Quote:Original post by Benjamin Heath

Quote:Original post by polymorphed

Quote:Original post by Benjamin Heath
I propose this:

"To continue playing, please enter the second word in the first paragraph of the March newsletter in your inbox."

To receive said newsletters requires a paid subscription, whether it's a few dollars a month or some proportional amount every year. To read it, the game has an inbox that is specifically for this newsletter and other messages from the company, so you don't have to worry about it being deleted or buried in your actual e-mail inbox.


Thoughts?

After about 5 minutes, the second word of the first paragraph of the March newsletter can be found on Google.

Sure, but if the word/paragraph/week?/month were random, then the user would need that newsletter on-hand.

edit: Though, the more I think about it, the more I think it becomes simply an activation model all the same, with product keys replaced by specific words.

After about 6 minutes, the scanned copy of the March newsletter can be found on Google.

Quote:Original post by NickGravelyn

Quote:Original post by Jesper T
I believe that the real world analogy that people so often use is inherently flawed. This is not about concrete objects. Essentially, it is about information.

You could say the same for paintings. Nothing special there, just a specific order of drops of paint. Or a piece of music. It's just a set of frequencies played in a specific order. There's no difference in my mind.

I think you are missing something here.

Van Gogh's Sunflowers is worth millions. (Unfortunately for Van Gogh, he is not around to collect.) But a print reproduction sold at the souvenir shop at the museum is effectively worthless. What makes the actual painting valuable is that it's the actual painting, and as such cannot be reproduced - at least, not in a way that would satisfy art critics. For the period of time that a forgery fools all the art critics, that forgery has value, as evidenced by the price it would fetch at auction.

The reproduction is about as valueless as the paper it's printed on, because it's trivial to create. It simply expresses the information in the laser printer's memory (or something analogous). It takes basically no labour to express that, and very little in terms of raw materials, leading to a lack of value. The museum might opt to charge, say, $20 for it, but they only get away with that because people are accustomed to being gouged at souvenir shops.

So the design itself of the painting is not what has value. When a painting by a modern artist hangs in a gallery today, the artist is paid potentially millions for the work, but s/he does not collect royalties from the gallery tickets. The gallery charges you for entertainment, not for the design of the paintings - else it would be ripping off the artists. I am free to go home and buy a canvas and oil paints and attempt to reproduce for myself anything I saw in the gallery - I might only have some problems attempting to sell the result.

I'm sure the analogies are fairly clear.