Copyright laws, Christian Engström and Rick Falkvinge and their take on it

Copyright reforms – are they needed?

Copyrights are a relatively new thing in the history of humanity, with the first legislative text, the "Statute of Anne" being passed in 1710. Since then, the laws around copyrights have continually changed somewhat over the years. However, since the dawn of the age of the Internet, it is fairly clear that the copyright laws of the past are often hard to apply and even downright terrible for the common consumer. Seeking to fix this problem, a few key changes to the laws were proposed by Christian Engström and Rick Falkvinge in their 2012 publication "The Case for Copyright Reform".

Main points of the proposal

The suggested changes to the legislation were as follows:

1. Keep the moral rights as they are.

An author should keep the right to be recognized as the author, and nobody else should have this right.

2. Keep copyrights for commercial purposes.

The copyright laws should keep existing for commercial purposes for fairly obvious reasons – to keep people from profiting off of others' work. However, this shouldn't apply to any kind of non-commercial sharing of files, especially seeing as trying to regulate that would be in direct violation of fundamental rights, like privacy. There would be no way to regulate it without snooping through private exchanges of information.

In reality, this was already the case before the Internet – anything you could feasibly do as an ordinary person wouldn't violate copyright. However, as the Internet came to be and evolved to what it is today, so did copyright laws, and not for the better. This is one of the reasons why reform is necessary – to specify that copyright laws should only apply to copying for commercial reasons. Other copying for non-profit oriented sharing should not be illegal.

3. 20 years of commercial monopoly.

The entertainment industry of today, though, largely relies on the commercial exclusivity of copyrighted works. This shouldn't change, of course, but the protection time of copyrighted works is... long, to say the least – a lifetime plus 70 years. This is far longer than any reasonable window for earnings on the works, which is why the proposal wants to shorten the protection time to 20 years from publication.

I think 20 years is a little on the short side, but it's still better than the life + 70 years system.

4. Registration after 5 years.

Another issue is that there exist copyrights on works, which don't have a clear owner, or the owner is impossible to locate. These works then provide no commercial value to the owner, yet are still covered by copyright, making them impossible to reuse or distribute.

The proposed solution is that automatic copyright protection should be kept working, but it should only last for 5 years. If the author desires to extend this period of commercial exclusivity, it must be registered.

I like this change, it's a good way to stop the copyright clutter from piling up while not introducing much hassle to authors who intend to publish their works.

5. Free sampling

The current copyright legislation limits a lot of artists who work with samples – musicians and filmmakers, for example. Clear limitations and exceptions should be made to facilitate the creation of parodies, remixes and the like. 

Anything that facilitates easier production of parodies, remixes and other creative work based on something else is good in my books.

6. A ban on DRM

DRM or Digital Rights Management stands for multiple different technologies that aim to limit people's abilities to copy and redistribute works, even if it's legal. The proposal states that it should always be legal to bypass these DRMs and that an outright ban on DRM technologies that limit legal copying should be considered.

I think this is a logical step, as the rest of the changes would be quite meaningless if corporations would still be able to write their own laws on what we can and cannot do even if it would be legal otherwise.

On the proposition as a whole

It seems to me that the proposal is quite reasonable. I must admit I am not very well versed in terms of legislation and copyright laws, but the suggested changes all seem within reason to me (much more so than the current laws, anyway).

Board/tabletop games, their virtual counterparts and their effects on each other

Computer games and their roots in the tabletop

When we talk about modern computer games, the first things that come to mind are massive, visually pleasing AAA titles, incredibly complex in both development and maintenance. Doubly so, if you consider the fact that most of them feature some kind of online multiplayer system. Their ancestors, board games, continue to exist to this day though, and keep evolving, influencing and taking influence from video games constantly.

The early days

A lot of the games from the infancy of the video game era were similar to tabletop games, with a lot of text-based roleplaying games and MUDs that took inspiration from classics like D&D, borrowing elements like dice rolls and various cards that each affected gameplay in its own way. Many games also use hexagonal or chessboard-like grids for their playing field.

Early text-based LOTR RPG, with a surprising amount of player freedom. Image source

A surprising development

It would be fairly expected, then, that video games would eventually push board games out of the market, especially with the advent of smartphones and their convenience – and for a while, that was the case. When smartphones came around, the "casual" board games like Scrabble, Pictionary, Uno etc. did see a major drop in popularity, and have not recovered since. It should be noted, though, that while the physical form of these board games might be dying, it's not like the games themselves are "dead" – the tabletop form is just used less because the same simple games are available as apps, some even official (and if you don't like the official ones, hundreds of clones exist).

Unexpectedly though, the interest in the more strategical, thoughtful (also known as German style) board games like Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne actually increased. With deeply strategic video games being fairly large players in today's entertainment market, many people that enjoy this type of game tend to also like strategic board games. The experience of chatting with friends over an engaging tabletop game is something you can't quite achieve or emulate in video games. These games can vary, with some being co-op, while others make the players compete against each other (with varying degrees of frustration, with the scale varying from "mildly frustrating" to "a hellish chimera of Monopoly and UNO").

In the world of games, the student has become the teacher. While in the early days video games drew inspiration from board games, the opposite is now true. With many board games adopting video game mechanics to varying degrees of success, the market has become truly colorful. From board game adaptions of popular video games like DOOM, The Witcher, and Fallout, to somewhat original titles like Terraforming Mars, there is something for almost everyone.

DOOM board game. Who could've guessed? Going on the bucket list. Image source

Personal experience

While I haven't ventured into the world of board games much myself (haven't bought them, that is), a lot of my friends are enthusiasts and have introduced me to their world. I have to say, I really enjoyed the Lovecraftian Cthulhu: Death May Die, a fairly classical dungeon crawler-type game. In the game, the players co-operate to clear out a dungeon and stop one of the Old Ones. I enjoyed the difficulty of it, and the possibilities of coming up with weird and outlandish strategies, that might be stupid enough to work.

Box art. Image source

I also enjoyed city(stable?)-building games like Unstable Unicorns, Citadels and Everdell. Their competitive nature is very fun, once the basics/game mechanics become clear, and they aren't nearly as frustrating for the fellow players as some classics. Looking at you, Monopoly.

Conclusion

The history of these two distinct, yet connected types of entertainment is heavily intertwined. While video games have mostly taken over the market, board games still fill a niche that is nigh impossible to achieve virtually, and thankfully are here to stay.

References:

https://www.mcvuk.com/development-news/how-video-games-both-killed-and-improved-the-board-game/

Early web technologies: the survivors and the forgotten

Circuit-switched networks

Before the advent of packet switching in its modern form, other ways of sending data were considered and used. Designed in 1878, one of these methods was circuit switching. The idea of it is fairly simple – a dedicated point-to-point connection is established to exchange information. This method was widely used for phone calls, and the use case survives to this day.

Organic network switches. A PBX in Seattle, 1952. Wikipedia

In modern circuit-switched networks, a connection is established through several switches. When data is being transmitted, no other network data can use these switches due to the continuous, dedicated connection. In a packet-based network, the data is broken into small packets, which then take the most efficient route possible at the time of sending. This means packets from the same transmission can take different paths and don't need a dedicated connection. This makes circuit-switched networks inherently more reliable, but far less versatile and scalable.

While obsolete in the sense of the Internet and its usage in it, some other networks still use it. In the telephone world, some hybrid systems are still in use, but VoIP is gradually being adopted. Whether circuit switching will become completely obsolete in the near future or not is up to debate.

TCP

TCP or Transmission Control Protocol is a connection-oriented data transmission protocol. Developed in May 1974, it is one of the main protocols used in the Internet today. It performs multiple functions, such as:

• Determines how to divide data into packets before transmission

• Sends and receives packets

• Performs flow control

• Handles transmission errors, such as dropped or corrupted packets by retransmitting them

• Packet acknowledgement

It was developed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, for which they received the Turing award in 2004.

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. Photo source

Today, the TCP protocol works in tandem with the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) protocol. TCP handles the use cases where reliability is needed thanks to its error detection and acknowledgement system, while UDP covers things where speed and latency are key such as video calls. Together, they are the two main data transfer protocols of the Internet.

References:

https://www.lifewire.com/circuit-switching-vs-packet-switching-3426726

https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/TCP