Command & Conquer in HTML5 with multiplayer
adityaravishankar.com
adityaravishankar.com
If you're making money off their stuff, they care a whole lot more. Also, making money from it leaves a trail. Just follow the money.
Donations do not mean a for-profit venture, but collecting cash for distributing someone else's IP does change the (1) how the IP holder will respond and (2) how the courts weight the fair use factors.
The fair use factors are not determinative; it is a balancing test that looks at all the facts and circumstances surrounding the use of someone else's IP.
Fair use in the US, as any legal interpenetration can only be made in a local sense, the fair use in the US has some prior cases where the affect on the market is used to determine if a fair use case is valid or not, but that doesn't require money to change hand.
IP law is not as local as you think it is. All parties to the Berne Convention must honor the IP rights of an IP holder belonging to any other Berne signatory. In other words, the law of American copyright belongs to works created by American citizens, in any other nation which signed the Berne Convention (which is every nation that matters).
Effect on the market is not a factor of the fair use test; that is a factor for determining the amount of damages to award for a violation of IP rights. But attempting to commercialize or otherwise monetize the distribution of someone else's IP is a factor that courts look at.
It is simple, IP laws lead to slower development of science and industry and accumulation of huge amounts of money and power in the hands of a few. Classical example is 19th and early 20th century British Empire - it's IP laws are what to a big degree allowed US and Germany to catch up and surpass it.
To use two Asian countries: it's my understanding that Japan has had a lot of technological success while at the same time employing copy-protection practices (from what I remember in my Nintendo days). China is not at Japan's development stage yet but do you believe China, barring a change in how they enforce copyright, will be as much of an innovations leader as Japan was in its heyday?
This may be incorrect, at least for one category (literature). There's actually some really interesting lit that argues that lax/nonexistent copyright laws of the revolutionary period are the reason that the publishing industry ever took off in America. And these same laws, it could be argued, are how American literature got its start. (Sorry, this is skeevy, but I can't remember the title of the book that articulates this argument for the life of me... Will post it if it comes to me.)
As to your second argument: Are there other aspects of Japanese society that could influence their innovation that go beyond intellectual property? I'm not going to deny that IP protections could play a role in innovation, but I could certainly imagine two countries with identical IP regimes having RADICALLY different levels of innovation. (Education, culture, etc could all create positive impacts on innovation... and these effects may even outweigh any effect produced by an IP regime.)
Are there any metrics for innovation as a whole? This would be an interesting thing to look into...
It's a very interesting book -- I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the subject, whatever their position.
I very much appreciate the high quality of discourse hn makes possible (despite the fact that the actual quality varies wildly).
No, that's not at all what he's saying. He's saying that intellectual property is actually an immensely broad and complicated issue. (Rather: That's what I interpreted him to be saying; I could be wrong here.)
I don't think you can really make a statement like "IP laws lead to slower development of science and industry..." because "IP laws" are such a broad category of laws. Do you mean patents? What kind of patents? (Does a 5 year patent on medicines, something proposed by the Pirate Party, count as an IP law that reduces development? Why? How does it differ from other patents that are longer / renewable?) Can I make a contract to stop someone from disclosing an idea of mine? Is that an IP law? (Probably) Is it aggregating money into the hands of the few? (More dubious claim there...)
Don't get me wrong, I tend to agree that there should be limits on the sorts of monopolies that IP laws tend to foster, and I think that the current IP regimes that are dominant are typically very damaging. But I also think there could be certain IP controls that are acceptable and positive. (Allowing for IP regimes that are basically "trade secrets only" seems a bit inadequate to me, especially since patents offer valuable protections to certain kinds of innovations.) This is a view that your wildly over-broad/under-specified interpretation of IP would not accommodate.
The pharma industry is a very good example of this...the costs of drugs and the tricks pharma companies use to extend patents is rightly criticized...on the other hand, the research and regulatory process is massively lengthy and costly, and one that no one would pursue if another company could swoop in and profit on billions of R&D.
There's also something else...rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower than it was in the past few centuries, because of a natural diminishing rate of return. To paraphrase -- I think, Stephen Colbert -- it's easy to make scientific discoveries when not burying diseased corpses next to your water supply is considered a health breakthrough.
This is a particularly superb point! I really like this argument.
Furthermore, even after deciding on a vague sort of metric, it's hard to quantize (choose a measure, in math jargon), advancement to be able to have rates.
Wow, it's amazing how different our views of the world are. IMHO the rate of advancement is now far, far, far surpassing any other time in the known history. The PC (1975), Web(1991), FB(2004), iPhone(2007) have created such an enormous change so fast. Have a look at "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought" by Ray Kurzweil to see how crucial sciences nowadays are advancing by the month.
In any case, I don't see the point in making a big debate over this on a post that's about porting C&C to HTML5. I think it's enough to point out that when there are protracted debates, it's because the issues involved are much more complicated than just a conspiratorial power-grab.
Besides the communication revolution as a product of the internet, and the ability to create images and sounds much more effectively using those devices, the average persons life has not changed much.
We have changed in some ways though due to that communication revolution - it has had profound effects on workforce distribution (labor jobs, if any chance exists, are simply deposited where the labor market is cheapest while stable enough not to have large overhead from unstable nations), wealth in the USA has been dramatically concentrated in the richest 0.1% as a result of that globalization due to computerized communication, we are much more involved as a species with each other, etc.
And communication improvements are great. But they are a tiny aspect of life, and they are about the only thing getting noticeably better. A lot of that is due to copyright, patents, and draconian laws holding back self driving cars, stem cell grown replacement limbs, 3d printers in the home, thorium power, and a bunch of other just-out-of-arms-reach revolutions in the way we live our lives outside of that audio / visual space computers vastly improved.
Arguably, this matters mostly to those below a certain threshold income (difference of 2% and 10% not as big as 10% and 50%), i.e. matters more to the poor than to the rich. I think American citizens tend to be richer than the rest of the world.
Personally I think he'd release his treatise under CC-BY (which requires copyright law to work).
FWIW patents are about an exchange of knowledge for a time-limited monopoly on the use of that knowledge. Patents allow the free propagation of the ideas behind patentable inventions and provide means to incentivise inventors and to reward beneficial inventions. They also, by exclusions, all the development, experiment and investigation of others in to the content of patent disclosures before the details therein would normally be disclosed.
The alternative to patents ("open [letters]") is industrial secrets. If you can show me how making all current patent disclosures in to industrial secrets promotes the propagation of technological ideas I'd be much obliged.
Current patents are not about exchange of knowledge (I'd ask what have you been smoking, but it's against the HN guidelines, in your view the patent trolls must be the bringers of fire) - Apple patents on rectangular form, Monsanto and Co patents on genes, the mind blowing obvious software patents.
Poor implementation in your jurisdiction doesn't make the idea of patents wrong.
Maybe something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%E2%80%93Ziv%E2%80%93Welc... or a video codec like H264.
Though personally I think the wording of UK patent law by the letter rules out patenting of such algos (that's always bugged me a little), but you asked.
I think the notion of being expensive to develop is misguided as a test for worth of a patent. Similarly the question of whether it 'needs to be protected' (paraphrasing you).
The question should be does it serve the public to stimulate the free exchanged of ideas in this way; does it promote useful technologies; does it encourage innovation.
[Aside: My preference would be for a shorter patent term to reflect the faster pace of technical change. I'd also bring copyright terms in line with current patent terms as a maximum period.]
However, it seems like most fields are integrating improvements from computing so there is a lot of low hanging fruit out there.
Now THAT is an easy one. You make your game multi-player online and host all the IP on the server. That is the alternative that the world is being pushed towards. Perfect DRM, and less power in the hands of consumers than we have ever seen before. (Playing it offline or after the company has gone out of business? Forget about it.)
I think most programmers will take industrial secrets over patents in the blink of an eye. Patents here are things that any programmer can come up with if they spend a few weeks working on.
I don't read that from his comment at all. What he said was that the issue is complex and demands more than a pithy one=liner.
I don't see any reason to invent a straw man, particularly an ad hominem one at that (by painting danso as some kind of arrogant elitist). Is there another reason why you're being condescending?
You have black and white beliefs in a grey world.
Yes, capitalism has some bad side effects. That is not a reason to throw out the baby with the bath water.
So, my question for against your statement is, if IP laws changed, why do you think that drug regulations (and everything else that drives up cost-to-market) would remain the same?
If another company could just start making that same drug as soon as it is proved safe and effective they could bypass over a decade of development costs that the other company ate(typically for many drugs since most fail so more like 4+ man-decades of development and trial costs). They could sell the drug for purely the manufacturing costs and have an equivalent product.
No one with capitalistic motivations would privately fund drug research in a market like this because it would make no sense.
Also Issac Newton was taking the piss out of a contemporary rival whom he despised who was well known for being very short when he said that.
If you get tired of playing in a browser, check OpenRA out!
[will edit in link when I'm not on a corporate network]
Is it sad that I still remember that, or what? :P
(Would provide links but can't at the moment. Google should find them easily)
In Dosbox, yes (don't have a reference for this, but it's safe to assume that every DOS app except Win3.11 will work in Dosbox)
Thanks for sharing!
EDIT: I actually searched Rdio for C&C music after seeing this post…was not disappointed!
thank you for the list, really appreciated
Aside from that, second to last map, GDI, best, mission, ever.
(I spent several years reverse-engineering Command & Conquer RA2, I should know - that game has hacks and flukes everywhere.)
I like the separate canvas for mouse activities. Makes a lot of sense. It's probably not that much of a novelty, but I'm a designer/lousy programmer, so I'm impressed easily.
If only it would be taken seriously. I.e. actual accounts that would get punished for leaving etc.
[1] http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/pointerlock/intro/
Run unit into attack range. Pull unit back and attack with other units. Enemy AI will attempt to chase unit which you are pulling back. Should mean with a bit of micro you won't lose any units.
(it has a multiplayer component)
And my dude walked across water.
But it was awesome!
Doesn't contain anything I connect with Emscripten (stack and heap references). Actually, not even the object fields names have been obfuscated! It is quite readable. But I'd feel bad minifying a port of a game I don't own, too. Maybe that's why.
Shouldn't a new technology only be embraced for a certain use (like creating games) when it is "better" in some way than what we already have? Sorry, I really just don't get it. When will people realize that games will never be viable in HTML5. Embedded audio, videos, vector graphics and minor animations for a web site/app - great. But games??? Please stop. You are not using the best (or even suitable) tool for the job.
All this and we can't really use it for years to come because it is not mature and not enough users have modern browsers.
Enough already. Let me know when the party starts, cause I am sure am sick of hearing hype over HTML5 when there are already better alternatives. When Flash was new and games like this were created (this was like 8-9 years ago LOL) It really was a big deal because nothing like it existed at the time.
HTML5 to me is like the GO programming language. YAY, another language that can do what hundreds of other languages can already do. It may be new and "neat", It may even be the best tool for doing certain niche things, but hardly worth seeing in the news every day.