verdigris

But why can't you just remove it? It being mounted into the studs isn't any different than any other spot, it's just more secure.

Thanks for the basic lesson in media literacy. I was replying to your comment which implies that this comic is somehow a media critique.

This comic is very explicitly bashing fans not the media.

Yes because they were licensed resellers.

Under many licenses no, you did not. Resale was certainly in the realm of things that license agreements could and often did prohibit. I was probably too blanket in my statement earlier, it was certainly not ubiquitous, but in many cases physically selling the CD did not transfer the license and the purchaser would have been in violation of the terms by using it.

You're conflating DRM with software licensing. DRM is digital enforcement of license terms. Steam was by no means the first form of DRM, but it is a DRM platform (though there are some DRM-free titles).

I am not too young to remember Steam being a highly controversial topic because it was basically launched as the DRM for Half-Life 2. The backlash against the normalization of DRM led to the creation of Good Old Games, still the premiere DRM-free vendor on the market.

However, software licenses have been in use since the 70s. The practice of selling actual copies of code as opposed to licenses to use the code was already rare by the 90s. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell or copy it, at least for most commercial products. Most people just never read the very long terms of usage.

Again that is a separate issue from the no undercutting clause. Prohibition of resale is ubiquitous in the software world because for decades the ploy has been to sell you a license, not an actual product.

Of course I'd love that to change but it's a core precept of how digital ownership works and has worked for most of it's existence. Steam is not the main force behind that.

Yeah that's not what they're preventing. It's to stop someone with rights to generate keys, i.e. the developer, from generating a lot of Steam keys and then selling them on their own site at a discount, which is basically leeching off of the Steam infrastructure & ecosystem while sidestepping the storefront. Which is fine as long as they don't undercut.

The EULA for any software you've ever paid for is what forbids resale.

2 is false. It only applies to steam keys.

In Firefox the term is Omnibar, or at least used to be. I'm on Mobile where the option doesn't exist, but search settings for that.

Sorry I deleted my comment because I misread your first one.

The joke, which is not funny enough to bear this level of explanation, is that she would do that and call it exposure therapy. That's funny.

My defense of the comic was more of an indictment of the average reddit/lemmy comic post, which very often literally have no punchline or stretch one panel of content into four.