House of Reps and Obama kill SOPA

Crezth said:

Citation goddamn required. I'm sick of seeing the same old tired talking points about how profit motive is the only reason people do anything. It's not, and people did all kinds of things before there was profit motive. I want to see this point substantiated.

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If anything, the mods and AARs, competitions and so on that revolve around every game on earth shows that people often do things because they are passionate about something and want to share their passion.

The same with Fan-Art, Fan-fiction as well as the entire existence of Youtube. How many self-made, non-profit, funny, interesting videos are there?

Review blogs? Wikipedia?

Crezth said:

Citation goddamn required. I'm sick of seeing the same old tired talking points about how profit motive is the only reason people do anything. It's not, and people did all kinds of things before there was profit motive. I want to see this point substantiated.

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You can believe in ideals all you want but stuff like I-pods, I-phones, and macbooks and most other common products wouldn't have been invented without the ability to profit from such things. If profit wasn't the incentive, there's no reason Apple crap would have to cost twice as much as comparable computers with the exact same specs.

Most of our Pharm products are also researched, tested, and produced due to profit incentive. Those new Beta-blocks, antibiotics, weight loss pills? Yeah, profit incentive.

Breakthroughs today aren't usually the work of one person, its the culmination of work of many people and its usually funded by some corporate incentive. Government does fund some research but the funding of designing and inventing actual products comes mostly from the private sector and is profit-driven.

If anything, the mods and AARs, competitions and so on that revolve around every game on earth shows that people often do things because they are passionate about something and want to share their passion.

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Sorry, but Civ 4 would have never been developed if Firaxis couldn't make a profit off of it. Those developers and artists need to be paid well and the company needs to generate a profit, otherwise they fold. All those mods you mentioned wouldn't have been possible without the game itself.


Why does Intel and AMD spend so much to develop the next generation of computer chips? Its not because they kind and good hearted, its because they want to beat each other so you'll buy their products.


I have relatives that do business in China and they keep telling me that China just pirates stuff and never invents or creates anything on its own nowdays precisely because there is no copyright or patent protection in China. Why bother inventing it if someone is just going to steal it?

To sum up, corporations are greedy and like money. That's news to nobody.

Individuals? Some are, but not all are. Sure, the money is a plus, but it's not the only reason anybody ever does anything.

choxorn said:

To sum up, corporations are greedy and like money. That's news to nobody.

Individuals? Some are, but not all are. Sure, the money is a plus, but it's not the only reason anybody ever does anything.

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But see, corporations pour 99% of today's R&D funds(if you exclude governments). Individuals pour in very little themselves of the funding. Without that technology wouldn't go nearly as fast.

We've invented more stuff in the last 120 years than in the 5000 years before and its largely because the existence of corporations. They might be evil and stuff but they do speed up R&D and technological progress and by a lot. The products of university research is mostly academic. It takes corporation's R&D to take that knowledge and turn it into something useful. Without the profit incentive, we would not have most of the stuff we have today. Your computer, your lamp, you laptop, your I-Pod, your Sofa -- These are all products that were designed, created, tested, and perfected because the company that sold it to you wanted your money. You have to be blind to not see that.

Fallen Angel Lord said:

You can believe in ideals all you want but stuff like I-pods, I-phones, and macbooks and most other common products wouldn't have been invented without the ability to profit from such things. If profit wasn't the incentive, there's no reason Apple crap would have to cost twice as much as comparable computers with the exact same specs.

Most of our Pharm products are also researched, tested, and produced due to profit incentive. Those new Beta-blocks, antibiotics, weight loss pills? Yeah, profit incentive.

Breakthroughs today aren't usually the work of one person, its the culmination of work of many people and its usually funded by some corporate incentive. Government does fund some research but the funding of designing and inventing actual products comes mostly from the private sector and is profit-driven.

...

Why does Intel and AMD spend so much to develop the next generation of computer chips? Its not because they kind and good hearted, its because they want to beat each other so you'll buy their products.

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The things you spoke of are all physical products: They will still be salable even without copyright. Even if you can reverse-engineer the product(which is legal) it doesn't matter if you don't have the infrastructure to produce them or if your product doesn't have the millions of dollars of marketing on it as apple had. Heck Pharm products are a bad example as generic drugs exist but the branded versions still sell well.

Crezth said:

Saying you're against SOPA is a subjective claim that is impossible to verify, but saying you're for SOPA is not?

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No, that's not what I was saying. Actually both claims are subjective and unverifiable, but that's beside the point. My point is that saying you're against SOPA makes for good PR, and saying you're FOR SOPA makes for bad PR. So savvy executives are likely to lie, and say they oppose SOPA when they actually favor it. Seriously--why is it suddenly such a stretch to accept that corporate execs might tell lies???

Crezth said:

Why are you persisting with this? GOMtv employees and other individuals directly or indirectly sponsored by Blizzard have all spoken out against SOPA/PIPA!

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I know. It's highly likely they're lying.

Why is it so completely reasonable that all corporate execs lie, and yet so completely unreasonable that some might actually oppose SOPA/PIPA?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHL912jlyE0

I don't know if you have seen this, but I'm leaving it here. I have no opportunity to check if this is even close to reality, but very interesting.

The thing with that BasketCase is that what they believe deep down in their soul doesn't really matter.

What does matter is that Blizzard is openly speaking against SOPA, while at the same time being conspicuously absent from the various pro-SOPA letters, petitions and supporters list. Because ultimately there are only about a few hundred men in Washington who matters in this.

Would Blizzard like tighter piracy laws? Almost certainly (and they have a right). Do they think SOPA is that bad? Perhaps not. Are they taking the risk of playing both sides, with the possibility of their "private" support of SOPA being revealed and hurting them a great deal more than just honest support to begin with? Seems unlikely to me - precisely for the PR reasons.

nikosison said:

The things you spoke of are all physical products: They will still be salable even without copyright. Even if you can reverse-engineer the product(which is legal) it doesn't matter if you don't have the infrastructure to produce them or if your product doesn't have the millions of dollars of marketing on it as apple had. Heck Pharm products are a bad example as generic drugs exist but the branded versions still sell well.

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For stuff like Advil, sure, generic stuff exists. But cutting edge drugs, its all done now by the Pharms and it wouldn't be done mostly without their support. Yes, they are physical products, because thats what we use each day. It doesn't matter if we know how to build a computer in theory if no one actually builds one for people to use.

Yes, those products would be salable without the patent, but no one would bother making them in the first place without the laws. The I-pad would not have been created if it could not make money, all those shiny graphics cards/chips that you play games with would not have the R&D for development if they could not make profit. AMD generally cannot re-engineer intel's chips and use them as their own technology. If they could, they'd just buy an intel computer and then re-engineer it and put their brand on it. If you did that, you have face legal charges and would have to take your product off the market.

Would Blizzard like tighter piracy laws? Almost certainly (and they have a right).

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Actually I doubt they care that much. Most of the revenue lost to them is from foreign countries like China and SOPA/PIPA isn't going to do anything about that despite what it claims to be able to do.

Fallen Angel Lord said:

Very few people would try hard or invest large amounts of resources to create or invent anything if we didn't have them. There has to be a large financial incentive for innovation.

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You don't think that a system of property that demands arbitrary supply-bottlenecks demands a re-think? I thought that's why we got rid of craft guilds...

JtheJackal said:

I'm seeing quotes of the bill's supporters saying this is just a "publicity stunt". Such weak criticism suggests supporters aren't going to be winning the PR battle today.

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Of course it was a publicity stunt. The bill's opponents wanted to bring this issue to the public's attention, and what better way than to show them what they could be facing if the legislation were to pass?

choxorn said:

I clicked on the link, and the page won't load.

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It won't load for me, either, and it's my page! Sometimes the site has insanely slow load times due to traffic - people are busily trading Collectibles, since that program has been canceled and we're under a deadline to finish trading extras to people whose collections are incomplete. And the site went partially dark yesterday to protest SOPA.

I'll see if the link has changed (it was quite a long time ago that I put it in my sig), and if not, I'll send a message to their tech people. I'd post the lols here, but there are a LOT of them!

aronnax said:

The same with Fan-Art, Fan-fiction as well as the entire existence of Youtube. How many self-made, non-profit, funny, interesting videos are there?

Review blogs? Wikipedia?

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I had a chance to correspond with Mercedes Lackey (a well-known fantasy author) whose stories have inspired fans to create their own fanfic and post it on sites like fanfiction.net. I asked her if she supported a piece of legislation that could potentially kill that site - that hosts hundreds of thousands of stories, poems, songs, and plays written by fans who create them as a labor of love and who neither intend to make money off them, nor expect to. She said that in her own case, her agent didn't mind as long as the fans didn't try to sell what they wrote. I would expect that most copyright holders are the same - after all, it gives them publicity and new readers that they couldn't begin to buy with marketing that they'd have to otherwise PAY for! But there are always the uptight jerks who would happily wreck it for everybody.

Example: A few years ago, some Spanish Dune fans made their own movie adaptation of Dune and posted the trailer on YouTube. Kevin J. Anderson and Brian Herbert and their lawyers promptly made a stink about it - even though the Spanish fans bent themselves into pretzels to make it clear that their movie was a labor of love and they didn't want a single penny out of it, nor any copyright. Sadly I never got to see the trailer before it was taken down - I saw the photos, and they were impressive! Now imagine this scenario with SOPA in effect... KJA and BH go after these amateur Spanish film makers and end up screwing up You Tube users the world over!

This legislation is sheer overkill - like using a nuke to kill a spider, when all you really need is a flyswatter or a firm stomp with your shoe.

BasketCase said:

No, that's not what I was saying. Actually both claims are subjective and unverifiable, but that's beside the point. My point is that saying you're against SOPA makes for good PR, and saying you're FOR SOPA makes for bad PR. So savvy executives are likely to lie, and say they oppose SOPA when they actually favor it. Seriously--why is it suddenly such a stretch to accept that corporate execs might tell lies???

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It's not a stretch by any means, but why any more likely to support SOPA (secretly) rather than oppose it (publicly)?

I know. It's highly likely they're lying.

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...how can you assume this? You have yet to provide a single good example of a way in which Blizzard benefits from this legislation, let alone an example that trumps the very obvious losses Blizzard stands to sustain from seeing e-sports fail in North America. I mean, piracy is not really a big deal for Blizzard, as much of their profits come from people paying to use their online services, online services that you cannot use without paying for.

So even if you subscribe to the "corporations are always trying to deceive us and maximize their profits" mentality (not a baseless assumption, of course), it does not follow, logically, to say that it's likely that Blizzard is lying. SOPA/PIPA will not increase their profits and is damaging to their long-term prospects. So, I mean, that's it, really.

Traitorfish said:

You don't think that a system of property that demands arbitrary supply-bottlenecks demands a re-think? I thought that's why we got rid of craft guilds...

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Are you talking about a flawed system of property or a flawed business model? The fact is that corporations don't want to change their cash cows and are trying to pass defensive legislation to nuke their competitors and to give us no choice other than to be passive consumers of their [old] way of doing business.

This legislation if anything is anti-capitalist - yet another attempt to buy the lawmakers of the corrupt US Congress in order to cage in markets with government-backed force.

Edit: Yes, you're right on the money with the craft-guilds. That's exactly what this is like.

Well, in this case when I say "system of property", I should make it clear that I'm not talking about private property as such, but specifically about "intellectual property". The comparison to the craft-guilds comes because they similarly possessed a form of abstract property, in the latter case the monopoly on legitimate practice of the techniques of their craft, which proved incompatible with modern production. So I think that it is possible that capitalism may yet offer some resolution to this apparent impasse; what I'm critical of, here, is the sort of re-entrenchment proposed by FAL.

Traitorfish said:

Well, in this case when I say "system of property", I should make it clear that I'm not talking about private property as such, but specifically about "intellectual property". The comparison to the craft-guilds comes because they similarly possessed a form of abstract property, in the latter case the monopoly on legitimate practice of the techniques of their craft, which proved incompatible with modern production. So I think that it is possible that capitalism may yet offer some resolution to this apparent impasse; what I'm critical of, here, is the sort of re-entrenchment proposed by FAL.

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I completely agree with you. I think it is the means which will become illegal and be eliminated, purged and censored - the means for sharing, uploading, posting, recording, distributing. Under this law, the average citizen will have these means taken out of their hands and outlawed - most of the population will be perma-banned from participation in the knowledge economy except as passive recipients of standardised, authorised corporate products.

So this is effectively an attempt to de facto make certain actions illegal to the many and the exclusive preserve of a few. Exactly like a guild, only more so as it pertains to an entire World of knowledge rather than simply to a few products.

Also, it's far from dead as the thread title seems to assert.

tonberry said:

I think that what "kill" PC gaming is simply the rise and diversification of console gaming. FPS, western rpg, etc, the console would absorb those genre one after another. Today, all that's left is MMO and strategy games.

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Except they don't really "absorb" it, they strip them down of their depth and just make a casual version of them.
Pull up old PC games from the shelves and just look at how they are more sophisticated than 95 % of what is released these days. It's very striking.

It's just like movies : targeting the stupid crowd makes big blockbuster. Making actually intelligent films is... rather niche.

Fallen Angel Lord said:

Very few people would try hard or invest large amounts of resources to create or invent anything if we didn't have them. There has to be a large financial incentive for innovation.

If you invent something or create something(and your weren't paid by someone else or a company to do so), you(and only you) should have the right to make large sums of money from it for a limited period of time.

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Not that I necessarily support the complete removal of copyright laws (though I support a SEVERE slashing in them), but do you really think most of the creativity comes from money ?

Seems to remember that, actually, it's when you put money that creativity dries up, as people become more interested by the profits than the creation process.
Don't tell me games these days are more creatives then before...

Akka said:

Not that I necessarily support the complete removal of copyright laws (though I support a SEVERE slashing in them), but do you really think most of the creativity comes from money ?

Seems to remember that, actually, it's when you put money that creativity dries up, as people become more interested by the profits than the creation process.
Don't tell me games these days are more creatives then before...

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Look, if not for the money, we'd still be playing tetris. The high-end 3d graphics and environments would have never come to be and all those GFX cards required to play these shiny new games wouldn't exist either. You probably wouldn't have the ultra-powerful computers to play them on. The R&D and the Mass production of such things all depend on corporate research. You can be creative all you want, but you can't actually make anything without the funding to do so.

The amount that has gone into R&D in the last 100 years is far greater(even proportionately) than every before and corporate research is key to that.

You don't think that a system of property that demands arbitrary supply-bottlenecks demands a re-think? I thought that's why we got rid of craft guilds

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Without these bottlenecks, no one would be willing to supply in the first place. Why bother spending millions or billions in R&D on a product when you can't make anything off of it?

I know some of you guys want to believe that people would develop technological and useful products just as fast just for "the good of humanity" if profit didn't exist. But, realistically, that just doesn't happen. People aren't angels and very few will expend the extra effort if there's little personal gain from it. You see that in the office every day. Don't try to pretend it doesn't exist.

The system of patents and copyrights needs to exist in order for research funding to be invested to advance technology and make new products.

Fallen Angel Lord said:

Look, if not for the money, we'd still be playing tetris. The high-end 3d graphics and environments would have never come to be and all those GFX cards required to play these shiny new games wouldn't exist either. You probably wouldn't have the ultra-powerful computers to play them on. The R&D and the Mass production of such things all depend on corporate research. You can be creative all you want, but you can't actually make anything without the funding to do so.

The amount that has gone into R&D in the last 100 years is far greater(even proportionately) than every before and corporate research is key to that.

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He was talking about creativity, not graphics.