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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1223 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 6, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I have spent a few hours playing the Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake (on PC I might add). It's a very charming and well-made game. It lifts the spirit.

The devs added major image sharpening to it though, probably in an effort to make a 1080p game look better on 4K TVs or something. I hope that can be modded out soon.

I think it’s vulgar to pirate games (I assume you’re not ripping it from the cart). Call it a matter of honor. If one must do it, it is best not to mention it.

Bravo. It surprises and disappoints me endlessly to see shoplifter ethics espoused by supposed right wingers.

There is literally no way that you can legally buy a game. You can only purchase a revocable, non-transferable, full-price license to play the game until the publisher changes their mind or the servers shut down. That license is gimped in a dozen different ways, not least of which is that they do not permit it to work on a general computing device but only on their special hand-marked and very expensive machine. It's as though you bought a Hermes bag but were only allowed to wear it if you had your entire outfit from the same store.

We are not talking about normal products and we are not talking about normal markets.

Isn’t the only reason these licenses exist because they provide the legal framework to challenge piracy in court? Otherwise, I could simply copy my “digital product” and sell it to fifty thousand people, right?

That can hardly be the only reason, because they impose way more restraints than that. And copyright law covers that case anyway: you own a physical book in all respects but you can't legally make 50,000 photocopies of it and sell them. There's no reason you can't give away, share, edit or inherit software and media in the same way that you can with the book, except that it's mildly more annoying to handle the DRM and the companies want to maximise copies sold.

In practice there's a huge amount of space devoted to control freakery: 1980 Nintendo's insistence on signing all games released for their console so as to protect their family-friendly brand, for example.

I thought the difference was that book republishing is subject to centuries of established law specifically about reprinting printed works, whereas digital copyright law is very recent and incomplete, so the ‘perpetual license’ served as a blanket assertion that resale (or copying and distribution for free) was prohibited.

I'll look into that, I wasn't aware. You may be right, but I do think that current licensing has remained extremely restrictive long after better arrangements could have been sorted out, primarily because publishers find the extra restrictions extremely beneficial in other ways. They have consistently resisted attempts to organise e.g. inheritance of digital property.

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