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Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

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Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#471

Post by brookst »

account42 wrote: post #431
charcircuit wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales or economics is not the only thing a developer may care about. Some people want control over their work and will be upset from people pirating their game even if it doesn't mean they lose a sale. Similarly many artists do not want you to repost their art or use their art as your profile picture.

Ok, but should we care if those developers/artists get what they want? Some companies would also really like to take games they have sold you away from you so they can sell you the next installment. Some developers don't want certain groups of people they dislike to enjoy their game. Not all things that developers want are reasonable.

Limiting sales to the “right” people is a totally different proposition than revoking sales after the fact. Both are dumb, but one is within a copyright owner’s rights, and the other is not.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#472

Post by vasco »

zufallsheld wrote: post #414
drdrey wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who do you hand the cash to in order to fund a website?

Sending cash via snail mail to buy stuff online exists. While Anna's archive does not support it, it certainly exists.

This is also forbidden by several post offices. In my country it's against the law to send money by mail.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#473

Post by brookst »

AngryData wrote: post #421
Aurornis wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I an exception? Years ago I was following development of an indie game. The developers wanted to provide a DRM-free experience. The game had some online functionality (leaderboard or something). They were surprised when the number of accounts accessing the online functionality exceeded their sales by a dramatic number. The developer updates grew more and more sad as they switched from discussing new features to…

I think part of the question though is also, would they have been as popular as they were without piracy, which does provide some advertising benefits through audience exposure. It is easy to say a really popular game would still be popular without piracy, but some lesser known games might never have gained any attention at all if there weren't enough people spreading word about it. Of course trying to quantify the s…

It’s difficult enough that perhaps we should leave it in the academic / ideological argument space and focus on whether copyright owners should be able choose whether or not to give away for free in the hopes of a net win.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#474

Post by brookst »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #417
tonyhart7 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah people pretending that "piracy" is good because they can try product first before buying which is true but lets be real out of 100 people doing that how many actually buy product in the end???? if net gain is positive then developer would not pay millions to license DRM

> out of 100 people doing that how many actually buy product in the end???? if net gain is positive then developer would not pay millions to license DRM Lets not pretend that markets and companies are actually rational.

Does the same go for pirates, or are they the sole rational actors here?

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#475

Post by dns_snek »

charcircuit wrote: post #399
kemayo wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difficult bit is working out what percentage of pirated copies are actually replacing a sale that would have happened if the content wasn't available to pirate. The more dramatic industry numbers like to claim it's 100%, which is ridiculous. It's certainly more than 0%, though. I'd assume that for your indie game, there were a lot of people who wound up thinking "I would play this if it's free, but I wouldn't spe…

Sales or economics is not the only thing a developer may care about. Some people want control over their work and will be upset from people pirating their game even if it doesn't mean they lose a sale. Similarly many artists do not want you to repost their art or use their art as your profile picture.

What does "control over their work" mean if it's not about losing a sale?

Developers exerting control over a copy that's already in someone's hands has never been a good thing. Too many games have had content ripped out years later because the developer had a change of heart, or was contractually obligated to remove it due to some licensing agreement (unbeknownst to their customers, of course). Both of these scenarios are immoral (arguably illegal) and don't deserve support.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#476

Post by charcircuit »

dns_snek wrote: post #475
charcircuit wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales or economics is not the only thing a developer may care about. Some people want control over their work and will be upset from people pirating their game even if it doesn't mean they lose a sale. Similarly many artists do not want you to repost their art or use their art as your profile picture.

What does "control over their work" mean if it's not about losing a sale? Developers exerting control over a copy that's already in someone's hands has never been a good thing. Too many games have had content ripped out years later because the developer had a change of heart, or was contractually obligated to remove it due to some licensing agreement (unbeknownst to their customers, of course). Both of these scenario…

For example an artist may create a character and they don't want that character to be used in relation to politics. Such an action may not affect sales but it would be annoying to happen to the artist especially if the politics didn't match their own. Similarly if it was promoting a religion that was not your own that could be uncomfortable.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#477

Post by carlosjobim »

ndriscoll wrote: post #317
carlosjobim wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until every new born child is forcefully implanted with a microchip in their brain at birth, you will never be able to stop people from thinking and having secrets. If people are not fairly compensated for sharing their secrets and discoveries with the public, they won't do it. They'll take it to the grave if so be. And we loose out on information which can benefit an enormous amount of people. So the quoted person i…

Trade secrets never expire and sharing them is a crime, so currently people can take them to their grave and the government will have their backs in doing so . A single person's secret is also unlikely to matter much next to the potential of global corporations' secrets, and the nature of corporations is that they are made of people who have little reason not to take an offer with a competitor after they've learned t…

We're way off topic, and it seems like this thread is just turning into unproductive argument. I'm just arguing that there will always be tension between information wanting to be free and information creators wanting to profit from their ideas or their work. We don't even have to involve companies and trade secrets in discussing that tension, it was just an example.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#478

Post by fundatus »

brianstorms wrote: post #174

Fuck that site. Offers people links to free PDF downloads of my book that I worked on for 32 years and finally got published by Pantheon Books in 2017. I didn't work all that fucking time for criminals like these to just break copyright law and make the book available for free. Fuck Anna's Archive, and I hope they go down in legal flames ASAP.

Well, according to the publicly available stats on annas archive, all versions of your book available there had 177 downloads combined. So it's probably not the end of the world.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#479

Post by account42 »

subscribed wrote: post #466
account42 wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH don't think those laws are conscionable because the money collected through those taxes is mainly paid to entrenched copyright cartels instead of being distributed to creators in a fair way.

Paying for media in iTunes store/Amazon Prime, streaming something off Netflix, buying a CD or even going to the cinema is also unfair to the creators. Looks like the only ethical way to consume the music is to buy it off the creator's website and go to concerts, yes? You are kind of moving the goalpost. The comment I replied to was suggesting downloading is unethical because it leads to the loss of sale (which was c…

I'm not moving any goalposts, I'm simply stating that I don't like these laws because they are essentially a tax that gets used enrich an arbitrary subset of creators (and other people) that doesn't match their stated purpose.

Personally I don't see any moral issue with copyright infringement with or without such laws.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#480

Post by bdhcuidbebe »

vasco wrote: post #470
bawolff wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I personally think the original bitcoin whitepaper is a work of genius. Balancing the soft game theory incentives with hard cryptography garuntees is really cool. I'd love to see more systems exploring this combination approach. There is a saying about not being able to solve a social problem with technology. Bitcoin is the blueprint on how to do that. Its everything that came after that point that is the probl…

> There is a saying about not being able to solve a social problem with technology. Bitcoin is the blueprint on how to do that. What problem did we solve with bitcoin?

The blockchain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

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