Again because a law can either be unnegotiable or something that can be superseded by a contract.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 What you seem to be saying is that it can in fact be superseded if it is possible to enter into a contract where you agree to waive those rights.

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 Are you commenting on the German law specifically and familiar enough with it to say it can be superseded by a contract?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.

Well there’s software that can make it easier. Just an option. For ZFS specifically there’s zfs_autobackup which I’ve got experience with and I haven’t tried this but just found out about a Web UI that works with it: https://github.com/natankeddem/bale

Modern filesystems like ZFS have snapshots and the ability to incrementally copy those around even over the network. I’d suggest considering using those instead of something that operates on top of the filesystem.

You don’t because everything here’s based on communities while Mastodon is on individual users. If you’d like something that does both in a single platform I think Mbin would be the best bet (although you can interact with Lemmy communities using Mastodon and other microblogging platforms to some extent)

Another vote for NeoDB. It’s been very useful for me and more people on fedi need to know about it.