As always, neither condoning nor condemning piracy but am interested to hear people's stance on circumvention of consumer-hostile/always-online DRM :) TL;DR
As always, neither condoning nor condemning piracy but am interested to hear people's stance on circumvention of consumer-hostile/always-online DRM :)
TL;DR
Hacking, cracking, piracy group Blizzless Project has released special versions of Starcraft: Remastered, Warcraft III: Reforged, and Diablo II: Resurrected, enabling them to be played offline with no connection to Battle.net. In what appears to be a message to Activision Blizzard, the team suggests it will put right what the company has been doing wrong.
Vanilla WoW was a good example. Fans/pirates did an amazing job reverse-engineering the server components because the product ceased to exist in a state that many loved. It served as a...
Vanilla WoW was a good example. Fans/pirates did an amazing job reverse-engineering the server components because the product ceased to exist in a state that many loved. It served as a preservation mechanism for something that otherwise might have been lost to the sands of time. Many other multiplayer games have suffered this fate due to failed/killed multiplayer platform/DRM systems. Some titles (like Dungeon Siege) have even had their full multiplayer capabilities disabled, even LAN play, as a result. (Edit for any Dungeon Siege fans: You can do a reg hack to enable LAN play on the Steam version)
Draconian DRM is a nuisance at best. Sometimes the internet goes out. Sometimes I'd like to play in places that don't have internet. Suspend/resume, especially now on the Steam Deck, works amazingly if the title doesn't require staying authenticated to a server.
Hell, I'm even anti-anti-cheat software. There are far better options these days to mitigate against cheaters than having an "uncrackable" root kit installed on every machine, limiting portability and causing all sorts of headaches.
To answer the first question many will have: Ideas for how to deal with cheaters, without client spyware: Human auditing of reported cheaters, crowdsourced to community, preferably higher-tier...
To answer the first question many will have:
Ideas for how to deal with cheaters, without client spyware:
Human auditing of reported cheaters, crowdsourced to community, preferably higher-tier players.
Trust-based queue systems (people who never paid are in a separate queue from paid players...CS:GO does this)
Silently flag confirmed cheaters and move them into cheater-only queues, especially if they pay money. Monitor their player state to make it easier to automatically flag cheat behavior.
And ultimately: If a cheater can't be identified by a human, and they're not winning prize money....who cares? Keeping cheaters from prize money is easier: They must play on clean, trusted machines in person.
There's a long-ish but fascinating talk about how CS:GO deals with cheaters, Robocalypse Now, that explains how Valve already does exactly what you suggest. The focus is on the then-new Deep...
There's a long-ish but fascinating talk about how CS:GO deals with cheaters, Robocalypse Now, that explains how Valve already does exactly what you suggest. The focus is on the then-new Deep Learning aimbot detection, but it's interesting to watch if you have an hour to kill.
The TL;DW is that CS:GO funnels games from both player reports and automated reports (from a Neural Network) into a crowdsourced system ("Overwatch", no relation) where players judge anonymized game replays on whether other players are cheating, and their judgement quality is in turn judged by an automated system that assigns trust values based on whether your judgement reflects the majority opinion.
Cheaters are partitioned into their own queues based on a trust score that takes into account previous Overwatch convictions as well as various internal measurements (account age, etc.).
Moving away from the matchmaking systems which have become the norm is another important thing for this. Hacking was certainly a problem in games before matchmaking took over, but it was a lot...
Moving away from the matchmaking systems which have become the norm is another important thing for this. Hacking was certainly a problem in games before matchmaking took over, but it was a lot easier to avoid before we threw players in with a new batch of strangers every match. You could find a good server with enough admins to constantly have someone on to ban anyone who is hacking or being a dick. This isn't really possible anymore, and that's a shame.
That would be pretty bad for false positives, you would have a bad experience with no way to complain (because you wouldn't know that you were flagged).
Silently flag confirmed cheaters and move them into cheater-only queues, especially if they pay money
That would be pretty bad for false positives, you would have a bad experience with no way to complain (because you wouldn't know that you were flagged).
I worked a lot on the preservation of Vanilla WoW (and tbc and wlk), years ago. Like, worked on it so much that I’ve had blizzard devs reach out when they were working on Vanilla WoW servers (for...
I worked a lot on the preservation of Vanilla WoW (and tbc and wlk), years ago. Like, worked on it so much that I’ve had blizzard devs reach out when they were working on Vanilla WoW servers (for answers on their old tech and file formats.
I remember a lot of the early preservation efforts around cata, while playable, had missing dialogue and other such minor issues. How much of the content for vanilla was being restored from old...
I remember a lot of the early preservation efforts around cata, while playable, had missing dialogue and other such minor issues. How much of the content for vanilla was being restored from old files versus player recordings, etc?
For wotlk, how did the collaborative storyline fair with an audience already familiar to it? Was there any of that wonderful awkward comradery still there?
So all media etc was easy to restore. Anything database-based, not so much. The "easy" part was anything that was straight up in a simple db table, such as items, npc info, loot tables, quest...
Exemplary
How much of the content for vanilla was being restored from old files versus player recordings, etc?
So all media etc was easy to restore. Anything database-based, not so much. The "easy" part was anything that was straight up in a simple db table, such as items, npc info, loot tables, quest info, things like that. Trickier things were the more "complex" systems, so yeah dialogue trees and special triggers, special events, all these kinds of things were hell for Blizzard to restore.
If you're a software engineer, imagine having all the data, but the business logic changed 200 times and the whole codebase has been refactored 20 times since. Almost nothing matches. They had to write an entire abstraction layer to get the old systems running on the new systems, migrate all the old data to the more complex new formats, and so on. For the simple things you can make mappings to the "new systems", but a lot of weirder one-off attempts at doing dynamic shit were long replaced by proper mechanisms for those, and the old ones are just super buggy and don't even work unless you look at them individually.
So all the things that were hacked in as one offs were very difficult. The dialogue tree is DEFINITELY a huge part of that; I never had access to the backend codebase but I believe this part was mostly server side scripting, which was all in Lua, so most often no data to migrate just lots of small scripts to reimplement, migrate to a new system, etc…
For wotlk, how did the collaborative storyline fair with an audience already familiar to it?
No idea, I left the WoW sphere before Vanilla WoW was actually released, and cut my ties with Blizzard altogether in 2019. All my work on WoW was done from 2005 to 2015. A lot of it on data preservation. I was behind most of the "old style" protocol reverse engineering work back then; aka the "pre-NGDP" days. Worked with Ladislav Zezula a bunch, the guy behind MPQ Editor, and wrote Python bindings for it. When NGDP came out, I wrote this thing to try to properly archive it, I even was in talks with the IPFS people to put this on an archive. I still thing this particular archival project of mine was one of the absolute best use cases for IPFS but the project never progressed all that much, and unfortunately after I left HearthSim they never maintained my archives so things that weren't backed up are likely now lost to time.
Marla backed up all the WoW stuff in his wow.tools database, so I believe all my WoW-related archival work survives there (if not, I put a shitton of it on archive.org). Unfortunately, the Hearthstone work is lost for good. Heaven knows if Blizzard has backups of it. I'm sure there's a chance I'll get the "vanilla hearthstone" call 10 years from now, same as I had for WoW.
I can only imagine the frustration of finding old hacks that have already been solved and needing to make sense of it, years later. Er, wait. From the outside, however, I love the idea of...
I can only imagine the frustration of finding old hacks that have already been solved and needing to make sense of it, years later. Er, wait. From the outside, however, I love the idea of rediscovering old design decisions.
Heads up, the site owner put out a notice that wow.tools is effectively on life support and is intended to wind down. I don't know what all has your touch but you might want to try backing some of it up for yourself, if it is meaningful to you. It sounds like you put a lot into it, so thank you.
The files are in safe hands. We ended up cross distributing all our backed up files across multiple data mining and archival communities. I backed up everything between several people from...
The files are in safe hands. We ended up cross distributing all our backed up files across multiple data mining and archival communities.
I backed up everything between several people from /r/datahoarder, Marla, archivists from the archive team, archive.org itself, and several other people interested in blizzard datamining.
Awesome to hear! Not sure how I missed it, but r/datahoarder is wonderful. Plus I love running into each other when the easystores go on sale lol. /offtopic
Awesome to hear! Not sure how I missed it, but r/datahoarder is wonderful. Plus I love running into each other when the easystores go on sale lol. /offtopic
I completely agree that a lot of companies, especially game companies, but also music companies, and those with rights to movies manage their intellectual property horribly. That is their right...
It served as a preservation mechanism for something that otherwise might have been lost to the sands of time.
I completely agree that a lot of companies, especially game companies, but also music companies, and those with rights to movies manage their intellectual property horribly.
That is their right though.
If someone wants to take down their website and never make the videos or stories on it available, they get to do that.
If a game company wants to stop supporting a game and ensure it can never be played again, they can do that.
It's not a perfect analogue, but if a sculptor wants to smash a sculpture they own before they die, or I want to smash a sculpture I've bought, I get to do so.
I can burn my diaries or letters, even if I were a person of historical significance.
Society doesn't have a right to access things. I never bought games that relied on battle.net or other platforms thinking they'd last forever. It wouldn't have been a reasonable expectation to have either.
(I totally agree that some anti-cheat systems are so invasive I refuse toget those games. That's my only option beyond loudly saying I'll take my business elsewhere)
Not really though. Copyright is not some intrinsic right, it is property law. One reason copyright used to be much shorter and limited is because of the recognition that once something enters the...
That is their right though.
Not really though. Copyright is not some intrinsic right, it is property law.
One reason copyright used to be much shorter and limited is because of the recognition that once something enters the public sphere, it's no longer just the creator's but becomes part of the shared culture. And that the creator doesn't retain ownership to that shared culture in perpetuity.
I share in that philosphy, and feel that strong copyright hurts more than it helps. I believe I have the right to share freely with my children the cultural experiences I had as a child 30+ years ago. I shouldn't have to hunt down old VHS tapes of a niche TV show from 2003 to legally watch it.
I think we could fix a lot of copyright problems with some simple steps:
Must be registered, like a trademark.
First registration free, with a 15 year period.
Subsequent renewals are for every 5 years and cost money.
Exponential renewal cost: $1, $100, $10,000, $100 million, $100 billion. If you wanna hold it more than 25/30 years, it's gonna cost you dearly.
You must have some sort of intrinsic right to destroy a work you've created if you manage that work actively over time (i.e. the equivalent of defending a trademark). That should probably last for...
You must have some sort of intrinsic right to destroy a work you've created if you manage that work actively over time (i.e. the equivalent of defending a trademark).
That should probably last for your lifetime, maybe a short time after. Otherwise creators are incentivized not to create works in case someone abuses them contrary to my values. Why is it fair "society", either collectively or as every individual get rights over someone else's work?
IP rights in principle are rightly something a large majority agree are necessary when presented with reasonable explanation/arguments. US-style durations of rights are obscene.
Without rights for creators, we're left with perverse consequences, or have to carve out a huge host of exceptions:
Consider parents releasing content of their children when they're minors.
Consider someone releasing content that could adversely affect them as times change ( dark humor, things later considered bigoted, nudity, something with extreme views you later no longer support - this list could be very long)
Consider someone not wanting derivative works that clash with their values. Say I create an incredible poem I don't want a supremacist organization making into their theme song.
Consider someone using one of your works to hurt the creator. I.e. someone coopting an anthem of peace to garner support for a military invasion.
Consider someone commercially using your work counter to your views: using your song/statue promoting respect in their pro-hate advertisement, or pro-genocide campaign.
There are surely many other downsides I can't think of off the top of my head.
Exponential renewal cost is literally giving power to vested money interests. Creators will be incentivized to compromise their values to get protection for their works that aren't commercial successes from others.
Billionaires and many large corporations show giving power simply because someone has money is a terrible idea. Let's not implement that in new areas.
The reality for a large portion of the world is US copyright laws. The US is keen on making trade agreements to force them everywhere. But to highlight the whole 'cultural aquisition', let's...
IP rights in principle are rightly something a large majority agree are necessary when presented with reasonable explanation/arguments. US-style durations of rights are obscene
The reality for a large portion of the world is US copyright laws. The US is keen on making trade agreements to force them everywhere.
But to highlight the whole 'cultural aquisition', let's consider Happy Birthday to You. A song that has been so deeply engrained in our (US) culture since before I was born yet has just recently entered public domain. Society owned that song long before 1980something.
I stand by my proposal that a reasonable copyright system mandates registration (to track ownership), is short, and requires an increasing scale to renew so the odds of any copyright outliving a human are virtually 0.
The problem with your analogy is that objects in the physical world are not really comparable to modern, digitally distributed, video games. Game developers/publishers are being allowed to make...
The problem with your analogy is that objects in the physical world are not really comparable to modern, digitally distributed, video games. Game developers/publishers are being allowed to make the products they sold to consumers no longer functional. So, in this case, it’s as if the sculptor is remotely destroying the sculptures they sold, even though they’re already residing in other people’s homes.
Again, when buying these games I never had an expectation they'd last forever, or would even be playable on future hardware of mine (see old games that have died). Without re-opening the old terms...
Again, when buying these games I never had an expectation they'd last forever, or would even be playable on future hardware of mine (see old games that have died).
Without re-opening the old terms and conditions, I'd be extremely surprised if we didn't all explicitly agree to it as well.
Especially with MMOs and other games, the expectation all along has been updates, changes and impermanence from the get-go.
I'm not saying I support companies doing this for doing this, but it's their right and we should push them to do otherwise for their benefit and the benefit of us users.
Alternatively, if society agrees that these expectations are reasonable, we can codify the behavior into consumer laws of various kinds.
What you expect and what others expect are clearly not the same. When I buy a standalone product, I expect to be able to do what I want with it (within reason) in perpetuity. Services are another...
What you expect and what others expect are clearly not the same. When I buy a standalone product, I expect to be able to do what I want with it (within reason) in perpetuity. Services are another matter, since it costs companies money to maintain them and they shouldn’t be forced to lose money in order for me to continue using that service.
However, the problem as I see it is that many developers/publishers (Blizzard being one of the worst offenders) have artificially transformed their once fully capable standalone games into services now, by intentionally stripping LAN/WAN support from multiplayer components, and adding always-online requirements to single-player components. They do this not to improve the game experience for anyone, but instead in order to undermine consumer rights, forcing customers to remain permanently reliant on them, and maintain control over the game even after they have sold a copy and it’s been installed on a customer’s machine. Same goes for a lot of other software companies too (See: Adobe).
And that’s why I see absolutely no issues, ethically speaking, with people cracking such software in order to keep using it as it worked when they originally purchased it, regardless of whether that’s legal or not. The law is always decades behind on this shit, and even when it finally catches up ethics are rarely the primary concern.
I'm not saying I support a car company making heated seats a monthly subscription. As I said: I'm for living in a society based on the rule of law, where we abide by laws, change them or accept...
I'm not saying I support a car company making heated seats a monthly subscription. As I said:
if society agrees that these expectations are reasonable, we can codify the behavior into consumer laws of various kinds.
I'm for living in a society based on the rule of law, where we abide by laws, change them or accept the consequences for knowingly breaking those laws.
We should strengthen many consumer rights by changing the laws. That has to happen on a societal level, not me taking things into my own hands.
What you expect and what others expect are clearly not the same. When I buy a standalone product, I expect to be able to do what I want with it (within reason) in perpetuity.
Buying a video game has never been equivalent to buying sheet music: expecting to be able to use the raw material for hundreds of years or forever. It's always been like buying an LP or a physical game cartridge that will stop working with time: reasonable people have always expected deterioration with time and/or use.
I always bought either a physical copy of a game with the limitations of that physical copy. OR a digital copy with the limitations going with that digital copy.
Never has it been reasonable to assume I've bought a perpetual license to eternally reproduce (maybe even resell?) a copy of the game code in whatever repackaged version I can get my hands on.
That is not universally true, and many sane countries (e.g. Canada, my own country) have format shifting laws that allow people to backup/copy the contents of their purchased media into other...
It's always been like buying an LP or a physical game cartridge that will stop working with time: reasonable people have always expected deterioration with time and/or use.
That is not universally true, and many sane countries (e.g. Canada, my own country) have format shifting laws that allow people to backup/copy the contents of their purchased media into other formats in order to prevent loss of access later due to the original copy deteriorating or getting damaged.
Never has it been reasonable to... (maybe even resell?) a copy of the game code
I never said that you could or should be able to resell copies of stolen proprietary code, even in repackaged form. That would fall outside the "within reason" part of my comment due to that act infringing on the rights of the original creators. But IMO you absolutely should be able to format-shift, backup, and preserve the media you have purchased purely for continued personal use. And you absolutely can and should also be able to legally resell original physical copies of things you purchase, which the first-sale doctrine backs up.
I'm for living in a society based on the rule of law, where we abide by laws, change them or accept the consequences for knowingly breaking those laws.
I'm generally for that too... but let's be honest here, us as individuals, and even in groups, are largely powerless to change the laws especially when corporate interests are firmly behind them. So when laws are unethical, unjust, and/or solely benefit corporations at the expense of society (which IMO applies to a lot of IP laws) I personally don't feel the need to always abide by those laws, especially when doing so doesn't harm anyone. If that gets me in hot water eventually then so be it, but that's the exception to the rule of law that I personally allow for, always have, and I'm sticking to it.
I'm probably gonna end up infamous for echoing this Heinlien quote around continuously, but I feel this is a fundemental truth that I daresay most people agree with in at least some fashion. Even...
I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
I'm probably gonna end up infamous for echoing this Heinlien quote around continuously, but I feel this is a fundemental truth that I daresay most people agree with in at least some fashion.
Even the most upstanding citizens will jaywalk if there's no reason not to. Laws which go against ones morals or common sense are easier broken than changed, and is ultimately why tons of ancient pointless laws remain on the books despite never being enforced.
I pirate half the shows I can get on my netflix sub because I see no moral qualms in doing so, in part because any other avenue to watch with an alternative UI is just as illegal or harder to use.
This is the ultimate truth that doesn't get enough circulation in modern discourse - everyone seems to be so convinced nowadays that the only correct opinion is their own. Everyone's moral compass...
This is the ultimate truth that doesn't get enough circulation in modern discourse - everyone seems to be so convinced nowadays that the only correct opinion is their own. Everyone's moral compass points in a different direction to the degree that what is punishable by death in one part of the world can be legal and highly encouraged in another.
Speeding laws for example exist for good reason to ensure general public safety and wellbeing, but if you were driving alone with no other cars in sight for miles around and you're willing to accept the consequences of things going badly, who's to say you did something deplorable by exceeding an arbitrary number on a road sign?
I may be an advocate for IP law from an economical and creators' rights perspective, but I will never say someone is morally wrong for pirating something of which there is an infinite supply. Who wouldn't download a car if there were infinite "copies" available for free? I believe the strongest effect one person can have in this capitalist world is to speak with their wallets, and I often find myself at moral impasses where I need to pay for something but the money would go to a consumer-hostile person/organisation. The question is which is the lesser of two evils, financially supporting a condemnable entity or resorting to piracy? How do we determine how biased our own moral compasses are in the first place so we can make that choice?
At some point you just have to realise you can't keep going down neverending black holes of existential questions and you should just run that MAS activation script/download that movie/whatever. Or don't, it's your life.
As always, neither condoning nor condemning piracy but am interested to hear people's stance on circumvention of consumer-hostile/always-online DRM :)
TL;DR
Vanilla WoW was a good example. Fans/pirates did an amazing job reverse-engineering the server components because the product ceased to exist in a state that many loved. It served as a preservation mechanism for something that otherwise might have been lost to the sands of time. Many other multiplayer games have suffered this fate due to failed/killed multiplayer platform/DRM systems. Some titles (like Dungeon Siege) have even had their full multiplayer capabilities disabled, even LAN play, as a result. (Edit for any Dungeon Siege fans: You can do a reg hack to enable LAN play on the Steam version)
Draconian DRM is a nuisance at best. Sometimes the internet goes out. Sometimes I'd like to play in places that don't have internet. Suspend/resume, especially now on the Steam Deck, works amazingly if the title doesn't require staying authenticated to a server.
Hell, I'm even anti-anti-cheat software. There are far better options these days to mitigate against cheaters than having an "uncrackable" root kit installed on every machine, limiting portability and causing all sorts of headaches.
To answer the first question many will have:
Ideas for how to deal with cheaters, without client spyware:
And ultimately: If a cheater can't be identified by a human, and they're not winning prize money....who cares? Keeping cheaters from prize money is easier: They must play on clean, trusted machines in person.
There's a long-ish but fascinating talk about how CS:GO deals with cheaters, Robocalypse Now, that explains how Valve already does exactly what you suggest. The focus is on the then-new Deep Learning aimbot detection, but it's interesting to watch if you have an hour to kill.
The TL;DW is that CS:GO funnels games from both player reports and automated reports (from a Neural Network) into a crowdsourced system ("Overwatch", no relation) where players judge anonymized game replays on whether other players are cheating, and their judgement quality is in turn judged by an automated system that assigns trust values based on whether your judgement reflects the majority opinion.
Cheaters are partitioned into their own queues based on a trust score that takes into account previous Overwatch convictions as well as various internal measurements (account age, etc.).
Moving away from the matchmaking systems which have become the norm is another important thing for this. Hacking was certainly a problem in games before matchmaking took over, but it was a lot easier to avoid before we threw players in with a new batch of strangers every match. You could find a good server with enough admins to constantly have someone on to ban anyone who is hacking or being a dick. This isn't really possible anymore, and that's a shame.
Comes with a ton of other benefits, too.
I do try to gravitate to games where self hosted is still the norm.
That would be pretty bad for false positives, you would have a bad experience with no way to complain (because you wouldn't know that you were flagged).
I worked a lot on the preservation of Vanilla WoW (and tbc and wlk), years ago. Like, worked on it so much that I’ve had blizzard devs reach out when they were working on Vanilla WoW servers (for answers on their old tech and file formats.
It was really fun. AMA if you’d like.
I remember a lot of the early preservation efforts around cata, while playable, had missing dialogue and other such minor issues. How much of the content for vanilla was being restored from old files versus player recordings, etc?
For wotlk, how did the collaborative storyline fair with an audience already familiar to it? Was there any of that wonderful awkward comradery still there?
So all media etc was easy to restore. Anything database-based, not so much. The "easy" part was anything that was straight up in a simple db table, such as items, npc info, loot tables, quest info, things like that. Trickier things were the more "complex" systems, so yeah dialogue trees and special triggers, special events, all these kinds of things were hell for Blizzard to restore.
If you're a software engineer, imagine having all the data, but the business logic changed 200 times and the whole codebase has been refactored 20 times since. Almost nothing matches. They had to write an entire abstraction layer to get the old systems running on the new systems, migrate all the old data to the more complex new formats, and so on. For the simple things you can make mappings to the "new systems", but a lot of weirder one-off attempts at doing dynamic shit were long replaced by proper mechanisms for those, and the old ones are just super buggy and don't even work unless you look at them individually.
So all the things that were hacked in as one offs were very difficult. The dialogue tree is DEFINITELY a huge part of that; I never had access to the backend codebase but I believe this part was mostly server side scripting, which was all in Lua, so most often no data to migrate just lots of small scripts to reimplement, migrate to a new system, etc…
No idea, I left the WoW sphere before Vanilla WoW was actually released, and cut my ties with Blizzard altogether in 2019. All my work on WoW was done from 2005 to 2015. A lot of it on data preservation. I was behind most of the "old style" protocol reverse engineering work back then; aka the "pre-NGDP" days. Worked with Ladislav Zezula a bunch, the guy behind MPQ Editor, and wrote Python bindings for it. When NGDP came out, I wrote this thing to try to properly archive it, I even was in talks with the IPFS people to put this on an archive. I still thing this particular archival project of mine was one of the absolute best use cases for IPFS but the project never progressed all that much, and unfortunately after I left HearthSim they never maintained my archives so things that weren't backed up are likely now lost to time.
Marla backed up all the WoW stuff in his wow.tools database, so I believe all my WoW-related archival work survives there (if not, I put a shitton of it on archive.org). Unfortunately, the Hearthstone work is lost for good. Heaven knows if Blizzard has backups of it. I'm sure there's a chance I'll get the "vanilla hearthstone" call 10 years from now, same as I had for WoW.
I can only imagine the frustration of finding old hacks that have already been solved and needing to make sense of it, years later. Er, wait. From the outside, however, I love the idea of rediscovering old design decisions.
Heads up, the site owner put out a notice that wow.tools is effectively on life support and is intended to wind down. I don't know what all has your touch but you might want to try backing some of it up for yourself, if it is meaningful to you. It sounds like you put a lot into it, so thank you.
The files are in safe hands. We ended up cross distributing all our backed up files across multiple data mining and archival communities.
I backed up everything between several people from /r/datahoarder, Marla, archivists from the archive team, archive.org itself, and several other people interested in blizzard datamining.
And I still have several backups myself heh.
Awesome to hear! Not sure how I missed it, but r/datahoarder is wonderful. Plus I love running into each other when the easystores go on sale lol. /offtopic
I completely agree that a lot of companies, especially game companies, but also music companies, and those with rights to movies manage their intellectual property horribly.
That is their right though.
If someone wants to take down their website and never make the videos or stories on it available, they get to do that.
If a game company wants to stop supporting a game and ensure it can never be played again, they can do that.
It's not a perfect analogue, but if a sculptor wants to smash a sculpture they own before they die, or I want to smash a sculpture I've bought, I get to do so.
I can burn my diaries or letters, even if I were a person of historical significance.
Society doesn't have a right to access things. I never bought games that relied on battle.net or other platforms thinking they'd last forever. It wouldn't have been a reasonable expectation to have either.
(I totally agree that some anti-cheat systems are so invasive I refuse toget those games. That's my only option beyond loudly saying I'll take my business elsewhere)
Not really though. Copyright is not some intrinsic right, it is property law.
One reason copyright used to be much shorter and limited is because of the recognition that once something enters the public sphere, it's no longer just the creator's but becomes part of the shared culture. And that the creator doesn't retain ownership to that shared culture in perpetuity.
I share in that philosphy, and feel that strong copyright hurts more than it helps. I believe I have the right to share freely with my children the cultural experiences I had as a child 30+ years ago. I shouldn't have to hunt down old VHS tapes of a niche TV show from 2003 to legally watch it.
I think we could fix a lot of copyright problems with some simple steps:
You must have some sort of intrinsic right to destroy a work you've created if you manage that work actively over time (i.e. the equivalent of defending a trademark).
That should probably last for your lifetime, maybe a short time after. Otherwise creators are incentivized not to create works in case someone abuses them contrary to my values. Why is it fair "society", either collectively or as every individual get rights over someone else's work?
IP rights in principle are rightly something a large majority agree are necessary when presented with reasonable explanation/arguments. US-style durations of rights are obscene.
Without rights for creators, we're left with perverse consequences, or have to carve out a huge host of exceptions:
There are surely many other downsides I can't think of off the top of my head.
Exponential renewal cost is literally giving power to vested money interests. Creators will be incentivized to compromise their values to get protection for their works that aren't commercial successes from others.
Billionaires and many large corporations show giving power simply because someone has money is a terrible idea. Let's not implement that in new areas.
The reality for a large portion of the world is US copyright laws. The US is keen on making trade agreements to force them everywhere.
But to highlight the whole 'cultural aquisition', let's consider Happy Birthday to You. A song that has been so deeply engrained in our (US) culture since before I was born yet has just recently entered public domain. Society owned that song long before 1980something.
I stand by my proposal that a reasonable copyright system mandates registration (to track ownership), is short, and requires an increasing scale to renew so the odds of any copyright outliving a human are virtually 0.
The problem with your analogy is that objects in the physical world are not really comparable to modern, digitally distributed, video games. Game developers/publishers are being allowed to make the products they sold to consumers no longer functional. So, in this case, it’s as if the sculptor is remotely destroying the sculptures they sold, even though they’re already residing in other people’s homes.
Again, when buying these games I never had an expectation they'd last forever, or would even be playable on future hardware of mine (see old games that have died).
Without re-opening the old terms and conditions, I'd be extremely surprised if we didn't all explicitly agree to it as well.
Especially with MMOs and other games, the expectation all along has been updates, changes and impermanence from the get-go.
I'm not saying I support companies doing this for doing this, but it's their right and we should push them to do otherwise for their benefit and the benefit of us users.
Alternatively, if society agrees that these expectations are reasonable, we can codify the behavior into consumer laws of various kinds.
What you expect and what others expect are clearly not the same. When I buy a standalone product, I expect to be able to do what I want with it (within reason) in perpetuity. Services are another matter, since it costs companies money to maintain them and they shouldn’t be forced to lose money in order for me to continue using that service.
However, the problem as I see it is that many developers/publishers (Blizzard being one of the worst offenders) have artificially transformed their once fully capable standalone games into services now, by intentionally stripping LAN/WAN support from multiplayer components, and adding always-online requirements to single-player components. They do this not to improve the game experience for anyone, but instead in order to undermine consumer rights, forcing customers to remain permanently reliant on them, and maintain control over the game even after they have sold a copy and it’s been installed on a customer’s machine. Same goes for a lot of other software companies too (See: Adobe).
And that’s why I see absolutely no issues, ethically speaking, with people cracking such software in order to keep using it as it worked when they originally purchased it, regardless of whether that’s legal or not. The law is always decades behind on this shit, and even when it finally catches up ethics are rarely the primary concern.
I'm not saying I support a car company making heated seats a monthly subscription. As I said:
I'm for living in a society based on the rule of law, where we abide by laws, change them or accept the consequences for knowingly breaking those laws.
We should strengthen many consumer rights by changing the laws. That has to happen on a societal level, not me taking things into my own hands.
Buying a video game has never been equivalent to buying sheet music: expecting to be able to use the raw material for hundreds of years or forever. It's always been like buying an LP or a physical game cartridge that will stop working with time: reasonable people have always expected deterioration with time and/or use.
I always bought either a physical copy of a game with the limitations of that physical copy. OR a digital copy with the limitations going with that digital copy.
Never has it been reasonable to assume I've bought a perpetual license to eternally reproduce (maybe even resell?) a copy of the game code in whatever repackaged version I can get my hands on.
That is not universally true, and many sane countries (e.g. Canada, my own country) have format shifting laws that allow people to backup/copy the contents of their purchased media into other formats in order to prevent loss of access later due to the original copy deteriorating or getting damaged.
I never said that you could or should be able to resell copies of stolen proprietary code, even in repackaged form. That would fall outside the "within reason" part of my comment due to that act infringing on the rights of the original creators. But IMO you absolutely should be able to format-shift, backup, and preserve the media you have purchased purely for continued personal use. And you absolutely can and should also be able to legally resell original physical copies of things you purchase, which the first-sale doctrine backs up.
I'm generally for that too... but let's be honest here, us as individuals, and even in groups, are largely powerless to change the laws especially when corporate interests are firmly behind them. So when laws are unethical, unjust, and/or solely benefit corporations at the expense of society (which IMO applies to a lot of IP laws) I personally don't feel the need to always abide by those laws, especially when doing so doesn't harm anyone. If that gets me in hot water eventually then so be it, but that's the exception to the rule of law that I personally allow for, always have, and I'm sticking to it.
I'm probably gonna end up infamous for echoing this Heinlien quote around continuously, but I feel this is a fundemental truth that I daresay most people agree with in at least some fashion.
Even the most upstanding citizens will jaywalk if there's no reason not to. Laws which go against ones morals or common sense are easier broken than changed, and is ultimately why tons of ancient pointless laws remain on the books despite never being enforced.
I pirate half the shows I can get on my netflix sub because I see no moral qualms in doing so, in part because any other avenue to watch with an alternative UI is just as illegal or harder to use.
This is the ultimate truth that doesn't get enough circulation in modern discourse - everyone seems to be so convinced nowadays that the only correct opinion is their own. Everyone's moral compass points in a different direction to the degree that what is punishable by death in one part of the world can be legal and highly encouraged in another.
Speeding laws for example exist for good reason to ensure general public safety and wellbeing, but if you were driving alone with no other cars in sight for miles around and you're willing to accept the consequences of things going badly, who's to say you did something deplorable by exceeding an arbitrary number on a road sign?
I may be an advocate for IP law from an economical and creators' rights perspective, but I will never say someone is morally wrong for pirating something of which there is an infinite supply. Who wouldn't download a car if there were infinite "copies" available for free? I believe the strongest effect one person can have in this capitalist world is to speak with their wallets, and I often find myself at moral impasses where I need to pay for something but the money would go to a consumer-hostile person/organisation. The question is which is the lesser of two evils, financially supporting a condemnable entity or resorting to piracy? How do we determine how biased our own moral compasses are in the first place so we can make that choice?
At some point you just have to realise you can't keep going down neverending black holes of existential questions and you should just run that MAS activation script/download that movie/whatever. Or don't, it's your life.