If you don't believe in copyright, whatever, but IA was doing something blatantly violating the law and getting away with it until they decided to flamboyantly draw attention to themselves by removing the veneer of legality and just giving away unlimited copies.
I've been playing Journey To The Savage Planet lately, and while the gunplay is not awesome, and the unlocks involve collecting materials, the "rare" materials for each enemy are behind a boss or mini-boss, and it's effectively a 3D metroidvania. There's enough hard platforming that I take more fall damage than enemy damage (or at least close), even in the boss fight I'm currently stuck on.
I want to buy something and have it be left alone without trying to steal more money from me for the thing I already bought.
The only possible valid excuse for a subscription to software is services that cannot possibly exist without meaningful spending on server infrastructure. If that's cloud storage as the core of the purchase of the app, computations that are literally impossible to do locally or rely on data that's expensive to maintain, a subscription is legitimate.
If it's anything else it's shitty and you're a shitty person for doing it. Sell actual upgrades when they're actually upgrades, without stealing access to what people bought. It's the only acceptable model.
No. [I was wrong. In addition to being distributed between servers like I said, you can also enable P2P sharing to distribute the bandwidth even further.]
If you have a server that allows users to sign up, the stuff they follow/watch (you'd have to look at details if you want to host to see exactly how it's distributed) goes through your server.
The flip side to this is that, when your user uploads an extremely popular video (or you personally do if you don't allow signups), you don't have to stream every video to every individual user. You send it on to other federated instances that those users are signed up to, but if one instance has 100 users view your video, you don't have to send it 100 times. (This is likely less efficient than YouTube, because they can control exactly how load is spread between their delivery network with a comprehensive view of everything, but it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for an individual to get involved or handle the distribution demand of a popular video.)
Just as a client, you don't serve anyone else. It's a website (or app) that works much like YouTube does. It's on the server side where the load is distributed.
I couldn't even come up with a take. I guess a conspiracy theory that Microsoft is kidnapping the internet's families to keep them from talking about Linux.
The rest is the "safe harbor" provision of the DMCA. Effectively, sites aren't liable for user generated content if they respond to official DMCA takedown requests in a timely manner. YouTube also goes beyond that to directly work with copyright holders to preemptively remove infringing content with content ID, which scans everything for violations, and their own tools to report infringement. They don't need to do that for the DMCA protection, but it's probably cheaper at their obscenely large scale.
Suggestion that did a lot for me. Get cheap smart lights or at least a smart outlet. Turn them on before your alarm (gradual ramp up is ideal, but just turning on is better than nothing). It makes mornings a lot less brutal.
A digital purchase means they owe you access, in the format your purchased, as long as they exist. Nothing short of that can possibly be acceptable if there is any copy protection at all.
A coupon for the same service is not and does not resemble a refund.
Yes, villainizing them is entirely correct. If they sold the license 100 years ago and stopped providing it, they should be legally liable for a 100% refund of the purchase price, plus interest. If they fucked up their contracts in a manner in which they aren't able to serve the content to purchasers until the end of the time, it's entirely their own problem.