Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Impeesa" data-source="post: 2730174" data-attributes="member: 498">Now that's a darn shame.Anyways.Politics is verboten, so I won't sling around accusations regarding the US government (one acronym is enough anyways: DMCA). We can get plenty of material just from commercial interests. The problem is that the corporate world cares nothing for your rights, only their profits. Consider this: for the last half a year or so, Sony CDs have come with software on them. This software automatically installs itself without your knowledge when you pop the CD in a computer, and is basically the same as the payload from certain types of virus - a rootkit. It hides itself from any sort of detection, and word is they actually worked with the major antivirus software vendors to make sure it wouldn't be detected. When this all went public, a 'fix' was released. It didn't actually remove it, just made some components visible. The software itself messed with your device drivers. All this, just to keep you from ripping the CD you've purchased legitimately and putting it on your iPod or something.Granted, that's a little tangential to the original point, but that's just the most recent incident I recall reading about. It illustrates quite nicely the attitude of content owners towards their customers. As one slashdotter put it, the most shocking thing here, after what Sony did, is the deafening silence afterwards. What they did is most certainly illegal - they intentionally developed and distributed damaging software, and there isn't much anyone can do about it. I'm not sure how much farther I can go without hitting the politics wall, but suffice it to say the corporate-owned world of Cyberpunk 2020 doesn't seem quite so far-out these days.--Impeesa--</blockquote>

Verification