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Tag: DRM

Humble Abandons Its Last Founding Principle

Long ago, a new games platform launched, the Humble Bundle. Founded by Wolfire Games, this new service sold bundles of indie games on a pay what you want scale with proceeds split between developers and charity. Purchasers of the bundles could choose to give all the sale price to the charities, or split the cost between the charities and developers, or anything in between. this novel sales approach lead to a huge success of the Humble Bundle and helped raise millions for charity.

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You Don’t Own What You Buy: Ouya Edition

Eliminate DRM: Defective By Design

On June 26th, the Ouya servers were finally shut down. After that day, there is no more store, no more updates, and no more games that rely on DRM in order to play. Razer in its announcement said it was up to the developers to decide how the games were going to be treated after the shutdown, and they had until that day to push out an update to fix any DRM issues.

But like any DRM that relies on a server check, some games on the Ouya store are no longer playable. I hopped on my Ouya yesterday to see what the state of the machine was. I wanted to see if any of the games I had were still playable. What I found was a huge mixed bag.

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Molehill Mountain Episode 72 – Animal Crossing: Happy Campers

Because that’s a far better name than “Pocket Camp.”

9:41 – EA and demands for high Metacritic scores

28:54 – Xbox One’s backwards compatibility would have arrived sooner if Microsoft didn’t have to spend a bunch of time and resources removing its ill-advised always-on DRM

39:46- Nintendo details Animal Crossing for mobile devices

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Molehill Mountain Episode 29 – Always Online

Andrew is away for the next two weeks, so you lucky ducks get to spend some quality time with EZK. This week, we enjoy some DRM chat. Nintendo’s Super Mario Run for iPhone is reported to require a constant data connection to play and several game developers have decided Denuvo, the supposed unhackable DRM, is not for them and have patched it out of their games.

It may be all EZK, all the time in this episode but Andrew does make an appearance in the chat, which we’ve transcribed below.  Next week, he’ll be on a plane where he can’t watch the podcast or play Super Mario Run.

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GOG makes some of your Steam games DRM-free

GOG ConnectDigital distribution service GOG continues to be awesome!*  This week the purveyor of DRM-free games and movies announced GOG Connect, a new service that connects to your Steam library and adds any eligible games to your GOG library so that you can play them DRM-free.

Yep, buying the game once was enough.  If you own one of 23 eligible titles including FTL, Braid, Twine, The Witcher, and Bit.Trip Runner on Steam, you can add them to your GOG library free-of-charge.

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Super Podcast Action Committee – Episode 169

Super Podcast Action CommitteeOn this week’s show (episode 169) hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss recent Nintendo patents(10:30 mark), the possibility of “Rare Replay” coming to the Wii U (34:42), Xenoblade Chronicles having crappy DRM (37:41), the French government’s plan to ban Tor and public wi-Fi in light of terror attacks (48:39), and a former FCC commissioner invoking the name of terror group ISIS while talking about net neutrality (54:58).

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The Library Of Congress Once Again Throws Us A Pointless Fair Use Bone

Copyright Consuming Fair Use Thanks To The DMCASince when is fair use something we must beg for on a triennial basis? I guess the answer is since 1998 when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was signed into law. This law not only extended copyright terms by an additional 20 years, it created a section of law that basically told the public that we do not own the media and computing devices we buy. No, the companies that produced that media and those computing devices own it as long as those companies put DRM on the products to lock out uses they don’t approve of.

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Super Podcast Action Committee – Episode 142

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