Worth noting that per the above comment it was removed because it had achieved its purpose, and also that there are various games, some over a year old now on which Denuvo still hasn't been cracked.
There's also only one main "group" (person?) cracking Denuvo, CPY, and it seems to be taking a while each time, giving a nice window of uncracked games for people using it in terms of sales.
While most reports are somewhat constrained due to the available information etc, it seems (based on my brief reading through) that the focus on revenues is to the point that profit or margins are effectively ignored.
Now, looking at revenues is fine, however the argument should also be that you don't NEED an increase in revenues to show health. You point out that digital sales are growing in all areas. These are close to zero marginal cost products. That means every digital sale is nearly pure profit (after retailer margins), while physical sales have a cost of goods, etc.
Flat revenues with a declining cost base would result in more profit in the industries. Growing revenues AND a declining cost base just means that there's way more money floating through. Of course, the people who really suffer are the manufacturing bases, such as physical disc manufacturers and retailers, not Hollywood or the content creators.
There is so much focus on revenues and barely anyone mentions the fact that digital is close to zero marginal cost and nearly pure profit, and that the digital/physical mix should be increasing profits naturally, even if revenues don't increase. And, as Amazon would hopefully tell people, profits are quite important, revenue isn't everything. Amazon has massive revenues but about zero profits.
The City of London police came to my island to let us know about the internet as well. Faster internet = more fraud! We have DSL which is typically >10mbps (not superfast), but more than fast enough for "fraud" to be an issue, as is any other speed. But apparently faster internet = bigger fraud threat, because they say so.
"David Clark from the Economic Crime Directorate said that while JT and Sure’s [the two local ISPs] investments would create a huge amount of opportunity it would also have a downside."
"For me, Guernsey is going to thrive on the opportunities of this faster internet, but while it is thriving and not looking back, then there is always the potential to get caught out by fraudsters"
The irony being that the CoL police are basically committing fraud with their actions most of the time, then coming and telling other people to be worried. Damn right we should be worried.
Um, isn't that picture copyright infringement? They totally need to be sued for at least $1m.
(Because it couldn't be fair use to use one screencap from a game. Unless you get in some lawyers to argue it is, in which case it's fine, but no lawyers, no fair use.)
31% of Americans have net wealth of under $10k. They can't afford to buy things if they are pirating, realistically. Even those between 10k-100k are basically choosing between "stuff" and a house, if they want to pay off their mortgage.
That means over 75% of the US population is unlikely to be able to realistically afford to spend "lots" on "stuff", and therefore there is a zero sum game between all "piracy" industries (movies, games, music) for those people.
Just because someone pirates it doesn't mean they could afford to buy it unless, potentially, they didn't buy something else. While the music industry may say they lost $1bn in sales (for example), that $1bn probably went to the games industry.
People have a finite amount of money. Most people can't buy everything. That's not saying they SHOULD pirate what they can't afford, but they couldn't buy what they are pirating unless they didn't buy other things. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, where Paul and Peter are the MPAA and RIAA.
Read the article? It's not about the film, it's about a trailer for the film which it appears bears very little resemblance to the actual film itself. Hence the status of the story the film itself is based on is irrelevant, as the film itself isn't what's being argued about.
Er, no, that requirement was removed before launch of the Xbox One... you can just unplug the Kinect and the console works fine.
As for the privacy thing... I wonder if anyone read what actually happened?
It's also something that's allowed in the ToS, and I'm sure it's in the Google ToS as well. This was an investigation that led to someone being arrested, so it's not like someone was bored one day and decided to look at a random user's email account.
Also, it assumes Google has never done the same thing. Which no one knows. The only reason we know about this instance was because of a prosecutor's filing, so clearly there was a legal ground for seeking the information... not some random searching.
Really? Because Square have been selling it from their own website and from Steam for a while now (their own website for well over a year, Steam for less time).
Also with regard to the guy talking about Blizzard. Some guys basically made a hybrid SCBW/SC2 mod for SC2, which Blizzard supported. And then Blizzard made the Arcade (custom maps in SC2) free for anyone at all to play, without having to pay for SC2 at all, so basically you can get some of SC2 and SCBW for entirely free made by fans.
But surely that means you can still go to court and it would have to be proven that you registered the domain for the purpose of committing illegal activity.
And then you have some recourse because you can sue the domain name provider for breach of contract rather than having to try and deal with the government, and if the courts agree and say the domain provider is at fault for giving up the domain, you can then use that to appeal to the government who took the domain.
Companies like Microsoft and Adobe make more sense, because they are almost certainly talking about real issues in markets like China and developing nations where piracy is an issue and most people probably aren't using legitimate software, including "official" places like government offices etc.
That's a real issue because developing nations are growth area for software companies, so it would be expected to show up in reports on the company's future like these.
Actually, in my job I do give them a summary of what I've done/where I'm at.
And then before they sign things off, they go through all the work I've done and review it.
First, the senior person gets an understanding of what the business does, then sets out key risk areas and what we need to look at and focus on, and then tells me to go look at it and find relevant documents. Then I do so, and then they review all the work I've done.
Key part is, I am told beforehand what is important, and before we start we obtain and understanding of the business both by asking the people there, and by our own experience of other companies and of the world at large and potential impacts from that.
Now, if we just relied on what was given to us as important by our client, and took their word for major issues, what might happen? We might miss things we would think are important, but don't know about.
This is an OVERSIGHT committee. You can't rely on the people you are overseeing to tell you everything you might want or need to know unless you develop your own understanding at some level. My point is that a data dump is too much at the level it's given to, members of the house, but it's asinine to expect that the NSA is going to tell them all the important things they need to know and not forget or miss or hide anything. The whole reason for the document dump is to hide things, so what makes you think that by getting the NSA themselves to tell the committee what's important that they won't just not tell them things?
The whole point is: THE NSA CANNOT BE TRUSTED AND IS TRYING TO HIDE OR OBFUSCATE THINGS.
YOU CANNOT EXPECT THAT THE NSA WILL APPROPRIATELY SUMMARISE ALL IMPORTANT INFORMATION THEMSELVES AND PROVIDE IT TO THE COMMITTEE.
He's implying they don't respect the role they have on the committee. He seems to be the one putting in time and effort, and everyone else is saying "hey, it's not my fault I didn't bother reading information", and laying blame on him.
It's not necessarily his fault the whole committee is dysfunctional. He shares some blame, but not all of it. They are disrespecting him by saying "we didn't know because we didn't do any work, and it's your fault".
Rogers makes a valid point. Who is going to select what information is "important"? If the committee are expecting the NSA to provide them with the important information highlighted, who gets in trouble when something the committee thinks is important isn't highlighted?
I think he is right, there is insufficient oversight because most of the people on the committee aren't giving it enough attention. That's not his fault.
The problem is the structure of the committee, not what is provided to it. Providing information is fine if there is someone to make a call on how to decide what is important, but the NSA can't do that, and individual members can't do that, they need support in a manageable fashion.
If the NSA was selecting what was "important" for the committee to see, where is the oversight? There is none, because the committee get provided with what the NSA wants them to focus on, and potentially serious *other* issues are hidden, because the committee assumes the NSA is doing both what is right, and what the committee wants/expects. And if it's not, suddenly there's a black hole anyway.
I don't think Rogers is necessarily the best person for his role, but he SHOULD be condescending. He can't decide what is important to other committee members, the NSA can't decide it either.
Of course they don't understand these things.
The people in power want to do whatever they want, the best way to get away with that is to give oversight and legal decisions to people who don't understand what you are doing, that way you can "explain" to them what you are doing, and they will let you get away with things because they still won't understand.
It's not exactly a new concept, and it happens on a daily basis. If you do something complicated, it's more than likely that you can get away with pretending to explain it to someone above you, and at some point they will just say "OK, that sounds fine, I trust that you know what you are doing", without really understanding it.
Partly you need to build up some trust initially, but considering it's the president and various long standing high security organisations, there is implicit trustworthiness. Then you just spew some jargon until they smile, nod, and let you get on with what you were doing.
Surely you can just counter-claim that they are bullying you.
You get accused. Things get done to you.
Then you claim that your ?emotional well-being, self-esteem or reputation? has been harmed by what has happened.
I think they mean with regards to the requirements of third parties they license content from.
e.g. iTunes has to geo-block because they license the copyright from a third party, who may only own/have rights to that copyright in some locations.
If they didn't block it, then the copyright holder/licensee elsewhere would not be happy.
The iTunes resale model isn't the same as people like Adobe or MS who sell their own products directly to resellers/consumers, so while for some it's necessary as they don't own the rights, for the underlying rights holders it's not. Except to protect margins/profits.
Still not easy to crack
Worth noting that per the above comment it was removed because it had achieved its purpose, and also that there are various games, some over a year old now on which Denuvo still hasn't been cracked.
There's also only one main "group" (person?) cracking Denuvo, CPY, and it seems to be taking a while each time, giving a nice window of uncracked games for people using it in terms of sales.
Revenues revenues... profit?
While most reports are somewhat constrained due to the available information etc, it seems (based on my brief reading through) that the focus on revenues is to the point that profit or margins are effectively ignored.
Now, looking at revenues is fine, however the argument should also be that you don't NEED an increase in revenues to show health.
You point out that digital sales are growing in all areas. These are close to zero marginal cost products. That means every digital sale is nearly pure profit (after retailer margins), while physical sales have a cost of goods, etc.
Flat revenues with a declining cost base would result in more profit in the industries. Growing revenues AND a declining cost base just means that there's way more money floating through. Of course, the people who really suffer are the manufacturing bases, such as physical disc manufacturers and retailers, not Hollywood or the content creators.
There is so much focus on revenues and barely anyone mentions the fact that digital is close to zero marginal cost and nearly pure profit, and that the digital/physical mix should be increasing profits naturally, even if revenues don't increase. And, as Amazon would hopefully tell people, profits are quite important, revenue isn't everything. Amazon has massive revenues but about zero profits.
Also fraud is a threat of faster internet!
The City of London police came to my island to let us know about the internet as well. Faster internet = more fraud!
We have DSL which is typically >10mbps (not superfast), but more than fast enough for "fraud" to be an issue, as is any other speed. But apparently faster internet = bigger fraud threat, because they say so.
http://guernseypress.com/news/2014/09/27/fraud-is-a-threat-of-faster-internet/
"David Clark from the Economic Crime Directorate said that while JT and Sure’s [the two local ISPs] investments would create a huge amount of opportunity it would also have a downside."
"For me, Guernsey is going to thrive on the opportunities of this faster internet, but while it is thriving and not looking back, then there is always the potential to get caught out by fraudsters"
The irony being that the CoL police are basically committing fraud with their actions most of the time, then coming and telling other people to be worried. Damn right we should be worried.
Simple solution
Ask to be on the committee.
If they say no, then sue over your right to free speech.
Infringement
Um, isn't that picture copyright infringement? They totally need to be sued for at least $1m.
(Because it couldn't be fair use to use one screencap from a game. Unless you get in some lawyers to argue it is, in which case it's fine, but no lawyers, no fair use.)
There is only so much money
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/americans-have-relatively-poor-net-wealth-cm257517
31% of Americans have net wealth of under $10k. They can't afford to buy things if they are pirating, realistically.
Even those between 10k-100k are basically choosing between "stuff" and a house, if they want to pay off their mortgage.
That means over 75% of the US population is unlikely to be able to realistically afford to spend "lots" on "stuff", and therefore there is a zero sum game between all "piracy" industries (movies, games, music) for those people.
Just because someone pirates it doesn't mean they could afford to buy it unless, potentially, they didn't buy something else. While the music industry may say they lost $1bn in sales (for example), that $1bn probably went to the games industry.
People have a finite amount of money. Most people can't buy everything. That's not saying they SHOULD pirate what they can't afford, but they couldn't buy what they are pirating unless they didn't buy other things. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, where Paul and Peter are the MPAA and RIAA.
Re:
Read the article? It's not about the film, it's about a trailer for the film which it appears bears very little resemblance to the actual film itself.
Hence the status of the story the film itself is based on is irrelevant, as the film itself isn't what's being argued about.
Re: Look, a rabbit!
Seems a fine figure to me.
It's commercial willful infringement. Seems like 6x10^5 times the damages is reasonable.
Re:
Er, no, that requirement was removed before launch of the Xbox One... you can just unplug the Kinect and the console works fine.
As for the privacy thing... I wonder if anyone read what actually happened?
It's also something that's allowed in the ToS, and I'm sure it's in the Google ToS as well. This was an investigation that led to someone being arrested, so it's not like someone was bored one day and decided to look at a random user's email account.
Also, it assumes Google has never done the same thing. Which no one knows. The only reason we know about this instance was because of a prosecutor's filing, so clearly there was a legal ground for seeking the information... not some random searching.
Re:
Really? Because Square have been selling it from their own website and from Steam for a while now (their own website for well over a year, Steam for less time).
Also with regard to the guy talking about Blizzard. Some guys basically made a hybrid SCBW/SC2 mod for SC2, which Blizzard supported.
And then Blizzard made the Arcade (custom maps in SC2) free for anyone at all to play, without having to pay for SC2 at all, so basically you can get some of SC2 and SCBW for entirely free made by fans.
Re: Re:
But surely that means you can still go to court and it would have to be proven that you registered the domain for the purpose of committing illegal activity.
And then you have some recourse because you can sue the domain name provider for breach of contract rather than having to try and deal with the government, and if the courts agree and say the domain provider is at fault for giving up the domain, you can then use that to appeal to the government who took the domain.
Microsoft
Companies like Microsoft and Adobe make more sense, because they are almost certainly talking about real issues in markets like China and developing nations where piracy is an issue and most people probably aren't using legitimate software, including "official" places like government offices etc.
That's a real issue because developing nations are growth area for software companies, so it would be expected to show up in reports on the company's future like these.
Re: Re:
Actually, in my job I do give them a summary of what I've done/where I'm at.
And then before they sign things off, they go through all the work I've done and review it.
First, the senior person gets an understanding of what the business does, then sets out key risk areas and what we need to look at and focus on, and then tells me to go look at it and find relevant documents.
Then I do so, and then they review all the work I've done.
Key part is, I am told beforehand what is important, and before we start we obtain and understanding of the business both by asking the people there, and by our own experience of other companies and of the world at large and potential impacts from that.
Now, if we just relied on what was given to us as important by our client, and took their word for major issues, what might happen? We might miss things we would think are important, but don't know about.
This is an OVERSIGHT committee. You can't rely on the people you are overseeing to tell you everything you might want or need to know unless you develop your own understanding at some level.
My point is that a data dump is too much at the level it's given to, members of the house, but it's asinine to expect that the NSA is going to tell them all the important things they need to know and not forget or miss or hide anything.
The whole reason for the document dump is to hide things, so what makes you think that by getting the NSA themselves to tell the committee what's important that they won't just not tell them things?
The whole point is:
THE NSA CANNOT BE TRUSTED AND IS TRYING TO HIDE OR OBFUSCATE THINGS.
YOU CANNOT EXPECT THAT THE NSA WILL APPROPRIATELY SUMMARISE ALL IMPORTANT INFORMATION THEMSELVES AND PROVIDE IT TO THE COMMITTEE.
Re:
He's implying they don't respect the role they have on the committee. He seems to be the one putting in time and effort, and everyone else is saying "hey, it's not my fault I didn't bother reading information", and laying blame on him.
It's not necessarily his fault the whole committee is dysfunctional. He shares some blame, but not all of it.
They are disrespecting him by saying "we didn't know because we didn't do any work, and it's your fault".
Rogers makes a valid point. Who is going to select what information is "important"?
If the committee are expecting the NSA to provide them with the important information highlighted, who gets in trouble when something the committee thinks is important isn't highlighted?
I think he is right, there is insufficient oversight because most of the people on the committee aren't giving it enough attention. That's not his fault.
The problem is the structure of the committee, not what is provided to it. Providing information is fine if there is someone to make a call on how to decide what is important, but the NSA can't do that, and individual members can't do that, they need support in a manageable fashion.
If the NSA was selecting what was "important" for the committee to see, where is the oversight? There is none, because the committee get provided with what the NSA wants them to focus on, and potentially serious *other* issues are hidden, because the committee assumes the NSA is doing both what is right, and what the committee wants/expects. And if it's not, suddenly there's a black hole anyway.
I don't think Rogers is necessarily the best person for his role, but he SHOULD be condescending.
He can't decide what is important to other committee members, the NSA can't decide it either.
Duh?
Of course they don't understand these things.
The people in power want to do whatever they want, the best way to get away with that is to give oversight and legal decisions to people who don't understand what you are doing, that way you can "explain" to them what you are doing, and they will let you get away with things because they still won't understand.
It's not exactly a new concept, and it happens on a daily basis. If you do something complicated, it's more than likely that you can get away with pretending to explain it to someone above you, and at some point they will just say "OK, that sounds fine, I trust that you know what you are doing", without really understanding it.
Partly you need to build up some trust initially, but considering it's the president and various long standing high security organisations, there is implicit trustworthiness. Then you just spew some jargon until they smile, nod, and let you get on with what you were doing.
Reversal
Surely you can just counter-claim that they are bullying you.
You get accused. Things get done to you.
Then you claim that your ?emotional well-being, self-esteem or reputation? has been harmed by what has happened.
Re:
I think they mean with regards to the requirements of third parties they license content from.
e.g. iTunes has to geo-block because they license the copyright from a third party, who may only own/have rights to that copyright in some locations.
If they didn't block it, then the copyright holder/licensee elsewhere would not be happy.
The iTunes resale model isn't the same as people like Adobe or MS who sell their own products directly to resellers/consumers, so while for some it's necessary as they don't own the rights, for the underlying rights holders it's not. Except to protect margins/profits.
Re:
Make sure to delete Steam as well while you're at it.
And all your browsers too.
And Windows actually.
This is a broadly similar flaw to one apparently present in Steam and other URI handling applications, and isn't Origin specific.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/bug-on-eas-origin-game-platform-allows-attackers-to-hijack-player-pcs/