HomeWeekly News Roundup (4 December 2011)
We’re in the final stretch of 2011 now, so soon, I will have to mentally note to write 2012 instead of 2011 whenever I need to write a date. Plus there’s the whole world ending thing. A few interesting news items to go through, so let’s get started.
There can’t be a copyright section without discussing SOPA, and while the Internet public once again showed how awesome they are on American Censorship Day, what with the 80,000+ phone calls made to Congress, the fight is still very much on.
And that’s the message Mozilla has been reminding people of this week, as they’re hoping for another day of action next Tuesday, and want people to commit to calling their Senators to oppose the senate version of SOPA, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Like SOPA, PIPA aims to do the same things, by making tax payers responsible for protecting the outdated business model of the music and entertainment industries, and sacrificing the stability and safety of the Internet to do it. I don’t like to discourage people from taking part, but I think we all know down in our hearts that these attempts will be futile, as Washington politicians are driven by their pursuit of corporate campaign donations, and have long since stopped fulfilling their duties to the people who actually put them in office (by voting, not buy paying for campaign ads). But it’s the only option we have, and it’s one we must exercise.
Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX) compares download a movie from the Internet to child pornography
What I find most disturbing about SOPA/PIPA, or maybe just predictable, is not that the RIAA/MPAA are pushing for it, but the others supporters. The involvement of the US Chamber of Commerce, in particular, because their M.O. has been to be the public face for corporations to behind. In this case, I think Big Pharma are involved, and they’re more interested in the counterfeiting part of SOPA. Counterfeit drugs should be stopped, as they’re either dangerous, or they do violate the earning rights of pharmaceutical companies, or both. But what Big Pharma may really be trying to achieve with SOPA is to block cheap, but perfectly legal (at least in other countries), alternative drugs. In the end, it always boil down to money. To greed. The fact that is SOPA/PIPA is passed, and the US government will be able to seize domain names of websites that are “dedicated” to selling cheap drugs for those who can’t afford it, and to force search engines to filter out results to these websites, is probably why Big Pharma are involved, why Pfizer was one of only 6 groups asked to testify at the SOPA hearings. We can also see Big Pharm’s involvement via their political lap dogs, and one of the co-sponsors of the bill, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas has perhaps revealed too much this week in a written rebuttal of criticism of his beloved SOPA bill. Completely dismissing concerns about censorship and freedom of speech (it’s not a core issue for our supposed democratically elected politicians these days), what interested me the most was how Smith chided Google for actively promoting “rogue foreign pharmacies that sold counterfeit and illegal drugs to U.S. patients”, and Smith has a history of introducing or supporting bills that would benefit Big Pharma.
Smith, like many other clueless politicians before him, also once again linked web piracy to child pornography. “Like online piracy, child pornography is a billion-dollar business operated online. It is also illegal. That’s why law enforcement officials are authorized to block access to child-porn sites,” Smith wrote in support of introducing new laws to block online piracy. I find this statement quite incredible really. Does Lamar Smith of Texas think that the only reason law enforcement take action against child-porn sites is because it’s a “billion-dollar business”? I think there are other issues involved, which Smith appears to not care about at all, such as the actual welfare of the exploited children perhaps? And any time a politicians tries to link web piracy to child porn, it doesn’t elevate the seriousness of web piracy, it only serves to devalue the serious of child exploitation. So unless Rep. Smith really thinks that child porn is no more serious than college students downloading the latest Harold & Kumar movie, he should retract his statement, or face being accused of downplaying the seriousness of a truly heinous crime.
But while the moral opposition to SOPA/PIPA is well justified, and the technical opposition that has mainly focussed on the dangers of messing with DNS is also quite valid, one aspect overlooked is that, like most plans to stop piracy, SOPA/PIPA may just not work, particularly the highly controversial search engine filtering part! TechDirt dug up some stats that showed websites that will be prime targets for SOPA/PIPA, like The Pirate Bay, only rely on search engines for a small part of their overall traffic. So even if Google introduced a block to remove all results from all suspected piracy websites, the majority of web pirates would not be affected. And blocking the large sites on Google will just encourage many more smaller sites to take their place, to fill up the holes in the search rankings for terms that carry lots of traffic. And stopping thousands and thousands of smaller websites is going to be a lot harder than stopping a single The Pirate Bay (and we know rights holders don’t want to do the work, so they’re not going to track down each domain name and fill in the right forms to get Google to remove them), and this fragmentation will actually make web piracy easier. And this is actually the preferred scenario – the likely scenario is that malware sites will probably move in, and all those piracy newbs that don’t know the domain name of the The Pirate Bay or don’t know that you can type it directly into your browser, will get redirected to malware sites and billions will be lost as a result (see, I can make up monetary loss figures too).
And the DNS/IP filtering, as I’ve explained before, can be easily bypassed as well by people who don’t mind putting in the extra work, and I’m never surprised at things people are willing to do for free stuff (I mean, just figuring out how to use BitTorrent, including port redirections and stuff, is much harder than switching to a non filtered DNS). And the group responsible for “defeating” Google’s anti-piracy auto-suggest filter is back, as MAFIAA Fire releases a new add-on for Firefox called The Pirate Bay Dancing, which aims to circumvent blocking and filtering by randomly using one of thousands of proxy servers. It promises to work with any blocked site, even ones that are banned for political reasons, in countries that the US is now trying to emulate.
And it is all about the money. RIAA and MPAA money, and money from corporations in general, have corrupted the American political system, but the same money corrupts the copyright system too, it seems. This follows a breaking scandal in the Netherlands where, ironically, an anti-piracy firm stole the music it used in those anti-piracy ads you find at the start of DVDs, and it follows the plight of the poor artist trying to recoup what he’s owed, only to come face to face with the corrupt copyright business. The composer, Melchior Rietveldt, was given a “deal” in which he would have to give 33% of his royalties to the boss of a royalty collection agency, or face the possibility of not getting any money back. So you have anti-piracy firms performing commercial piracy, and you have copyright licensing firms doing backdoor deals and pocketing the real artist’s money for themselves.
Skipping ahead to gaming, but still within the topic of copyright, we have Sony revealing details about the memory card for its upcoming PlayStation Vita portable console, and once again, it’s exactly what you would expect from a company like Sony.
Sony will force gamers to buy new proprietary memory cards for the PS Vita, at $120 for 32GB
The PlayStation Vita’s memory cards will be yet again another Sony proprietary format, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s a new proprietary format that only works with the Vita – even Sony’s own proprietary MemoryStick format was apparently not good enough. Sony says this has been for performance reasons, and that may be partly true, but everyone knows that security is the real concern here (if performance was such a big problem, then why not dictate that only class 10 high speed SD cards can be used, and perhaps even run a speed test on cards before they’re allowed to be used on the Vita). By making the Vita memory card a proprietary format stuffed with DRM, and removing compatibility for the card to be used as a mass storage device (so that the card can only be accessed via Sony’s proprietary software), Sony hopes that hackers can’t use the memory card as a platform to launch a hack into the system, to avoid what did happen with the PSP.
But Sony’s actions may have the opposite effect, as hackers will see this new system that appears to be harder to hack, and see it as a challenge. But if there’s a way to use something, there’s a way to hack it to do something else, and I don’t think this will change regardless of how difficult you make it for legitimate gamers, now forced to pay a premium for Sony’s memory cards ($120 for 32GB).
Following up last week’s story about game retailers such as Steam and Good Old Games urging publishers to compete with pirates on service, not just on price, I have my own personal story this week with just how difficult paying customers have it compared to pirates. I purchased the game Sins of a Solar Empire a while back, it’s a game that doesn’t have DRM and I thought I would show my support (but mainly because it was on sale – pricing is still very important, more on that later). I had played the game a while back, but that was on XP, and now that I wanted to get the game running on Windows 7. While the game is DRM free, the full purchase process involves buying from Stardock’s Impulse platform, which has recently been sold to GameStop, registering within Impulse to download the game – Impulse was not required when I originally installed the game in XP, as it was only needed for updates. The Impulse platform is an app like Steam, that allows you to purchase, download and organize your game collection. Unfortunately, the serial code for the game I had would not register on Impulse, and searching the web, this appears to be a common problem. The only solution is to email Impulse tech support, and that’s what I did. But the problem is that it left me with a game that I purchased, that I wanted to play right now, and I’m unable to as a paying customer. So instead, I did what many would have done in my position – I downloaded a pirated version of the game, from a file hosting/sharing website without having to commit any illegal “uploads”, so I could play it right away. It took Impulse tech support 3 days to answer my query, which was to provide a new serial that would register.
Crappy games, like Duke Nukem Forever, is still popular with game buyers because it's been heavily discounted
And pricing, I have to say, plays a big part in game purchases. And I’m not talking about must-have games, but rather, the games that you might think you’re interested in, but not so much that you would want to pay full prices for. Right now, piracy seems to be the most popular way to get these types of games, but for me, the various Steam sales have become the better alternative. I’ve bought a lot of games just because they’re cheap, and for $5, you can’t really go wrong. It’s this type of thinking and impulse buy that could drive the PC gaming market, and also prevent piracy (or monetize piracy, as downloaders “legalize” their pirated copies by buying a legit one on the cheap). I understand that you can’t release new games at this low price point, but for games that have received less than positive reviews, the price drop should happen much more quickly than it does right now (to be fair, some publishers have already started embracing this principle – badly received games are often now purchased up despite the bad reviews if the price is right – that’s money the publisher otherwise wouldn’t have had, or wouldn’t even deserve for publishing a bad game).
Alright, enough ranting for this week – gotta save something for next week. See you then.