The Real Human Being
Gender: Male
Rank: Ace Attorney
Joined: Wed Oct 22, 2008 5:53 pm
Posts: 3479
Hello everyone, I come here today to let you all know, that Flash, the original web media player, has finally been laid to rest.
This is truly the most awful thing happening in the world right now, hundreds of thousands of porn games will no longer be playable, crudely made animations made 20 years ago are now completely unusable in their native format, all for the sake of "Security" I want you to seriously consider the implications of an entire format being pulled just because the original creator said that's what they wanted. Imagine if Toshiba and Philips up and decided they no longer wanted people to have VCR's due to them having the ABILITY to be used as a weapon, so they take every VCR ever made and destroy them for
your safety. It doesn't matter if you paid for it, they made the format and by God you just can't be trusted with it anymore.
That's what Adobe did, they pulled the plug on an entire artform. An entire generation of creative works is now gone as far as the casual viewer is concerned.
Moving something that you don't like to another platform for the sake of "security" (I.E. CONTROL!) is something that shouldn't happen in a free society, it's not right.
Don't just scoff and say "well you can still see it, you just need to do X and Y"
THAT'S NOT THE POINT! Putting up barriers to these works is wrong, it's just another form of... some word that starts with "C"
You can claim it's fine, but what happens when it's something YOU care about being taken down? Or a creator YOU like being squelched?
You need to recognize that the fundamental rights of all creators, AND viewers should be inalienable.
Submitting to a giant corporation, and them telling you which rights you can and can't have or express is complete lunacy.
I don't like every flash ever made, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve to exist.
It's not just that they stopped supporting it, that's one thing. I can understand that they want to move on and create other things. But they didn't just let it die on it's own, they KILLED it.
They up and removed something that millions of people people followed, entire groups of people made connections based on their love for flash. And one company can just flip a switch and kill it for everyone? How ubiquitous does a commodity need to be before it's warranted regulation by elected officials? We regulate everything else; Oil, Logging, Hospitals, water, radio, TV,
banks, all of these companies need to abide by specific rules so as to not obtain a.... another word I'm forgetting that starts with the letter "M", I think a board game is named after it...
Anyways, why is it OK for platforms to be the final say so in what rights a creator has? A water company needs to give fresh water and not charge too much, a gas company can't just decide to shut someone's heat off just because they don't trust the occupant, why can Adobe shut down an entire platform, and disenfranchise millions of people?
But that's fine right? They're a private company and it's THEIR software, their website. Anyone who wants to see old flash movies can just go somewhere else, it's not like every other company would conspire against that one thing, right?
OH WAIT...