You talk as though closed-source developers reviewed all the upstream code. The exact same problem exists with closed-source, except there isn’t even the possibility of reviewing all the code if you want to. At worst, the lack of review in FOSS projects is on par with closed-source projects. At best, it’s a much smaller problem .
The current CEO of Microsoft.
“I can’t wait for my PC to load the classic Windows UI elements, the Metro elements AND THIS NEW UI all at the same time regardless of what applications I’m running. It’s not going to put unnecessary strain on the hardware or introduce annoying bugs and instability at all!” -Somebody, probably.
They can’t unless the parties agree that they can. The sneaky part is the “by continuing to use our services, you agree to the new terms” part, which is standard practice. You’d have to terminate your account before the new terms come into effect, then take them to court to make sure they didn’t keep your data around and use it to train their AI anyway because they “didn’t notice” that that particular content belonged to someone who didn’t accept the new terms.
Nothing suspicious at all about being contacted by the subject of a news story just to say it’s not newsworthy. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
No, that was John McAffee.
Thank you, dear madam or sir!
If they call it a “sale” rather than a “licensing” then I consider myself entitled to remove the DRM (which I do to all my Kindle ebooks, for example) or to download a cracked copy for archiving (which I do to some games I wish to keep, if I haven’t bought them on GOG or another DRM-free platform). Common sense and ethics dictate that I am in my right to do this.
If companies are relying on a technicality - an obscure one to the general public, even though techies have been aware of this issue for over a decade - to hoodwink people and charge actual-purchase prices for mere licensing, then I am relying on the implicit tenets of morality, good faith and common sense to bypass their malicious and bad faith distortions. Artificial scarcity be fucked, I paid what they claim is a fair price for what they claim is the purchase of a digital good, so I shall treat it with Animus Domini just as I do with any physical purchase. This includes lending to others as per the First Sale doctrine.
The fact that the seller consciously chose to contradict themselves, calling it a purchase out in the open and a licensing deal in the fine print, should it ever work to someone’s disadvantage, should obviously be to the disadvantage of the person who intentionally made the blunder, not to good faith third parties. This is a well-established principle of legal ethics and Civil Law which is adopted by legal scholars the world over. Whether or not they have failed to apply it to these specific cases is wholly irrelevant to its validity, and I apply it to my own dealings with a perfectly clear conscience.
I legally purchase all my media, and I will use any and all means necessary to protect my good faith acquisitions, including those which are incontroversially illegal for those who have not purchased that piece of media, such as downloading cracked software, because this is simply done to remedy an inexcusable omission on the part of those who claim to have sold me a copy of that software but don’t provide me with the possibility to archive my copy locally. So long as these transactions are referred to openly as purchases, sales, etc. I shall continue to act in this way to enforce their overt nature over the malicious mischaracterization contained in their licensing.
In other words, slimeballs, have the guts to call it licensing and renting. Until you do, I and many like me will continue to make your lies come true and there is realistically nothing you can do to stop us.
+1 for Syncthing
It’s actually a really good game, though of course it has some problems. The real issue is the fact that most people weren’t even aware that it existed.
To be fair, we absolutely should outlaw at least 99% of all currently practiced forms of advertising and make it so that new forms of advertising have to be whitelisted by a panel of psychiatrists, sociologists, environmentalists and urban planners before they’re allowed.
… with blackjack and hookers.
In other words, the consent of a corporation is more important than the consent of a human being… for the public distribution of that human being’s likeness in an intimate context. Holy dystopia, conservatives are fucked in the head.
EULAs don’t have to say “you own this forever” because it’s implicit. Just like when you buy bananas at the grocer you aren’t forced to sign a EULA that says you can eat the banana or make a smoothie with it but can’t use it to make nuclear weapons or commit war crimes.
Let’s break this down: a product is an object that is delivered to a buyer. A service is an action or group of actions that is performed for the buyer. If I have to keep running my servers for your game client to connect to, push updates or offer tech support, I am providing a service because it requires me to keep doing something for the thing to work. If, on the other hand, all I do is give you some code you can run entirely on your machine - and it doesn’t matter if I give it to you on a CD, a floppy, via digital download or if I print it out as a big book for you to type yourself into a hex editor - then our transaction is finished when I deliver it to you and you pay me. There isn’t anything to license because now you own that copy of the code. My participation in what you do with it is finished, just like the grocer’s is finished when you leave his store with the bananas.
Do you understand now?
I could be wrong but it seems like before, licenses for games you owned but hadn’t downloaded were already loaded o to your account when you logged in. So in your example, if user 2 bought a game and didn’t download it on that console, then user 1 bought and downloaded it and took the PS5 offline, user 2 could still play it because his license was already there. Now, user 2 has to go online to grab the license first.
Seems like it will have a minimal impact.
What they don’t seem to understand is that Reddit employees don’t create value, the users create value. And mods are users. The more they make things shitty for users, the more quickly the company will go bankrupt. I distinctly remember stories about killing golden geese and milking cows to death but the MBA crowd must not have been told those growing up.
Most customers won’t know or care, unfortunately. People have been brainwashed into thinking that corporations have a moral right to aggressive litigation to protect their poor, fragile interests almost as if they were David and the indie studios who dare to break their totally fair patent on “having different buttons to confirm and cancel” or whatever were big bad Goliath. And many gamers, especially younger ones, who are Nintendo’s core demographic, are notoriously ready to defend their pet corporations tooth and nail against any and all criticism, almost as if they were being personally attacked.
First the water turned them gay, now this. Frogs can’t catch a break.
Yikes. At least he’s dating someone with similar interests?
You’re right about the lesson learned. A silver lining.
Censorship is bad, but Facebook and X’s entire business models revolve around spreading content that is at once false and inflammatory, either just to create engagement or for more malicious purposes, and they reach a huge portion of the population directly, including children, teenagers, the mentally ill and other vulnerable populations. This requires a new understanding of accountability for spreading information.
I wouldn’t agree that it makes sense to hold a Mastodon instance responsible for what its users post, because they don’t have a financial incentive or the ability to promote misinformation at a massive scale. Twitter does. As Aristotle said, we must treat equals equally, and treat the unequal unequally according to the form and extent of their inequality.