Happy First Sale day!
John sez, "Today (June 1) is the 100th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision credited with establishing the "first sale doctrine", which upholds the right of book buyers, libraries, used bookstores, and the like, to pass along their books and other copyrighted works for others to enjoy.
In the linked blog post, I briefly explain the background and importance of the first sale doctrine, and why it's worth celebrating First Sale Day today."
Link
(Thanks, John!)
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I've never heard of this...pretty cool though, especially considering I went to a booksale at a local library today (and found a copy of VENUS ON A HALF SHELL by Kilgour Trout!)
You lucky dog! Now you can join the debate - was it written by Ted Sturgeon or Philip Jose Farmer (as Wikipedia would have it).
Is anyone still making a big deal about Microsoft treating their Zune customers as lease-holders to the music they buy for their music player? As an iPod fan, I can only imagine how incensed I would be if Apple did that to me.
It might be worth mentioning that this happy holiday falls very close to the release date of a major computer game whose DRM software arguably violates the first sale doctrine. (buy the game, open it, find out that the DRM only allows you three installations of purchased software).
The game is called Mass Effect (likely vaguely familiar for some due to exaggerated hubbub in headlines about sexual content, but I digress), and the DRM is a similarly functioning version of SecuROM to that used in Bioshock, which also generated public and customer outrage and (I beleive), did so badly enough to get its own mention on BoingBoing for doing so.
Securom is a mild curse that PC gamers (including myself) have put up with for a couple of years now, at least on our game machines. It is installed by many games. The Bioshock hubbub was an unexpected interaction between it's Securom code and AVG Antivirus signatures. I was one of those affected -
until I uninstalled AVG I couldn't install Bioshock (best single player game of the year IMHO). PC gamers have been putting up with this kind of treatment for years - the obvious technology for mitigating this is the forum. That's where we went to solve the problem together, just as soon as it appeared.
Mmmh, no... the Bioshock fiasco only incidentally mentioned problems with AVG, because in truth AVG was legitimately identifying its attempts to bury virus files (albeit virus files that attempted to claim some sort of moral high ground) on the user's computer.
The primary concern was that users had to "activate" the game, dependent on an external server maintained by a third party, and that they were allowed a limited number of install "credits" with which to do so.
That number was raised 5, incidentally, and people were still upset about it. Mass Effect's number of deigned "activations" is 3, and if you reformat, have an OS problem, etc. you lose one of the three. An uninstall/reinstall on the same PC with the same current OS installation does not use these up, but that's the limit of the fraction of consumers' rights that the publisher has deigned to allow them to use.
I would like to suggest that our different experiences of the problem reflect different concerns. I was concerned with playing the game, and relatively unconcerned about a measure which I expected to be hacked before it would interest me practically. I have already had the experience of buying games, then installing the CD-cracked version in order to play them on a laptop (spinning a CD dramatically reduces battery life). Putting up with game distributor's customer abuse is old hat, not news, boring, etc...
Well one certainly can't argue with a difference in personal importance of issues.
However it is worth mentioning that protecting the stuff in that manner was, I believe, a new practice at the time.
The slippery-precipice argument that it will be getting worse is also buttressed by the fact that the scheme seems to be catching on, with another title just now released that uses it, and another extremely hugely important game in the future planned to implement it (spore)... further so by concerns that the next game in the line after the first arbitrarily chose a less generous (if the word applies here) number of installs.
Also, they're taking longer to crack, meaning that if one purchases said software with the intent of just cracking it and sidestepping the issue, it may begin resulting in more appreciable delays, and accidentally buggy crack releases. So things can be said to be potentially on their way to worse fates and greater frustration for the legal consumer.
To me, this feels like good reason to take up activism in at least some form, and start spreading the news around and trying to get people informed and active in protecting their interests and rights. Beyond that I don't really have the resources to act, but at least more people hear the news, those responsible are held accountable by a broader audience, and perhaps see that more people feel strongly about this than they thought.
Then things can get pushed back closer toward the acceptable, hopefully.
To me, the main problem with copy protection is the money. Major content providers pay mega-bucks (scientific term, I know) for something that will not work/be broken within a week (or a month if it is good), and pass that cost along to its customers.
This is part of what causes game prices to be over $50, and therefore over my self imposed spending limit. Consequently, I download the majority of my games instead of buying (to be fair, I download old Gameboy, Nintendo and Super Nintendo games which should be in the public domain, if we had reasonable copyright laws).
#3: Careful Stu Mark, Apple does effectively the same damn thing. If you actually owned those iTunes songs they'd be playable on any device and could be copied as many times as you pleased. They aren't.