Valve’s Steam Deck Deemed a Success, How Fair Use Helped It
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The Steam Deck wasn’t born ready, but it’s ready now - The Verge
The Steam Deck is my favorite gadget of 2022. I have no hesitation in recommending it anymore. The kind of person who would buy one should buy one. My only question: are you that kind of person?
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I should know. I’ve now spent 435 hours playing Steam games across three different Decks, averaging well over an hour per day since launch. I’ve torn through all 150 hours of Elden Ring and beat Stray, Cult of the Lamb, Signalis, The Forgotten City, Into the Breach, and Vampire Survivors* on the Deck alone. I’m in the middle of dozens more. Plus, those 435 hours don’t count all the time I’ve spent futzing around with alternative games stores, emulators, streaming games from PS5 to the handheld, or cracking open the case to install a better fan and a larger SSD.
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How a Fair Use Win Paved the Way for Competition From Valve’s Steam Deck - Public Knowledge
Valve’s Steam Deck is a new handheld gaming device that can play PC games. First of all, my official product review: it is very cool. With that established, let’s talk about the really interesting stuff: copyright doctrine.
The long-running and bitter fight between Oracle and Google concluded in 2021, when the Supreme Court ruled 6-2 (in a decision written by Stephen Breyer, with Justices Thomas and Alito dissenting) that re-implementing Application Software Interfaces (APIs) – a form of software library – was a fair use. Google had written its own code that was functionally identical to existing Java software to make it easier for developers to write for the then-new Android platform. A developer’s code might ask the system for particular information, or to perform some kind of calculation. By re-implementing Java APIs on Android, Google made it so that a developer’s code can ask the system for the same things, in the same way, and get an answer back it understands. While the “functional” code in a re-implemented API might be totally new and different from the original, the new code still has to essentially call things by the same names.
The Supreme Court rightly found that this is pro-competitive and legal. Copyright law is not intended to lock software developers to proprietary platforms or prevent the emergence of new compatible platforms.