On consoles in general, backing up digital media (if even possible) requires full-system exploits, thus bypassing DRM, and decrypting them also requires breaking DRM
Woah, we're not talking about cracking your games. I think every console from at least the last two generations has supported copying game files to external/removable media.
Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct. Copying doesn't matter if it doesn't produce a usable backup.
If you remove the DRM, then you do actually own the thing for practical purposes. And non-ownership of things you buy is unjust, so entertaining the law here is silly.
> Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct.
Don't move the goalposts.
The only thing I am conceding is that conceptually it still ownership if you own the encrypted bits but they work fine with some other hardware that has the keys to decrypt them. I can backup my games on one playstation and play them on another.
Otherwise, we agree ideologically. At the same time I'm rhetorically supporting the point at the top of the thread that this has been a problem long before Sony decided to go digital. I am copyleft and anti-drm and whatever else you can imagine. It doesn't change the fact that there's a precedent that consumers will purchase drm games that require a rootkit to run under ambiguous terms that make it clear they don't own the bytes and it's a true observation that for some reason people allow this to happen on PC but when Sony does it it's the end of the world. I think to make progress here you need to address the root of the issue legally, not attack Sony for doing what society has condoned for decades.
You can't back up your encrypted bits on one machine and use them on another without constant permission from Sony though. Other hardware doesn't have the keys to decrypt them (actually this is it's own issue: it's obviously a very monopolistic, anticompetitive move that you can't run a PS5 game on a commodity PC because of their encryption). As far as I know, Valve's "DRM" just calls into a dll that asks Steam whether you own it, and you can just give it your own implementation of the Steam API dll that says you do. Or many titles on Steam don't have any DRM at all.
There are reasons to criticize Valve (gambling, microtransactions, "achievements"), but they seem to be too busy making money to want to do DRM.
You can’t back up your games on one PC and use them on another without constant permission from Value either. It’s the same and that is all I’m trying to point out. DRM is a red herring, the real problem is the phone home always online bullshit.
Both Valve and Sony run a completely legal video game platform service. There are minor differences here and there, of course… but this is 100% a general intellectual property law problem, not an instanced technical implementation issue.
Let's put the actual numbers in front of people: 1,924 out of 43,179 games, or 4.4%, as of today (according to PCGamingWiki) are DRM free.
The vast majority check whether you've purchased the game at runtime. If you stick to only indie games and the one off AA or AAA with no license check on Steam then sure thou-art-holier.
I think the argument is more precisely made by saying: on Steam, while the platform supports DRM, the decision is up to the publisher whether or not a game will use it and at least that provides the option for consumers to speak with their wallet and play only DRM free games. On Playstation it's all or nothing, you have to reject the entire platform/ecosystem if you want to avoid DRM.
At large, the problem still remains that our society allows DRM in the first place and if people want to avoid it then they need to be principled activists.
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy... but it is easily removed
And it takes about 2 seconds to find the removal tools on github. So you can treat Steam's DRM as basically non-existent. This is unlike consoles, which require kernel exploits or hardware modifications to bypass.
So we agree that Valve, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all operate platforms that support DRM. Wonderful!
I'm not interesting in bickering over who's DRM is the easiest to remove XD
In the US it's not piracy to make archival backups of digital media that you own in the first place, anyway. Even so, nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA (except for your rights under the DMCA to create archival copies) regardless of whether you backed up the media with or without the DRM.
To put it plainly your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software. I think that's an issue that should be solved, we likely agree, but let's not pretend that the situation with Steam is somehow healthy for society whereas with Sony it's not just because the DRM is slightly easier to circumvent.
> nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA
Correct, that right is innate.
> your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software
It does. Not even morally, but legally. Sony litigated this and lost, but bankrupted the emulator developer in the process. Emulators and compatible hardware and software have been consistently ruled legal. It is only the bypassing of copy protection that is not.
And if you're not interested in the feasibility of asserting your rights by removing the DRM, then naturally you'll never understand why people consider Valve and Sony materially different.
How do you backup game files from a console, to an external drive/location that you own; and ensure the validity of that backup will still be usable on the console later?
Did you read your [2] citation? While the 6th court denied immunity, they tried to claim a different immunity. Upon appeal to the Supreme Court, the SC said you settle it without immunity first, the 6th court did not take that advice. Sounds like they used a different law.
I am not familiar with the case, but from my reading IJ is still trying to fight the immunity.
> Instead, the high court asked the Sixth Circuit to decide the issue first. Rather than seriously engaging with the issue, as the Supreme Court asked, the Sixth Circuit unthinkingly applied outdated caselaw, becoming the sixth federal appeals court to do so. Now, IJ is asking the Supreme Court to weigh in and deny the government one of its many tools to avoid the Constitution
It is difficult for me to admit I'm an idiot but when I was younger and living in an apartment, I loved the idea of a single family home. And now that I'm living in a single family home, I feel like I was wrong all along. Not that I want to go back to the apartment I was in before. Dear lord no but the idea of a mixed use building not too tall only like first floor with high ceilings for business or shops with two or at the most three floors above for residential units feels like the ideal sweet spot. Ideally with a lot of these close together to have everything I need within a walking distance but also a subway station within a walking distance if I need to go farther.
I wasted a decade trying to live in single family homes. Now at 40 my wife and I are living in a small city in a condo and couldn't be happier. Neither of us enjoyed the workload of managing a SFH. Dont force yourself to stay if you aren't happy, you'll wish you moved sooner (I do).
Do you have kids? I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.
Most kids are only into playing in the yard for a couple years really. Before long they are preteens living in their room, probably seething at the fact they need a ride from a parent to hang out with any of their friends.
Apartments can also have stuff you could never afford that a kid would like, such as a massive pool (try pricing out a new build pool these days).
> I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.
And families do it in NYC, and Hong Kong, and Germany, and Spain (AFAICT, 65%), and…
They manage, but it's not a good experience. The apartments are usually too small for families and the ones that are big enough are too expensive. This is solvable, but has not been solved.
Think about having to share a bedroom with your child, and when they're old enough to need their own one, putting up a partition wall and having each be less than half the size of a normal bedroom, very cramped. And you don't get a living room. (If you did have a living room, now it's your bedroom while the child gets the actual bedroom)
People also change and want different things at different parts of their life. Young and single - living in an apartment is amazing. Once someone is coupled up, has kids, and some animals, a SFH also looks much more appealing. Once the kids are gone, then an apartment/condo starts to look pretty attractive again.
Depending on where you are, there are nice middle class apartments that can be family friendly. I have friends not in tech in my same neighborhood with a three bedroom place for 1500. Granted this is the midwest and not SF but their place is near the train to get downtown for work and surrounded with a lot of parks for baseball, soccer etc for kids
A not top tall building doesn't have enough people to be mixed use. Cities often cheat their with several side streets of residential (it might be zoned mix use but it isn't) only for every street of mixed use. People on the non mixed use streets travel to the mixed use one.
By providing free or cheap parking for people that don't live there. Urban land is extremely expensive and parking generally doesn't cost what it should, other land uses would provide a lot more revenue. Parking in US cities is greatly over provisioned to make life easy for suburbanites, destroying urban fabric.
Massive ongoing investment into roads. EV incentives that would pay for 3-4 ebikes outright. Big 3 bailout. Cash for clunkers. Impact fees from developers towards roads. As others said parking requirements. There is so much beyond that too.
> Road wear increases with the fourth power of axle weight iirc
That's not actually true, and the paper that describes the "fourth power" thing even says that right up front.
If you massively oversimplify the model so that you've got all vehicles fitted with infinitely hard bicycle tyres on a perfectly smooth surface, it kind of works out, but not quite.
Interesting! Nevertheless I believe it is true that bike and pedestrian paths are much cheaper to construct and maintain than roads for cars and trucks.
Most roads are not used for delivering goods, so if we'd just reduce private car use that would already be a great improvement. If you want to go even further, rail has a lot of potential left.
Like everything else community construction responds to incentives. So we need to structurally incentivise short distance commute communities. Congestion pricing seems like a reasonable first step.
I’ve done that and those areas change over time. A town becomes more like a small city. A small city becomes more dense. Etc. Then all the urbanists move the goal posts and ask why you didn’t live somewhere else.
Just move to the rust belt. If you are going to move to a growing job market don’t be surprised when the job market grows and triggers demand for development.
God forbid society grows around you. How dare all those productive aspiring people build things near you. Did they not know you had exclusive right of refusal on nearby development?
Even if that were true, Nintendo is better than most companies, which will use deceptive practices wherever they are allowed, even if they have to pay to maintain multiple systems and configurations.
If I am unable to play Minecraft any longer because I have to buy a shit ass XBOX, I will never buy another piece of software (or hardware) from them. My $5 in 2009 came with a guarantee I would have access (and free updates) to Minecraft forever. Microsoft not honoring that agreement, which they said they would, is a step too far. I already signed up for a shit ass Microsoft account to keep access, and I said to myself that was the last hoop I would jump through.
> Microsoft not honoring that agreement, which they said they would, is a step too far.
They already took that step too far - they broke ToS and closed all MC accounts that weren't linked to a MS account within the timeframe.
I'm obviously not saying I'd like them to make everything an Xbox exclusive, but it's the only play that makes sense after throwing $75B to buy Activision.
Can you share more information? I just looked at their Wikipedia entry and they spent 2018- basically doing acquisitions. What were they layoffs you were thinking of? It's hard to find historical data from 2016. And what's their new focus? It looks like they still have the same huge roster of apps.
My gaming machine is isolated and well protected through firewalls in and out. I don't store any sensitive information like payment information on them. Why can't I choose when to update them? Let me use my thread model to keep myself secure. Respect my time. Let me manually update when I want.
You don't, though. When I download a game on Steam or GOG, I have the files on my PC. I can back them up. I can modify them.
Yes, live service games still have an online component I don't control, but I do still control the files on my computer. I don't on a console.
Actually, I don't own any consoles for reasons of software freedom but I hear they are much more difficult to do things like back up your data, etc.
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