Archival is extremely important and one of the side effects of copyright schemes is that they limit its viability. The less access people have, the more likely some work becomes lost forever. I’ve seen it a few times already, with recent work, but in one or two hundred years we’re talking about libraries of art that could have been preserved but are just gone.
Closed source software, that’s actually distributed to people, has all kinds of problems beyond that too. Tons has been written about that, but from an artistic perspective, I think the biggest loss is that people can’t legally expand the original work. Giant franchises with a central cultural presence get walled off and usually just go through a huge creative decline, which is crazy because there’s millions of people preoccupied with the concepts from the franchise who are barred from using them to express themselves. With software in specific, if it’s open source you can modify it, fix it, expand it, maintain it, whatever - there’s all these great resources they could use, but we won’t let them.
It’s pretty insane. At first I thought damn, from now on our culture will be so thoroughly documented that future historians will struggle to parse it all, but now I can’t trust anything to last for 5 years and I can’t have copies of it, either.
Piracy shmiracy, some random dude’s homegrown server is not an archive, and anything that fails without electricity to power it is not a copy.
That’s the horrible thing about online services. You never really own it, it can be taken away from you at any time. If you want to preserve something, you need physical and/or offline access.
And in addition to that sentiment, compression from moving or sending a copy of a copy is known to very slowly degrade digital media, so physical is almost always preferred.
Sure, it’s possible, but it’s unlikely. A properly kept laserdisc compared to, for example, a YouTube Video isn’t even a competition. Physical media not exposed to radiation or impact can last decades if not centuries. Don’t even get me started on Vynil.
Literally every seeder is part of that archive. You can look at individual trackers in the microcosm as individual archives and indices, but it’s the culture of piracy that causes the wide scale collection and preservation of media.
We’re actually at this kind of interesting cross-generational point of guerilla archival where it’s become easier to find certain obscure pieces of media history. I suspect this is in large part due to things like bounties, where suddenly a forgotten VHS of a 35 year old HBO special that aired once or twice could be a step toward a higher rank and greater access to a wider range of media.
Modern piracy has a strong incentive toward finding lost material that’s no longer readily available. Zero day content is great, but have you seen the RADAR pilot or both seasons of AfterMASH?
They belong in a museum. Indie would be proud, even if Harrison wouldn’t. Not that I know his perspective on piracy.
If you use most digital formats for media and compress them with something like .7z or Winrar, then it might take years or decades to noticeable degrade, but it is still a matter of when not if.
Holy crap. File compression is not the same thing as lossy media compression.
File compression uses mathematical algorithms to create definable outcomes. Meaning it doesn’t matter how much you compress/uncompress a file, it will always be exactly the same.
5 X 2 will always give you 10 and 10 ÷ 2 will always give you 5.
Compression and transmission of data causes loss of parity. We lose or flip some 1s and 0s. Over time the effects become very noticeable. The best visual example I can think of are experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades. In a more reasonable scenario, near lossless file types and compressions would degrade much more slowly.
You’re referring to a video codec degrading as it keeps rendering the video again, not just copying and pasting the bits. There is no degradation from copying and pasting a file as-is.
And when you download the processed video and reupload it, it’s a 1 to 1 conversion of the same video codec, and every generation it gets worse. That example is a low hanging fruit, but the concept applies to everything.
Literally every file distribution method compresses the media first. A better argument was that YouTube re-encodes the video during the re-upload with a particularly lossy method to save on bandwidth and server space.
That 1:1 conversion through the same codec is very likely lossy. However that’s not a straight file copy which is what you originally said causes degradation.
Imo, an easy way to remove YouTube’s postprocessing from the equation would be to copy a video file to and from a nas or other computer several times and compare it with the untouched file.
experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times, it very quickly degrades
That just means Youtube’s software uses lossy compression, that is a Youtube problem, not a digital media problem. Are you familiar with the concept of file hashing? A short string can be derived from a file, such that if any bit of the file is altered, it will produce a different hash. This can be used in combination with other methods to ensure perfect data consistency; for example a file torrent that remains well seeded won’t degrade, because the hash is checked by the software, so if anyone’s copy changes at all due to physical degradation of a harddrive or whatever other reason, the error will be recognized and routed around. If you don’t want to rely on other people to preserve something, there is always RAID, a 50 year old technology that also avoids data changing or being lost assuming that you maintain your hardware and replace disks as they break.
Here’s the fundamental reason you’re wrong about this: computers are capable of accounting for every bit, conclusively determining if even one of them has changed, and restoring from redundant backup. If someone wants to perfectly preserve a digital file and has the necessary resources and knowledge, they can easily do so. No offense but what you are saying is ignorant of a basic property of how computers work and what they are capable of.
It’s the most obvious example of a digital media problem. Computers might be able to account for every bit with the use of parity files and backups with frequent parity checks, but the fact is most people aren’t running a server with 4 separately powered and monitored drives as their home computer, and even the most complex system of data storage can fail or degrade eventually.
We live in a world of problems, like the YouTube problem, compression problems, encoding problems, etc. We do because we chose efficiency and ease of use over permanency.
Computers might be able to account for every bit with the use of parity files and backups with frequent parity checks
Yes, and this can be done through mostly automatic or distributed processes.
even the most complex system of data storage can fail or degrade eventually.
I wouldn’t describe it as complex, just the bare minimum of what is required to actually preserve data with no loss. All physical mediums may degrade through physical processes, but redundant systems can do better.
but the fact is most people aren’t running a server with 4 separately powered and monitored drives as their home computer
It isn’t hard to seed a torrent. If a group of people want to preserve a file, they can do it this way, perfectly, forever, so long as there remain people willing to devote space and bandwidth.
We live in a world of problems, like the YouTube problem, compression problems, encoding problems, etc. We do because we chose efficiency and ease of use over permanency.
All of these problems boil down to intent. Do people intend to preserve a file, do they not care, do they actively favor degradation? In the case of the OP game, it seems that the latter must be the case. Same with Youtube, same with all those media companies removing shows and movies entirely from all public availability, same with a lot of companies. If someone wants to preserve something, they choose the correct algorithms, simple as that. There isn’t necessarily much of a tradeoff for efficiency and ease of use in doing so, disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, the technology is mature and not complicated to use. Long term physical storage can be a part of that, but it isn’t a replacement for intent or process.
I wouldn’t describe it as complex, just the bare minimum of what is required to actually preserve data with no loss. All physical mediums may degrade through physical processes, but redundant systems can do better.
I think you didn’t read correctly on the statement about the most complex system failing. I’m not saying that is the most complex system, I am saying the most complex system will fail.
It isn’t hard to seed a torrent. If a group of people want to preserve a file, they can do it this way, perfectly, forever, so long as there remain people willing to devote space and bandwidth.
LMAO at the idea of comparing every bit of every portion of every seeder’s copy with each other simultaneously and then cross referencing every parity file to be doubly safe, and then failing to see the chance of loss of parity during transmission of said files even after that. I will admit it would take a lot longer for a torrented file to degrade than some other forms of file distribution, but it’s not going to last for a thousand years, mate.
And I am saying complexity has little to do with it and also that a system can exist that will not fail.
it’s not going to last for a thousand years
Specifically why not? What is unrealistic about this scenario, assuming enough people care to continue with the preservation effort? All nodes must fail simultaneously for any data to be lost. The probability of any given node failing at any given time is a finite probability, independent event. The probability of N nodes failing simultaneously is P^N. That is exponential scaling. Very quickly you reach astronomically low probabilities, 1000 years is nothing and could be safely accomplished with a relatively low number of peers. Maybe there are external factors that would make that less realistic, like whether new generations will even care about preserving the data, but considering only the system itself it is entirely realistic.
The best visual example I can think of are experiments where YouTubers downloaded and reuploaded their own video 100 times
This has nothing to do with copying a file. YouTube re-encodes videos whenever they are uploaded.
A file DOES NOT DEGRADE when it is copied. That is something that happened to VHS and cassette tapes. It does not happen to digital files. You can even verify this by generating a hash of a file, copy it 10,000 times, and generate a new hash and they would be 100% identical.
No I won’t be, because I’ve done this before for various reasons, but not a single but was changed.
Let me put it this way. A computer stores programs and instructions it needs to run in files on a drive. These files contain exact and precise instructions for various components to operate. If even a SINGLE bit is off in just a couple of the OS files, your computer will start throwing constant errors if not just crashing entirely.
And this isn’t just theory. It’s provable. Cosmic rays have been known to sometimes hit a drive and cause a bit-flip. Or another issue is a drive not being powered on for a long time causing bit-rot
At this point I’m starting to think you’re a troll. There’s no way someone believes what you’re saying.
Then you’re not a troll, just completely deluded and frankly stupid. You’ve been getting so many genuine responses trying to help you learn, but you keep digging in your heels and doubling down on being confidently wrong.
Believe whatever you want, just keep it to yourself.
They want to “help me learn” that a form of media storage invented and refined within a couple of decades will outlast all other forms, because they’ve deluded themselves that the things they rely on are perfect and that failure is impossible.
What you’re talking about is 100% unrelated to what the discussion is about. The media the files are stored on are irrelevant. USB flash drives are known to die within just a couple of years in some cases. But when the storage media itself fails, then the data on it is more is less lost. And that includes degradation of the medium itself. That’s why both spinning hard drives and solid state drives need to be powered on and “refreshed” every so often (about a year for solid state and roughly a few years for magnetic). And degradation in this context means beyond the point where each bit can be reliably and accurately read from the medium. Once you go past that point you end up with corrupted data. And that includes pictures and videos. A raw picture probably won’t be affected too much with a single bit flipping, but a jpg for example, will visibly look corrupted. This is what a corrupted jpg looks like. And it can occure with just a single bite or byte being incorrectly changed/saved jpg1jpg2
All it takes is a single corrupted byte in either the b-frame or i-frame in a video and it will cause that momentary glitch. That’s what happens when data “degrades”. Digitally copying a file absolutely does not “degrade” data each time it is copied. The idea is just laughable. We aren’t talking about copying a VHS tape.
This is why I always look for cartridge-based Switch ports of games I play, so they’ll be mine long after the online play ceases, they can no longer be legally purchased and my current device reaches the end of its product life. It also helps that game cards last longer than optical discs
The updates are still annoying but yeah it’s better than nothing. Of course there are some releases with the complete games all patched but those are rare and usually special/limited editions.
Partner found out about the unity crap when a bunch of steam library games published updates about changes in development, at least one of which stated they’re transitioning from free to paid
Ugh, CAD. I thought that webcomic died a decade ago.
I’m surprised you can write a 14-year-old’s name on your crotch and send her a dick pic on your own forum, yet years later people still find your comics and share them.
This is the first I’ve heard of that, and after searching the most I found was “This was alleged on 4chan but that’s it,” without even a link to the archived 4chan conversation. It’s kinda hard to take a complaint seriously when 4chan is the primary source. Can you share anything more substantive?
Basically every complaint about him that I’ve read is summarized at …shoutwiki.com/…/Ctrl%2BAlt%2BDel, or on (choose your reddit mirror): r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3v3uau/what_exactly_did_tim_buckley_do_besides_make_a/ and tbh that should be enough on its own for most people to stop reading his webcomics
Aside from the alleged child abuse, which if true is horrid, I don’t really get people’s problems with content they don’t like. That wiki page is so overboard, it’s absurd. What exactly is it about the content that they can’t simply ignore it? Did Tim Buckley go to their home personally and Clockwork Orange every issue into their brain? Just let people make what they want (within reason), and if you (the figurative you) don’t like it, just ignore it and go find something you do. No need to add so much negativity into the world.
I agree with you, generally - so many people need to internalize “It’s okay to not like things, but don’t be a jerk about the things you don’t like.”
With Buckley in particular, much of the criticism is like that, but I think that due to particular things he’s allegedly done - the above sexual assault of a child, for one; the more verifiable (not that I’ve verified them, but I’m sure other people have) claims about him banning people from his own forums for various reasons, like providing (allegedly) constructive criticism of his comics; his generally being rude to many of his fans and critics, etc. - that almost everyone is less likely to defend someone from criticism they’d otherwise speak up about when that person has already earned their ire in some other way. As a result it kinda snowballs and you get pages like that one with almost nobody willing to speak in his defense.
To be clear, I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve criticism. I have no love for Buckley. He probably deserves most of it. But spending so much effort on wiki pages like that and on thinking about content you simply don’t like is so pointless. And it’s not just CAD hate. This kind of mentality permeates the internet and seems to latch onto everything. It’s so tiring to see.
90% of the badwebcomics wiki exists for no reason but to shit on someone for daring to put themselves out in public where others can see them. I completely agree. There’s the odd creator on there that fully deserves criticism for genuine assholery and abuse, but mostly it’s like “this guy makes a very cringy comic, jump him!” bullshit.
Yeah, I gathered it was edgy bs by the goatse logo. It’s just so dumb and disheartening to consider that nonsense like this could discourage someone from following their passion, just because sadsacks feel compelled to drag everyone down to their level.
Google is shit nowadays, sadly - it used to be you could Google “Tim Buckley Jackie” and see the picture yourself. A girl’s name written on his junk near his pubes.
It got out on his forum and he banned anyone who mentioned it. He wound up doing a complete purge of the CAD forums and got rid of half his mod staff. It’s not just a 4chan thing; it was all over the internet like… 15 years ago. (Maybe longer?)
I’ve had the unfortunate displeasure of having seen it one time, so I can vouch that it exists. I can’t find it nowadays, but I can find people referencing it:
If you do the search now you can see that Google removed some results “for legal reasons”, which is likely the EU “right to be forgotten” law being used to scrub it. But it used to exist and was well-known for anyone who was on the internet in the long long ago times…
I believe the founder and first queen of Carthage said that if we don’t learn to circumvent that, we deserve nothing more than we get. She went on to claim that nothing we have is truly ours.
Is it just me or was that Phoenician quite a bit ahead of her time?
I appreciate the sentiment around preservation, but there’s an argument to be made that if you make something, you should get to decide if you want to destroy it. Banksy did something like this recently by destroying one of his pieces of art when it went up for auction.
@Kushan so you're saying they should be able to take your money and then destroy what you bought with out any sort of warning or compensation right? I strongly disagree with you if that's what you're saying.
No no, not at all - I agree with you, if you sell something to someone you shouldn’t be able to just take it back arbitrarily.
However, OP is talking about forcing companies to open source something they created - and while I love open source and am a big supporter of it, I don’t think that’s necessarily right either.
The Banksy example is also bad because they didn’t take anything away from anyone, just sold something that would change form after sale. And they knew that this stunt would only increase the art’s value going in.
I agree with your sentiment that a creator should have control over their work. However. I do feel that an art piece which can only exist in one form is different from commercial mass media. Mainly because you start getting in to an “original vs a copy” territory. While I believe an owner of something should have control over copyrights…once someone legally owns a “copy” of something that copy should be theirs since the owner made the mass media thing for the public to consume I believe the public should, at some point, have a say in the future trajectory of the product, after all it is still the public who “decide” if a product is good and will be remembered, and they even “decide” the value of the product as well.
Art is usually only made for a select few to own…it is “artisanal”…meanwhile video games are made for a much larger group…
I don’t believe in that at all, human lives and the feelings associated with them are finite, the appreciation of art lasts as long as the canvas does which can be hundreds to thousands of years depending on what it is. The feelings they feel as the artist aren’t significant on that time-frame and whatever respect I have for them is irrelevant in that context. I believe in preservation even against the will of creators because it benefits future generations, for the same reason historical knowledge does and their feelings today do not.
People have told me I’d feel different if it was my art but not really (I find that argument incredibly presumptuous and condescending which is why I’m acknowledging them here before anyone has the chance to make them as some kind of comeback), I recognize the value of art and the fact that just like these other artists I won’t be around forever either.
Moshi moshi, mr publisher? That book I released a year ago? Yeah, I want all copies destroyed. Yes, I mean ALL of them, including copies currently in possession of people who bought it legally.
And then what? Corporations will just slap a disclaimer on their products informing you of said condition and that you need to agree, understand and accept these terms and conditions and call it a day.
I feel like lack of ownership of more and more things in our lives is a sign of problems. Sure, this is just a silly game. But this kind of shit is already hitting cars.
And then products without that label would gain at least a little a bit of market share. Most people still buy inefficient fridges because they are shinier, but at least a few read those yellow labels mandated by law and choose the more efficient ones.
Edit2: Jesus people, please engage with the actual argument… not some strawman argument I didn’t make.
I must be missing something here.
Company buys land, designs and builds theme park
Company operates theme park.
Theme park isn’t profitable.
Company closes theme park
???
Company must give away designs and schematics to theme park rides for free so people can build theme park themselves that might be in direct competition with new theme park company is trying to build???
Edit: I do think that abandonware should be opensourced at some point… but I don’t understand this level of entitlement.
Good analogy. The battle shouldn’t be about forcing abandonware to be opensource. We should focus on DRM, it makes games almost impossible to play when servers shut down.
OP should have compared it to other medias such as movies. When you buy a box copy, you expect it to work long after the authors/studios/etc. are gone.
The issue is about the lack of legal ways to play older games as time moves on. It will only grow bigger in the next few years with even more games relying on DRM and online servers.
Online only play models are difficult for the consumer. I personally don’t play that many online only games for partly this reason… and partly because I don’t play many online games at all.
It still doesn’t seem entirely equivalent to me. We’re not talking about them giving out the source code. We’re talking about how shit it is that something like software already installed on your computer just no longer will work.
Or let’s use your analogy; why not just abandon the facility instead of shutting it down and chasing everyone away?
Like, don’t get me wrong. I understand that this is the nature about always online stuff and that it can always be closed down like a theme park, but I feel the conversation is more about “why did they design this like a theme park without an abandonment clause instead of a shut-down clause. Historically, most other theme parks have been fine with being abandoned”
And I mean, I’ll agree with you that it’s nothing new, we saw it with Overwatch 1 and countless others, but I feel it’s a conversation one should be able to have without it being dismissed?
(I may have read too much into your comment, but it felt like it was dismissing it as a non-issue since theme parks work like this, when this is not a theme park)
After reading the rest of your comment, you are reading the wrong thing from it, the physical parts of the amusement park would be the extant binaries you already have. They still run the same as they did before, but without maintenance they will deteriorate and become non-functional or only partially operational. In an online system there are server bits that might not be available to the end user and those pieces also need an operator.
To make a slightly more specific analogy, with a water park we could imagine a separate water treatment facility that would need to be run to keep the water in the water park safe. That treatment facility could also have plans and schematics.
The actual facilities in these cases are not independently valuable in the software case. It’s the plans and schematics (the source code) that has value… but in both cases you only need the facilities and operators/maintenance to allow people to attend the water park/play the game.
Could the game company also give away a physical treatment plants so that an independent organization could buy their own servers and run their own game servers so that they could still play in their own private water parks? Sure.
Should they? Maybe. But it’s specifically the entitlement to the plans/schematics that gets me…
Why would I need to elaborate on an argument I didn’t make? I don’t understand? I made my argument, if you don’t understand it, I don’t know what you don’t understand?
It doesn’t matter. Whatever argument you’re making, you’re missing the point of the OP.
Because the analogy I drew was in line with the OP. And you said you were making a totally different argument. So whatever argument you’re making is irrelevant.
My argument directly engaged with the original post that game developers should be forced to open source their software. The analogy you made has nothing to do with open source software, it has to do with payment models…
Edit: and ops position doesn’t make any claims about payment models…
The underlying analogy was totally wrong though because it misses the point of why people are so angry about it. The payment model is integral to understanding the entire point of the discussion.
the problem is that we’ve allowed this to happen. all mobile games function this way, the “rug” can be pulled at any time. all that money you spent on gacha pulls, was it worth it?
the problem goes back innocuously to MMO subscriptions, i think. which had a valid reason for existing, but an MMO can be “rug pulled” at any time as well, thankfully most of the greats have stayed up (wow, ffxi, eq) but ONE DAY they will be gone forever, relegated to private servers only.
lemmy.world
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