111–118 of 118 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't plan on making Portal 3, don't tease Portal 3 with easter eggs like the Borealis.
Like I made mention before, just because they don't want to release it now doesn't mean they won't want to do another one in 20-30 years after technologies and ideas have had enough time to mature to put a new twist on things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like I made mention before, just because they don't want to release it now doesn't mean they won't want to do another one in 20-30 years after technologies and ideas have had enough time to mature to put a new twist on things.
Half their fanbase will be dead in 30 years
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you imagine how great these services would be if copyrighted works fell into the public domain after 28 years instead of the nearly 100 years they are now?
Sure, but in that case most current films would never have been made... or at least I got that distinct impression from MPAA.
Services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video would be a lot more successful if only their catalogs in regions outside of the US would be comparable to their home turf. If US clients would have the tiny tiny catalogs they offer e.g. in most of Europe, you would also be scratching your head how this could ever justify the subscription cost.
I just got back from vacationing in Greece and Croatia. Though I can't say whether the number of movies was higher or lower than in the states, I can say that the quality of films was much higher. Both my girlfriend and I complained multiple times that the movies we were watching in Europe were not available to us in the states.
Of course, with digital distribution, the cost of actually making them available in the US should be extremely low, so it should still be profitable given there's a very small number of Americans who would watch them, surely more than the puny number who watch crappy old B-grade movies that are now available on YouTube. So I'm not sure why they don't bother.
No doubt they weren't cryptography and security nerds. I wonder how a team with great operational security would have done. I bet that it's possible with a dedicated team with good clean opsec and intelligently placed servers it'd be possible to fly under the radar for decades.
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That goes without saying, content providers are shooting themselves in the foot with an atomic shotgun with the current fragmentation and lots of content is not legally available anywhere.
A tragedy of the commons among the content providers -- exclusive content is an edge that they can't resist individually, but damages them collectively.
"Tragedy of the commons" is when a bunch of private interests use a publicly-owned resource in a greedy way and end up ruining it for everyone. I don't think this quite applies here, but I don't know of any other term to call it because I can't think of any non-internet analogies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think being not available through legal means should be a defense (something like fair-use) for any copyright infringement claim.
Unfortunately this either makes law or the notion of private property meaningless.
IMHO there are fundamental differences between that and something that was purchased to satisfy the needs of yourself or your close associates.
There's also a world of difference between a new paperback copy of The Fellowship of the Ring for $10, and a movie from some old company that went out of business in the '70s and whichever company bought up all the scraps never bothered to capitalize on the IP, and the movie can't be purchased (new) for any price anywhere. If it's been ten years since your media was commercially available, it should be at least temporarily public domain. If you want to assert that copyright, start selling it, then you can have exclusive access to selling it again.
It's dumb how much of 20th century history has been lost because of the march of ever dumber copyright laws.
Services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video would be a lot more successful if only their catalogs in regions outside of the US would be comparable to their home turf. If US clients would have the tiny tiny catalogs they offer e.g. in most of Europe, you would also be scratching your head how this could ever justify the subscription cost.
For as long as I can remember now, every Netflix experience boils down to spending 15-30 minutes looking for something remotely interesting before finally giving up and reading a book or playing a video game instead.
I'm not sure how much of the problem is them not having enough content, versus just their (at least on Android) godawful UI making it impossible to find, but the end result is the same.