Someone is going to reverse engineer Destiny's server component from scratch? Has that ever happened before with other online games? Ones as complex as Destiny?

Yes it has.

I don't keep close track of this kind of thing. Got any examples?

Honestly, I think this whole Music of the Spheres drip drip drip leaking Marty and his army did has set a bad example.

Marty had nothing to do with the MotS leak.

Other than at least encouraging it and promoting it once it leaked, sure. He certainly didn't oppose it even given an official release was forthcoming.

The official release was announced months after the leak, delivered a year later, and possibly would never have even happened had it not been for it getting out.

People don't get to own ideas. Even when they are "implementations" of ideas, like a specific painting, story, game, whatever. As a people, we need to reward the effort of generating ideas that move people forward, which is where patent and copyright laws come in. But the narrative is so twisted nowadays where we talk about people "owning" software, algorithms, specific implementations of ideas... because that's how many make their living. I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, just that that is what is.

We can't forget that enforcing this is something that we, as a society, have decided. It doesn't mean it's how it has to be done... but that's how it is right now.

Cody has in the past done things like collect audio for preservation purposes. He's in that same line of thinking here -- preserving the ideas (or, specifically "art") that is within the space of Destiny. On the flip side, Bungie definitely shouldn't be required to release a disc or make that easy... As a society, we potentially lose in the long run for making an experience or game like Destiny basically disposable and unknowable over a longer period of time.

Big deal? To some. Probably not for many more. As has been mentioned here, one persons trash is another's treasure (see: commissioned art and the thoughts around certain artists in their own time). Who knows if Destiny will be forgotten in the years to come or if it's pivotal to video game history...? There is a bigger picture at work here than just "I play games, Bungie makes them. So what?"

Also apples and oranges. heh.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

Vinyl is not lossless AT ALL. There is analog noise / distortion and a loss of dynamic range. You can take a redbook audio file, copy it a bazillion Times, and still be able to perfectly access the original waveform as recorded.

The phrase "perfectly access" is problematic because the equipment you use matters. On the cheap, digital sounds "better" by most measures, but arguably not all. There's a subjective aspect. Vinyl and digital sound different. On the high end, digital can sound more like vinyl and they can be less distinguishable, but you also have to consider how the recording was made and mastered. You can claim digital supremacy based on specs but the quality of the listening experience can't always be quantified that way.

Meh. To me, this is crossing definitions.

On a technical level we have gotten so much better about recording music. We capture more of it and we can reproduce what we captured perfectly. Obviously, playing a digital recording on a $5 pair of speakers results in a different sound than playing it in a perfectly tuned concert hall, but the same is true of analog recordings. With digital, every sound that was made originally is contained in the digital file.

It should be said that most of the ~1,000 vinyl records I own were pressed before full digital recordings were common.

With analog, the very end medium the audio is recorded on degrades. What you heard 20 years ago is not the same as what the same record or tape will get you today. And there were various level of quality loss getting it from the original instruments to tapes to the those end vinyl records.

Listening experience of digital vs vinyl is also a strange comparison. I will not buy any modern music on vinyl because stamping those tracks to a physical analog medium is inherently changing the sound of the music. You aren't getting Music of the Spheres when you put it in your record player. You're getting Music of the Spheres + vinyl distortion. For old stuff, stuff that was recorded before the digital age, people say it has a different feel, but I often find they mean that they have simply grown use to the pops and hisses and other sounds that were not original part of the music.

To me, the slight speed up and slow down of a cassette tape or the distortion and pops that come with a record are imperfections that should not exist at all in modern recordings and would not have existed in classic recordings if they had the technology we have now. It is my opinion that anything else, any talk of subjectives like listening experience or richness or warmth comes from nostalgia and not from the physical reality of known specifications and facts.

I don't know, man. Millions of 20-something hipsters can't be wrong.

The ability to copy a million times is mostly irrelevant because we're talking about one transfer to the end user. Also, perfectly accessing the original waveform is conditional. It depends on if the original was recorded on magnetic tape and then converted etc.

Nope. A digitally recorded signal onto a hard drive for example actually would better represent the original waveform than a tape. The idea that digital sampling creates jagged or stairstep waveforms is false. It comes back perfectly smooth up to the nyquist frequency.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

There is analog noise / distortion and a loss of dynamic range.

This is 100% true

You can take a redbook audio file, copy it a bazillion Times, and still be able to perfectly access the original waveform as recorded.

The ability to copy a million times is mostly irrelevant because we're talking about one transfer to the end user. Also, perfectly accessing the original waveform is conditional. It depends on if the original was recorded on magnetic tape and then converted etc.

Vinyl is not lossless AT ALL.

Trust me, I think digital is the superior format for a myriad of reasons. I know that Vinyl playback has all those things you mentioned, I'm just not sure that word is used the way you are using it. If it were, all changes in medium would be lossy.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

Vinyl is not lossless AT ALL. There is analog noise / distortion and a loss of dynamic range. You can take a redbook audio file, copy it a bazillion Times, and still be able to perfectly access the original waveform as recorded.

The phrase "perfectly access" is problematic because the equipment you use matters. On the cheap, digital sounds "better" by most measures, but arguably not all. There's a subjective aspect. Vinyl and digital sound different. On the high end, digital can sound more like vinyl and they can be less distinguishable, but you also have to consider how the recording was made and mastered. You can claim digital supremacy based on specs but the quality of the listening experience can't always be quantified that way.

Meh. To me, this is crossing definitions.

On a technical level we have gotten so much better about recording music. We capture more of it and we can reproduce what we captured perfectly. Obviously, playing a digital recording on a $5 pair of speakers results in a different sound than playing it in a perfectly tuned concert hall, but the same is true of analog recordings. With digital, every sound that was made originally is contained in the digital file.

With analog, the very end medium the audio is recorded on degrades. What you heard 20 years ago is not the same as what the same record or tape will get you today. And there were various level of quality loss getting it from the original instruments to tapes to the those end vinyl records.

Listening experience of digital vs vinyl is also a strange comparison. I will not buy any modern music on vinyl because stamping those tracks to a physical analog medium is inherently changing the sound of the music. You aren't getting Music of the Spheres when you put it in your record player. You're getting Music of the Spheres + vinyl distortion. For old stuff, stuff that was recorded before the digital age, people say it has a different feel, but I often find they mean that they have simply grown use to the pops and hisses and other sounds that were not original part of the music.

To me, the slight speed up and slow down of a cassette tape or the distortion and pops that come with a record are imperfections that should not exist at all in modern recordings and would not have existed in classic recordings if they had the technology we have now. It is my opinion that anything else, any talk of subjectives like listening experience or richness or warmth comes from nostalgia and not from the physical reality of known specifications and facts.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

Vinyl is not lossless AT ALL. There is analog noise / distortion and a loss of dynamic range. You can take a redbook audio file, copy it a bazillion Times, and still be able to perfectly access the original waveform as recorded.

The phrase "perfectly access" is problematic because the equipment you use matters. On the cheap, digital sounds "better" by most measures, but arguably not all. There's a subjective aspect. Vinyl and digital sound different. On the high end, digital can sound more like vinyl and they can be less distinguishable, but you also have to consider how the recording was made and mastered. You can claim digital supremacy based on specs but the quality of the listening experience can't always be quantified that way.

Yes, all true.

The recording can be poorly mastered as per the 'loudness wars' and will sound bad. Likewise, some people prefer the imperfections of vinyl. But they are imperfections. They can be replicated because we know why and how they happen.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

Vinyl is not lossless AT ALL. There is analog noise / distortion and a loss of dynamic range. You can take a redbook audio file, copy it a bazillion Times, and still be able to perfectly access the original waveform as recorded.

The phrase "perfectly access" is problematic because the equipment you use matters. On the cheap, digital sounds "better" by most measures, but arguably not all. There's a subjective aspect. Vinyl and digital sound different. On the high end, digital can sound more like vinyl and they can be less distinguishable, but you also have to consider how the recording was made and mastered. You can claim digital supremacy based on specs but the quality of the listening experience can't always be quantified that way.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

Yeah, there may be some loss of information compared to the original recorded digital source due to some technical limitations of the hardware, but that is not due to algorithmic compression, which is what "lossy" refers to. Also, depending on the equipment (playing back the digital source or the vinyl), that loss might be minimal or indiscernible.

Given that a CD can have 20 to 60 more dB of dynamic range than the vinyl depending on how it’s made, I’d say that would be perceptible in many cases as well as having a higher noise floor.

44.1khz LPCM is truly lossless for the range of human hearing.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

Vinyl is not lossless AT ALL. There is analog noise / distortion and a loss of dynamic range. You can take a redbook audio file, copy it a bazillion Times, and still be able to perfectly access the original waveform as recorded.

Yeah, this. The law is not morality; ideally it reflects the morality of society but it rarely, if ever has in the history of the world.

I'm just not sure I see the moral ground here. "We want X!" Is not a moral stand-point. Marty agreed to make music for a Bungie project NOT for his own use. Bungie decided to not release that music. What MORALLY requires Bungie to release it? And since it was made for them what makes it morally right for someone else to release it without their permission? This is all about wants and desires not needs. Even the example that Cody used about Wu Tang and Shkreli. No matter how much you think Shkreli is a terrible person he has no moral obligation to release something he bought to the public. Him being a terrible person does not make it right to steal from him. Very few moral philosophers have ever said that two wrongs make a right.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

Yeah, there may be some loss of information compared to the original recorded digital source due to some technical limitations of the hardware, but that is not due to algorithmic compression, which is what "lossy" refers to. Also, depending on the equipment (playing back the digital source or the vinyl), that loss might be minimal or indiscernible.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Because Marty doesn't already have the lossless masters :P

UH, he had to give everything back to Bungie when he left… he didn't have any copies of MotS.

Well, the pre-order for this set came with lossless digital copies, so I'm sure he has them now.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Isn't vinyl technically a lossless format? I agree with your overall point, but that vinyl release has some sweet art!

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Because Marty doesn't already have the lossless masters :P

UH, he had to give everything back to Bungie when he left… he didn't have any copies of MotS.

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

Because Marty doesn't already have the lossless masters :P

...Mike sent Marty a physical copy of the retail release numbered #001. So there's at least that.

Wasn't that on Vinyl? It's a lossy format and doesn't preserve all of the original :-p

That is the whole point. Not all laws are just. And in certain circumstances just laws can end up being unjust.

Yeah, this. The law is not morality; ideally it reflects the morality of society but it rarely, if ever has in the history of the world.

Context matters. I mean, there's a difference between a cut level of game and a fully mastered and complete suite of music that people want to hear. The only thing Bungie had to lose by releasing it was pride and that's not while the law doesn't recognize morals specifically, I feel that the law protected the wrong party in this circumstance.