Maybe he’s just enthusiastic about a game that does something he’s into?

https://fortelabs.co/blog/the-secret-power-of-read-it-later-apps

So this article was included with Omnivore, which is suggested elsewhere in this thread, but it does provide a bunch of well structured arguments for the utility of a dedicated app.

Thanks for this. I don’t usually dive into longer format article stuff because I find it on my phone and reading on my phone sucks. I tried pocket, but it didn’t function at all on my reader.

This solves that problem reasonably well.

(Edit: also an RSS reader? Maybe I should start using RSS again. I do wish it offered paged navigation controls to better work on an ereader, but it’s definitely an improvement still.)

I would much rather pay full price than still pay for a DRMed version that’s effectively guaranteed to be supporting some sort of organized crime group. Mass distribution at scale, with DRM, by definition means Russian organized crime, or a drug cartel, or some other global bad actor on that scale that’s doing shit like trafficking humans, arms dealing, drugs, etc, as well.

But ignoring that (and that I generally buy my content), I wouldn’t pay $.10 for an illegitimate copy that had an added layer of DRM on it. It’s fundamentally fucking repulsive for some subgroup whose whole business relies on bypassing someone else’s copy control to add their own.

DRM on pirated games is fucking gross as shit.

I tried. It’s basically the only app I couldn’t get to work on my boox.

If you’re scared about Microsoft tracking your UX engagement on a website, the best way to make sure your sex life stays private is to file it in federal court.

Yeah it’s not really supposed to be “funny”. It’s just Barney being corny because that’s who the character is. (When he’s not being a sociopath with women.)

DNS names are restricted to your tailnet’s domain name (node-name.tailnet-name.ts.net)

I guess that’s fine for some. Not a compromise I’m willing to make though.

The performance (at least on the Pro; I gave my original to my brother) has definitely improved a lot, too. It was a slide show on the original and the pro with and without boost mode enabled for a good while after I bought the PS4 pro, but it’s not bad now. Load times suck though. I basically only made progress once I switched to PS5 and got to take advantage of the SSD. (Note that PS4 games still load way slower than PS5 games on PS5, for the most part.)

Because it’s a copy. It’s literally that simple.

Libraries can operate because of first sale doctrine. You can do almost whatever you want with a physical object that contains a copyrighted work.

What you can’t do is copy it. There is no possible legal way to distribute a digital copy of a work without an explicit license from the copyright holder. There isn’t even a legal concept of “owning” a digital copy. You purchase a license.

There’s really no credible argument that their distribution of books even might be legal.

Their only defense is fair use, and there’s no precedent for a “fair use” defense justifying copying a work wholesale for mass distribution. (Yes, “one copy at a time” to multiple people is mass distribution.) Copying a whole work has effectively only qualified as fair use when that copy is not re-distributed, and is actually for a personal backup.

The constitution explicitly grants authority to regulate IP. There’s absolutely no path to a constitutional issue, and constitutional issues are the only way you get laws overturned. “Other legal doctrine” means something like violations of due process somewhere in the chain, which is a constitutional issue, or direct conflict with another law.

The only possible judicial remedy is the premise that it’s fair use, which there’s a lot of precedent that it isn’t.

What Internet Archive did is digitized physical books, then loaned out their “one copy” with DRM. Their assertion is that this constitutes fair use. I don’t really think there’s any merit to that argument based on the law and the body of precedent, and fundamentally tend to dislike legislation from the bench (judges just arbitrarily reinterpreting laws). Passing new laws and restructuring how IP law works is the job of the legislature, not the judiciary.

IA then made this worse by taking the already super tenuous “fair use” argument and throwing it out the window by removing the lending limits during Covid. It was waving a red flag in front of IP holders and begging them to take aggressive action.

But those moves have traditionally come when a game is out and has, by whatever metric, failed. Or, at the other end of the scale, when a game fails to get off the ground earlier in development, and a publisher decides to cut its losses, or as it would probably say, “reallocate resources”. To commit five years of work, to build an entire company around the goal of producing a single game, and then throw it all in the bin just days before it was supposed to come out is a whole new level of ineptitude that’s particularly cruel, even by this industry’s cruel-by-default standards.

Abandoning a project right out of the gate before there’s a real chance to see what it can be is “cruel”.

Recognizing that a product doesn’t deserve to be shipped is a good thing. They gave it a great chance to get to a finished product, evaluated where it was at, and had the decency to not shovel shit out the door and rip people off.

I’d be all for altering definitions in a way that enables them to do stuff like the controlled lending system (also just digitizing shit generally).

But I think the law is pretty clear, and a precedent calling their use case fair use would be mind blowing. You need new, much more common sense IP legislation that redefines consumer rights in a digital world.

How the GPL works is that anyone who buys the game is fully entitled to share the source code with anyone else completely legitimately (modified or unmodified), provided they include the license.

It’s not piracy to do so.

That’s not a different or added risk vs a website.

The only change is that it’s significantly easier to keep an archive going.

It’s not theirs. What you grant them is a non-revocable permanent worldwide license to use the content.

This is mostly necessary for the service to function, which is why it never really got pushback in the “early days” when communities were more tech literate. You need to be able to serve the content to users, and to a lesser extent being able to share popular active discussion topics is a big part of enabling the service to form communities.

What clearly isn’t necessary is the “non-revocable” part. People should be able to delete their posts, and excluding for the purpose of moderation, have them removed. What also would be part of an “ethical” platform (to me), is a clear restriction in purpose to that license. I would limit my rights to the ability to use the content for the purpose of providing the “forum”(/whatever), moderation, and sharing public posts/comments to attract people to the community. But that’s something that isn’t trivial to write a contract for, and it is worth noting that unless they gave away DMs (which is extra awful), all of this content was deliberately public.

You could, as a host of an instance, have mostly whatever terms you want. The code is open source and it’s not typical for open source licenses (including the GPL) to restrict things like that (you could probably structure a license that qualified as open source to prevent you from doing abusive things to end users of a service, but restricting how you serve it at all is unusual).

The DMCA process is pretty good. All you have to do is counterclaim and the host/platform can put your content back up unless the claimant actually files in court. Also, without the safe harbor protections, it would be almost impossible for sites to allow user content at all, because they’d potentially be liable for infringement of users.

ContentID goes way past DMCA requirements and proactively allows copyright holders to have content automatically taken down, without a clear and fair process to appeal, and without due diligence that holders actually legitimately own the content they’re claiming.