Mastodon: @sean@dice.camp

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • copyright and all of intellectual property was meant to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”—it has since eroded it and held it up for ownership by capitalists public domain was originally 14 years after publication. 14 years ago was 2010—imagine if everything before 2010 was in the public domain. All video games. All movies. All books, songs, etc. How much of our culture could be preserved? Compare that to now. How much of what you imagined is owned by a corporation? Managed by shareholders? Has the commons been fostered, or has it been divided into fiefdoms?










  • I’m a socialist. I understand market forces and I wish more people did. Technology itself can help the lower class. Government protection of technology (patents, copyright) will always hinder them.

    lowering the barrier to entry without protecting the elite will bring about market forces necessary to defeat corporations—small sizes can move and adapt faster and try new things than those with institutional bureaucracy, who just follow the money and don’t innovate. Corporations learned this, and now use government protections (copyright, patents) to prevent these new, necessary, market forces. I don’t like the “economic” terms myself, but it’s not rocket science that corporations benefit from cops (aka law enforcement aka laws).

    We can remove the restrictions on new market forces by reducing IP protections, prevent corporations from mucking with newbies by preventing them from getting uncompetitive protections, or by stealing from corporations without regard for the law. I think we should steal more, honestly.

    Stopping technology has never worked, though. I understand the plight of artists, but I’m extremely excited for the new human artists that dream up art that AI can’t create because it hasn’t been fathomed before.


  • You are fortunate that you have the experience to make that decision. Lots of kids are sold on becoming game devs young, and the ones who succeed land a job at mega publisher studio who has all the financial capital to hire junior devs.

    At the end of the day, it is the employer at fault. They are the ones saying “your family’s health insurance will be revoked if we don’t like you” and there are no industry-wide or general unions to tell em to fuck off. “It’s their choice” sure, but they have a family to feed and they know how to make games since they were in high school and that has always fed their kids—how’d they know this industry would turn into a capitalist fuckfest? I get the frustration, but it should be pointed towards organizing and put the pressure upwards, not down or sideways.




  • AGPL? Google has a ban on all AGPL software. Sounds like if you write AGPL software, corporations won’t steal it.

    Code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) MUST NOT be used at Google.

    The license places restrictions on software used over a network which are extremely difficult for Google to comply with. Using AGPL software requires that anything it links to must also be licensed under the AGPL. Even if you think you aren’t linking to anything important, it still presents a huge risk to Google because of how integrated much of our code is. The risks heavily outweigh the benefits.

    Any FLOSS license that makes a corporation shit its pants like this is good enough to start from IMO.

    https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy




  • I’m not sure how you can look at hundreds of years of IP laws getting btfo by pirates and say the ship is sinking 😂

    I’m sorry, but until you can somehow answer the question of “how to make people avoiding laws impossible?” without causing a revolution, there will be laws avoided by people

    No laws have ever stopped people from getting what they want. Games will be made by those who hate IP laws and be played by those who seek it. Will that scene be a trillion dollar industry backed by governments and international corporations like the AAA scene is today? Probably not. Will a punk indie scene exist? Of course.

    Every popular entertainment medium that has a giant industry will see these same results as well. Movies, books, music, etc. As long as the medium is popular, it will persist outside of IP laws.