Wow, this “journalist” had no idea what games programming was like back then. Yars Revenge even used its own code to display the neutral zone. There were a lot of creative tricks like that to save on memory and CPU.

Tanks!

Had a ton of fun with that one when I was a kid.

WTF, Germany?

This is a big part of why fair use is in such a bad state right now: no predictability in how courts will rule on it as a defense, plus no way to keep you out of courts in the first place.

That’s not completely true. Fair Use has four declarations that you must pass, so there’s at least some definition to how it would play out in the courts. But, it’s not a definitive rule of law, so yeah it’s not going to keep you out of the courts.

that is technically transformative, but most likely not enough to justify fair use.

Right, but it’s pretty obvious that the transformation for AI is very transformative, and it’s lossy at that. After the training, you can’t just duplicate the image it was trained from, even if it was asked a thousand times.

Imagine going back to exclusivity with gaming consoles. PCs, and by extension, Steam won the console wars, and Nintendo is just trying its damnest to hold on to the last gasp of gaming exclusivity.

I’m not trying to frame this in the context of the lawsuit, even though that’s the point of the original article. The Crew’s nonfunctionality is just a consequence of our lack of ownership.

Perhaps this article would explain things better than I could.

Ultimately I think what consumers are looking for is less like ownership and more like a warranty

No. That’s not true. Otherwise people wouldn’t be reciting this phrase over and over again.

Consumers want to fucking own shit again! Renting everything is the entire fucking problem.

How are the two related?

A user obtains the game through legitimate means by “buying” the game. However, they do not own the game, and are in fact, just renting something. This is despite decades and decades of game buying, especially pre-Internet, equating to owning the game and being able to play the game forever, even 100 years from now.

By pirating the game, a user has clawed back the implied social construct that existed for decades past: Acquiring a game through piracy means that you own the game. You have it in a static form that cannot be taken away from you. There’s still the case of server shutdowns, like this legal case is arguing. But, unlike the “buyer”, the game cannot suddenly disappear from a game’s store or be forcefully uninstalled from your PC. You own it. You have the files. They cannot take that away from you.

The phrase essentially means: You have removed my means of owning software, therefore piracy is the only choice I have to own this game. It’s not stealing because it’s the only way to hold on to it forever. You know, because that’s what fucking “buying” was supposed to mean.

I would relish a lawsuit against EULAs where the defendant somehow sends the prosecutor a EULA in a software package that declares that they automatically lose the lawsuit by clicking Agree.

It would really hammer in the point that fucking NOBODY reads this shit.

Goddammit… get the quote right:

If buying ain’t owning, piracy ain’t stealing.

Because it’s a hack-and-slash Diablo clone. The whole point is quantity of enemies.

If you want Dark Souls, go make another game and call it something else. You can’t just make Starcraft, and then say that Starcraft 2 is going to be an FPS.

Yes, because getting so lost in the skill tree that you can easily gimp your character by clicking on the wrong node is exactly the direction they need to push more towards.