Oh look, Sony revoking more licenses for video content that people “bought”.
You know what say: if buying isn’t owning then pirating isn’t stealing.
Pirating isn’t stealing because it’s addition not subtraction. You’re creating more of a thing not taking a thing away from someone who had a thing. Actually what Sony is doing here is closer to stealing as people had a thing they purchased and now they don’t.
Here’s my risky comment of the day.
I think piracy isn’t like stealing, but it’s still wrong in some interesting and nuanced ways. Just so you know, I’m in no position to judge people for pirating, because I’ve done my fair share of sailing the high seas. However, I would still like to discuss the ethical aspects of piracy and how it compares with stealing.
IMO, calling it stealing is completely wrong, but free-riding or trespassing could be more suitable words for this. Obviously, the movie industry would love to compare it with the most severe crime they can come up with, but they certainly have financial incentives behind that reasoning. I’m looking at it from a more neutral perspective.
Stealing has clear and direct harm associated with it, whereas the effects of piracy are more subtle and indirect. Free-riding a bus or sneaking into a circus (AKA trespassing) are somewhat similar, but there’s clear indirect harm. If you watch a football match from the outside of the fence, it’s probably still considered free-riding, but I would put that into a completely different category. IMO it’s also closer to piracy than the other examples.
Most pirates shouldn’t be counted as lost customers, so the argument about depriving the creator of their rightful income is only partially correct. If pirating wasn’t possible, but paying for the movie was, vast majority of these people would prefer to do something else like, go outside and play football with friends. To some extent, piracy still does reduce the demand for the pirated material, so there’s an indirect harm associated with it, and that’s what makes it unethical IMO. Still not wrong enough that I would stop doing it, especially considering what the alternatives are. Again, I have no moral high ground in this situation, and I’m willing to call my own actions unethical. You can call yours whatever you want.
Piracy isn’t stealing, the same way riding the subway without a ticket isn’t stealing.
Riding the subway without a ticket would be called, in many jurisdictions, theft of services
It’s nice that they made the distinction between regular theft and theft of services. The harm associated with them isn’t the same, so it would make sense to treat them differently. However, I still think that describing free-riding as a theft of any kind is a bit too harsh.
More like guidelines than actual rules
This is where our lazy lawmakers need to step in and protect consumers. Make it illegal to revoke these types of licenses over greedy, lazy, exploitative business mergers and acquisitions. If corporations want to fight that, then they shouldn’t be able to “sell” digital movies or games anymore: Any time you go to “purchase” digital content, it must plainly tell you that you’re renting said content for an undetermined amount of time.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… It’s almost like companies don’t actually want you to ever truly own anything. A rent economy is toxic and rotten, and it’s infuriating that it’s literally becoming our entire economy.
Companies change the contracts all the time and customers just agree to them.
Consumer protection would help, so maybe it’s time to start voting for the people who support it.
I want a lot of things from the US Congress, but platform planks like better consumer projection/rights just sound like easy votes for any candidate. I can’t wrap my head around why nobody is at least lying that they’ll address this.
They’re probably getting paid specifically to not address this is the issue.
Meanwhile, the EU is crafting all sorts of consumer protection laws just like the member countries have been doing long before even joining the union.
Yeah if I have to go all digital that’s the last console I get. At least with a PC I can get DRM free copies.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… […]
While I will freely admit that the lack of a physical drive is a huge way to drive downloaded (and licensed, revokable) content controlled by the company, it’s worth noting that physical media is really not all that great a medium for transferring things like games or movies anymore. Blu-ray discs can hold, in ideal situations, around 50GB of data. A lot of games – especially AAA games, are well beyond that. I think Spider Man 2 came in at like 85GB? The internet says Hogwarts Legacy is ~75GB on XBox.
Network connectivity, and downloading content to our devices is almost certainly going to be the way a lot of the world works going forward. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to back our content up elsewhere, or offload it to some other device.
Your right in noting that the laws and regulations need to keep up and protect consumers’ right to the content they’ve purchased.
edit: Here, I’ll bold the important part.
Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.
Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.
Would the reading speed of those SD cards be as fast as the reading speed of Blurays? Or is the reading part of using Blurays unnecessary in the first place because most of the game is loaded onto the console itself?
I imagine you could write-protect the SD cards the same way you do with Blurays, so if the question above is a non-issue, then that’d be quite a cool solution. SD cards pushing terabytes easily now, they’d be large enough for sure.
But then again, afaik, the discs are not really needed and don’t need to accommodate that much space in them except for licensing and DRM stuff, I think, since the majority of the game is downloaded regardless, right?
Would the reading speed of those SD cards be as fast as the reading speed of Blurays?
Disc speeds are notoriously slow. PS vs N64, Cartridge based systems were instant where as discs had to be loaded into a ram space/buffer and had terrible load times. The difference back then was that disc’s had a boatload more storage where cartridges were very expensive to get any significant capacity. That’s still kind of true today, but at scale not nearly as much as it used to be, and max capacity of sd cards are WAY bigger than discs overall.
6x Bluray drives (which is what is in the PS4 for example) read at about 27MB/s. I don’t know what speed the PS5 is, but bluray supports up to 72MB/s as a standard and has it’s highest capacity at ~100/128 GB.
Meanwhile… You can hop on amazon and buy 200MB/s sd cards no problem. I’ve seen them as “fast” as 300 MB/s, and as high capacity as 1TB. So easily 3x more bandwidth, and significantly more capacity. Usually costs more though. Some weird side-benefits though… You can actually update the game that lives on the card. You can leave some assets on the card that get called less often when you install to SSD to save space on internal storage. Or if you’re live loading assets from the sd card to an internal SSD, any load times will be significantly faster. You CANNOT do these things on spinning disc, it’s too slow.
The real difference here is latency though. A disc has to spin… You have a physical laser head that has to seek to a particular sector. That’s slow as hell and at the density of tracks that you have to do on BD-XL disks, you can actually overshoot tracks if they’re laid out poorly which increases the delay of getting the data. SD cards don’t care at all, everything is nearly instantly responsive.
So yes, sd cards are significantly faster than bluray discs in a number of ways.
Edit: Minor edit to make it more clear.
Thanks for the detailed response. Lots of interesting new information!
SD cards rule, then lol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#BDXL
Even normal UHD BRDs can and do hold upwards of 100GB, as those can have 4 layers (~25GB each layer).
A lot of game size bloat is due to lazy optimization. Lords of the Fallen on PC–while it had questionable game performance for some folk–the game looked gorgeous and was quite a massive world, yet the download for it was around 40GB.
There are very few games I can think of that warrant being 100+GB. And even if they’re more than 100GB, what’s stopping them from just using 2 Blu-rays? Remember the PS1 days when games like FF7 had 4 discs? Or when WoW came out, it came with like 8 installation discs or some other absurd number? Blu-rays are more expensive, sure, but I can’t imagine games getting to be more than 2 discs long during the lifespan of Blu-ray as a storage medium anyway.
Except that games are broken at release and need day1 patch in order to work. Although you will ship BD, the day update servers are taken down, your physical copy won’t allow you to play the game either.
The only question I have is : Is torrenting game patchs / updates concidered piracy as well ? If it is, we are definitely doomed.
I’ve been boycotting Sony since the CD rootkit debacle & haven’t regretted my decision yet.
I forgot about that whole thing. For those that need a reminder like me:
Damn i remember that shit.
I lost a very expensive (at the time) CD-RW to that shit.
How’d that happen?
He smashed it in a fit of rage
To shreds, you say?
Was its IDE port rent controlled?
To shreds you say?
Its barely the second month of the year and these companies are nose diving to the fucking bottom.
If what they’re doing isn’t theft, then digital “piracy” isn’t theft either.
🏴☠️ sharing is caring.
if they pull this shit with music, i’m gonna have to look for self hosted music streaming apps.
Why stream music when SD cards are approaching TB?
Because 90% of standard phones now don’t have SD card slots. Thanks pixel
I want to buy a fairphone, but they refuse to add wireless charging (even as an add-on) and they also removed the headphone jack so that they could pish their Bluetooth earbuds which they discontinued after barely a few years, now they have Bluetooth headphones where they will likely do the same. Completely contrary to their ethos.
Though I don’t see how it relates to my comment in the slightest. Showing that 1 phone that has an SD card slot is just my point. There are few good phones being made currently with SD card slots.
There is a Venn diagram of camera quality, software support, headphone, and SDcard where you can have 3 but never all 4.
the headphone jack is unforgivable for many users. as an audiophile i often use external DACs anyways, but it still sucks ass to carry around an “emergency audio adapter” which stops working after like a year (even the expensive ones) compared to a built-in one.
fuck you fairphone, but the upsides of the 4 outweighed the downsides for me.
We gonna go after every company that does this because pretty much all of them are.
I’m game.
Everybody seems to say this to me until I tell them that the companies that own the rights they are selling to distributors are also at fault and we should blame both. Then people are like “what? No! Why would we punish Paramount or Fox, or Universal?”
I feel more and more justified about piracy every article I read about licensing and stuff just getting taken away after having paid good money for stuff
Especially since they suddenly become not so sure when talking about feeding things under IP to “AIs”. It seems that when some process is not too open, like dataset collection, people doing it get used to bending laws they themselves rely on.
Actually this should be leveraged.
One approach - IP is solid, so those big companies championing “AIs” will have to pay royalties for everything produced by an “AI” which had been fed something of that IP. That’s just logically a Gordian knot.
Another approach - IP is an artificial concept which is complete bullshit, then “digital piracy” is not a crime, and neither is commercialization of fan works over some IP without paying royalties.
Anything in between would mean that a company has more rights under the law than an individual. Would be a good analogy to cutting that knot IMHO, but a bad outcome.
