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jamotto

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  1. Pirates will always exist, however the way Stardock is going about to try and reduce the problem is the right way in my opinion, Also what Starforce did was very tacky.
  2. GalCiv 2 news quote:Digg is reporting that a website is implying that we want Galactic Civilizations II to be pirated. Absolutely not! Of course we DO NOT want our game to be pirated. We're a small company, every lost sale hurts us. This got started because sales reports on Galactic Civilizations II have been much higher than anticipated. We've now outsold the first Galactic Civilizations in North America in the first 10 days. Last week we were apparently the #1 PC game at Walmart. Naturally, some peple have taken the conclusion that because we don't have copy protection on our game, that we invite piracy. That is not the case, we simply think there are other ways to stop piracy than CD checks, strict DRM, etc. What we do is provide a serial # that users can choose to enter when they install and use that unique serial # to download free and frequent updates. Our license allows you to install the game onto as many machines that you own that you want as long as only one copy is being used at once. How many sales are lost because people want to have a game on their laptop and desktop and don't want to drag CDs around so choose not to buy the game? Our company also makes utility software. We've been around a long time -- 14 years now. Our software gets pirated. We don't like it but piracy is a fact of life. The question isn't about eliminating it, it's about reducing it and trying to make sure that people who would buy your product buy it instead of steal it. Our primary weapon to fight piracy is through rewarding customers through convenient, frequent, free updates. If you make it easy for users to buy and make full use of your product or service legitimately then we believe that you'll gain more users from that convenience than you'll lose from piracy. We realize that some people or companies might feel threatened at any evidence that implies that draconian DRM schemes or CD copy protection may not make that big of a difference in sales. For example, we were quite disturbed to discover that the company that makes Starforce provided a working URL to a list of pirated GalCiv II torrents. I'm not sure whether what they did was illegal or not, but it's troubling nevertheless and was totally unnecessary. All software is pirated, there's no way around it. We've been making software for over 10 years. We don't like our software being pirated. Like I said, every lost sales has an impact on us. But there are other ways to reduce it than through draconian copy protection systems. Incidentally, the site that Starforce's forum admin linked to "prove" how much our software was being pirated we visited, followed the instructions on the site to get our game removed and the links were removed within a couple of hours. We'll continue to follow-up with them.
  3. quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: Is anyone blown away by these shots released yesterday?
  4. WASHINGTON--New broadband taxes may be on the horizon, if an influential senator and his like-minded colleagues get their way. At a Tuesday hearing convened by the Senate Commerce Committee, several senators from largely rural states called for expansion of the Universal Service Fund (USF), a multibillion-dollar pool of money that's currently used to subsidize telecommunications services in rural and other high-cost areas, schools and libraries.
  5. yea, they never want to be upstaged.
  6. LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Don Knotts, who kept generations of TV audiences laughing as bumbling Deputy Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show" and would-be swinger landlord Ralph Furley on "Three's Company," has died. He was 81.
  7. you can read the filing here The link is to a pdf file.
  8. who needs photoshop when you can do this with MS Paint Picture If you use dial-up this page will take awhile to load as the picture is 3MB in size.
  9. Link quote:US record-label body the RIAA and movie-industry moguls at the MPAA are attempting to argue that copying a CD to a computer for carrying on an iPod does not, and has never, constituted fair use. A report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation says 14 organisations, including the two mentioned, have submitted a filing as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's regular review process of exemptions to provisions against tampering with technological protection measures. This means that, in essence, all rights to copy anything are held by the copyright owner. Those rights can be sold or assigned, which is why a record label can reproduce and distribute a given musician's songs. Since copyright holders haven't granted specific permission to make a copy of a song, you aren't allowed to, by the letter of the law. Within American law, "fair use" is an exception that, among other things, allows people to make copies within certain circumstances and constraints. So making a copy of a CD for your own personal use is within the scope of fair use. That's the way copyright law has worked for quite some time. But these new claims show that the right to tote your CD's contents around on your MP3 player were never expressly given, and that, for some reason, fair use doesn't apply. The implication is that all this time, they've been graciously allowing us to make tapes and MP3s from CDs bought for personal use. The RIAA also claims that digital rights management has only increased legitimate access to copyright works.
  10. Well if this goes uncontested then I suspect people who drink will be next as it just makes good business sense or so they say.
  11. When the first high-definition DVDs finally hit shelves this spring, a mad scramble may ensue--not for the discs themselves, but to figure out what computers and devices are actually able to play them in their full glory.
  12. quote:Originally posted by LostInSpace: I find nadda anywhere about this Kerry's speech. When did it occur?search for Gore not Kerry.
  13. quote:Originally posted by Race Bannon IV: Two words-Peter Jackson Even he can't save this one.
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