Random Rants 92 - Not Enough Snerk

[Chukchi Husky]

That would rather seem to be exploitation, no?
Like... slavery.

What they said did remind me of how slave owners did complain about how freeing the slaves is bad because it's a loss of their property, but they'll just say that it's completely different. It's not exploitation, they should be grateful to have a job and not complain because of how it improves their lives.

Don't tell that Github .[
Or the US federal government , since anything what a US federal employee produces is in the public domain, and therefore free to use (e.g. pictures from NASA).
Or Volvo, who made the seatbelt free.

Well, you know what we here say about your friends anyways.

They hate open source software because it's free, there's no quality control and the example they used of open source software is a virus that can disable people's internet connections.
As for NASA, they told me that NASA has copyrighted everything they ever did, telling me that NASA makes money every time the "One small step" line is quoted.
As for the seat belt, they said that Mythbusters proved that the seat belt is dangerous.

I worked hard and created a bunch of money in my bank account. I can't give it away for free? I have to sell it at a profit? Seems silly.

You're free to do anything with your money. It's your money that you've worked for, you didn't steal it for take it from someone else.

 

[Grendeldef]

Giving something for free isn't preventing someone else making profit out of it. It might make profiting more difficult but that's a greed issue, not a moral one.

The Cynical Brit before his sad & untimely exit from the game of life also enthusiastically argued that consumers shouldn't be able to re-sell their games they don't want to play anymore as it's taking money from the creators and hence limiting their opportunities to make more goodies for the people. I didn't then & still don't agree with that but I can see the point.

 

[Takhisis]

No idea if I can justify or not it but I feel that the moral implications of piracy fades with the age of the item being pirated. I have zero problems with pirating old films or old games. Perhaps I should but I definitely don't. Newer stuff is a different matter all together.

I recently had a long talk with a friend who works in a bookshop. He explained to me how printing houses print, say, twice as many books as the number that, at the current selling price, will make them break even. Anything sold after that is a profit. Even if it's reselling at bulk rates (often buying by weight) it's still a profit. Which is how I can suddenly get a crapton of books at €1-2 each, because they came out within the last five years but unless you want them right now you just wait a couple of years and for the publisher it's still a profit. That's the business model with books on paper.

With videogames, too, they do a similar thing. Sure, you can buy a copy of MDK (1996), but you can't tell me that you still need to sell it at 40 dollars just to cover the game's costs when they have long since been amortised.

Also, why shouldn't you be permitted from installing the game on more than one computer? You buy the CD, you get to play it.

I worked hard and created a bunch of money in my bank account. I can't give it away for free? I have to sell it at a profit? Seems silly.

‘It's your money’ except that it's not.

 

[The_J]

What they said did remind me of how slave owners did complain about how freeing the slaves is bad because it's a loss of their property, but they'll just say that it's completely different. It's not exploitation, they should be grateful to have a job and not complain because of how it improves their lives.



They hate open source software because it's free, there's no quality control and the example they used of open source software is a virus that can disable people's internet connections.
As for NASA, they told me that NASA has copyrighted everything they ever did, telling me that NASA makes money every time the "One small step" line is quoted.
As for the seat belt, they said that Mythbusters proved that the seat belt is dangerous.



You're free to do anything with your money. It's your money that you've worked for, you didn't steal it for take it from someone else.

uufff... before I write a long post... are you aware how they're wrong (you might), or do you require a long post? (which I'd happily write if necessary).

 

[Takhisis]

I'll just point out that you're replying to Chukchi Husky.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Giving something for free isn't preventing someone else making profit out of it. It might make profiting more difficult but that's a greed issue, not a moral one.

The Cynical Brit before his sad & untimely exit from the game of life also enthusiastically argued that consumer's shouldn't be able to re-sell their games they don't want to play anymore as it's taking money from the creators and hence limiting their opportunities to make more goodies for the people. I didn't then & still don't agree with that but I can see the point.

I have no moral objections to pirated games in personal use as companies don't seem to have any morals or responsibilities to not release technically unplayable or unwatchable crap. Discs without rootkits should be mandatory, not optional.
I played pirated Civ5 two years while having the legal copy as I didn't see the reason for being online in a single player game without anything to buy or sell. I also happily played D2 expansion as I was introduced to it in a weekend LAN-party. I bought it later to support the company for their excellent product but after 20 years the game is still wrapped in original plastics.

I think they agree with that idea from the Cynical Brit, not about reselling games but about how game companies need profit in order to make more games as profit is the sole motivation to do anything.

They're console gamers, not really playing PC games that much so the idea that games can be buggy to the point of being unplayable is something that they believe is a myth made up by PC gamers. That PC gamers try to fix these games they see as wrong, because it "goes against the developer's intent".

I recently had a long talk with a friend who works in a bookshop. He explained to me how printing houses print, say, twice as many books as the number that, at the current selling price, will make them break even. Anything sold after that is a profit. Even if it's reselling at bulk rates (often buying by weight) it's still a profit. Which is how i can suddenly get a crapton of books at €1-2 each, because they came out within the last five years but unless you want them right now you just wait a couple of years and for the publisher it's still a profit. That's the business model with books on paper.

With videogames, too, they do a similar thing. Sure, you can buy a copy of MDK (1996), but you can't tell me that you still need to sell it at 40 dollars just to cover the game's costs when they have long since been amortised.

Also, why shouldn't you be permitted from installing the game on more than one computer? You buy the CD, you get to play it.

‘It's your money’ except that it's not.

They bring that up all the time, that game prices cost that much for a reason because of the cost of making the game and the manufacturing of the game, but don't like how games end up discounted, treating things like sales as being almost as bad as piracy, even for older games. The game costs that much for a reason, lowering the price cuts into profits and that's immoral.

uufff... before I write a long post... are you aware how they're wrong (you might), or do you require a long post? (which I'd happily write if necessary).

Nothing can be done about that. It's absolute morality. Black and white. "Anyone who disagrees just wants free stuff."

There's one thing I did mention to them, about the band After Forever and their problems with their record label. I told them about this band and the troubles with the record label.

https://web.archive.org/web/2008060...erforever.com/forum/topics.aspx?ID=618&PAGE=1

They sided with the record label, because the record label has a right to make a profit while the band has no rights. No one has a right to anything while people who own property have a right to make excess profit.

 

[The_J]

Nothing can be done about that. It's absolute morality. Black and white. "Anyone who disagrees just wants free stuff."

Oh, yeah, no, I'm aware, your friends are... lost.
Just asking if you need more arguments, in case you've run out of them.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Oh, yeah, no, I'm aware, your friends are... lost.
Just asking if you need more arguments, in case you've run out of them.

Not all of them, one of them has started to go in the other direction.

I was never any good at arguments.

 

[Takhisis]

They bring that up all the time, that game prices cost that much for a reason because of the cost of making the game and the manufacturing of the game, but don't like how games end up discounted, treating things like sales as being almost as bad as piracy, even for older games. The game costs that much for a reason, lowering the price cuts into profits and that's immoral.

If the developer's sold the game to a store that's the store's prerogative.
For new games, especially on digital distribution platforms, there might be pricing deals, of course.
But the reality is that after the initial rush it's all residuals. All windfall, all profit.

 

[Grendeldef]

For those who don't know who The Cynical Brit was

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TotalBiscuit

Most if not all his videos are still available as his wife continued running his YT site.

https://www.youtube.com/c/cynicalbrit/

 

[The_J]

I was never any good at arguments.

You've seem to have given them good counter-arguments, so no, I think you're wrong there .

 

[Hygro]

I argued with a bunch of strangers on the internet today and none of them told me I was right

 

[Ajidica]

I recently ordered a new RPG direct from the publishers webpage a few weeks ago and haven't received any sent notices. I emailed the company asking when it might be sent, and they responded that due to distributor problems they are still struggling to meet pre-orders and are unable to provide an estimated shipping date to me even on the scale of weeks/months. Alright, I thought. They aren't a large publisher and could easily be having difficulties due to scale of pre-orders and supply chain stuff. I got the pdfs of the RPG when I ordered it, so not too bad.
However, when looking for something else on Amazon, I saw that the publishers official page had the items they are having distribution problems with for sale with confirmed stock; and cheaper than I bought it for on their website!
Whole lotta salt going around right now.

 

[Synobun]

I pay for anything I'm able to achieve reasonable access to. There are some things that are either impossible to access in Canada or require excessive hoop-jumping/exorbitant costs. This is, after all, how Steam, Spotify, and Netflix cornered their respective markets: accessibility without frivolous charges. Probably the closest I get to "illegal" access to content now is using an ad blocker.

Sometimes I'll torrent show episodes that I pay for access to. That's legal to do, and I mostly do it for quality-of-life reasons. Sometimes the stream platform player is abysmal (I despise Crave's player), sometimes I have watch parties with friends (and streaming a browser includes the cursor and has quality issues), and sometimes I have spotty internet and want to make sure I have something to watch if I'm offline. Anyway, torrenting in this way is only possible because of piracy; there aren't enough "I want a hard copy" advocates to otherwise justify the accessibility.

I won't comment on Chukchi's friends and their arguments, as they are just parroting the basic talking points of Stossel-Randian libertarianism. That was boring when it was first conceived, and is doubly so a decade later. It's also not something you can talk someone out of until they mentally mature, which is not something any average bystander can really trigger.

 

[Arakhor]

Moderator Action: Please don't discuss or promote piracy on CFC. Some posts have been edited or removed. Thank you.

 

[Grendeldef]

Rant: discussing piracy is banned.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

...getting anything for free is immoral because it deprives someone from making an excess profit, bringing up game demos, the public domain and anything that its creator gives away for free.

If someone wants to give me something for free and it's something that most others would ask payment for, I'm going to assume that the price is still there, but doesn't mean it's necessarily in cash or currency.

Example: I belong to the Early Reviewers Program on the LibraryThing site. Each month there are publishers who make some books available for free, in exchange for reviews. Most books are e-editions now, rather than physical books that have to be snailmailed. I've received some rather interesting books, and some that were godawful boring. And some of them couldn't be reviewed because I was unable to download the e-copy.

For game demos, they say it's immoral because you don't get to enjoy a sample of something for free without paying for it first. "You don't watch the first ten minutes of a film for free just to see if you like it or not. If you want to try a game, buy it first and if you don't like it, sell it."

Actually, if you go to a movie and decide 10 minutes in that you don't like it and walk out, chances are that you will be at least partially refunded, if you ask nicely.

The gaming site where I get my games offers a 60-90-minute trial, to see if I like a game (and more importantly, if it works on my computer). If I do like it, I'll buy it. If not, I just delete it and write a negative review saying why I didn't like it.

For the public domain, just because something has reached a certain age doesn't mean that someone can no longer make a profit from it, even if the original creator is long dead. Just because someone like Charles Dickens is dead doesn't give people the right to read his works for free. If copies of his works still exist, someone can make a profit from it and by reading a copy for free, you are denying that person from making a profit from selling that work and that's immoral, even if the only copies of it in existence are too expensive for anyone to buy. There is no right to have any work preserved, that's just an excuse.

Thank goodness for Project Gutenberg, and that not everything there is 200 year-old literature anymore. Though if that's your thing, or you like old French novels by Dumas, that's a source (I would have honestly tried reading The Count of Monte Cristo there in French if my second-hand book dealer hadn't found me an unabridged English translation).

For something where the original creator gives something away for free, they consider that selfish because it deprives someone else from being able to make a profit from their work. If a band or a musician decides to give their music away for free, it deprives a record company and record stores from being able to make a profit from their work. They don't care if the original creators make any money from their own work or not.

Hm. Let's see... today is Saturday. At some point in the next few hours, Fabian Salazar of Wuauquikuna will host a livestream of music and multi-lingual chat for approximately 90 minutes, from somewhere in Poland where his studio is. Some of the fans will donate, most won't. I listen to the music guilt-free, because they are offering it freely. I may not contribute money, but I have done the "like/share/subscribe" thing. Apparently that's helpful. And in the meantime I get relaxing native South American music to keep me company as I'm trying to get through another NaNoWriMo competition.

They also have this idea that if anyone gives away what they've created for free, it means that whatever they've created isn't any good. The only reason to create anything is to make a profit, to give it away means that you know it won't make a profit because it isn't any good. Calling it a passion project or a labour of love are just excuses to make up for a lack of talent, because someone who has talent doesn't create because they want to create, but because they only see it as work to make a profit.

Some authors crack down on fanfic writers who dare to play in their sandbox. Waaay back when, people wondered why George Lucas didn't do that. He reasoned that the fans wrote stories and made fan films out of love for the Star Wars setting and characters, nothing they did would ever be better than the real thing, and it kept the franchise in people's minds until the next official film/book came out.

Shame KJA/BH and the rest of the HLP didn't take that attitude when they eviscerated the Dune setting on Second Life, or issued a C&D to a group of Spanish fans who were making a fan film. None of that could possibly have threatened book sales or interest in official movies, and it would have kept the fans' interest up. But this is not something the HLP can wrap its collective tiny, mercenary brains around.

Star Trek fan films, on the other hand, were getting into a murky territory where some of them were getting as good as some of the TV material. For instance, I'd take Star Trek Continues over DiscoTrek any day. There are a few of the Phase II fanfilms that are really good - much better stories than what's on TV. The people who made these did it with the help of crowdfunding, but they charged nothing for anyone to watch it (of course there were certain levels of donations that got some extras).

Most people who write fanfiction understand that it's illegal to profit from it. They write it and post it on one or more fanfiction sites (ie. fanfiction.net, ArchiveOfOurOwn (AO3), Wattpad, A Teaspoon and an Open Mind, LiveJournal, or many other places. TrekBBS (the Star Trek forum I belong to) has subforums where people can discuss the professional tie-in fiction (that people pay for) and the fanfiction (that's free for anyone to read). The rule is that you don't discuss fanfiction in the TrekLit forum, and everything's fine.

 

[really]

Visiting in laws for Easter, one hour into a 2:30 drive we realised we left the Easter eggs at home...

Stopped in a town to see if we could find any but all sold out.
Rang in laws and they had some bought so disaster averted.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Visiting in laws for Easter, one hour into a 2:30 drive we realised we left the Easter eggs at home...

Stopped in a town to see if we could find any but all sold out.
Rang in laws and they had some bought so disaster averted.

Hopefully you left them in the fridge...

 

[Chukchi Husky]

If the developer's sold the game to a store that's the store's prerogative.
For new games, especially on digital distribution platforms, there might be pricing deals, of course.
But the reality is that after the initial rush it's all residuals. All windfall, all profit.

They said that stores can only survive and make a living if they can make an excess profit.

You've seem to have given them good counter-arguments, so no, I think you're wrong there .

As proven over and over again, I'm an idiot, I'm always wrong, I don't have any talents and I'm not good at anything, just completely useless.

Probably the closest I get to "illegal" access to content now is using an ad blocker.

They consider ad blockers to be immoral because ads are the only way for websites to survive.

I won't comment on Chukchi's friends and their arguments, as they are just parroting the basic talking points of Stossel-Randian libertarianism. That was boring when it was first conceived, and is doubly so a decade later. It's also not something you can talk someone out of until they mentally mature, which is not something any average bystander can really trigger.

What's Stossel-Randian libertarianism?

If someone wants to give me something for free and it's something that most others would ask payment for, I'm going to assume that the price is still there, but doesn't mean it's necessarily in cash or currency.

They're fine with gift giving, probably because of that reason, although they do get angry if someone doesn't fully appreciate a gift.

Some authors crack down on fanfic writers who dare to play in their sandbox.

Fan works are something else that makes them angry. They take the same position as Nintendo, that all fan works are copyright infringement. They also claim that people who make fan works lack talent, because if they were any good, they would instead make original works so that they can charge money for it.