Interesting. They seem to be saying the index consists only of European sites as well. If that’s the case I hope we can also do searches within Europe, the Ecosia announcement doesn’t say much about that.

Again because a law can either be unnegotiable or something that can be superseded by a contract. Anyway, I was just wondering what type it is in this particular case. What you seem to be saying is that it can in fact be superseded if it is possible to enter into a contract where you agree to waive those rights.

Well, parent poster was talking about Mastodon, you seem to be talking about threadiverse platforms like Lemmy. One thing that applies to both and every single platform that is large enough for that to happen is that you’re always going to lose out on a lot of the content because there is just too much content for one person to look at. It isn’t actually that difficult to subscribe so much that you get past that point in my experience.

For the Mastodon-type fediverse microblogging platforms there’s some things that can help when trying to sift through the more popular stuff more (and less) similarly to how an algorithmic timeline would do it. Boost bots that track what’s trending and tools like Phanpy that allow you to check out what has been boosted the most in your recent timeline. There’s also starter packs (currently a fedidevs third party feature but will be added to Mastodon in the future too) and Sharkey antennas that let you watch for keywords over all the posts that flow through your instance. When it comes to things that aren’t here yet but are being worked on Fediscovery seems very promising.

Maybe some of that stuff should exist for Lemmy etc. too or maybe the “all” feed could be improved.

we were talking about laws that exist in Germany and perhaps somewhere else too. Are you commenting on the German law specifically and familiar enough with it to say it can be superseded by a contract?

If there is a law that puts limits on what you can agree to in a contract then you don’t get around it by making a contract that violates the law.

You should be able to separate the general idea and whether we’re talking just law or morals here. Sure, copyright law gives ridiculously broad control to the copyright holder. They can just outright go after mods in general and disallow them free or not too. I guess if your position is that modding should just not be allowed in general then that’s at least consistent. Personally I think regardless of law things like reverse engineering and mods should exist at least in some form though.

it’s a poor argument because the game couldn’t exist either without many other companies and individuals having invested millions and millions or their labor in order to release, promote and support other things.

There’s at least the freely available VorpX release only for Cyberpunk 2077. I do hope the VorpX dev doesn’t get spooked by this like he did when the RDR2 takedown happened as he’s doing somewhat similar things in the paid software.

it wasn’t a waste of time and effort because he got paid a living wage doing it at least until now though.

I don’t think you have a clue about the relevant law if you’re saying things like “derivative works are fair use”. They absolutely aren’t which is exactly the reason game devs can exert such strong control over mods generally. Fair use would not necessarily limit commercial use either if it applied here.

In the case of the VR mods they are making the argument that this is not really a derivative work of the games in question at all because it is a generic framework that supports numerous games similar to how an emulator runs all the games of a platform and can present them differently from the original hardware. We won’t get to see how that argument would do in court probably because the modder can’t afford to go to court with these huge companies.

I wouldn’t really say it’s about “property” either. Copyright and all these related rules are a completely man-made concepts unlike real property which has a pretty intuitive basis in our reality where only one person can hold a physical item at a time.

now you’re making me think of a future with a “Silk Road” for game mods. Very cyberpunk.

there’s really no difference, a mod doesn’t necessarily mean modifying the game’s code or assets either, it can be just adding or replacing things with your own code and assets. The game functioning relies just as much on the operating system and the libraries it provides as such a mod does on the game.

That doesn’t really apply in the case of this particular type of mod though. They don’t go out of their way to support these VR mods in any special way.

The argument for these VR mods not running afoul of copyright law as it currently exists is that they’re more like an emulator that supports a significant number of games and don’t really modify the game itself at all. Obviously game companies tend to hate emulators too and have even tried to go after them so you probably can’t trust their judgement on this.

You could even draw parallels here to something like Google’s recently announced autospatialization feature of Android XR that will make it possible to play any game (in theory, in practice some games will probably work better than others) with 3D visuals. Google certainly isn’t offering that for free since it only works on an Android device that they get paid for because it is using their software.

The current state of VR does still seem to be such that interest is limited. I think the main thing is that using the hardware just needs to get less involved for the masses to bother. If wearing it was like eyeglasses both in terms of weight and what it does to your ability to have awareness of your surroundings you’d probably have many more people interested.

Another piece of the puzzle is certainly the content gap between flat and VR as AAA game devs just don’t see the business case for it still. Things like UEVR and 3D becoming something that is easy to get out of any game or video thanks to AI efforts like Google’s autospatialization could potentially help a lot here. Same with other types of 3D capable hardware like glassless 3D displays and smart glasses becoming so common that 3D becomes more interesting to support again.

This isn’t actually a government doing it. It’s just some VC backed company that went to Davos to announce it.

what in particular do you mean by lack of discoverability?

I think they’re automating the photo validation. The CEO mentioned something about giving back by releasing their facial recognition solution or something in the interview at Davos.

“Oh so you want to have CSAM on the platform?”

Just misrepresenting the position you’re holding in the same way you are doing to others.

Anything any of these people say is beyond worthless.Their position depends on them just parroting what the supreme leader wants.