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Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

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Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#271

Post by braveo »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #267
braveo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's like saying that robbing Bill Gates and distributing the money to millions of poor people is morally good because it's good for many people. - FooBarWidget > That degrades property rights, so it's bad for the many. - Dylan16807 Straight out of the horses mouth, that's not a strawman, it's literally what you said. We shouldn't take money from the rich and give to the poor because property rights, but we shoul…

>Straight out of the horses mouth, that's not a strawman, it's literally what you said. >We shouldn't take money from the rich and give to the poor You're ignoring the part where I said twice that taking money from all the rich with a tax would be okay. So "we shouldn't take money from the rich" is not my stance at all. But sure I should explain a bit better. Levying taxes on all the rich and giving to the poor is fi…

> You're ignoring the part where I said twice that taking money from all the rich with a tax would be okay

That isn't the point the person you were responding to was making. And you know it, but you're trying to weasel your way out of ridiculousness here.

> Taking old code arbitrarily from one company can degrade ownership-of-old-code, but that's not really a bad thing, because that type of ownership is unimportant to society

Tell that to the banking industry.

And SC tournaments are still televised in South Korea (fyi).

The problem you're running into is that what you're arguing is completely arbitrary. COMPLETELY arbitrary. "old code" doesn't mean shit when we have companies that are still running code that's well over 20 years old.

It's arbitrary on your part because you have an agenda and you're willing to ignore Blizzards rights to code they paid to have produced.

Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#272

Post by braveo »

wtetzner wrote: post #266
braveo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an unimportant distinction for the purposes of this discussion. Under the law, damages have occurred, especially if someone then takes that source code and makes it public. So whether you have 2 copies or 1 copy or umpteen copies, if you've economically affected someone, you will lose that fight in court. But this is not relevant to this discussion and I think we should keep on topic. The point is this: Dylan168…

> So whether you have 2 copies or 1 copy or umpteen copies, if you've economically affected someone, you will lose that fight in court. First, I never argued that it was or wasn't against the law. Second, it's not clear that releasing the source would economically affect Blizzard. It's not like someone could start releasing competing StarCraft games. They still don't own the brand etc. > (and thank you for having the…

> Second, it's not clear that releasing the source would economically affect Blizzard

Even if you ignore the fact that Blizzard owns the rights to the code. Which you shouldn't, but some people here seem to think that's alright.

EVEN IF you ignore that, SC is still televised in South Korea. Releasing that code could affect the integrity of the competitive scene for SC.

But you won't accept that because this isn't really about what's fair, it's about what you want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_StarCraft_competi...

> Over US$4,000,000 in prize money has been awarded in total, the vast majority of which comes from tournaments in South Korea.[3] For several years after the release of StarCraft II, competitive StarCraft: Brood War was no longer televised. However, in early 2015, the game returned to Ongamenet's televised lineup.

Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#273

Post by croon »

scrollaway wrote: post #205
croon wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it could be that Overwatch is 9 years newer.

You mean, that TF2 has had a 9 years headstart in improving and polishing their game's design, add more content etc?

It's hard to throw out core principles or do massive overhauls without starting over. At that point it's no longer a patch. They had many years to consider what made a game good, and what to improve on, and modernize concepts.

Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#274

Post by Dylan16807 »

braveo wrote: post #271
Dylan16807 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Straight out of the horses mouth, that's not a strawman, it's literally what you said. >We shouldn't take money from the rich and give to the poor You're ignoring the part where I said twice that taking money from all the rich with a tax would be okay. So "we shouldn't take money from the rich" is not my stance at all. But sure I should explain a bit better. Levying taxes on all the rich and giving to the poor is fi…

> You're ignoring the part where I said twice that taking money from all the rich with a tax would be okay That isn't the point the person you were responding to was making. And you know it, but you're trying to weasel your way out of ridiculousness here. > Taking old code arbitrarily from one company can degrade ownership-of-old-code, but that's not really a bad thing, because that type of ownership is unimportant t…

> And you know it

What do I know? I seriously need you to explain what you imagine I'm saying.

> Tell that to the banking industry.

A bank using 30 year old code does not mean that the IP rights to that code are worth a single penny. They use it because they need their systems to be bug-compatible with what they have been doing for decades, and they would not lose competitive advantage if they no longer had copyright over that code.

> And SC tournaments are still televised in South Korea (fyi).

The source code hypothetically being public domain wouldn't affect the art assets, and wouldn't affect the monetization of those tournaments in any way.

> It's arbitrary on your part because you have an agenda

Are you completely opposed to the idea that different realms of copyright might have different ideal lengths of time? There's basically a 0% chance that the current copyright lengths are ideal now and forever.

Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#275

Post by unionpivo »

echlebek wrote: post #220
jakebasile wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll agree it's an unfortunate thing that Blizzard hasn't released the code. Personally I'd love to get at Diablo 1's code too. Maybe they will one day, but that right is theirs even though they are a huge corporation. Copyright law doesn't care about that detail. This thread has a lot of people wanting the guy to go vigilante, which I just can't get behind.

It seems that you think that following the law is the right thing to do. That's an understandable point of view. But there's also something called civil disobedience. Sometimes the will of the commons should trump law. Is this one of those cases? Frankly, I don't know or care. But I think if you don't try to understand what you call the "vigilante" point of view, you're doing yourself a disservice.

How is it civil disobedience, if private citizen violates right of another private citizen (or in this case corporation)?

civil disobedience in my mind is when private citizen stand's up to what he perceives as unjust system or law. And I can't see what unjust you see here in this case.

The way I see it is simple a lost property returned to an owner, and reward for person who found it

Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#276

Post by pjc50 »

jakebasile wrote: post #252
pjc50 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When, in 20 years, we're hearing that this disc got lost again sometime in the bankruptcy chain of Activision Blizzard, we'll see whether corporate archiving or vigilante illegal archiving is more effective.

Is there any risk that the compiled binaries, on millions of computers and available for free and legal download from Blizzard, will disappear in 20 years?

No. But the source is useful for other purposes than compiling , especially with original comments.

For rarer games, and those shipped on DRMed/copy protected media, it's certainly possible to get into a situation at risk of losing all known copies of the binaries!

Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#277

Post by tripzilch »

eridius wrote: post #45
jakebasile wrote: post #44

It looks like someone found a copy of Blizzard's copyrighted source code, returned it to Blizzard, and got a reward. Why are people upset about this? It seems like the right thing to do to my mind. If someone found a copy of my own source laying in the street I'd be very happy if they returned it instead of releasing it on the net.

I don't know. A lot of people in this thread apparently never learned to tell right from wrong.

to be more exact, many people here seem to be incapable to tell right/wrong from legal/illegal or taking the easy/hard choice.

these are all different from each other. and more importantly, orthogonal to each other.

by orthogonal I mean that given a choice, deciding whether it is right, should be done independently of whether it's legal or easier/harder. think about it. even if you had the power to change law, making something legal won't make it any more right, and vice versa.

it seems to me that this guy made his choice of returning the CD vs releasing the code on the basis that the former is legal and doing the latter (somewhat securely) is harder.

not so much on whether preserving the code, in light of the cultural historical importance is right or wrong.

(you don't need to agree with me, but I'd love to hear a solid argument why the latter would be wrong, that doesn't conflate right/wrong with legal/illegal)

and even then, it's not entirely indefensible to base your actions just on what's legal or easiest. ethics is hard and especially the law provides a nice shortcut if you don't like to think for yourself too much. Just, don't go pat yourself on the back for doing the right thing. You don't get to do that. He does get a ticket and goodies from Blizzard, though. Sweet. Shouldn't taste bitter at all, at least for a while.

Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#278

Post by chickenfries »

FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #253
chickenfries wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Methinks you're a Blizzard fanboy. I like their games. I like Valve and Bethesda games too. > I haven't seen exact figures, but you are severly underestimating how much cheddar people drop on stuff like Team Fortress 2 items. I don't have exact figures either, but whatever people spend on hats cannot possibly approach what people have spent on WoW subscriptions... According to Wikipedia, Valve's total equity is $2.…

> According to Wikipedia, Valve's total equity is $2.5 billion while Activision Blizzard's is $8.068 billion. It's not just Blizzard. You're forgetting about the huge juggernaut that is the Call of Duty franchise. >I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that WoW and WC3 are similar games. One is an RTS and the other is an MMORPG. Obviously, WoW has an army of creatives making content and developing an immersive world…

I actually completely forgot about how much of a flop Pokemon Go was once the hype wore off. I was actually thinking more about whatever the Mario game that came out was.

The Basketball analogy is interesting, and I definitely think that watching Dota is a lot more interesting than HotS, no contest.

You've made a lot of good points, and I hope Overwatch's modding tools are awesome. I think we both agree that opening up Blizzard games for modding would be great, but we can both only speculate as to the effect that snubbing modding has on their business. I think I'm undecided on that issue now.

Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#279

Post by tripzilch »

jakebasile wrote: post #68
scrollaway wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unclear whether it's a legal obligation given that the disc was found, it's even less clear whether it's a moral obligation. If you didn't know anything about Blizzard, what would you speculate? Someone elsewhere in the thread for example is speculating Blizzard would destroy the copy -- if I thought that'd be a possibility, I would personally never send it their way and you could in no world convince me it's mo…

It probably isn't strictly a legal obligation to return the physical disc barring stolen property stuff, but it would definitely be illegal to redistribute copyrighted code without a license to do so. Maybe you could claim some type of fair use but it wouldn't be transformative so I can't see how. As for morality, I apply the golden rule: if someone found the code I wrote for a groundbreaking piece of software, and I…

> That line of thought can get pretty dark pretty fast.

so does "do unto others", if you follow it.

additionally you just argued that the same moral rules and rights that apply to you, a living breathing individual with an inner drive to enact right over wrong, can be transferred to an entire corporation, a legal construct blind to ethics unless forced by legal rules. which is kinda inhumane.

and, the golden rule is only a good moral yardstick if your choices in what you'd want to have others do unto you are moral in the first place. not a very nice thing to question, sorry, but your hypothetical example does feature you writing groundbreaking software but wanting to keep it closed source. depending on the software and how groundbreaking it is, that's an open question, very much up to discussion.

Re: Guy Finds StarCraft Source Code and Returns It to Blizzard

#280

Post by tripzilch »

braveo wrote: post #163
Dylan16807 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That degrades property rights, so it's bad for the many. Unless you systematically take most of the money away from billionaires, which could be totally justified if society wanted to enact such a tax. In the case of 20 year old source code, there's not really an important norm to uphold.

Wait, so let me get this straight. Your reasoning for that is "it degrades property rights", but you're for publicly releasing Blizzards property for "the good of the many"? You want the source to be available and you're trying to back into it with some sort of moralistic argument instead of just admitting that you want the work to be available but have no real basis for it outside of personal preference. Because tha…

> Your reasoning for that is "it degrades property rights", but you're for publicly releasing Blizzards property for "the good of the many"?

just the information on the cd, obviously.

degradation of property rights has nothing to do with copyrights.

and suddenly it's very clear, if the round bit of plastic was very valuable (maybe it's gold, maybe it's the only copy), then yeah obviously you're doing right if you give it back.

after you made a copy.

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