even be possible to release the software because it is not just software and the resources to prepare it for releasing may not be available.
In other words, so you don't know, and vague assumptions on a closed box because closed boxes allow you to make them.
Most MMOs usually have multiple instances running, each which need to be maintained separately. That means they have usually gone through the process of encapsulating the server functionality in a way that can be reproduced and recreated into new instances. They have to be maintained at the same time, so they need to be relatively standard. At one point those supposedly absent resources to duplicate the instance of a server have likely existed, and just need to be packaged for public release. Proprietary portions can simply be excluded - an incomplete release is preferable to an absent one. Can't release databases, they can release schemas, etc. Incomplete > absent.
You largely seem to be giving MMO companies the excuse that if their server solution could theoretically be proprietary and convoluted enough, even if it really isn't, that they not be subject to the Stop Killing Games initiative. MMOs, unlike single player games, have a far more notable sociable and persistence factor to them, a bigger cultural footprint within those communities, that makes the Stop Killing Games Initiative particularly applicable to them. There's one simply way not to be subject to its demands - don't kill the games.
"but black dynamite!....... i sell drugs to the community!"
Yup, that's correct. What about it?
Companies would still be cutting flour with chalk if they had their way. "It's limiting blah blah blah" that's the point you corpos, consumer rights are about the consumer not the bottom line
This is just pure fabricated bullshit. They themselves started limiting options. Remember the old days where you could host your own server with basically any game? They took that away, not us. So they themselves are 100% responsible for this 'uprising'. Besides they could just provide/open-source the backend and disable drm. Hardly any work at all.
But of course it's not about that. They just try to hide behind this 'limits options' argument. But they simply don't want you to be able to play their old games. They want you to buy their latest CoD 42.
I remember the "old days". That was when dialup internet was still popular and running a server usually meant it was on your 10Mb LAN. When we got DSL it was better and you could serve outside your LAN. This was also the time when games had dark red code booklets, required having a physical CD inserted or weirdly formatted floppies (sometimes a combination of these). You could get around these things and many groups of people worked hard at providing these workarounds. Today, many of these games are only playable and only still exist because of the thankless work these groups did. As it was and as it is has not changed. Many groups of people are still keeping games playable despite the "war" that corporations wage on them (and by proxy on us). Ironically, now that there is such a thing as "classic games" and people are nostalgic for what brought them joy in the past, business has leapt at this as a marketing opportunity. What makes that ironic? These business are re-selling the versions of games with the circumvention patches that the community made to make their games playable so long ago. The patches that publishers had such a big problem with and sought to eradicate. This is because the original code no longer exists and the un-patched games will not run at all on modern hardware and the copy-protections will not tolerate a virtual machine. Nothing has changed.
We can even go back as far as when people first started making books or maps that had deliberate errors so that they could track when their work was redistributed. Do the people referencing these books or maps benefit from these errors?
Why do some of us feel compelled to limit knowledge even at the cost of corrupting that knowledge for those we intend it for (and for those long after who wish to learn from historical knowledge)?
Lol. We're gamers. We know that if we encounter enemies we're going in the right direction.
"curtail developer choice" is such a weak argument because you could equally apply it to literally every piece of regulation ever passed. Of course it curtails choice, that's almost the dictionary definition of an industry regulation.