Context: It's a paid mod but doesn't appear the guy was in it for profit, rather to support the time spent which covers multiple games.
The precedent here I find a little weak, a mod isn't facilitating piracy nor is it a replacement for the original product. You need to own the game, the mod is a layer that adds additional features.
When mapping the context to the real world it's more worrying, you don't get car makers suing accessory makers for selling phone mounts advertised to fit their vehicles.
At $10/mo for access even if he's not doing it for profit he's absolutely making bank. Verge in 2022 estimated about $20,000 a month [1].
CDPR has an explicit policy allowing free mods with a tip jar, but not mods that are pay-only. Whether or not you agree with that policy it's CDPR's right to make that decision, and you can't complain when they enforce it.
This is taking the whole 'you don't actually own this game' to a whole new level when trying to dictate what mods you can use with it. The digital world needs a major reboot in terms of consumer rights, and this should happen sooner rather than later as companies are increasingly trying to take this into the real world by attaching software to hardware and then seeking to gain both rent and control due to nonexistent state of consumer rights associated with software.
I agree, that do not(should not) have a leg to stand on here.
They might not like the fact, but the dev is selling his software, not theirs. It would be akin to MS sending a take down request to software running on windows.
I wonder how much "strength" the tos really has in this case.
The term "derivative work" covers a lot. For example all fan translations are one and all content stored on movie subtitles sites is by definition illegal. I don't know about those particular VR mods but in general case it is easy to show that game mod is not a standalone work and counts as derivative work, so game developer can limit the distribution however they want.
I think it's more a dependency and less a derivative (there isn't any source code/game objects being distributed via the mod as far as I can tell.)
I would be very interested to see how a court would rule on this, as AFAIK such as Lexmark v. Static Control Components, you can modify products you purchase, but how much weight would the TOS really hold?
But they're not going after people who use the mod. They're going after someone who's profiting off of their IP. Someone else said upthread that CDPR doesn't go after people who make free mods (or donationware) so it's clear they don't have a problem with mods per se.
I'm not saying I agree with their stance, but we're talking about different matters entirely.
Depending on your age the term Game Genie [1] probably brings back some fond memories. If it was before your time, it was a hardware device - a mod, you could attach to video game devices that would enable you to tweak the memory of the game in real time enabling you to do all sorts of things, mostly it was used for stuff like infinite lives or whatever but you could also do neat things like tweak the gravity in games.
The neat thing is that the device was completely unapproved by the device IP owners, most notably - Nintendo. It required the creators to reverse engineer the NES, crack their anti-pirate measures, and then finally enable a nice interface for users to 'hack' games at the end of it. And then for the icing on the cake they then bought copies of every single NES game, 'cracked' them, and published, and sold, books with codes for specific games precisely profiting off players of these games.
Nintendo tried to sue, and lost. They appealed, and lost. The Game Genie wasn't violating Nintendo's IP, they weren't even harming their sales in any way, shape, or fashion - they probably helped them, if anything. And so it was a pretty much open and shut case with all the legal wrangling lasting mere months. And the exact same is true here. As a fun aside this even set the precedent for legally selling games on consoles without the approval of the console IP owner.
The point is that a derivative work has to be a derivative work, not just something that works with your IP. And this just sounds like a mod that hacks in VR capability for dozens of games that don't otherwise support it. I imagine they'll comply simply because going to court against just one of those companies is going to be a lot easier than fighting it, but it's a shame. Mainstream success seems to have turned into a terrible curse for CDPR.
> they weren't even harming their sales in any way, shape, or fashion - they probably helped them, if anything.
I would like an even stronger precedent, to say that even if sales are harmed, it's non-infringing. E.g. a car aftermarket customization that improves performance so that it is equivalent to a more expensive model of the same brand, thus harming profits of that car brand. Or hell, just plain old regular repairs, so one can keep an old car for longer.
We don't owe it to corporations to protect their business models.
How would they prove that he's profiting off their IP when his "mod" doesn't add content or require any particular feature of a base game (the "mod" supports many games) and is actually primarily meant for interoperation with a novel input and display method?
If Valve was the developer of the VR compatibility software, CD Projekt would get crushed in court.
> How would they prove that he's profiting off their IP when his "mod" doesn't add content
Adding a VR mode to the game is definitely adding content. If you mean storywise, okay, I agree with you. Still, he's profiting off it in the fact that you need to pay a monthly fee to access the mod.
Even if he claims he's not, he indeed is profiting off it, because there is no way you can use the mod without paying first.
> If Valve was the developer of the VR compatibility software, CD Projekt would get crushed in court.
The difference is that Valve would have asked for permission first from CDPR if they could sell their software, or even then, work together with CDPR to have the software be implemented natively on the game. Plus, Valve has the same stance on paid mods on Steam, so it's not really a good comparison here.
> I'm not saying I agree with their stance, but we're talking about different matters entirely.
I don't see any difference between a paid or free mod. Were CD Projekt losing out on sales of the VR DLC?
> They're going after someone who's profiting off of their IP.
They are going after someone who is making their IP more valuable. I missed Cyberpunk the first time around due to the initial bad reviews and then not having time after they fixed them.
With Valve coming out with their VR headset I am considering getting one, and looking at VR games, Cyberpunk with the mod was going to be a purchase.
It's their game, it's written in the EULA, which everyone accepts blindly without reading. You have accepted the EULA before playing the game.
This is the same as the Steam Subscriber Agreement saying you CANNOT make paid mods using Valve's IP unless given permission to do so.
There's nothing wrong with CDPR going after someone who thought they'd get away by making an important mod paid-only. It's a totally different story if the $10 fee was optional.
It shouldn't be CDPR's right to make this decision. A mod is just software that runs on top of other software. Microsoft doesn't get to dictate what I do with Windows. Apple does try to dictate what I do with my iPhone, but even then, if I manage to jailbreak my phone there's nothing they can do about it.
Question is, as long as he's not using their assets, what leg have they to stand on and enforce this? He's selling his software, not infringing on theirs.
On the money, had not spotted how much he was making from this. Given he's been at this for several years and the quality of the product I'm quite happy he's been able to devote the time to this.
AFAIK DMCA is such a strong law that you just have to circumvent any kind of access mechanism to violate it. I’m not a lawyer.
“No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
“to "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner;”
I’m not sure how modding works in the case but usually this is why companies can come after folks.
> “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.”
This wording always bothers me. If a person were to circumvent a technological measure that tries to control such access, then the circumvention itself proves that this measure was not effective at doing what it is supposed to be doing. Therefore the person is not circumventing something that _effectively_ controls anything. They just showed that it is ineffective, and therefore the law does not apply to them.
Of course, no one who actually has to interpret these laws shares my opinion.
I switched to Zen a while ago and while for the 'main browser window' it's fantastic I often open multiple smaller windows (in a tiling VM) and hated having to manage collapsing the sidebar. It's done via a keyboard shortcut that seems to break half the time. Tried the new Firefox and I'm already switching back.
I believe so but would like better details. We used to use another provider that depended on exact kernel versions whereas the falcon-sensor seems quite happy with kernel updates.
I see these tools as complimentary. Sometimes Sentry &al don't capture a user session (blocking, didn't consent &c) and this tool acts as a nice fallback you can instruct the user to use rather than having to explain how to open dev tools and screenshot the console.
A NAS built from generic x86 hardware and some disks. Use ZFS, it's a bit of a rabbit hole but an excellent choice for both reliability/redundancy and as a tool to backup. I'm not gonna explain how this works, just describe what you can do, it's an option.
ZFS:
- ensures you don't get bit rot
- manages both disks (raid/mirrors &c) and the filesystem, it's an all-in-one solution
- supports block level replication to local and remote systems, after the first backup it's fast
- can create dynamic partitions to group files together and build replication strategies around
For backup get a second machine somewhere else in your house with a smaller setup and use ZFS replication to keep it up to date with everything on the main box you need backed up. Currently I use a raspberry pi with a USB disk but this is perhaps cutting it fine. You wanna keep this online so ZFS can periodically check the health of the data on the disks. Fully offline backups can be a risk.
Finally for a 3rd backup use some of those external drives, format to ZFS and use replication. Plug them in on a schedule and take a backup.
If you want to backup to remote systems (cloud/a box in your parents house) it also supports filesystem encryption. With the right options you can stream incremental backups over SSH only passing encrypted blocks. The system at the other end never needs to see the raw data.
I think this is spot on, and the only thing I'd add is to use something that can take ECC RAM. Rather unfortunately, that probably means server hardware which doesn't always mix great with consumer settings. I'm currently thinking about a Dell Precision workstation for this as it seems like a decent blend of server hardware in a nice, quiet package.
I find it depends on the number of subcommands and if those subcommands are clear. It's rather useful to have the options whittled down to just the ones you need if you know which subcommand you need but otherwise can be painful.
Grepping through a large list of options is also painful, seems ther needs to be a balance here.
But we are comparing the pain of searching vs the pain of having to re-run the help command for each possible subcommand, and parsing through all of that. Much easier to just have one command invocation and search through it.
There is a web analogy for this in how people organize FAQs. Some have a list of section links, and you have to click on a section to get the FAQs for that topic. Others just put everything on one giant page.
Here's the problem scenario with splitting things up into section pages: You think you see the appropriate section, but then you don't see your concern answered. There are two possibilities: either the organization was counter-intuitive and your concern was answered in one of the other sections, or your concern wasn't answered anywhere. And what's the only way to be sure? Visit every single section page and search through all of them.
Much, much less painful to just have it all on one page and search it.
> DO NOT DOWNLOAD TRON FROM GITHUB, IT WILL NOT WORK!! YOU NEED THE ENTIRE PACKAGE FROM r/TronScript
I see later it mentions you can check some signed checksums but that doesn't inspire confidence. Very much epitomises the state of Windows tweaky utilities vs stuff you see on other platforms.
The precedent here I find a little weak, a mod isn't facilitating piracy nor is it a replacement for the original product. You need to own the game, the mod is a layer that adds additional features.
When mapping the context to the real world it's more worrying, you don't get car makers suing accessory makers for selling phone mounts advertised to fit their vehicles.
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