For quite a while now, their games have only been made "good" after significant time and effort by the modding community to fix common game-breaking and progress-losing bugs, along with endless quality of life improvements and the fixing of console-port-related issues.
"Vanilla" Bethesda games are pretty bad by reasonable standards, particularly on and shortly after launch.
Nobody wants a dozen different "movie subscriptions" just like nobody wants a dozen different "streaming service" subscriptions.
The value of the early movers/original services is that they gave access to EVERYTHING (or nearly everything) with a single login/payment.
Whatever value was originally generated by the first service is quickly lost as soon as everyone and their dog gets greedy, spins up their own special snowflake version of (service), and pulls their content out of the original service. This forces consumers to choose between signing up & paying for a dozen different services, or canceling everything and simply going back to the convenience & ease of piracy, which, incidentally, makes everything from everywhere available in a single location (value!).
It's at least worth asking if the streaming future you implicitly envision here -- where one service, presumably Netflix, becomes the gatekeeper for nearly all commercial streaming content, dictating what is available to us to watch and, by virtue of their market power, effectively dictating what producers will be paid -- is really all silver lining and no cloud. (There are also downsides to advocating piracy as the solution, and whether it's convenient and easy is definitely in the eye of the beholder, but that's a different discussion.)
For MoviePass vs. AMC Stubs Plus or whatever they're calling it, the market dynamics are different from streaming, anyway; while there are movies that are released exclusively to specific theatre chains, they're few and far between. So in practice, very few people are going to feel compelled to subscribe to both services in order to see all movies -- they're going to subscribe to one or the other.
Also, last but not least, there's strong evidence that the value to moviegoers that MoviePass represents comes from a "the more you use our service, the more money we lose" model. I am not sure that I would sneer at AMC as a "special snowflake" for questioning the wisdom there.
The answer is simple, non-lockin to any particular theater chain. Revenue of the $20/mo is split across multiple theatre chains, and goers can see a movie at any participating chain.
Theaters get predictable revenue and guaranteed income, and viewers get a bulk discount.
All you can 'eat', and theater chain freedom are two different features. They can still keep both.
Because their own chain versions are bad ($20/month for 3 movies/week for just AMC vs $10/month for 1movie/day anywhere) and will not be successful with consumers.
This reminds me of the late 90s/early 2000s when record company’s response to Napster/mp3 was to make worse services for more money. [0]
I'm a Moviepass holder myself, and I love it, but let's face it. It's not going to last. It's losing money and the chains don't like it. Yes, I'd prefer a future with Moviepass, just as I'd like everything to be on Netflix, but neither are going to be the future. Like it or not, multiple streaming services and (likely) multiple movie subscriptions are the future. What this will mean is that people will only have one or two just like they have one or two streaming services.
"Because their own chain versions are bad ($20/month for 3 movies/week for just AMC vs $10/month for 1movie/day anywhere) and will not be successful with consumers."
The AMC one also doesn't involve the dog and pony show you have to pull off with MoviePass, it includes premium showings like IMAX and stuff, and if you're in a place where most, if not all of your local theaters are AMC, it's not a problem.
In your case, there is no guaranteed income for any participating exhibitor because they still have to compete to get viewers in their theater for their share of the $20.
> It's at least worth asking if the streaming future you implicitly envision here -- where one service, presumably Netflix, becomes the gatekeeper for nearly all commercial streaming content, dictating what is available to us to watch and, by virtue of their market power, effectively dictating what producers will be paid -- is really all silver lining and no cloud. (There are also downsides to advocating piracy as the solution, and whether it's convenient and easy is definitely in the eye of the beholder, but that's a different discussion.)
It would be nice if there was a universal protocol for streaming music, video, movies, and etc. It'd create something that people can build hardware gateways to spec.
Netflix is only a gatekeeper to their own content. The licensed library isn't allowed to grow because they don't have the cash to let it become a one stop shop. They did have it with their original DVD model but that's being killed off.
How many different theater chains are around you? This isn't like streaming services where it may not make sense to have Streaming Pass A and Streaming Pass B if they primarily share content.
Quality ones here, 2. Total this-or-that proposition here as they have the same offerings.
Why I didn't do MoviePass (beyond the unsustainable nature of it and the seemingly cutthroat nature by which they try to get theaters to essentially profit share) but am really considering this is if: 1) it is painless. MoviePass appears to require a bit more effort than I'd like. 2) IMAX/3D/etc.
Around me there are 3 "major" multiplex cinemas as well as 2 smaller independent theaters. Having moviepass is helpful in this case. While the major ones have some overlapping content each of them also seem to have some unique movies that only they show.
On top of this I get the benefit of being able to see a movie when traveling. Granted this may not be on everyone's list of things to do when traveling. For me going to see a movie with family a few hours away and doing something before/after is something nice to do. This doesn't work well if the theater branded movie subscription doesn't have a theater in the location you are going to. However with moviepass it is never an issue for me.
There is an appeal for me for AMC's special snowflake. I have been going to AMC exclusively for the past 10 years or so because I like their ICEE flavors; I'm quite sad that White Cherry is being removed nationwide. I will go to other theatres if I need too but even before I got a movie pass I've been going to AMC. I'm a Stub's member too, so right now my question is if the points I get from my subscription vs the points from using my stubs card and movie pass debt card is better. I also tend to only go to one or two movies each weekend and max at three.
I'm not the only one like this, but I am a minority.
AMC was doomed they replaced their MovieWatcher program (pro consumer) that was great with their Stubs program (rent seeking) that sucks and changes quite a bit.
It reflected a change from a useful service for movie fans, to a service trying to extract recurring revenue from customers.
Do most people have more than one theater that they visit frequently? I'd personally be fine with a subscription to just one chain, since almost all chains have almost all of the content.
Well, there are standard theaters that have the blockbusters, and you are right that the chain really doesn't matter, but there are also art theaters that have the more intellectual films not shown in the big theaters. Those generally aren't owned by chains. Currently MoviePass works with both the chains and the indies in my area. Which is great for as long as it lasts.
I only have 3 chains near me, but I visit different ones based on schedule. Theaters are a commodity to me, except for a few drafthouses that play special movies.
Most people likely have one brand of theater around them. For them, there isn't much difference in availability between MoviePass and that chain's offering.
The population is heavily weighted to urban areas, and urban areas tend to have multiple major chains, multiple local independents, and possibly regional chains.
I doubt very much that most people only have a single “brand of theater” (or even single firm, since some firms of multiple brands) around them, for ant reasonable definition of “around”.
Where I'm at, while there are a couple AMC theaters, the place is heavily dominated by Edwards/Regal theaters. While yes, there would be more places that accept MoviePass, effectively for me, there wouldn't be much difference between availability. In fact, if the Edwards/Regal one were to offer something similar to AMC (allowing IMAX and other premium showings), it would be more appealing to me.
And yet, two (maybe two and a half) isn't the "dozen" the grandparent post is discussing.
There's room for a couple services with good content libraries. I don't know that there's room for each major media company to have their own. I've personally opted to skip the new Star Trek series because I have no interest in a CBS-specific streaming service.
Same, but there aren't that many large movie theater companies. AMC competing against a third-party "shitload of movies" provider isn't diluting the pool too much.
If you adjust the aspect radio by playing in windowed mode and keeping it full-width while lowering the height, you gain significantly more visibility. I imagine playing on an ultrawide display would have a similar effect.
Granted, it wasn't built to support a zoomed out camera so some controls behave poorly at the outer edges of visibility.
Far more convenient when you consider that Netflix's catalog of reasonably mainstream as-seen-in-theaters movies has been shrinking for years.
As the end user I don't care "why" their catalog has been shrinking, I only care that something I watched last year and want to watch again is no longer available on that service.
And no, I'm not going to sign up for a dozen different services just on the off chance that one of them will have what I want to see at any given point.
Other responses indicate that the recipient/target has to opt into their location being shown via an SMS, so I fail to understand the outrage assuming the same requirement exists for the non-trial version.
You think consent is being asked for on the non-trial version? This is the service LEOs use to track down fugitives dumb enough to carry their phone. They aren't going to ask for any consent.
Just because you "can" use a bunch of memory without issues now doesn't mean you "should" not make any attempts to cut resource usage whenever possible.
Of course you're right. But why does it seem like memory usage takes precedence over battery life and latency? I may be in the minority, but it seems to me a native app's key advantage over Electron is performance/watt and I don't see how reduced memory usage would help.
Fission is expensive to start up primarily due to regulation. Modern designs are extremely safe (fail-safe instead of fail-unsafe) and produce little in the way of dangerous waste. Politics is what killed fission.
I believe the LTSB Enterprise edition physically does not contain the "windows app store", cortana, and all the other garbage that gets in the way of a normally functioning computer.
They can claim something is illegal all they want, but that has no impact whatsoever on the actual legality of it. Anti-consumer EULA/TOS items haven't held up in court for a while now.
Depends on jurisdiction a lot, quite honestly. Nintendo can say it's illegal all it wants, but if I own a physical copy of a game, and make a digital backup of such, then I'm in the clear as far as Canadian law (see our copyright bill C-11) goes. A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original.
That being said, if there's DRM and you break it, then you have a different issue entirely. Owning the ROM wouldn't be illegal, but breaking the DRM certainly would be. Even if in the process of legally backing up your data off of the disc you break the DRM, you're still in legal hot waters.
Quite frankly I'm convinced Nintendo can say all it wants, it's a scare tactic and for the most part they're full of shit unless you take into account a specific part of US or Japanese law in a specific state or jurisdiction. I would not assume that they know exactly what they're talking about globally.
There is an important distinction however with regards to exercising the so-called "private copy rights" — at least in the case of European law, I cannot speak about other regions — which is that the source of the data you copy must be licit. Which means that your private copy right allows you to copy the ROM from a cartridge that you bought, but not copy the data from a torrent since (presumably) the uploader had no right to put it there.
Post-scriptum : read that for a better understanding of why it matters where the bytes came from, even if they are identical and should make no difference from a computer science point of view : http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Nothing you said disagrees with anything Nintendo said.
You also should note that page is from the Nintendo USA/Canada region website. It isn't trying to explain the situation for every jurisdiction globally.
ThatGeoGuy: "A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original."
Nintendo: "whether you have an authentic game or not, or whether you have possession of a Nintendo ROM for a limited amount of time, i.e. 24 hours, it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet."
Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet".
And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.
>ThatGeoGuy: "A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original."
A dollar bill stolen in a robbery is "pretty hard to tell apart" from a dollar bill you received as change from a legal cash transaction. It is silly to argue that how those bills were acquired is not a factor in your claimed ownership of them.
>Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet".
I read it differently. The subject of the sentence is "an official copy" and the "vs. downloaded from the internet" portion was a prepositional phrase. On second reading it is certainly possible I misinterpreted it. The author should have used a conjunction like "and" instead of a preposition like "versus" if they wanted both copies to be the subject.
>And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.
Nintendo says nothing about making ROMs from official copies. It does not claim they are illegal. They are definitively legal. However almost all games sold today have some sort of DRM included. A copying device is illegal if it tries to circumvent this DRM. Therefore if a game has DRM, there is no legal way for a person to own a ROM of that game.
To summarize Nintendo's point and the one that Tech Radar seconded, the only legal ROM of a commercial game is one you create yourself from a DRM free game that you already own.
> It is silly to argue that how those bills were acquired is not a factor in your claimed ownership of them.
Robbery and online downloads are worlds apart. The first is a violent act that deprives someone of their property. It's an unjust action that harms one party for the benefit of another. Downloading a ROM from the internet, for a game that the downloader already owns, lacks all of the negatives that make robbery repugnant. Legality is a different question entirely, of course; legally, it matters how I acquired the ROM.
> Nintendo says nothing about making ROMs from official copies. It does not claim they are illegal.
False. They claim that making ROMs from official copies, as well as the devices that allow you to do so, are illegal because they can be used to illegally distribute the games online. Quoting from Nintendo's FAQ:
Are Game Copying Devices Illegal?
Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer. They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks. These devices also allow for the uploading and downloading of ROMs to and from the Internet. Based upon the functions of these devices, they are illegal.
> A copying device is illegal if it tries to circumvent this DRM. Therefore if a game has DRM, there is no legal way for a person to own a ROM of that game.
That's not Nintendo's claim, but it's a claim with stronger legal support than Nintendo's. It's also moving the goalposts, IMO. Take an NES game as an example. There was a game lockout system (and similar systems in the SNES and N64 consoles), but those don't prevent access to game data, just cause the console to reboot if authentication fails. Those are 3 of the major systems that I'm thinking of when I think about getting copies of ROMs.
> Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer.
Source that says copying bits from my own retail game disc to my own hard disk is a crime, please?
> They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks.
If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon? Redistribution may well be an issue in most jurisdictions, but we weren't talking about that.
> Source that says copying bits from my own retail game disc to my own hard disk is a crime, please?
That's Nintendo's claim, not mine ;-) You'll have to ask them.
> If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon? Redistribution may well be an issue in most jurisdictions, but we weren't talking about that.
In the specific case of DVDs, and in the specific case of my jurisdiction (I live in the US), I think that the argument would be that you circumvented the DRM of the Content Scrambling System, in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In other jurisdictions, you'd have no problem. In the UK, for example, my understanding is that there's no restriction against breaking DRM, and that creating a copy of a copyrighted work for personal use is perfectly legal.
> If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon?
Which country are we talking about? There's something about "circumvention of technical prevention measures" which is part of WIPO and so in many laws. It's in the DMCA and in the European laws. Some of these contain exceptions for backups, but not all of them.
no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy? Not sure if they could say that you couldn't play the backup directly (as in, that you'd be forced to push it to an official cartridge or disk), but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.
> no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy?
I think that's probably true, but it's not what Nintendo is claiming. They claim that the copying devices themselves are illegal to own or use, since the result is a file that can be illegally uploaded and shared, and that as a result, any digital copy that a consumer might create is also illegal, even if kept for personal use.
> but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.
Yes, but not terribly exotic. There are EEPROMs that are drop-in replacements, in many cases. So they're also the kinds of chips that you can just connect an EEPROM reader to, to dump the data. Reading the data from the cartridge pins themselves can be a little more complex; I know that the 8-bit Nintendo systems broke their games into swappable sections, with access controlled by a mapper chip. To dump those games from the cartridge connector, one would need to send bank-swapping signals to the chip. The NES had a couple hundred variants of these mapper chips; the Game Boy had about 5 common ones. Not sure about the SNES. Sega Genesis/Megadrive just exposed the cartridge pins directly to the CPU's address bus, I think.
I know that people build Arduino-based ROM dumpers. The secret sauce is more in the mapper-handling code than anything else.
Newer systems like the Nintendo DS are likely to be less straightforward, but I haven't looked into it that closely.
I recall using a Nintendo DS to dump ROMs to a device in the GBA slot, which would then store it in memory, so you could then eject the cartridge in the DS slot and insert another device that could write to a MicroSD card. GBA and GB cartridges could be transferred directly from the GBA slot.
The difficulty there was in loading and running the software.
Once games distributed on discs, backing up for swap-free play became easier, but I still recall having to use the original Wii hardware to read discs and write their files to a specially formatted hard drive.
If you have the device designed to read the original game distribution medium, you can modify it, sometimes just with software, to read game files and write them to the medium of your choosing. The original console has to decode the data and get it to the CPU somehow, and if you can run your own code on the CPU, you can always dump, even if it is just by displaying a series of 2-d bar codes on a TV screen and taking photos of them.
It is also worth noting that you cannot trust a company like Nintendo or Sony to make a distinction between civil-illegal that results in a tort, where the company can sue you for damages (if they find out about it), and criminal-illegal that results in a crime, where the state can put you in prison (if they find out about it).
> The original console has to decode the data and get it to the CPU somehow, and if you can run your own code on the CPU, you can always dump, even if it is just by displaying a series of 2-d bar codes on a TV screen and taking photos of them.
That would be a novel hack, and I've considered something similar with an old IBM computer with an almost-dead floppy (probably a stretched drive belt?) The floppy will read something like the first 50-100KB from a disk, and fails on the rest. That'd easily be enough for a little program that reads the hard drive sector by sector, displaying them on screen as a colored grid, or something. Then it'd be an exercise in video processing to extract the data.
Not novel. I heard about it from a possibly apocryphal espionage story wherein a program was loaded to an airgapped machine, then it flashed a rapid sequence of 2-d bar codes on the screen, and the attacker exfiltrated the data as a video file.
For your problem, I'd try pumping the data out of the serial or parallel ports first. An RS232 to USB cable might work.
Sorry, my comment was badly-worded. I was thinking about older systems having 16-bit memory spaces, into which all IO is mapped (including the cartridge). So all but the absolute simplest games would need bank-switching hardware.
Looking at the Genesis and SNES, each exposes a 24-bit address bus. I was speculating that the increased area would be enough that bank switching wouldn't be necessary (the largest SNES game seems to be around 48Mbit, right? A little over a third of the CPU's memory, although I haven't looked up where the cartridge data's window is usually mapped).
Of course, there's the added fun of external coprocessors and such.
Disclaimer: I've only read your quotes and I am not a lawyer. Copyright is not a law about having a copy. It's a law about making a copy. A copy is neither legal nor illegal. Copying may infringe copyright or it may not.
Generally speaking, unless you have permission from the copyright holder (or the copyright has expired), you may not make a copy of something. Again, generally speaking, if you do not make a copy of something, then you can not infringe copyright (although, you might be liable for conspiracy or other similar things so your action may still be illegal).
The provision for private copying complicates things a little bit, but not that much. Usually private copying allows you to make a limited number of copies of things that you own, as long as it is for private use. It does not allow you to make a copy of something that you don't own. So you can't borrow it from the friend or a library and make a copy without infringing copyright.
(Quick side note since there is some discussion about Canadian copyright law: Historically there has been a levy for recorded musical performances which allows Canadians to make copies for private use. In the past you did not have to own the copy in order to make your own copy! This is a completely different issue than what I'm talking about. It only applies to recordings of musical performances, so it doesn't apply to games. I moved away from Canada a long time ago, so I've lost track of what's going on with the levy. Most misunderstood copyright law ever, I think...)
It doesn't matter if you own a copy of X. You can not make a copy of your friend's copy of X. They can not make a copy of X and give it to you. Both of those actions are infringement on copyright. Downloading off the internet doesn't change anything at all. The only grey area is which action is considered "copying" from the perspective of copyright infringement: uploading, downloading or both. My understanding is that in most countries both actions are considered "copying".
The end result is that whether or not you own a copy of a ROM, it is still infringement to download a copy from somewhere else. It may not be infringement on your part to buy or be given a physical copy. If that copy was made in an infringing way, the person who made the copy would be liable, not you. However, like I said, consipiracy, etc can still apply to you if you are knowingly entering into these kinds of arrangements.
What people usually get confused about is that if someone comes to your house and says, "You have infringed copyright" and points to your copy of the ROM, the copy itself isn't really evidence that you infringed the copyright. They would have to show that you made a copy of a different ROM (which may or may not be difficult).
Long story short --
ThatGeoGuy: technically correct since they didn't say "it's legal to download the copy from the internet". But basically misleading as hell because how did you get the copy without infringing copyright?
Nintendo: In most countries they are correct and not misleading at all. You may not download a copy from the internet unless they give permission. Also you may not play ROMs that are under copyright unless you have a license because some people have successfully argued that loading a game (or any data) into a computer is "making a copy". This latter argument may not stand up in some countries, but I wouldn't really want to be the landmark case that tests the law where you live...
Am I going crazy? I provided an honest source for my point. It was pointed out the source I used is likely biased. I therefore provided a second independent source that agreed with the original source. No one has yet provided any source that disagrees with anything I stated or anything stated by either of the sources I linked. And yet is a fallacy for me to ask that someone should have a source if they are going to argue against the two sources I provided?
Your source was someone asserting, without justification, that it is illegal. That's not a legal argument. Even without considering that the source is very, very biased, it's not helpful.
They're right, it isn't legal. The only legal way to acquire a usable ROM in the US is to rip it yourself from a disc/cartridge that you own.
That doesn't mean that it's wrong to download ROMs. I've done it. It's just not legal. People are confusing a factual accounting of the law with personal moral condemnation.
Because they have been bought and paid for by the existing ISP monopolies, who stand to gain enormously from the loss of net neutrality, at little to no extra effort on their part.
I see lot of downsides to that like for example in long run ISPs might end up offering their connection for free as Google/FB etc. are already providing their own ISP services (may be they started so because of this law!) => every large corporation move into ISP business offering their service for free instead of paying someone else!
"Vanilla" Bethesda games are pretty bad by reasonable standards, particularly on and shortly after launch.