Second Life and Open Source [LWN.net]

Second Life and Open Source

Posted Dec 16, 2006 17:49 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Second Life and Open Source by mikov
Parent article: Second Life and Open Source

Any time you break any digital copyright protection sceme it is a violation of the DMCA.

Anyways. You attributing the success of PS1/PS2 and Xbox to some sort of copy protection sceme is misplaced.

People would of bought them either way.

ID software allows you to download the game itself off their ftp server. You just need the data files. It's not regulated, it's no charge. The 'cdkey' protection is laughably easy to circumvent. But they are still able to make a boatload worth of money.

Sure you didn't know anybody that used cracking to circumvent Xbox protection, but I bet you also didn't actually ask anybody did you?

My mom had a plumber try to sell her PS games for a dozen for 20 bucks when he found out that I liked playing video games. Yes, it was a bit weird.

I know people that have cracked Xbox scemes to install Linux.

I've cracked protection scemes in DVD devices to play non-US videos.

I knew a guy that cracked the protection scemes in his PS2 so he could play japanese games in it.

I would say that these devices succeed despite the protection scemes.

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Second Life and Open Source

Posted Dec 16, 2006 18:49 UTC (Sat) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link]

Sorry, but you misunderstand my point. I am not attributing the commercial
success of the consoles to the copy protection scheme. However:

- Consoles are a commercial success and they do have TPM.

- The vast majority of users will not crack their consoles. Because they
don't care, because they can't/don't want to open their consoles and break
them or lastly because its illegal.

- Trusted computing does make the platform more attractive for businesses.
Things like: DRM for media. Multiplayer games where one cannot cheat.
Better control of what the costumer can do. Etc.

Think about the last point. It is not about ethics or "freedom" - the
businesses and even the consumers don't really care about that. From a
business point TPM is very very advantageous. I don't like it, but it is
true.

I am not sure what the solution is or that there even is a solution. We
can't really fight business sense with ideology. We can't realistically
hope that most consumers will magically realize the harm of trusted
computing and stop buying consoles. Actually, I am feeling pretty
desperate about the situation - I think that trusted computing is upon us
and there is nothing we can do. I hope I am wrong.

Second Life and Open Source

Posted Dec 16, 2006 21:52 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

The vast majority of users will not crack their consoles.

It probably depends on the country. The argument can be made that the commercial success of a console in Europe is linked to its "crackability", and not the opposite.

Trusted computing does make the platform more attractive for businesses.

Short term maybe; long term, these artificial restrictions limit the usefulness of a device and its application.

We can't really fight business sense with ideology.

Business sense has its own ideology; very often businesses hurt themselves because of it. At other times businesses can see the truth and act wisely. IBM supports Linux because it is cheap and good, but also because it is open and free.

Second Life and Open Source

Posted Dec 17, 2006 13:08 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

The vast majority of users will not crack their consoles.

Right. They just go to the internet shop and buy a cracked one (you do know why the console with long-obsoleted firmware 1.50 will cost $15 more then console with current firmware, right?).

Trusted computing does make the platform more attractive for businesses. Things like: DRM for media. Multiplayer games where one cannot cheat. Better control of what the costumer can do. Etc.

And since all this makes the platform less attractive to the customer in a lot of cases the real penetration only occurs when the TPM-scheme is hacked.

It is not about ethics or "freedom" - the businesses and even the consumers don't really care about that.

Consumers don't care about "freedom" - they care about price. Right now you can buy 10 movies for $3 in Russia on DVD (pirated, of course - but I've not seen noone who actually cares about this when I was there). Movies on HD-DVD or BlueRay discs will cost 50-100 times more at first. Do you really think customers will buy them ? They will wait for DRM to be broken - or the whole scheme will just go nowhere.

We can't realistically hope that most consumers will magically realize the harm of trusted computing and stop buying consoles.

In a lot of cases they just wait till the DRM-scheme-of-the-day is broken. May be not in U.S. - but in less affluent counttries it's the rule...

Second Life and Open Source

Posted Dec 18, 2006 5:15 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

Many DRM schemes rely on no one being able to break them -- if a single person can break the protection, they can distribute the results to others.

In the case of CopyBot, it seems that only one person needed to run the program and it would let other users with unmodified clients copy things. And given that the

So even if there was some form of DRM on the SimpleLife client, you'd need to do better than "The vast majority of users will not crack their consoles".