This brings me hope Ubi might rot from within and collapse. And some nice Lemming will buy all their IP for a song and release it with a copyleft license.

After Ubi’s careless addition of microtransactions into games, I stopped buying Ubisoft games. After the whole unaddressed sexual harassment of the staff by executive officers scandal made news, I stopped playing even the Ubisoft games I own.

Actually it does. It involves making use of a copy that is not the original. Fair use is about experiencing media for sake of dialog (criticism or parody) or for edification. That means someone is reading the book or watching the movie, or using it for transformative art or science.

AI training should qualify for fair use.

Cranky enough to demand satisfaction (in the courts if not the dueling field), but no one in the company will think their own ire warrants empathy for those from whom they pirate.

It’s even more okay when the bourgeoisie does it in the interest of potential profit gain.

One can only hope. Copyright has, for a long time been wrongdoing against the public by denying it a robust public domain. We should have free access to ideas less than a century old.

This reveals, nonetheless, even European government is about control, not governance, enforcement of established hierarchy, not civil rights for all.

Volition! Noooooo!

Here in the US, there are no progressive legislative bodies. The Democratic party treats its progressive members as the red-haired stepchildren who have to dine at their own table.

Here.. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The whole point of IP laws (according to the Constitution of the United States) is to develop a robust public domain. Every registered idea, multiplied by every limited rights extention is a violation of public interest and public rights.

By burying or failing to preserve content, they are in fact stealing from the public, since we won’t be able to access it when it is our right.

I assume, paid for by the state out of the general fund, with no impact on police budgets. But I’d love to hear I was wrong.

I have no doubt that Adam Lanza’s obsession with Dance Dance Revolution compelled him to commit the Sandy Hook massacre.

That’s how they get you. Before it was Catcher In The Rye, then it was Helter Skelter. Next it’ll be Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe!

It’s the tessellation of the splines, I tell you! THE TESSELLATION OF THE SPLINES

Jack Thompson has entered the chat?

In a civilized society, the cure for radicalizing speech is more speech, particularly discourse. Besides which we already have plenty of evidence that violent video games don’t radicalize. (Though, to be fair, terrorist operatives find pre-radicalized people and point them towards targets via social engineering.)

Someone who is already dangerous may play violent video games to help cope. But withholding them doesn’t address the problem, just as withholding porn doesn’t make people less sexually frustrated.

Then there’s the matter that drone operators recognize and feel the effects of having killed, and get PTSD and burnout in ways that video game players killing shadows do not. The high turnover and mentalmhealth crisis of drone operators demonstrates to us simulations don’t cross that critical line.

COD is modeled (more or less) on war settings, but so are the Tom Clancy games, So is Six Days in Fallujah and Spec Ops: The Line which are distinctly anti war. And as Penn and Teller brutally demonstrated, there is a huge visceral and emotional difference between shooting guns in games, and engaging with the real thing.

We know how to address amuck killers. We know reducing rampage killers is not just in addressing gun culture, but also addressing precarity. But neither of are political parties is willing to take that step. One is, indeed, banking on War Boys voting them into power, sight unseen, but then signing up as brownshirt goons by the legion.

Turning your ire on video games is quaint and misguided and plays right into their hands.

「Points to US Army.」

COD has had creepy right wing ideology sewn into it at least as far back as Ghosts (which also featured – I hear – amazing dog levels) but yes, even recent one had messages more about _are you willing to make the tough choices [and commit atrocities] in the name of national security. That’s pretty right-wing.

But that doesnt qualify as incitement to action (at least not in US law) because it isn’t specific (e.g. Justice Thomas must be killed before he does any further damage to our civil rights )

Freedom of speech allows us to paint groups as bad guys in art, and it’s up to our critics and curators to highlight these and other problematic features.

I’d say you’re not south enough.

You might not. It’s very hot desert weather all year around.

Niger is a known intentional misspelling of the n-word used to circumvent censorship. So this is an evolution of the Scunthorp problem.

Media piracy is in the tradition of oyster piracy (stealing from landlords trying to control the oyster market) and the golden age (robbing the Spanish silver train that was exploiting the nations of the new world) in that it’s crime against unreasonable state regimes.

This is not to say underground media sharing has always had the moral high-ground, and it’s not even to say that fair copyright laws are unreasonable, but since the mid 20th century (since Disney, essentially) intellectual property law has not served the public in a community effort to build a robust public domain of ideas and content, rather has been used to do the opposite, to favor established businesses over new ones with complete disregard for the public.

But then there’s the technological matter, where DRM is used to obstruct of sharing (reasonable or otherwise, legal or otherwise). Here in the states it’s legal to use DRM to obstruct legal backups and sharing, but it’s not legal to bypass DRM to facilitate legal backups and sharing. It shows us that our regulatory agencies are captured, that our government serves rich companies and plutocrats rather than the public. The law runs contrary to the social contract.

We are in an age in which our language (English) only has words for wrongdoing that acknowledges two authorities: Sin (wrongness against the Church – allegedly against God) and Crime (wrongness against the state, in accordance to what laws are enforced by a legal system). When we talk about other entities that can be wrong, say, individuals, the community, the world population, ecosystems outside of human society, we have to make do with the words we have, e.g. sin against nature, crimes against humanity, and so on.

Intellectual property law is a construct that (according to the Constitution of the United States) was intended to do a thing that it has totally failed at, going as far as creating perverse incentives to misuse the law. And given the companies that produce the media we might pirate are poor at compensating artists and developers, or at recognizing licenses already established (say, your DVD copy of Ghostbusters when the new medium emerges), given they pirate each other’s content shamelessly, and will steal yours outright if you can’t outspend them in court, it has actually become more ethical to pirate content than to buy it legitimately.

But I’d teach my kids not just to pirate, but to recognize shoddy work from good work, and to not consume at all when they can, since consuming content benefits its producers, whether or not it’s acquired legally. (The MCU is about hero-team organizations who defend the status quo from all enemies, including the far left, and including those who want the human species to have a future. So they’re not really our heroes, are they? Batman runs around and beats up poor people, leaving the wealthy to continue to rule over the rest of us whose last resort is crime.

If we’re going to consume content, let’s use it to inspire the content we make ourselves, until commercial content is entirely unwanted and unnecessary. This is the future the MPAA and RIAA fear. Not everyone pirating their stuff, but everyone not bothered to pirate their stuff.

Edit: Clarification

They’re spoiled from selling you the same movies over and over again whenever a new medium becomes normalized, despite all your previous licenses. Then they complain when your media breaks or you want to share with your best friend.

They want your money for not doing anything new.

Historically there have been several instances of anarcho-communist organizations and social movements flourishing.

Most of them were sabotaged by plutocrat agents invoking violence or mischief. Often just giving an angry militants in the region some materiel support and bad intel.