Soliciting donations for something you made using someone else's IP without permission seems like it is absolutely crossing the line. This is a cool demo and I like the trend of people porting classic games to the browser, but you absolutely shouldn't have a 'give me money for this' button sitting there. It's just asking for trouble.
So you're saying: "It's very complicated, you won't understand my arguments."
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.
>So you're saying: "It's very complicated, you won't understand my arguments."
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.
You interpreted me right. One dimension that needs to be considered is that, as opposed to Newton's day, the average human has substantially less chance of dying from a consumer product.
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.
>> rate of advancement is likely going to seem slower
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.
We are barely living any differently than we did in 1962 - our vehicles are not any fundamentally different (maybe more fuel efficient / safer due to standards implemented), the way we grow and consume sustenance has not changed (green revolution was mostly in the 40s / 50s), the vast majority of our electricity comes from the same sources (long dead plants), we die of the same things (cancer and heart attacks), our education system is the same (in America), our roads are the same freaking roads from the national highway system in that decade (in the USA).
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.
Consumer goods are, however, much cheaper now as compared to 50 years ago (at least in urban Asia where I live). It makes a huge difference between spending 10% of my income on daily necessities, as opposed to 50% like my ancestors did.
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.
The cost of a loaf of bread in that decade was 5 cents, the average wages per hour in the US was 35 cents. Today, a loaf of bread is $2.50 and the average wages is $12 an hour. A house would be $10k to build (my grandparents built their house in '72 for $15k, it is now worth $250k) where a person was making $6k a year. Today a house averages $250k and you make $60k. In actuality, the costs of necessities have gone up, but the costs of almost everything else dropped due to globalization. But you can't outsource growing food, buying land, or building houses really well.
Was that systemic of high prices in traveling / hotel fees, or because of other causes? I can imagine a lot of things - a fledgling tourism industry, the Cold War stifling international travel, not enough information / knowledge about foreign nations, no advertising campaigns attempting to attract people to visit. That could be due to a lot more than just "travel / hotel costs have dropped a lot" (only because I don't know if they have).
I don't think we're disagreeing here. I said "seem" slower when in actuality, we are progressing quite fast. However, it seemed that you were implying that our rate of progress was not fast enough because of the IP laws we have now.
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.
I actually think the dumbphone was the biggest change, not the smartphone or anything else on your list. No matter if it is SMS, Facebook or HN - that was the moment people started getting emotionally chained to computers and text-only interfaces. Being punctual and reliable also matters a lot less since then.
>"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.
Really depends on your metric of "rate of advancement". If it's going to be about what common people think, then consumer-product and lifestyle innovations would be over-weighted. Viewed by a specialist in any field, that field's progress would be overweighted. From the perspective of productivity increase (or GDP per capita increase), qualitative changes in lifestyle would be underweighted. etc.
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.
> "So you're saying: "It's very complicated, you won't understand my arguments.""
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 can't copyright a physical law, you can't even patent it. So in that respect Newton's work wouldn't be limited in it's use.
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.
Yeah, that's an excellent selling/lobbying tactic - limit the choice to as few alternatives as possible, ideally two. E.g. the alternative to smoking is drug abuse, so smoking is not simple... How do you see an industrial secret being an alternative for a video game (the original post)??
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.
> How do you see an industrial secret being an alternative for a video game (the original post)??
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.)
It can be argued that patents are more effective for older fields than new ones. In 1992 people where building high quality cars engines that are much like today's engines and all patents protecting a 1992 engine has expired. So, any new patent must be a non obvious improvement on a fairly high quality design. Software and DNA patents can still cover obvious things because the field has moved so rapidly.
However, it seems like most fields are integrating improvements from computing so there is a lot of low hanging fruit out there.
Yeah I don't think anyone here is going to agree with you that computing and life has been vastly curtailed in creativity after the dominance of Apple and its copyright-imposing policies.
Give me a single example of a patentable thing in software that is nonobvious and so expensive to develop, that you need patents to protect it, 'less someone copies it the minute you enter market and steal your entire cake.
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.]
> 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.
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 think America surpassing Britain in any category was solely due to copyright laws. I would bet it was more of an issue of the UK absorbing a huge brunt of the wartime activity during that period.
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?
>"I don't think America surpassing Britain in any category was solely due to copyright laws."
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...
So very refreshing to see a response to a (self-acknowledged) lack of citation which is helpful and advances the discussion rather than snarky or negative.
I very much appreciate the high quality of discourse hn makes possible (despite the fact that the actual quality varies wildly).
Do you realize how much it costs to take a drug from the lab to the market? If there were no IP laws virtually all private drug development would stop.
I've heard that argument many times, and I really find it hard to believe. Would the landscape of the market change? Absolutely, but saying that it would disappear seems like fiction.
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?
So....we shouldn't have animal and human trials of drugs before bringing them to market? Those are incredibly expensive regulations that I guess we could remove. Do you realize how many years it takes to bring a drug to market, and the kind of salary that the researchers require? Not even counting the hundreds of study participants for the various human trials. The last phase is massive involving multiple hospitals and thousands of hospital visits for the patients.
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.
I was irritated and fell back upon the Socratic method, it's condescending, I'm sorry.
It may be that dismantling IP would have the effects you describe. But I would argue that this is not necessarily an argument against IP, it could also be an argument against the current architecture of our economic systems. We need to design them in such a way that these kinds of fundamental conflicts either don't arise or find themselves balanced appropriately. I was saying that maybe rather than throwing out a good idea because it does not fit into the current paradigm, we should address the paradigm itself. We probably do not know enough about large scale complex systems to address this issue appropriately, but we should begin the dialog and arguments like this are too narrow in scope.
The precedent is in place. Prior to the release of C&C4 EA release the original games for free online. Many different sites have hosted the files, everyone I have seen has had ads.
That's not how copyright works. Copyright is specific to the manifestation. EA gave its blessing for sites to host the game install files as part of its promotion. EA does not appear to have given its permission to host this game. As long as this game is merely a tech demo, it is arguably covered by fair use to some degree (i.e., as educational). However, once you add in attempts to derive revenue the fair use analysis tips toward commercial considerations which are far less forgiving.
Donations does not automatically mean a for-profit venture, nor does it has any affect on the legality of the use of the work in regard to fair use. 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.
Donations does not automatically mean a for-profit venture, nor does it has any affect on the legality of the use of the work in regard to fair use.
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.
This isn't an HTML5 game, but OpenRA is an open source clone of Command & Conquer: Red Alert which also supports the original Command & Conquer and Dune2000.
Or, you know, just download the actual game instead of a clone. EA released the first three in the series (Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, and Tiberian Sun) for free several years ago.
[will edit in link when I'm not on a corporate network]
OpenRA launches fine and plays multiplayer fine except for a persistent synchronization bug that will occasionally crash large multiplayer games. The developers are currently vigorously hunting that bug.
Actually, the very original C&C had that bug, too. I remember trying to play it with a friend of mine and it would often crash with an "sessions are out of sync" error after 10-15 minutes of playing.
Using OpenRA, I'd still consider it the same game since it needs the MIX files to work. Using a modern engine makes sense, since you can play with higher screen resolution.
We play a lot of OpenRA at work, and we were unable to make RA work in dosbox on Macs. Plus playing in true full-screen mode is much better with OpenRA.
I've always wondered when we'd get a browser based RTS that doesn't require some silly plugin. (maybe one exists?) This is a nice start, but will probably get shot down as soon as it becomes noticed by the powers that be at EA (or whoever owns the copyright)
That's my thinking. Not to belittle the accomplishment here, but I would bet the hardest part is the art and design - something easy to 'borrow' from an existing game. I hope he is using the C&C art as a placeholder until he can master the engineering aspect of this, and then invest in original art/design once he's got the foundation down. I'd like to support a game like this.
I think a big part of the reason is the effort needed to reverse-engineer the code and also try to not get sued by Blizz. You can follow the discussion on teamliquid in the BW forums.
And the effort not to give up when your reverse-engineering efforts reveal remarkable stupidities in the original code. We all know crunch happens, but that doesn't make dealing with the resulting spaghetti any easier.
(I spent several years reverse-engineering Command & Conquer RA2, I should know - that game has hacks and flukes everywhere.)
Ex-neighbors of mine are trying to accomplish this, I think they're working with one of the big game publishers. They have a demo of left4dead on their site: http://gooengine.com/
Great. Just great. So much for productivity today.
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.
Funny... I was confused when I saw an already visited link when I opened up HN for the first time today. I found this last week after that Dune II post.
I find it a bit difficult to scroll up/down/left/right, because I constantly overshoot and then it stops scrolling. I then have to move the mouse back and try to find the exact point where it starts scrolling. A bit frustrating after 20 minutes of gameplay. Is there a way in HTML5 to "capture" the mouse within a certain area?
Wow - I didn't even think of trying that, because for some reason I figured that the original game could only scroll using the mouse. So much for presumptions...
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.
Well it has a few bugs it seems (it took me like five minutes to deploy my factory, and then I got disconnected) but wow, what a great service to humanity.
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.
Will HTML5/JS games ever approach the performance that we have had for years with Flash/Silverlight? I try all these HTML5 demos and have thus far never failed to be sorely disappointed at the complexity that is required to code them and the poor performance they yield.
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.
Maybe browser support isn't good enough yet? I don't think there is anything fundamental that makes HTML5 slower than Flash or Silverlight other than the fact that it's new and standard, which makes it harder to get right (but will make it far more useful in the long run).
Then Hype HTML5 when it is ready for prime time. I am sick of all the excitement surrounding it. It is not revolutionary, nothing about it is particularly new (can it do something that Flash/Silverlight cannot???) or exiting. Everything that it does can already be done and in a better way.
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.
