They still track you? Is there much of a difference? Get an account you only use for YT, I can't imagine the difference in data leaking will be that much greater if they track you just by IP/other fingerprinting vs a session?
Me too! Except I wondered why my non-tech wife had stopped complaining about ChatGPT limits, and it turns out she has quietly been subscribing to Pro plan. It's happening.
I have an opposing viewpoint here. Incompressible to me how normalised copyright theft has become in the commercial emulation space.
There are huge YouTube channels such as Linus Tech Tips reviewing $100 devices that contain copyrighted games that would have retailed for over a million dollars. This is not normal and is very different from an individual downloading some ROMs.
And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them.
It's not incomprehensible, it's actually quite understandable.
Being able to play a full catalog of retro games these days is just not possible without piracy and emulation. Sure some games are still available like with what Nintendo is doing with NES games or MSFT is doing with original Xbox games. But go outside of that narrow catalog and finding the other games legally is impossible outside of going into retro game stores and hoping they have a copy.
I'll use the Need for Speed franchise here as an example. You point blank cannot find legit ways of playing the original underground games, they aren't sold in stores, and not sold via any digital avenue. I would have loved to pay for both underground games but I was forced to pirate them since there was literally no other option.
Using “forced” in the passive voice is telling here. Wouldn’t it show more agency to say you chose to pirate them because your desire to play them outweighed your estimate of the moral / legal downsides?
Wouldn't it show more agency to acknowledge you chose to focus on the word 'forced' because your desire to make a rhetorical critique outweighed your interest in engaging with the substantive issue of abandoned software preservation?
Perhaps. I admit I find the phrase “I was forced to pirate this game” so jarring that it is really hard to process the text around it, so maybe I missed some substance.
People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
Like, they can write the best and most entertaining video game of all time, one that makes you pass out if not almost die from joy, and they have the right to sell only a single copy for $10 quadrillion and sue the shit out of anyone who plays it without their permission.
And there is no right, or need, to play a video game as far as I'm aware.
None of what you described is a moral downside. Yes, people already admit that it is illegal to engage in copyright infringement regarding stuff that it is impossible to buy in the first place.
That has little to do with the fact that it does not contain any moral downsides to doing that.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
IMO they shouldn't - not for intellectual property.
Look, IP laws like Copyright make a lot of sense when we're encouraging innovative and rewarding companies for putting something unique and desirable on the market.
But if it's not on the market, there's nothing to incentivize or protect. Then it just becomes hoarding, or, more often - using IP as leverage to artificially inflate the value of it. Basically, you can not sell things, thereby making the thing more scarce on purpose, so later on you can maybe scrape more cash.
This sucks. It's bad for consumers, it's bad for markets. So, maybe we should consider disincentivizing this.
Proposal: if you do not sell copyrighted material, you forfeit the copyright. You keep all the protections and incentives of copyright. But! You essentially legalize pirating old shit or you force companies to put their money where their mouth is and distribute said old shit.
If this old shit is truly a harm to someone's bottom line, then uh, you need to be selling it. Otherwise there's no bottom line to harm.
> People have the right to be greedy capricious dickheads with the property (physical, intellectual, and real) that they own and you are infringing on that right.
I'm pretty sure the post you're replying to was referring to "legit ways" as in the purchase would be actually from the current rights holder. Buying on the secondary market comes with its own problems:
1. The people who made-- er, own the rights to the game get no financial benefit. Functionally, what is the difference to EA if I download a copy of NFS: Underground, or if I buy a copy from some rando on eBay? Yes, the courts care, but it's not exactly like I'm supporting the artists.
2. You are not guaranteed a legitimate copy. eBay sellers will ship duplicated discs all the time, whether contemporary copies or ones made recently to meet the demands of retro gaming. Can you claim you got duped and offload your moral responsibility to the seller? Maybe. But you could still be a pirate.
3. Copyright law is complicated, and you might still be pirating if you do get a legitimate copy. The arcade cabinet is a great example. Did the seller own it outright, or was it on a lease that got abandoned when the game was no longer profitable? In the latter case, your purchase would not be covered by the US first-sale doctrine. So you could spend £4095 and then may as well hoist the jolly roger.
4. The used game market is a long-standing problem currently being solved by games publishers. It will not be long before there are no old CDs of retro games available because they never existed in the first place.
I've just always been weirded out when people hold up gray market purchases of used media as some paradigm of moral responsibility. It's like a financial transaction with the transfer of physical media is some magical incantation that erases all questions of ownership.
There was a brief attempt in late 90s Japan by game publishers to curtail used game sales by campaigning against it on back covers of games in late 90s/early 2000s. They stopped after the court said no to it.
Additionally, the market is also seeing used games as collectibles like cars and are inflating their prices that make it out of reach to actual buyers in favor of collectors. (cf. WATA Games)
> I would have loved to pay for both underground games but I was forced to pirate them since there was literally no other option.
The alternative is to play a different game, which is what the media rights holders want you to do. Or buy it at a second hand shop or off a collector. People aren't mandated to sell you something in the form you want, and you aren't entitled to buy it.
Like I have a growing collection of scifi books that are out of print. I don't complain that I can't pirate the ebooks in order to read them, I look for them where they can be found.
So it's not immoral for a rights holder to manipulate you into buying more product...but it is immoral for me to continue to use the product I want, even after the company has made it impossible for me to compensate them for it?
I didn't make any comment on morality, and there's no "continue to use the product" in this entire discussion. It's "buy an old product that a company doesn't sell"
For most of human history, it has been completely normal. It was fine to make your own cave painting look exactly like the one you saw on a visit to a neighbouring cave. It wasn't til the early 1700 that there was any formal idea of copyright, and almost 1900 before it became pervasive.
Even today, nobody gets their panties in a knot if you sell a copy of the Mona Lisa. Everyone accepts that the copyright has long expired. In other situations (as in retro games) the only question is how long, and under what circumstances, copyright should persist. Reasonable people can disagree. Making it a moral issue is a bit tiring.
It says that the legal basis for the investigation is article 171 ter of the Italian Copyright Law, which lists a lot of things that boil down to selling what you have no right to sell. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/477668 The one part that is different is "c) promotes and organizes the unlawful activities under paragraph 1" which might also apply to a reviewer who does not directly sell things. But it's not just "promotes or organizes" either, so I think they'd want indications of quite substantial involvement before launching an investigation.
Need to do this to music too. Otherwise you'll end up in a situation where the game still can't be distributed in its original state because the music that's used is still under copyright. Even when the original developers of a game re-release it, sometimes they have to change the soundtrack if they used licensed music because acquiring a new license may be too expensive or just entirely disallowed.
i can do this without the snark: it's infringement, it's not theft, and changing the word to theft doesn't strengthen your argument at all. copyright inherently immoral in my opinion, and even outside my extreme opinion, it's current implementation in the US objectively doesn't align with what most people would call "good".
i doesn't make sense to respect the draconian copyright laws to the extent of not distributing 40 year old video games, that are easily obtained after 5 seconds of online searching, and whose theoretical potential purchase has zero impact on the actual working class people and families that originally made them. you are, at best, allowing Nintendo to maybe make a few bucks, if Nintendo even had the option to still buy these games in any way (they usually dont, i think)
There is also another market for these games with platforms like Pico-8 and Tic-80 where games are open source and one can simply pull the curtain, read the code and learn how the saussage is made. Many of these modern retro games are way more fun than most of the older copyrighted content and the community is thriving too.
Perhaps he should have put/ said a disclaimer on each video.."This reviews is not intended to promote....".
That would put him on an an equal footing with any geologists that couldn't predict an earthquake.
Oh, wait...
No, one cannot just comply with the "general rules" of GDPR, you have to comply with every last letter of the considerable legal legislation. The fact that the rules can be generalised to a reasonable few paragraphs is meaningless.
That’s just not true. I’ve consulted with a few privacy legal agencies and spent a lot of time evaluating the law. Some sections are even worded in a way to allow wiggling room for prosecutors, or require good will on your part. What would even be supposed to happen if you weren’t „compliant“? In the end it’s always about specific kinds of misconduct, and that means fines. The amount of a fine depends on the severity of the misconduct. The GDPR isn’t different at all from other laws in that regard.
If you’re found to be in breach of the GDPR, the severity of the breach as well as the amount of negligence or malevolence on your part is taken under consideration to decide on the fine. The prosecuting attorney also doesn’t have to actually fine you if it’s clear you put in effort and acted in good will.
For a concrete example, a startup usually isn’t required to provide a fully fledged data deletion policy, but if you cannot roughly outline how you intend to handle people’s requests to delete their data, that doesn’t look good. If you don’t even have some sort of privacy policy on your website, that looks worse.
Nobody can implement the GDPR 100%. But you can try to handle data responsibly, and if someone discovers you don’t and you try your best to fix the error (which is on your part, mind you), nothing draconian is going to happen.
And we’re still talking about basic respect towards your users or customers here, it’s not like someone asks something ridiculous of you.
Perhaps regulators in diferent countries take different attitudes; in the UK, it's very soft-touch. Only the most egregious, repeated flouting of the regs attracts a penalty.
As far as I can see, the Irish regulator is even softer; you could be mistaken for thinking that the Irish regulator's job is to make sure that US tech companies don't move their server sheds away from Ireland.
I'm skeptical that it's a deliberate conspiracy, and this is not a scientific test, but I just checked the following news sites, and not one of them had any related hits for "Ohio" listed on their main pages:
BBC America
Reuters
CNN
Fox News
The New York Times
The Seattle Times
MSNBC
CNBC
Seems a little weird for sure. All of those sources have coverage AFAIK, but one has to dig to see it. I imagine algorithmic content promotion is at least partly a factor. I.e. if people aren't clicking on news about that story as much, it probably falls off the main page. So perhaps it's more like paid corporate Wikipedia shills, except it's click farms to promote other content and get the embarrassing news off of the front page?
That having been said, I know of at least two topics the American press is likely to deliberately downplay or avoid reporting on - solo suicides and certain types of civil unrest - so while I strongly dislike conspiracy theories in general and think it's unlikely in this case, I can't rule out the possibility that this is another one of those topics.
I just loaded up CNN and saw 20 stories before having enough. The worst example being a celebrity pregnancy. I did not note anything about this story. I viewed the mobile website and desktop version.
I can think of a billion things going on right now that are vastly more important than anything about a celebrity pregnancy.
