Sex workers in Bangkok pay around 10% of their salaries to the bars where people can find the workers.
Apple and other companies take around 30% as a fee for using their marketplace.
I don't see a reason why big tech should get a higher cut.
Apple and other companies take around 30% as a fee for using their marketplace.
I don't see a reason why big tech should get a higher cut.
We've been able to install whatever we want on our PCs since the dawn of personal computing and it never was an issue. I don't see why we couldn't have a similar system on mobile devices too.
Also, why even defend the right of megacorps to lock users in their walled garden? What could society or even you possibly win through this?
I am certainly not opposed to gaming companies opening their SDKs and consoles to hobbyists.
Sega's trademark rights were literally ignored as a "Fair Use" for a 3rd party to be able to release games for Sega's console, because the alternative was that it would be impossible to legally release a third party game cartridge, which the court did not like as an outcome.
But then we got the DMCA and laws and rules that make it not legal to circumvent DRM in an attempt to do the normal Fair Use things. That's the primary legal limit to running whatever you want on consoles. Companies were given the legal right to make a technical protection of their IP, and if you tried to get around those technical measures to do things that you had a legitimate and legal case to do, you would still fall afoul of the law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention
Basically the DMCA completely obliterated the previous "You can't prevent a third party from touching your stuff after you sell it" that was status quo before. There's all sorts of vagaries in US copyright law about Fair Uses and "legal backups" but the DMCA destroys all of that. All you have to do is encrypt or even just xor your program/movie/whatever with a simple key and suddenly it's completely illegal to use any tool other than one provided or licensed by that company to interact with that data. It's insane.
The courts had given americans fairly strong property rights with digital property, much more closely aligning with rights for physical items and the doctrine of first sale, but the DMCA destroyed all that, because that's what IP companies wanted.
edit: maybe pull the entire thread into the prompt, rather than just the comment you're replying to? Preprocess to add some context around previous replies so you know they're yours? Not knowing anything about your previous responses is a tell.
But it's somewhat hyperbolic to compare a mandatory cost that you have to pay to someone regardless, to being kidnapped.
It's not hyperbolic when you don't have a choice in who you're paying.
Monopolistic practices are their own thing. Bad for very different reasons than kidnapping.