191–200 of 259 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disney lawyers, meanwhile, are looking to extend copyright to 50 years beyond the life of the author's 3rd generation descendant or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last.
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did those as well, and they also paid for extensive marketing material to make it seem like buying a cracked game was directly contributing to a mafia that was planning on killing your granny. Do you not remember the ads? The "you wouldn't steal a car"? Piracy is just what they were able to get. Should have hired the bank's PR managers, who turned "failing to do due diligence on a customer's identity" into the c…
Wasn’t it “You wouldn’t download a car”? Which ended up being quite funny, because I very much would download a car
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He knows what cracked means. I think you misunderstood.
Not much room to misunderstand, and if he knows what cracked means what's going on should be obvious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great example of how today's "piracy" is tomorrow's "only working copy left". I wish there were a more formal way to explicitly allow this, though I'm probably just pining for shorter copyright terms. This game was released 20 years ago, longer than the original U.S. copyright term of 14 years.
Disney lawyers, meanwhile, are looking to extend copyright to 50 years beyond the life of the author's 3rd generation descendant or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like windows game developers are universally incompetent. They have their source so they can reproduce their binaries at will. They understand the risks of malware and how embarrassing it would be to unwittingly ship some, so they should know better than to be shipping releases built using their personal machine they also browse the web with. For Rockstar to be shipping pirated cracked binaries as their own…
Reproducible builds and controlled toolchains are not really things you are going to realistically have, shipping games for Windows - even in 2023. That does not necessarily mean the final build is coming out of Mikes office PC, however.
By reproducible I meant they can recreate their binaries from source code, not necessarily bit-for-bit.
There's zero reason to ship a Warez group's cracked version of a game when you're the copyright holder in possession of the source and ability to simply build an executable without the copy protection crap the crack is bypassing.
It's pathetic on Rockstar's part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
pirating software (movies, and music) is a term from the 90's by the MPAA, Riaa, and Games industry in attempting to link the act of simple copyright infringement, a civil non-criminal violation of the law to violent robbery on the high seas... Cracking is a method of removing undesired features or inclusions from software, often licensing controls, or other anti-consumer features. Many many many people "cracked" the…
The use of "piracy" to describe unauthorised publication of a copyrighted work dates back to the 18th century, it's not something the MPAA came up with.
> A bookseller that seizes the copies or writings of other men without permission.
> PI'RATE, verb transitive To take by theft or without right or permission, as books or writings.
EDIT: I just got out my OED, and sure enough:
> 1668 J. Hancock Brooks String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies... [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pirate#etymonline_v_16375
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Bullshit, you're just being curmudgeonly. Hades, Horizon Zero Dawn, Baldur's Gate 3, lots of clever little indie games like One Shot, music like Rujnuj and Mana, and way more.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
- Douglas Adams
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think people on HN understand what a derivative work is, considering how often I see it referenced incorrectly. You can't make a derivative work without a license. That's why it's derivative. It derivates from the copyrighted work and is therefore within the domain of the copyright and under the control of the copyright's owner. A Harry Potter spin-off about Hermione (I don't know anything about HP, sorry in…
If the patch is distributed on its own, without the original binary, is it still a derivative work? Is the unique, creative work of writing "perform XYZ instruction at XYZ address," in lieu of the original executable, still derivative? This is actually an unanswered/unproven question that comes up quite a bit in automotive tuning, where individuals and tuning companies modify OEM calibrations and create application s…
Yes, just as annotations are recognised as being a derivative work even without the original.
> Is the unique, creative work of writing "perform XYZ instruction at XYZ address," in lieu of the original executable, still derivative?
If you can convince a judge that, on the balance of probabilities, you were divinely inspired to write it with no connection to the original executable, then it's not derivative. But good luck with that.