Absence of such a claim is a commentary on its own, intended or not. Economic activity is almost always presented as a positive thing. It’s said to create jobs, generate wealth, increase production, etc. And here most of the things on the list moved massive amounts of capital without producing any of the positive effects. We get an odd WWW proposal that did actually produce those effects, but for each of those we also get a dozen of blockchain links. I’d say same goes for AI. While it has more utility than blockchain ever did it’s hard to say it was net positive overall to date.
How much money? I mean, the natural answer is full price but that’s not the amount the author gets from a regular sale. There’s a whole range where it’s cheaper to freebooters and still more profitable to the author.
I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
I suppose there’s a similar dynamic in publishing where the overhead created by all the intermediaries is significant compared to the actual work done by the author, editor, designers, and so on.
If you send the author half of what the book costs, there's an almost 100% chance this is more than they would have made if you had bought the book. If you send the author 20%, that's roughly what most authors earn per book sale. It can be substantially higher or lower depending on a bunch of factors, but I think it's a reasonable rule of thumb.
> I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
Streaming is a particularly brutal example for musicians. Book authors make quite a bit more per book sale than musicians make per stream.
Wouldn't it be cool if we could get to the point where authors (and artists generally) are making more from voluntary direct payments than they are from the platforms?
It would be a great way to demonstrate how broken the funding model is, and all of that money would be money that didn't contribute to the surveillance/censorship tech that copyright is used to justify.
By this measure tweeting “end your life” at no one in particular should be classified as a weapons of mass destruction.
There’s intent to cause harm. If people actually do, it would substitute achievement of the intent. The mechanism is novel, unlike knives and bullets. Maybe hit rate is a bit low but still, the potential number of targets makes it almost a certainty it would work.
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We learned back in 80s—even earlier—that mixing data and executable code is not a good idea. It took some decades to move onto a different approach. Now we’re back to it with LLMs. It’s not a novel problem. The results are very much predictable.
Nobody thinks a single tweet telling someone to commit suicide has a significant probability of success. It manifestly does not or else we would be an extinct species by this point.
People have been convicted for using words to convince other people to commit suicide.
Broad appeal? You can’t do anything good aiming for broad appeal. People like too different things, they all don’t mash together well. If you add to many tings that appeal to different people you end up with incoherent mess. Instead of appealing to everyone you end up pissing off everyone in many different ways.
Look at the Ring of Power. Did it have broad appeal? Maybe, first 2 episodes brought in 25 million viewers. The whole first season was watched by 150 millions, despite season completion being ~40%. For reference, X-Files pulled in more only in 1 of its 11 seasons with most under 20 mil, and Friends lowered in 20-25 mil with only one season being about 30 mil. So the numbers are impressive but do you know anyone who loves the Rings of Power? Anywhere near to how people love SG-1?
This is one of the reason why that law will surely be challenged and very likely invalidated by SCOTUS. Trade secret protection is a very fundamental part and if this is forced to be broken by legally compelled speech, then it needs to have very creative interpretations over judicial precedents.
99% of the server code doesn't deserve trade secret protection, and fulfilling the goal of games continuing to work doesn't require releasing the other 1%. They can keep their matchmaking algorithm secret while releasing the code that lets people straightforwardly connect to each other. They can keep most of their code secret.
What a fucked situation where a company that fails who took money from people on the premise of a service existing no longer offers that service, says it's against the first amendment to enable people to continue having access to the product they paid for.
If this only applies to new sales then there is nothing that must be broken. The developers would need to choose technologies where license allows this. Those that don't wouldn't get new sales from game developers.
It's the same as GPL and similar licenses. If you don't want to publish your source that contains trade secrets then don't incorporate GPL licensed code.
There are also already various laws which compel certain types of speech. Consider things like nutrient labels or ingredient lists.
Issues like that are part of why the law is only going to apply to new releases.
If you still choose to license something you can't release later, and it's critical to the game's operation, then that's a deliberate liability and you'll need to replace it.
That sounds like a bad incentive. Lots of games license software like Photon to run game servers. For many games, building something like that is a non-starter.
It's not like it specifically has to be open source. Photon can license their software in a way that allows for free servers that are still tied to the specific game. And then companies can buy that.
And it's not expensive for Photon to do that, so I don't see why they wouldn't add that feature for a modest price or even free. (And that's assuming the license doesn't already allow it.)
I’m not sure what you mean. Photon makes money running game servers as a service. It wouldn’t surprise me if their business wasn’t viable selling software alone.
As far as I can tell, you can have Photon run the servers or you can license them to run yourself. Though they clearly prefer the former.
Either way, there's not much revenue coming in to most games by the time the developer wants to abandon them, and Photon's not getting paid much either. There's a lot of ways to make this work out monetarily.
It’s not that simple. Many of the newer products are designed cloud-first.
I’d love to see you rise to the challenge. If you think there’s an opportunity to make money here, “lots of ways to make this work,” perhaps take it up yourself.
Cloud first is fine as long as there's a fallback. Photon has a fallback.
Can you name something that's stuck on the cloud on a technical level and also couldn't be substituted with a mild dev effort?
Right now I don't think it's a good money making opportunity. Becoming one would need Photon or some other significant service provider completely refusing to license their software in a way that's compatible with this law, and assurance that they'll continue to refuse while I build my entire product around supplementing/replacing them.
Simple: that contract would be illegal. It's that simple. You can't put yourself into a position where you would be violating the law. The licensor would be on the hook for violating the law. This is "you can’t outsource compliance". Either your contract makes sure that you are compliant or a judge would make you both.
so a new law making it required would likely solve the legal issues, and gets the dev team (the only ones thinking about users or doing what's right) get what they wanted from the start?
I doubt it. I don't think another law _reduces_ legal issues. If anything it makes the situation more complicated. The plug is still getting pulled and I don't think this materially changes the outcome. If the company shuts down I'm not sure there is a legal obligation to release the code or refund. What entity would be responsible for that work?
Take I’d for example. They released source code for genre defining extremely popular games and were fine.
And how often is code reused anyway? Every online game seem to either use mostly stock server code that comes with the engine or build anew every time.
I just want my brightness/volume indicator back in the middle of my screen without fluffy graphics.... :( I dont know why it isnt even a power-user option....
