Copyrights, Trademarks, Patents, and branding irons

[Grath]

But but but Denuvo delays piracy by hours or sometimes even days!

[Thad]

But but but Denuvo delays piracy by hours or sometimes even days!

I get that you're being facetious, but I see people use this line unironically all the goddamn time. That DRM like Denuvo is justified even if it gets cracked within days, because it's all about that release window.

Worth noting that, even if it were true, the games affected by the two bugs I've mentioned are months or even years old and long since cracked. Even if you accept the premise that Denuvo serves a useful purpose for publishers (which I do not), it is clearly not serving that purpose anymore once the first crack is released.

It's also striking how many people over the years have told me that Denuvo must be worth the tradeoff for the publisher, because after all, they have internal data that we don't, and clearly it supports their decision to use Denuvo or they wouldn't do it.

I guess it's an object demonstration of just how hard the "rational market" line gets hammered into our skulls. Like, have you ever worked for a corporation? Have you ever dealt with management or bean-counters? Because "management makes decision that costs them money for no good damn reason, and justifies it using questionable data" isn't just a plausible explanation, it's very often the most plausible explanation.

Never mind that, just as a matter of pure fucking empiricism, your default response to someone having data they won't show you should be the opposite of implicitly trusting that data because they must know what they're talking about.

[Mongrel]

they have internal data that we don't

I am unbelievably tired of fucking moron fanboys who use this line in general to justify publisher bullshit and my god, I could not agree more.

[Friday]

I guess it's an object demonstration of just how hard the "rational market" line gets hammered into our skulls.

This drives me nuts to no end. As you say, counterexamples are so commonplace as to be ubiquitous, and yet everyone continues to labor under the delusion.

I don't know what the fuck it is with people, man. Why are so many people Corpo stans?

[Mongrel]

Our paperclip optimization machines have good propaganda.

[mharr]

Denuvo still exists? I thought Steam rendered all that shit redundant years back.

[Mongrel]

Denuvo is the reason I still haven't bought Valkyria Chronicles 4

[Thad]

Denuvo still exists? I thought Steam rendered all that shit redundant years back.

The simple, snarky answer is "It did."

The slightly more complex answer is that Denuvo, as an added layer of DRM on top of Steamworks, can make it take longer to crack games, sometimes. All that nonsense years ago about how it was uncrackable and the warez community was just going to give up forever has, of course, turned out to be pure goddamn bullshit. Denuvo games are routinely cracked now, frequently on day one, sometimes even sooner.

But some publishers still use it. (I don't have data to back this up, but anecdotally, it seems like fewer publishers use it than did a few years ago, and while some of those publishers are American it seems like the majority are Japanese. Japanese culture is even more rabidly protectionist of copyright landlords than US culture; remember that Nintendo got game rentals banned in Japan in the '80s.) The most frequent justification, like I said, is that it's all about that release window, that even if the game's going to get cracked eventually, that first week after release is the most crucial time to prevent piracy so that people will buy games. And Denuvo does hold off piracy for a few days, sometimes.

Some publishers do eventually patch their games to remove Denuvo, after that initial release window (and, often, after Denuvo causes major performance problems, as in the case of Sonic Mania and Mega Man 11). But sometimes they wait years, and sometimes they never do.

I'm sure the publishers do have data telling them that Denuvo is worth what they're paying for it, and that they wouldn't be using it otherwise. I'm skeptical that that data is any goddamn good.

You can compare internal sales data for a game with Denuvo to internal sales data for a game without, but you can't isolate that variable. How do you prove that a game with Denuvo that sold better in its first week than a game without Denuvo sold better because of Denuvo? The answer is that you can't.

You can look at how many seeders and leechers a torrent has, but you can't tell how many of those are people who would have bought the game if they hadn't torrented it.

How do you estimate the number of lost sales that are caused by the inclusion of Denuvo? Because I can tell you right now that there have been multiple occasions when I would have bought a game but saw that Denuvo badge on its Steam page and closed the fucking tab.

Given that you can't know how many lost sales are due to piracy or how many are due to people not buying Denuvo, how can you reasonably assume that the former number is higher than the latter one? Hell, how can you tell when they're one and the same? Seeing as it's increasingly clear that pirates get a superior experience, I'm sure there are people torrenting games because of Denuvo, who would have bought them if they hadn't had Denuvo. (Or even people who did buy the game but then snagged a cracked copy with the expectation that it would perform better and not stop working one day because some fuckwit forgot to renew a domain.)

tl;dr It's magical thinking, superstition, and confirmation bias. We live in a world where a certain contingent of people would rather eat horse dewormer and shit their stomach lining out than get a free vaccine. There are always going to be marks for snake oil.

[Büge]

I guess it's an object demonstration of just how hard the "rational market" line gets hammered into our skulls.

This drives me nuts to no end. As you say, counterexamples are so commonplace as to be ubiquitous, and yet everyone continues to labor under the delusion.

I don't know what the fuck it is with people, man. Why are so many people Corpo stans?

Because corporations make things people like consume invest way too much of their lives into. And if they examine too deeply, they'll realize that they've devoted themselves to media and technology developed by businesses that don't have their best interests in mind. And they worry that enjoying something crafted by corrupt and exploitative entities might reflect badly on them.

Hence the rationalization.

[KingRoyal]

Corporations are makers and hence must be revered. As just mere humans, we are takers and must be impugned. It often feels like people just took the mental model required to worship kings and started applying it to the new form of wealthy property owner, which in this case is corporations and CEOs.

And every corporation probably has hard drives full of "white papers" and "case studies" that prove the effectiveness of DRM. No actual scientific studies, but enough corporate pap that they see everyone using it and would feel like fools if they didn't. It's like when the music industry was claiming it was losing billions from piracy, a figure it arrived at by simply multiplying the number of downloads by $17 or whatever a CD cost at the time.

[Mongrel]

I feel like this is almost giving too much credit to people, or at least imagining there's that much conscious thought put into it. Corporations are Big and have lots of staff and make lots of money; if they didn't know what they were doing they would be bankrupt, right? Right guys? IMO it's just another retreat to simple binary thinking: Big Guy Win, Small Guy Lose. Big Guy Right, Small Guy Wrong.

Another possibility is that the thought that all our shit is run by organizations so completely incompetent and horrible (you know, as they really are) is so horrifying, that the thought that most corporations are competent is actually reassuring to them. You might be a Loser, but The System Works (oops, it doesn't).

Too often people simply refuse to envision change or even alternate possibilities because it's daunting and requires at least a little imagination, so instead they retreat to "that's just are the way things are". Everyone being crushed down further into desperation a little more each day only increases this, because by golly who has time for dreams or "philosophy"?

[Thad]

I think it's also part of the same old song about people adopting the things they like as part of their identity. Like if you criticize Nintendo or whoever you're attacking them as a person and they have to defend themselves.

I once had a guy try to tell me that X-Men is better than Batman: TAS. Which, like, okay, that's a matter of taste, it's subjective, it's not wrong; it's pretty clearly not the consensus opinion, but like what you like.

But then when I said I thought Batman was better, he said I was only saying that because I'm a DC guy.

Which caught me off-guard, honestly, because I thought I was talking to a grown-ass man, not somebody who decides what breakfast cereal he's going to eat based on what cartoon character is on the box.

Again, like what you like. But it's fucking weird to decide what you like based on a brand, and to assume other people do the same. If you like X-Men better than Batman, that's fine, but don't assume that anyone who disagrees is only doing so because of some silly brand loyalty.

[KingRoyal]

I like Batman, X-Men, Nintendo but I think there is a difference between bringing them into my identity and thinking they should have unchecked power to guide the economy and people's lives. I think it goes beyond mere preference and into a state of worshipping the power these companies wield. Corporatism and the Divine Right of Kings aren't that different, just a matter of which entity the person decides has an innate entitlement to power

[Brantly B.]

I'm in Double Hell right now and can't give this conversation the attention it deserves but I would like to point out that one of the "side effects" of Denuvo is that it forces the user to open a firewall exemption and consent to constant telemetry. So I'm not sure game sales are 100% the bottom line, here.

Am I being paranoid? Maybe.
Is that paranoia justified? Yes.

[Thad]

Oh, I haven't even started on kernel-level anti-cheat software.

[KingRoyal]

FTC to put an end to "click to subscribe, call to cancel"

The new guidelines around “negative option marketing” — which includes everything from automatic renewals to free trials that convert to paid subscriptions if consumers take no action — go beyond mandating that companies offer straightforward cancellation.

Companies, including news companies, must make “clear and conspicuous” disclosures, including “each deadline by which the consumer must act in order to stop the charges,” “the amount (or range of costs) the consumer will be charged or billed,” and “all information necessary to cancel the contract.” And customer service reps will have to keep new guidelines in mind: “In implementing effective cancellation procedures, marketers should not, among other things: hang up on consumers who call to cancel; place them on hold for an unreasonably long time; provide false information about how to cancel; or misrepresent the reasons for delays in processing consumers’ cancellation requests.” (You can read the full enforcement policy statement from the FTC here.)

[Thad]

Apple will soon send parts and tools to users who want to repair their phones

This is a welcome step, though of course their motivation for doing it is so they can say "See? You don't need to pass right-to-repair legislation; we're doing it voluntarily."

[Thad]

NordicTrack Patches Out 'God Mode' In Treadmills That Allowed Users To Watch Anything On Its Display

I've been saying this for years, but part of the complete and utter shortsightedness of moves like these (or, say, HP using a firmware update to disable third-party ink cartridges) is that it conditions users to mistrust security updates.

That's really bad. It's going to do far more damage than whatever short-term benefit you think you're gaining by not letting people watch Netflix on their treadmill or whatever.

[Thad]

Top Disney Lawyer To Become Top Copyright Office Lawyer, Because Who Cares About The Public Interest?

[Thad]

I'm seeing Ars and other outlets report this story with headlines like Canon can’t get enough toner chips, so it’s telling customers how to defeat its DRM, but it's not DRM by any reasonable definition of the term, it's just a screen that warns you that the ink isn't official and you click "OK" and it still works.

Other companies (most notably HP) have used chips to lock out unauthorized ink cartridges, but based on how this story is described, that's not what Canon's doing. It's DRM in the same way that WinZip's nag screen was DRM.