775
Chad.
But also PSA - remember to support (buy or donate) the artists & especially foss peeps when you can. I'm not sure how else can we start to change the mentality of the people.
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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Pirated many things when I was student. When I started earning a living I realized that the amount they ask for is really not excessive so started paying for several media, but they keep insisting on making sure that what you pay has less usage value than what you pirate. Stopped buying CD when one was designed to not play on my computer. Stopped paying for movies since they decide to tell you where and when you are supposed to watch them.
I gladly pay for books (which half of the time I then pirate to read on my eReader) and video games but the other digital media are trying to establish a toxic relationship and I'll have none of it.
It really sucked when I figured out that I don't own my Kindle library.
Or do I? 😇
I downloaded my library of Kindle books and ripped the DRM out of them just last month. Now they're safely tucked in my cloud drive as well as a physical drive.
I've pirated things I've already paid for and own so many times. The ease of use and drm restriction free access of piracy just can't be beat some times.
This quote is just so powerful and it gets more powerful the more often I see it. It's like the number one reason why it shouldn't be frowned upon to play Magic the Gathering with proxies
Same with 40k tabletop minis. Fuck scalpers, and fuck GW for artificial scarcity (among so many other things). MY BATTLEWAGON WORKS CUZ I SAYS IT WORKS!
Ork armies should only allow proxies, just to stay on brand
I knew a guy back in the day (2000-2004) who plays Orks who did this. He bought the models and painted them a simple 3 color scheme for tourneys, but for regular play he'd always field the strangest most detailed and ridiculous proxies.
Fucking soda can with nailed on wheels and scrap brass fittings. Dude would root around the trash / ground at construction sites for electrical off cuts and things, then go home and make them into models to field, it was awesome. He's the only person I knew that used the sprues from his models for bitz.
Legend!
Wait so according to a quick online search, "proxies" in wh and mtg refer to nonofficial figures or cards, correct?
So basically banning proxies is literally gate keeping some model behind large sum of money???
Edit: just had a quick look on some prices on the figures, and you could buy a decent quality resin printer with the price of just couple sets and download the models online. Doesn't make any fucking sense to pay a penny for an official model
In trading card games, you can take a cheap/common card and use it in place of a more expensive or harder to get card. This can range from writing the name on it, to re-backing an unofficial print, as long as it's obvious that it is a proxy.
I'm not sure what the 40k equivalent terminology is, but it does have a rule that only allows authentic GW miniatures in official games. This rule is not just to keep GW's profits but to also prevent cheating as the game relies on the actual physical measurements of the miniatures.
As long as all players are fine with using proxies, and the rules don't prevent it, they're allowed to be used, but anything involving the IP owners is usually restricted to authentic items. In short, yes, it puts official tournaments behind a massive paywall, especially if a card/mini is no longer being manufactured.
It's mostly frowned upon because the people that do it, just want to copy decks to win. At least that was the primary reason back in the day when I still played it. Just play with the cards you have and enjoy it... it's just a game after all 🤷♂️
Edit: And just to add, buying cards to do the same was also frowned upon, more so than proxies even.
It's always a dialogue. If everyone's on board for playing power, go for it and don't hold back. If you're just playing casually in your friends group, obviously be careful with what cards you choose to play. It always comes down to overall expected power level in the pod you're playing in
Back when I played we just used proxies because there were some cards that we didn't want to shuffle, or we'd proxy in the same really good cards for both players (I never played tourneys, just among friends). I have no idea why it never occurred to me that some folks would do it to copy a deck.
Of course this was before the internet was a behemoth. I don't really remember but I think most of our deck ideas came from one of the magazines (Wizard maybe?) and we were just out there playing for shits and giggles.
Internet forums and professional card dealers kinda ruined the game. Some people got waaaay to competitive and only played with the latest overpowered decks they copied from the internet (developed by professional players) and would mail order all the cards or print proxies if they couldn't afford them.
I sold all my cards shortly after for a nice profit, so I can't really complain, but damn did that spoil all the fun of that game.
I sold all mine when I graduated high school to fund myself while I waited to leave for the military so I never complained. I do a little now because I had some stuff from beta and revised that could have gone for way more, but you live and learn.
That's always kinda been my reasoning... I couldn't afford to buy it anyway, so what really is the company losing if I find another way to play?
I remember when hotline Miami (2?) was not giving a rating in Australia so we couldn't buy it. So the Devs said feel free to pirate it.
It's an interesting open question what we would want to replace intellectual property with.
My brain is so used to capitalism that I would be inclined to preserve things like artists having a contractual obligation to turn their work into a finished product if they got paid for it by someone that wanted a finished product. But if you look at some of the great renaissance artists, many of them were infamous for just skipping town and leaving unfinished works left and right when they got bored of making them. So maybe it's better to just accept that many great works are never finished so that other, greater works can get made instead.
One thing that does seem very important is crediting the actual artists and people that made it possible. Not to deny the right to copy or distribute, but to make it so people just know who is responsible and who they want to support or praise or communicate with. You would need infrastructure for that to make it easy to check, to remove duplicates, and to make sure entries give credit correctly.
Another important thing is the location, maintenance, and integrity of physical pieces. Hoarding seems bad, especially behind closed doors and especially without the permission of the creator or their (cultural) descendants. Letting artpieces decay seems bad, especially if others would pay to maintain them. Defiling artpieces seems bad, perhaps even with the creator's consent. But how do we decide which measures, if any, are okay to address these issues? I honestly don't know.
I don't know if it's necessary to do anything beyond these two that is specific to art. As long as there is a digital currency and wealth is already fairly distributed, voluntary patronage and donations (using the crediting infrastructure to make sure it ends up at the right places) may just be the best system for deciding which artists get what budget and how much of the world's resources and labor go to art. If wealth weren't fairly distributed, poor people would have less say in what gets made than everyone else, but the solution to that is to redistribute the wealth, not to patch that up with special rules for art. If there is no digital currency, then it's inconvenient to pay artists remotely.
Porn is probably the most pirated visual work that I'm aware of and I've noticed that one of the responses by the people who make it is to move their business model away from restricting access indefinitely to producing custom/bespoke pieces at a relatively high one-off price to compensate for cases where it immediately gets proliferated without further gain for themselves. If someone pays them to make the clip and then shares it with others it's OK because the producer has been rewarded in full at the point of sale. This is roughly equivalent to a piece of art being bought or commissioned and paid for in full by a museum or gallery, who put it on public display and make digital copies available for people to make their own prints from.
From an artist's POV this is much simpler and more economical than trying to gather royalties on an ongoing basis and enforce copyright to create false scarcity.
In my solarpunk future though, I will be an artist whose basic needs are met by machines and nature and who receives a universal basic income which I can give away to other artisans as a way to say thanks and to encourage them.
@Churbleyimyam
Cory Doctorow calls it "The Bitchin' Society" and Ian M Banks calls it "The Culture". Maybe someday.
@Tiresia @solarpunk
So maybe it's better to just accept that many great works are never finished so that other, greater works can get made instead.
I don't remember where I first heard this, but "works of art are never finished, merely abandoned."
Every creator always has things that they would continue to tweak or adjust about their works, stopping only when they get distracted or are faced with a hard deadline.
I know some artists and it's quite rare to see them finish stuff on time. Many just don't finish stuff at all.
Fact is that clients feel entitled to results, so they create pressure, which is the most counter productive thing you can do for creativity, since it needs to be free and open. Add to that a splash of mental health issues and perfectionism and there you go.
Artists also tend to be good at a lot of stuff so they are constantly asked by people to do stuff. They're constantly busy solving other people's problems. They're valuable people in society but often are quite miserable from stress and poor.
There's more to it than that but it gives you an idea why artists hate clients.
Regarding culture and affordability, there are some crazy things. In the next city there is an opera house. Which runs so hard into the red that each and every ticked is subsidized with several hundred Euro. The tickets are still expensive enough so that only the rich can afford them.
And this in a city that already runs on a big deficit.
Now there's a creative way to pilfer the working class' money, have their taxes fund things exclusively used by the rich. Next they'll make a 'public' marina for the local yacht club.
I uploaded my own solarpunk novel to a solarpunk “Library.” Mostly care about spreading the ideas anyway.
Links to either, please?
Keep circulating the tapes!
Thank you authors of the First Amendment!
And teachers everywhere
Not that I would ever want this, necessarily, but the sheer quantity of good games that exist today is enough for several lifetimes. All video games could be free to download for the public.
Brazil go brr
I saw a thread about this and people did nothing but Bash the guy for saying what he did.
@stabby_cicada I would not call culture any single manufactured product made by a private company primarily for profit. Culture, to me, is the sum of activities of a group of people in a certain area during a certain period. Making you think you're missing on culture because you can't obtain a game, an album or a movie is, to me, a strange capitalistic distortion of the notion of culture. I do not see "pirating" anything as bad though.
I have to disagree with your definition of culture.
I think, in general, art is vital to a people's culture. More specifically, subcultures form around the creation and enjoyment of specific art forms - from graffiti to theater to, yes, video games. And those subcultures, in aggregate, form and inform a people's culture as a whole - because when people ask themselves what art is most important within a genre, what art most matters to their culture, what even counts as art and what doesn't - that determination is generally informed by the subculture that surrounds that genre of art.
When you're part of a subculture focused on a particular art form, and you aren't able to experience a work of art that people in that subculture consider important to experience, yes, you are missing out. Theater and movie fans have lists of shows every true fan needs to watch at least once. Fans of a particular musician would deeply regret missing their concerts when that musician is touring in their area. If gamers aren't playing the same games their fellow fans are, they'll be left out of discussions and won't understand the memes. And so on.
If you don't have the money or resources to do something that many other people in your subculture consider important, you are missing out, and it does suck. And this is true whether the thing being missed out on was created for profit or not. Because it doesn't matter why the thing was created. It matters how you and the other people in your culture feel about it.
Culture, to me, is the sum of activities of a group of people in a certain area during a certain period.
Aren't games made by a group of people in a certain period? Historical artists produced commission work to live, is their art worthless because it's made for profit?
@Damage In the sense I see it, you cannot have access to culture or not. Whatever you use to do or avoid doing, and the values you transmit or avoid transmitting, this is the culture of the human groups you belong to. Some people do not have access to some kinds of goods or ways of self-education and information, but they are not barred from culture. Some groups produce video games, some others consume video games, that is indeed part of their culture. That is the way I meant it.