I wonder if it’s a more western thing. Like the remake of
Yo-kai Watch 2 was revealed a couple of weeks ago in the latest Nintendo Direct and the trailer is obviously gen AI yet… no one seems to care about that. Especially not on the japanese and asian social media https://youtu.be/76L1JKQWB8w
otoh I would put the Runescape community and people who play Yo-kai Watch games as far away as possible from
each other
When I see something I consider sterile, infantile and shallow, the information that 1% or 99% of the people on the planet like it changes nothing about my assessment of it. Looking to see if this quote had been posted before, I found it in a comment that I generally agree with, that also happens to be on the subject of Gen-AI:
My completely biased take for which I will cite no sources is that the language barrier allowed Asian fan communities to avoid the corpo-led (Disney et al., surreptitiously through social media-based surrogates) astroturf campaign against genAI (that they don't control). Asian social media doesn't care because the normal human reaction is to not care, and the intense and overwrought negative reaction here was one that had to be specifically cultivated via bad-faith arguments put forward by people with conflicts of interest who leveraged their cults of personality to shut down and marginalize opposition.
Yes, there are no legitimate concerns about genAI, all opposition is just astroturfing that was artificially propped up by famous anti-AI companies like Disney (seen falling head over heels to partner with OpenAI less than a year ago). It has nothing to do with apocalyptic messaging that was fostered by AI companies themselves here in the West, or the culture that dictates that people are to be declared useless and discarded the moment the quality-per-dollar ratio of something made by automation surpasses theirs. It may not be good, but damn is it cheap compared to having a worker!
I'm well aware of the labor issues, and agree that the use of AI to displace workers is fraught at best, easily transcending to a sort of banal evil under common circumstances.
3) The problem isn't that people have reasonable, rational, and principled stands against how the AI industry has developed. It's that there are also irrational and unreasonable takes that end in, "Literally kill anyone tainted by genAI," and that the vociferous and zealous nature of this opposition is driven in part by fearmongers with links to corporate interests who happily use homespun AI (just don't call it that!); or who are, at the very least, protecting their own economic moat without being up-front that their opposition is largely self-interested (as was the case with anti-AI's direct antecedent, anti-crypto).
I've seen too many real artists crucified by "real artists" and their sycophants for experimenting with or working into their practice these tools.
It does not read as a principled stand, but a tantrum. You can compare the reaction of such artists to that of mathematicians, who were hit not merely with a nebulous sense that the big AI companies were doing them dirty, or enabling others to do so, but an actual verifiable instance of one platform stealing their work and attempting to publish it in official channels without attribution. They are angry, they are doing some soul-searching, but they are not excommunicating AI users or calling for their heads.
Conversely, I've been heartened by the rise of anti-data center activism, because it means that people are actually doing something productive towards the ends they profess a desire for, rather than just bitching and witch-hunting online.
But wait, how can someone who is defending AI usage be happy to see data center projects fail? Could there be actual nuance to their perspective? Life has many doors, Ed-boy.
Interesting if you read normie comments on news sites, Facebook etc that grown man shouldn’t play video games and it’s embarrassing. We still have a long way to go.
> Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.
TV shows are even worse because of the soundtrack.
Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even video games are not exempt from that. GTA games has tons of music removed from the radios with later digital re-releases so currently the original console disc versions are the only way to play the games as they were released back then https://www.reddit.com/r/GTATrilogy/comments/1gsqdc5/what_so...
This isn't even the worst outcome. There are hundreds of video games that are never re-released at all and have never been available for sale digitally, entirely because of soundtrack licensing.
That might actually be a better outcome though as then those interested in those games will be funneled towards authentic pirate preservations whereas if there is a butchered re-release then some buyers will not even be aware that they are not getting the real deal.
In the end the situation around sound track licensing in different media seems so counter productive to even the interests of the rights holders. Essentially shows and games that incorporate songs are free advertisements for those songs and in no way compete with direct sales / streaming of that music on its own.
There is a similar case with Top Gear. Aside from the popularity of Clarkson/May/Hammond and the fantastic cinematography, the show had great editors with an ear for soundtracks. Unfortunately it seems a lot of the tracks were only licensed for broadcast TV and the DVDs have some stock music where the rights were no longer available. There are also some gags which don't work any more because the audio doesn't make sense.
I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.
It's a shame they never released the full series on DVD (or blu-ray). Most of it is available if you consult a chart of all the releases, but they've been cut and rearranged to fit on discs, and the soundtrack is as you say. I imagine they didn't due to problems like this at the time, but after the scandal and with how much time has passed, they'll never actually bother, unless someone straight up steals/copies the broadcast tapes from the archives and do us all a favour.
I think it’s true for a lot of BBC shows, many had great music, but the BBC also ran hugely popular radio stations and i think it was through that they were able to license a large amount of music.
And TV shows too. If they don't have the soundtrack-free version available, they have to do surgery to remove the music in postproduction somehow, or just not re-release at all.
> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.
Yup. Daria is one of the most tragic ones, given how it was an MTV show and thus featured music iconic to the era and familiar to the audience. Replaced with muzak in the DVD releases, and a bunch of pirates have cobbled together best-effort mash-ups based on audio from TV rips, which sometimes were of very low quality, but for some episodes, all that had survived in the piracy scene was like, a RealVideo file with a 64kbps audio stream.
I loved the show Tour of Duty on CBS from 1987-90 about the Vietnam War. It used a lot of 1960's music including the Rolling Stones Paint It Black as the opening theme.
When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.
I also really enjoyed this show and rewatched it a few years ago on DVD. But I certainly noticed the main title music was different. I don't recall noticing in-episode music though, and wouldn't have remembered it from the show.
I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.
Scrubs was another one with pretty obvious music changes, because some were part of the dialogue or a joke that just doesn't make sense after the change.
Daria is another example - being on MTV they used a lot of popular music from the time which clearly did not cost them much extra at the time of TV broadcast but was replaced with generic music for the DVD release.
Some anime on Netflix is affected. Off the top of my head, the iconic first ending theme for Naoki Urusawa's Monster had its haunting vocals removed leaving only the backing track, and Neon Genesis Evangelion had its similarly iconic ending theme covers of Fly Me to the Moon sung by its voice actresses removed.
Interview With the Vampire theatrically ends with the rolling stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” playing over the final scene and end credits. When the movie was on Netflix, that was cut from the soundtrack and replaced with an acoustic cover of the song.
Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.
Shortening of copyright would fix many of these issues. Games and movies make almost all of their lifetime earnings in the first few years, and the dribble that's left afterwards is less important than preservation and public access.
It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.
> Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later.
Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.
Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.
The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.
Honestly I think it's fine. If corps are going to make poor decisions with their IP, oh well, their choice and their loss. There's plenty to go around.
It's not their IP though, the rest of us have only granted them a temporary monopoly and its in our interest that we still have the original works after that time.
Video games sign terrible licenses even for their most core parts. Many of the millions selling Forza games disappeared from the digital stores because they couldn't use the cars anymore.[0]
It's almost unbelievable since cars and their makers are actually getting a big marketing push from those games, but studios cannot get better conditions.
>Last summer, the company took aim at a much larger target. Together with Counterlife Media, Strike 3 sued Meta, accusing the tech giant of downloading thousands of its films via BitTorrent to train AI models. With 2,973 films at stake, the case could be worth up to $446 million.
>According to a motion filed last week, an anonymous pirate behind a residential AT&T connection is an executive at Meta’s Reality Labs division, which develops the Quest VR headsets.
>After AT&T shared the information, Strike 3 says its investigation revealed that the subscriber is an executive in Meta’s Reality Labs division. Citing his LinkedIn profile, the company notes that he has worked at Facebook and Meta for more than a decade.
Honestly I just loathe korean tech. I still don't get what makes korean brands _extra_ shitty. Like these dark patterns are all over the world but somehow korean brands crank it up to one more level.
I'm not sure it fits the free and/or libre software philosophy but I'm a big fan of releasing otherwise free and open source software as a paid version and with some exclusive QoL features in proprietary store fronts.
For example Krita. https://krita.org/en/download/ FOSS but you can buy it on Steam, Microsoft Store, Epic Store, and Apple Store. You get one exclusive feature, automatic updates (and more recently Steam Cloud sync support), and you also support the developers (on the other hand Valve, MS, Epic, and Apple also gets a cut too).
If you read for example the Steam reviews everyone points out that it's a free software but buying on Steam is also a good and very importantly straightforward way to support the devs + the platform itself has such a pull ("buying games you never play") that people buy it just for the case of having it in their library
Filebot used to be open source. I bought it on the AppStore, it was a way to support development and I figured it would give me easier updates that would just happen in the background.
When Apple moved to ARM, the App Store version lagged behind. An ARM version was available, but not in the App Store. I assume this is because that ARM version was a separate download instead of being a universal app, and the x86 app would run on everything (for now).
The app is no longer open source, and is paid. To get the ARM version (due to my stubbornness in not wanting to install Rosetta), I had to pay again just to get the app through a different means of distribution.
Too many run-ins with silly issues like this can really sour a person on the “free app in a paid store” model.
That can happen regardless of which storefront you use to buy a free app. It's more of a developer-specific nitpick than a chronic problem with FOSS and freeware.
If you're happy to sponsor the app's development, then owning the App Store version should make you feel proud. The developer is still able to make a living thanks to you, and they're offering extended support if you're unwilling to use a fork of the free version. A good example of this is Dwarf Fortress, which I have bought on Steam 3 times now so that I could gift it to two of my friends. God willing, nothing will prevent me from buying a 4th and 5th copy when Christmas rolls around.
This kind of thing happens to apps regardless of whether they are closed source or FOSS.
If management of a closed source app in an app store changes in a way that you don't like, you have zero recourse.
If it happens to a FOSS app, then you could potentially use the source to install the app yourself or pay another supplier to do it for you.
Although given the reality of the low cost of mobile apps and small, niche user bases, your purchase probably amounts to something more like contributing to a tip jar anyway.
I think I have donated more for Inkscape, Gimp, Firefox, and Libre Office than I ever spent on proprietary software. I also tend to buy paid versions of open-source apps in app stores, where available. It's great when a piece of open-source software has an easy donation link / button.
That said, I tend to trust all closed-source software significantly less, even if it's given away for free. Especially is it's given away for free.
Without knowing how much you've paid for proprietary software, that could be a lot, or a little. If you're coming from a position where there is alternative FOSS software available to use, that's your bubble/sphere of experience. In other realms, say software for doing aerospace CAD, there is no FOSS available because it's just such a niche piece of software.
I mostly speak about more mundane software than CAD. I would say that the total sums involved are in the $100-$200 range, accumulated from multiple $5-$10 donations and purchases. I buy really, really little proprietary software %)
The free software philosophy aside, I feel like another problem is that once you start accepting payments then you start accepting various forms of responsibility/liability/accountability/etc. along with it. At a high enough price it'd become worth it, but that might not be anywhere near the price that your customers/users want to support you at.
Yet by the active unique user numbers they have estimated sold at least ~168k copies and maybe upwards ~500k https://steamdb.info/app/280680/charts/ And that's Steam alone. I'd be really curious compared to this how many people click on the Donate button on the Krita homepage.
That's a lot of purchases imo for a project like this. I'm kind of ambivalent about the store cuts but they give a huge enough exposure to any game or software.
otoh I would put the Runescape community and people who play Yo-kai Watch games as far away as possible from each other
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