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Cake day: December 29th, 2023

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  • require a centralized control over how much people are allowed to raise prices to match inflation for games.

    and? governments already track inflation. in australia, our minimum wage and unemployment benefit amount and a lot of other things are legally defined relative to CPI (the “cost of a basket of groceries”)… rental increases are capped at “reasonable” amounts given the increase of other properties in the area… these are not only doable, but already being done in different contexts

    And, as mentioned many times already, it doesn’t work with microtransactions or free to play games

    that’s true, but this is why we say “reasonably available” as the core metric rather than specifics: we define what IS reasonable, and then let the courts decide outside of that list

    incentivizes setting a very high launch price to work around the limitation of using launch pricing as a benchmark for a product’s entire lifetime.

    which is why i didn’t say launch price - i suggested something along the lines of an average… the cost of the game should be something like the median price that people paid. what most people are willing to pay is “reasonable”

    People ARE arguing that something being up for sale should be the trigger instead

    think you’re misunderstand - it’s not “for sale”, it’s “reasonably available” to an average targeted person

    I think this is a very, very hard problem to fix, but if you made me try, I’d argue that a deep reform should enable copyright exceptions regardless of whether something is up for sale. I don’t even know why people here are so fixated with that element. The exclusive right should not be about copying a thing, it should be about selling or profiting from a thing. Not copyright, but sale right.

    sale is irrelevant to the issue though - the issue that we’re trying to solve is general availability to the majority of people the product was designed for. if you are the copyright holder, and you make your work available for consumption then nobody should be allowed to distribute your work without permission (for some reasonable time)… if you decide to stop distributing a work, there’s no public good that comes from that, and thus it should have no copyright protections because copyright protection is meant to increase the volume of creative works


  • yeah the concept is great, but open sourcing often takes a lot of work

    Why do you say that?

    because i’ve been involved in open sourcing products and libraries on many occasions

    closed source code often relies on proprietary libraries etc

    I don’t see how that matters. If you write code that depends on something and opensource it, your product might not be buildable/compilable/usable without it, but your code is still opensource, and that’s what matters.

    that’s not the way a lot of these things goes - especially when you start to talk about hardware. lots of times there are NDAs around even the interfaces to their libraries.

    or sometimes there’s things called “vendored” code, where the library is included with the source. sometimes that’s easy to pick apart, but sometimes it’s not, sometimes someone’s copied and changed code from the library and barely documented what’s been done

    code is often very messy. it’s easy to say ugh what shit devs! but that’s the reality, and we all write code sometimes that we look back on in a year and think it should have been a crime

    or perhaps there are secrets embedded somewhere - even it source control history

    That’s up to you to clean it up. It’s just like publishing any repository online.

    that’s what i’m saying - it’s not like open sourcing is free. open sourcing software has a cost. people asked above different questions about eg who does that when a company has gone bankrupt?

    i’ll add my own: how do you ensure a company doesn’t skimp on the dev time to open source, and accidentally release a secret that opens vulnerabilities in devices that people still use? like a signing key


  • Is a 250 USD collector’s edition from Limited Run on a game that originally cost 15 bucks “fair and reasonable”? I mean, they sell. People buy them. People buy them even when the cheaper option is still available.

    well that’s an easy one - you can have whatever price you like for a collectors edition, as long as some edition of the game continues to be offered at or around the original price (or perhaps average unit sale price) that the game was sold at

    again, we sometimes do this for housing in australia in some areas - you can build a luxury apartment block as long as you have a certain amount of affordable housing mixed with it

    People are being too simplistic here and assuming that things are either copyrighted or on the public domain

    i think perhaps you’re misreading what people are saying. copyright is an important tool to ensure people get paid for their creative works, and that investment gets put into such projects however the point of copyright is not to make people money - money is itself a tool to maximise the goods and services available. the point is to maximise the availability of goods and services.

    i think it’s pretty easy to have a law that days if the work is not available for consumption, it loses at least some of the protections of the copyright system to ensure others can make it available for consumption in some way

    based on whether something is being monetized, just a fair scenario for unmonetized redistribution. If you make it so people sharing and privately copying things at their own cost is fine but selling is reserved for the copyright holder it doesn’t matter how the holder prices things

    i think now we’re kind of agreeing - im not sure that anyone is arguing that monetisation itself is the trigger - the availability of the product to the average (or perhaps original target) group on fair terms is the trigger