I might be spending way too much time playing Skyrim ...

Week 2 of my Skyrim adventure sees me fighting a dragon, two wolves, two bandits, a conjurer and a bear, all at the same, inopportune, time. It also saw an incredibly laborious trek at walking speed (thanks to having to carry too much dragon bones and scales), from the site of my latest dragon slaying, to my horse, which was “parked” quite a distance away at the nearest watchtower. Yes, I could have dropped a few items and fast travelled back home, but I’m a level 46 hoarder in the game, so I must loot everything (and I mean everything, as my prized collection of forks and plates will attest to).

Wait, what? WNR? Oh yes, that. Um, yeah I guess I better get started, not that we have much to go through since, well, as you can see I had a lot of other things to do during the week.

Following up on last week’s story about Ubisoft’s DRM foolishness – apparently, the server migration didn’t go as smoothly as Ubisoft had hoped.

Gamers soon reported that games that were supposed to be unaffected by the server outage, like Driver: San Francisco and Anno 2070, were somehow being affected as well.

It seems to be me that game publishers are happy to burden paying gamers with ridiculous levels of DRM, forcing them to jump through hoops just to play the games they’ve already paid for, but aren’t willing to step up the plate to make any sort of guarantees in regards to the uptime of authentication servers. I think publishers may find that paying for authentication servers with 99.99% uptime, an industry norm, and having to keep them running for the life cycle of the game (say 8 years), might actually cost a lot more than not having DRM, considering the actual DRM may require a licensing fee as well if it isn’t developed in-house. And since the DRM doesn’t stop piracy anyway, I do wonder how these companies even justify the expenditure to their shareholders.

And the problem with online based DRM is that you’re really at the mercy of those who control the DRM servers. When the publisher decides that it’s no longer in their financial interest to keep the DRM servers running, then your games will simply stop working. And if you try to remove the DRM yourself, you could fall foul of the DMCA.

Now, I love Steam, and I free admit I have purchased way too many games from them in the various sales. But the greatness of the Steam platform sometimes makes me forget that, in the end, it really is just another form of online DRM. Sure, they do have an offline mode, and Steam makes the authentication part mostly invisible, and then makes up for it by giving gamers more value-added features. But it also means a catastrophic loss if you’re unable to access your Steam account, if it was stolen by a hacker for example, or having it banned by Steam. And this is exactly what happened to Russian gamer gimperial, who had his Steam account banned for no apparent reason, and only managed to get it re-instated after the story of his plight made headlines. The thing is, had gimperial purchased his games the old fashioned way, on DVDs from retail stores (and those games didn’t use Steam), it’s unlikely that just a single ban of an online account would result in all of his games being unplayable.

There are several things Steam could do to alleviate the potential suffering of gamers. They should start by investing some of their vast amounts of revenue into having a telephone support line, as it’s much better to deal with a real person in real-time to resolve problems such as an unwarranted account banning, then via email. They should also outline clearly which specific offences can lead to an account banning, and when accounts are banned, the user should be notified of the reasons (so at the very least, they know not to make the same mistake the next time). And then top it up by having a transparent appeals process. And it’s not just Steam, but all online services should really have something like this (I’m looking at you Google), because losing any of your online accounts these days can be a traumatic event that creates extreme difficulties for your professional, and personal, lives.

Europeans are protesting the controversial ACTA treaty, which will force countries to adopt harsh measures to combat online piracy

While the hoopla over SOPA/PIPA is dying down, our friends in Europe (and elsewhere) have not been resting on their laurels, and protests continue as I type, in Poland, the Czech Republic, France, England, Croatia, and many other places, against the controversial ACTA copyright treaty. Thousands of people are protesting what they’re calling an unprecedented level of surveillance the treaty will encourage member countries to adopt, something many haven’t seen since the days of the communist bloc. But instead of being watched by Big Brother for the benefit of the ruling party, it’s now surveillance to help (largely) American corporations, which is a little bit better I suppose, but also a little bit worse (for example, it’s impossible to overthrow a foreign corporation). And just like with SOPA/PIPA, victory is possible, now that Germany has already distanced itself from signing the treaty. The message seems to be clear – “It’s not acceptable to sacrifice the rights of freedom for copyrights,” words spoken by Thomas Pfeiffer of the German Greens party.

The fact that Hollywood, one of the key backers behind ACTA, seems to be targeting Europe shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Hollywood will claim the focus is due to the fact that piracy rates in Europe are much higher than say in the United States (after all, it is home to The Pirate Bay). But a new study seems to suggest that it may very well be Hollywood’s own fault for the higher than normal piracy rates in Europe, and it’s all down to something called a “release window” (or really just a fancy way of saying “delayed releases”). The reasons for the delays varies. Sometimes it’s due to short term greed, the delay in negotiating better distribution deals (if the movie or TV show becomes a big hit in the US, then studios are in a much better position to negotiate if they wait), and having multiple release windows (eg. one for Blu-ray/DVD, one for subscription TV, one for free-to-air TV) allows studios to have tiered licensing rates. Sometimes it’s also due to localization issues, subtitles and dubs and the like. But it’s mostly, entirely avoidable. The new study found that the longer the release window, the higher the financial loses that the industry has largely blamed on pre-release piracy.

More importantly, pre-release piracy seems to have little effect in the US, suggesting that people are not choosing pre-release pirated versions (usually poor quality) over the cinematic experience, which makes sense if you think about it. And it also suggests there’s less urgency in the US to be able to watch a movie before it is officially released, whereas the urgency seems to be much more, um, urgent in international markets, especially if the movie has already been released in the US.

And I think the Internet is largely to blame for this urgency. The good old watercooler discussion has now moved online, and it’s now global, so the need to be able to join in online conversation about the latest movie, or the latest episode of a hit TV show, or even the latest game (Skyrim!), means people need the content, and they needed it yesterday. If they can’t get it legally, in the time-frame they want or at the price they can afford, then they’ll seek alternatives. And it just happens that piracy is the most available alternative there is. I believe there’s a huge, untapped market that can be exploited if content creators removed the artificial barriers for international releases, and by providing localization as quickly as possible. Or basically what Valve’s Gabe Newell said a couple of months ago, with proof of the success of this strategy in the fact that the notorious piracy market that is Russia is now Steam’s second largest market in Europe. Content creators should strive to make content available cheaply and quickly, before they go trampling on people’s basic rights to enact laws that will do very little to combat piracy in the long term.

There also exists the potential to monetize piracy, and while the industry might want to hold the moral high ground, at some point, they have to accept that piracy, no matter what you do, will always exist. And you might as well make money off it. As usual, Apple are pioneering the way forward, at least with the music industry, via iTunes Match. The service aims to “convert” pirated downloads into legitimate copies, all for the small price of $25 per year. And with license holders getting a share of the cash, they’re largely happy to get something that they wouldn’t have got before.

And I also think there exists a third potential revenue source – getting people to pay for thing they didn’t think they wanted, by presenting something that appears to be really good value. Steam makes this work via sales and relying on stupid people like me to buy crap games, yes even games like Duke Nukem Forever, just because it’s cheap. But not all cheap games are crap, and some have even become my favourites, leading me to buy sequels (albeit also at discounted prices). Steam, and the publishers that take part in sales, know that cheap games have promotional value, especially if a sequel is just around the corner, and so cheap games becomes a sort of discovery incentive. Piracy also enables discovery, with the incentive being that it’s all free.

An Amazon Prime membership, for $79 a year, gives you unlimited access to a library of 15,000 titles

What’s my point? Well, after getting a Kindle Fire and getting hooked on the free content that the free one month trial of Amazon Prime offered (with 15,000 movies, documentaries and TV shows on offer, unlimited free steaming for Prime subscribers), I recently signed up to a year’s membership for $79. Most of the content on there I wouldn’t consider buying, nor would I consider piracy (although some probably would) – but having had access to it for a month, I determined that $79 per year is good value for what I’m getting. That’s $79 content holders would never have gotten if they hadn’t made the content available for “free” on Prime. And on a related note, the fact that people paid for premium Megaupload accounts so they could download more pirated content suggests that even pirates are willing to pay, as long as you present them with something that’s is seen as having good value.

Speaking of Megaupload, with the file hosting industry still scrambling to ensure their own safety, it’s interesting to note that RapidShare, a leader in the field, has been calm throughout. After all, why wouldn’t they be, as they were removed from the RIAA/MPAA’s “notorious markets” list last year having been on it the previous year. So what exactly is RapidShare doing right, that Megaupload and other websites have not done? Education and enforcement, seems to be key. Education means educating those in positions of power about what RapidShare’s business model is all about (ie. not about piracy), and RS’s lobbying activities in Washington won’t have gone unnoticed. It also means actually ensuring their business model is not dependant on piracy, so no rewards program for major uploaders or referrers.

And possibly more important is the need to show content holders the site’s copyright policies aren’t just for show. RapidShare has a well staffed abuse department, that not only aims to deal with takedown requests in a timely manner, but also seeks out and removes infringing content pro-actively. Does RapidShare still host pirated content? Of course they do. But they have a business model based on legitimate usage, and they have a working anti-piracy policy, and that’s all that’s required really from a legal point of view – nowhere in any law, except for the failed SOPA/PIPA, does it say that a website has to ensure that it’s 100% clean of pirated content, an impossible tasks these days due to the user generated nature of website content.

Gaming wise, the NPD figures for January are out, and they don’t make good reading. In fact, it’s so bad that analysts are even questioning the validity of the data. I haven’t had time (I know, I know) to fully digest (I know, I know) all the figures yet, but I’ll do that and write up the analysis as usual early next week.

Despite not wanting to write a lot, and not having much to write about, I’ve somehow gone over the 2000 word mark, so I think that’s as good a time as any to stop writing. See you next week.

Quite a bit to get through, and with the steel ingots and leather strips not making themselves into armor and requiring my urgent attention, let’s get started!

The fallout from the Mega story last week continues, as file hosting websites scramble this week to “clean up” their services, or simply to shut up shop.

This is probably what federal prosecutors, and the content holders urging them to take action, had been hoping for. With thousands of illegal download links now put out of commission, some permanently, it does seem like a major victory in the war against web piracy. Although whether this actually leads to any revenue increases, the whole point behind stopping piracy, time will tell.

For the music industry, this is the second major breakthrough against web piracy in just over a year, along with October 2010’s closure of LimeWire. But it appears that despite what the NPD calculated to be a 46% decline in the number of downloaders shortly after the LimeWire closure, and with less songs downloaded per individual when comparing to the same period a year ago, music revenue for 2011 hasn’t actually increased much at all. In fact, it remains 3% down compared to 2010, when LimeWire (up until October at least) was fully operational. The rate of decline has slowed, but you would think that with such a dramatic decline in piracy rates (nearly half of the people downloading pirated music were using LimeWire to do it just before it was closed down), and the RIAA’s warning of billions upon billions of damage caused by piracy, that it would have at least helped the industry get back into growth. So it will be interesting to see, now that piracy through file hosting services has decreased, what effect it actually has on revenue.

Apparently, only $23 out of every $1000 made on music sales actually goes to the musician, on average (source)

This is of course assuming the main aim behind the targeting of Megaupload was in fact to do with piracy, as it was noted this week that Megaupload was already making plans to take on the music industry head on, in plans that could cause the major labels more damage than piracy ever could. The plan involves a new website called Megabox, which allowed unsigned artists to completely bypass music publishers, and market directly to music fans, with 90% of the revenue going back towards the artist. Even free (ie. pirated) downloads would generate money for the artists, as Megaupload promised to share the very income, earned from downloads, that got them into trouble last week. And if Megabox works, then it would have been a big blow to the majors, and would have seriously questioned their relevance in the age of the Internet, when “naturally” generated hype is more valuable than any kind of promotion that labels could come up with. And with technology enabling artists to sell directly, without having to invest a lot in infrastructure (or they can leave it to tech companies to handle that side of things), artists no longer have to see a majority share of their revenue going to record labels. If there’s one thing the labels fear more than web piracy, it’s this, and while it might require one to be wearing a “tin-foil-hat” to think that this was the only reason behind the Mega take-down, it’s probably a nice little bonus the record industry got out of the whole thing. But while the likes of the RIAA can stop Megabox, they can’t stop innovation and progress, not forever, and a major shift in the way content is packaged, sold and distributed is on its way, if it isn’t here already.

While the Mega stories were very much dominating the headlines, the temporary demise of SOPA was still on people’s minds. One of those minds was EMI’s VP of Urban Promotions, Craig Davis. In a Q&A session with the Reddit horde, Davis expressed largely personal views that seemed to differ quite a bit from the general line of thinking coming out of the music industry these days, in that legislation is the only way forward to deal with the web piracy problem. Perhaps highlighting the internal divisions within the music industry on how to handle the web piracy problem (something we don’t usually get to see, with the RIAA’s loudspeakers drowning out all other opinions), Davis personally opposes SOPA, and says that piracy is more of a service issue, than a pricing one, mirroring what Valve’s Gabe Newell said a few months ago. In fact, Davis specifically mentions Newell as having the right idea when it comes to fighting web piracy. By focusing too much on the pricing issues behind piracy, major content holders often come to the conclusion that there is no real way to “compete” with pirated downloads, as they could not offer their content for free (although I would argue that piracy itself carries a cost, in terms of legal risk, technical and safety issues, and a moral cost, and so for legal content to compete, it does not have to be free, it only needs to be seen as good value). But by concentrating on service, innovation, basically by making legal options more attractive in more ways than just on price, then “legit” could compete with “free”. And perhaps Newell’s Steam could offer guidance to the music, and movie industries as to how to best leverage the positive aspects of the Internet, and how to compete with piracy – Steam’s legendary sales, it’s active community of gamers, and value added features, all help it not only compete effectively with pirated downloads, but also traditional retailers.

But innovation always carries a risk, a risk that, historically, the music and movie industries havn’t been willing to accept. Whenever something new hits the block, whether it’s home audio taping, or VCRs, these industries have resisted change and has tried to sue their way out of the problem. Eventually though, they did accept that change was inevitable, embraced innovation, and has come out better for it. But what’s different this time though is the incredible power lobbyists now hold over elected officials and the systemic corruption in D.C., and this now offers entrenched major content holders another “solution” – to legislate their way out of trouble. Most in D.C. have  gotten so used to using money to buy policies, that they no longer sees anything wrong with it. Which is probably why former US Senator, and current MPAA head, Chris Dodd was so transparent in his attack against political opponents of SOPA, literally threatening to stop writing checks for them come election time. That he simply didn’t see any problem with the head of a lobby group threatening to stop paying politicians if a favourable law wasn’t passed, shows just how “comfortable” the Washington crowd has gotten with the way things are done over there (or it may just be because Dodd is stupid). But while Dodd may not have felt that there was anything wrong with his statement, others did, and using the same tactic that has already worked against SOPA, people are signing a new petition on the White House’s “We the People” petition website to ask for a full investigation of Dodd for bribery. With 25,000 signatures required within 30 days for the White House to officially issue a statement on the petition, 30,000 signatures were promptly recorded in just a week (that’s the Internet for ya). The fact that the White House will now have to issue on statement of Dodd’s alleged improprieties, regardless of what the statement actually says, should be hugely embarrassing for the MPAA Chairman. Or it could be much much more serious.

Anno 2070 looks great, but just pray that you don't need to change your GPU, or the game's DRM could lock you out

With so many big issues being discussed, trust Ubisoft to still somehow steal the headlines via yet another incident with one of their controversial DRM choices. When review site Guru3D went about using Ubi’s Anno 2070 in a hardware benchmark test, they found that the 3 PC activation limit also applied when the GPU was changed, and so having barely started their test, they had used up all of their activations. Having calculated that they would need 7 copies, or 21 activations, to finish their testing, Guru3D contacted Ubisoft about this potential “bug” with their DRM, but Guru3D were promptly told that not only was this normal and intentional, Ubisoft wouldn’t be providing the 7 copies needed to finish their testing. So Guru3D did what any self respecting website would have done – they published the entire detail of their ordeal for the Net public to judge, and the expected public backlash eventually forced Ubisoft to back down and allow for GPU changes. Ubisoft came out with the usual statement saying that very few people were affected by this particular problem with their DRM, which is probably true considering the game only came out in November, and I don’t think many would have changed their GPUs twice during this period. But the problem with DRM is that it’s forever, so were Ubisoft really expecting PC gamers, of all people, to not frequently change their GPU or other parts of their hardware? Or maybe they just didn’t think their games were that good for people to be still playing it for more than a couple of month. For now though, while GPU changes are exempt from requiring new activations, other hardware are still being included, and so don’t be surprised if this problem pops up again at a later date.

And on that note, we move to gaming. For some reason, all the Xbox 720 rumours decided to out themselves this week.

Of course, there cannot be an Xbox rumour without mentioning Blu-ray, and the next Xbox (which I hope will be more imaginatively named than “Xbox 720″) will apparently have a Blu-ray drive. Whether it plays Blu-ray movies or not, remains to be seen though, since the Wii U will have a “Blu-ray like” drive, that won’t play movies.

Just one of the many Xbox 720 mock-ups floating around the net

On the GPU front, a Radeon 6000 series chip might be used. This actually feels too “new” of a chip for a console that’s supposed to be released next year, since the Wii U is only using a Radeon 4000 series. The reason why console manufacturers use older chips, other than the maturity of the product line, is due to the time it takes to engineer an existing off the shelve solution for a game console, the cost involved in using the state-of-the-art GPU, and the fact that optimizations mean console GPUs don’t need to be as powerful as their PC counterparts.

The most controversial rumour involves Kotaku’s reveal that the next Xbox could ban the playing of second hand games. Publishers have long complained that second hand games are cannibalising sales, as gamers can “share” the same copy and game stores profit from each transaction – only one payment from these transactions is made to publishers, right at the start. Publishers have come up with various ways to solve this problem, for example, a voucher system (but that don’t really works for limiting the multiplayer component of games). So if Microsoft really wanted to please publishers, and get them to release more exclusives for the platform, then having a system that ensures second hand games won’t work will do the job. Although I think this will backfire and hurt sales, and the platform, in the long run.

Nothing much more happening this week, at least no in the real non-Skyrim world, so we come to the end of another WNR. See you next week.

In another week in which the copyright related headlines dominated the news, we start with reaction to last week’s White House statement on SOPA. The reaction from none other than media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

The controversial media owner wasn’t afraid to be controversial when it came to talking about the SOPA/PIPA controversy, accusing Obama of being beholden to his “Silicon Valley paymasters”, and calling Google a “piracy leader”. But for many, the fact that Murdoch is supporting SOPA/PIPA, is probably enough to push them to the other side of the debate.

Wikipedia, and thousands of other websites, blacked out their content for most of January 18 - a protest that got the attention of DC politicians

Which is probably why so many joined in on the January 18th day of action, which saw websites, including this one, black out their content to protest the votes on the controversial bills scheduled for 24 January. Even the newly obtained Righthaven.com, obtained via court appoint receiver auction last week, joined in the fun with a hilariously redacted letter to the MPAA (still not quite sure what the squid is all about). While thousands of websites joined in, the website that had the most influence on proceedings was probably Wikipedia. The website took the unprecedented step of blacking out all of their English language pages for 24 hours. When it was all over, and with everyone realising just how important Wikipedia has become in their lives, many also found out just exactly what SOPA was and what it could do. Some have criticized Wikipedia for participating in online activism, when the online encyclopaedia is supposed to be position neutral. This may be true, but when the very environment under which Wikipedia exists, and its own existence comes under threat, then there may be a need for a bit of activism. With people flooding elected official’s websites, emails, phone lines, calling on them to not support SOPA/PIPA, the power of the Internet was on full show.

And the protest seems to have had an almost instant effect, with key supporters of both SOPA and PIPA pulling out, and it became apparent pretty aoon that both bills were, in effect, dead in the water. With the 24 January deadline coming ever closer, the two sponsors of the bills, Rep Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and the senior senator for Vermont, Patrick Leahy, decided to postpone both bills, indefinitely. It was a political necessity, as they would say, for now at least. Chances are, the same bills with only minor changes, and very likely with different names, will be reintroduced at some later point when the heat dies down, but for now, this was still a major political victory for the Internet. The tech sector, who have largely stayed out of the political arena, may have also realised the power of lobbying – whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, that remains to be seen. It’s an unfortunate reality in today’s political environment that political lobbying is so effective, but for too long, politicians have only been hearing one side of the story, and perhaps this will help even things up a bit.

Of course, the MPAA was fairly incensed at both the blackout, and the fact that their bill, and I’m using “their” correctly and intentionally, was sunk. Chris Dodd, who has had a difficult learning period as the new Chairman of the MPAA, came out attacking the blackout as a “dangerous gimmick … designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals”, obvious inferring that politicians against SOPA/PIPA are negligent in their duties in stopping criminals, and playing to the xenophobic crowd, added the quantifier “foreign” just in case. Dodd also attacked the decision to pull the bills, again using all the right keywords, describing the entire Internet as a “safe haven for foreign thieves”. And showing his experience as a Washington player, Dodd warned his former colleagues not to “ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk”, demonstrating in one sentence the undue influence of money in US politics, and the entertainment lobby’s masterful manipulation of democracy through it.

MegaUpload's domain has been seized on order of Federal prosecutors, who say the website engaged in racketeering and money laundering

But before the champagne bottles had emptied, an even bigger story broke, as it was revealed that Megaupload, one of the web’s largest properties, had been shut down. In a simultaneous, multi-national, law enforcement action, involving FBI agents in the US, and law enforcement in the Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand, servers were seized, offices raided, an the founder of Megaupload and some of his employees were also arrested. In the court documents filed so far, incriminating emails (that were obtained, somehow) showed that the people running Megaupload were well aware of the nature of their service, in that it was being used by pirates, and sought to continue to profit from the activities. But then, only an idiot, or maybe a DC politician, won’t have known what Megaupload was all about just by searching for a few MU links on Google.

I’ve not had a look at all the emails, only some of the more serious ones being posted here and there, but to me, this whole MU case strikes me as a civil matter, not a criminal one. For example, what makes MU different enough to the ongoing MPAA vs Hotfile trial – if anything, Hotfile appears to be even more “guilty”, as they were paying pirates directly based on the popularity of their uploads. And as for incriminating emails, we’ve seen it all before in the Viacom vs YouTube case – despite the existence of these so called  ”smoking gun” evidence, as Viacom liked to call them, Google/YouTube eventually won the case on DMCA Safe Harbor grounds. So for those that are saying the government’s case against MU is rock solid, I think it might be a bit too early to judge, as the legal documents revealed at this stage only shows one side of the story, the government’s side. When MU provides their version of events, things might no longer be as black and white, and their lawyers might just cloud the issue enough to make the most serious criminal charges (like the racketeering and money laundering charges) go away.

And their version of events might just include testimony from the many that used MU’s service legitimately, and most are pretty angry at the excessive amount of force and haste the government seems to have used in taking down MU. You cannot deny that MU had substantial non-infringing uses, and that could provide MU protection under the Betamax verdict, but it all depends if the infringing aspects are enough to negate MU’s legitimate uses, and how complicit the owners and operators of MU were.

I also think part of the strategy here is to scare the rest of the online storage industry into taking copyright enforcement more seriously, even if the government doesn’t ultimately win the case against MU. With SOPA/PIPA on hold for now, online storage services will need to take a good look at the DMCA, and make sure their compliance is genuine. That should be enough to keep the FBI away, for now, while most likely, tons of pirated content would still exist on these sites.

So a lot happening, and perhaps too much to digest in such a short period, but I’m sure both SOPA/PIPA, and MU, will be occupying the headlines for a while yet.

And on that note, we come to the end of this rather short WNR. Nothing left to say except, Xin Nian Kuai Le, Gong Xi Fa Cai (Happy New Year , Congratulations and be prosperous).

In any case, we should be able to get through this one rather quickly.

And as all of the news were copyright related, this should make things go even quicker – we’ll start with the SOPA related ones. Having forced a policy change at GoDaddy, albeit one that’s still not 100% convincing, Reddit users have now decided to target politicians that support SOPA as their anti-SOPA next move.

Operation Pull Ryan aims to unseat Republican Paul Ryan for his alleged support of SOPA

There are quite a few politicians to choose from though, considering most of them seem to support SOPA or the senate version, PIPA. But with a few key SOPA backers not facing re-election, Reddit has decided to make an example out of rising Republican star Paul Ryan, even though he may not actually fully support SOPA. Despite Ryan’s spokesperson coming out and clarifying the Congressman’s stance on SOPA, or rather, some expertly crafted political language that implies fence-sitting without actually coming out and saying so, Reddit plans to get Ryan’s opponent, Democrat Rob Zerban, elected at the next election. A fantastic result if they can do it, but the successful completion of Operation Pull Ryan will not be easy. Bigger than the issue of SOPA for the Reddit people taking part is Paul Ryan’s controversial budget plan, as well as his support for the equally controversial National Defense Authorization Act.

But the truth is that Ryan’s fence-sitting wouldn’t have been needed just a few month ago, when SOPA was widely supported by politicians on both sides of the aisle. And that’s progress, I suppose. The popular uprising on SOPA shows that people can affect political change, and while SOPA may still get passed, those in the US still retain the right to punish those who openly supports SOPA at the next election. But as expected, it’s perhaps the industry and monied interests that are having the most effect on the weakening political support for SOPA. We already know that most tech companies are against it, but this week, it was revealed that the major gaming companies, who have long complained about web piracy, are also withdrawing support for the controversial bill. Microsoft have already distanced themselves from SOPA (and may have even been secretly working behind the scenes to get others to come out again SOPA), but now, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and even Sony Electronics, have apparently withdrawn themselves from the official list of supporters for SOPA as well (Sony music is still very much a supporter). Now, the cynical side of me says they’re only doing it to avoid the negative attention SOPA is receiving, perhaps very much the same reasons behind GoDaddy’s change of heart, but maybe that’s the best we can expect from companies like them. Not supporting SOPA is not as good as being all out against SOPA, but at least it’s better than supporting SOPA. And if there’s one positive to come out of this whole mess, it’s probably the realization by many of the real power of the Internet, how it can empowered anyone to make a stand on issues that affect them. And that’s even more reason to fight SOPA and help protect the valuable tool that is the Internet.

MPAA using questionable calculations methods to derive losses due to piracy, and may be triple counting non existent losses

At the heart of the argument *for* SOPA is the economic damage caused by web piracy, but it’s been common knowledge that the entertainment industry frequently stretches the truths when it comes to publishing “losses” figures. So when the MPAA made the statement that they estimate there to be $20.5 billion in losses due to piracy every year, it came as no surprise to people that what most likely happened was that the MPAA simple multiplied the number of illegal downloads by the full retail cost of each piece of content. But what most didn’t know was that the MPAA’s figure manipulation went even further, by double and sometimes even triple counting the already exaggerated figures. If you have a $10 DVD, in which $2 goes to the manufacturer, $2 goes to the transportation company, and another $2 goes to the retailer, then the MPAA (or rather, the group the MPAA tasks with making the calculations, the Institute for Policy Innovation) calculates the loss by a clever bit of maths: $10 + $2 + $2 + $2 = $16. This is an  absurd way to calculate losses (that people downloading a $10 DVD costs the economy $16), as this kind of methodology is usually reserved for calculating changes in output and employment.

The MPAA also fails to take into account that SOPA doesn’t affect non US visitors visiting non US websites, and most importantly, it fails to realise (or deliberately ignores) the fact that just because people save money by illegally downloading movies, it doesn’t mean they don’t spend the same money on other parts of the economy. In fact, with the economy so bad and so many families struggling, perhaps the most simple explanation for piracy is that people just don’t have the money to buy movies, preferring to spend all their money on things like food and rent instead (which means they still contribute 100% of the earnings back to the general economy) . In the past, they simply stopped watching movies, now, they don’t have to make that sacrifice as long as they can still afford a cheap-ish Internet plan. But even if the bad economy isn’t to blame, then there are so many different (and some would argue, better) entertainment choices out there, such as video games, that people may simply be shifting their resources towards other parts of the economy. Regardless, the net effect of web piracy might be zero for the overall economy if people have not been hoarding money or throwing it away, although the loss for the affected entertainment companies is still very real.

But that’s what’s actually most wrong about SOPA. It will cost tax payers 10 million dollars a year to maintain the bureaucracy for handling SOPA, and to provide pro bono legal services for billion dollars companies, courtesy of the Department of Justice. And even after all that,  it may not help the overall economy at all, even if it worked to stop piracy (which it won’t). And that’s also if we don’t count the cost of damaging the Internet, innovation and other industries. It ends up being corporate welfare for the music and movie industry, and in the end, it will benefit nobody, not even the very same industries that will be better served in the long term by embracing innovation.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, just one of major releases for 2012, which will probably help Hollywood have another record year

And the industry should also take a long hard look at itself and see if there are any reasons within for their current problems. With box office receipts down in 2011 compared to the record breaking 2010, it would be easy to blame piracy. But piracy is very likely not the cause of the relatively small 3.5% decline, at least not according to film expert Roger Ebert. Ebert’s opinion is that the decline in revenue is largely due to the lack of a blockbuster the likes of The Dark Knight or Avatar, the high cost of going to the movies (3D and refreshments), and the greater choice people have these days when it comes to watching movies (whether it’s at home with Blu-ray on their big screen TV, or via Internet services such as Netflix). The MPAA always seem to believe they “deserve” ongoing revenue increases, but it’s only sensible to accept that this will most likely not be the case, given how much choice people have these days. Although with that said, I think 2012 will be another record breaking year for Hollywood (assuming the world doesn’t end) – what with The Hobbit, the Alien prequel Prometheus, a new Bond film and The Dark Knight Rises. And the music industry should stop conning people about its losses, which are almost 100% to do with the shifting buying habits of music lovers, from CD albums to digital tracks (the industry used to derive almost 90% of its revenue from album sales), and also the improving indie scene (thanks in some degree to the Internet).

That’s all the news I have this week unfortunately, I apologise if you were expecting more. I think there will be much more next week, not just because CES 2012 starts either, but due to everyone waking up from their holiday hibernations. See you next week.

I guess it would be customary, at the end of the year, to review the just ended orbit around the sun and summarise the major events. But that would require actually remembering what happened, all year, when I can barely even remember writing last week’s WNR. It should also be a time to look forward to the brand new, still in shrink wraps, year, and make some bold predictions about 2012. But that would require insight and imagination, both of which are in short supply in this 36C (97F) heat.

With the award season upon us soon, I guess I can format this WNR “a look back” in similar fashion, but without spectacular musical numbers, or comedic writing. So basically an award show without any of the interesting bits. Or any actual awards. Sounds like a great idea!

There has been many deserving winners of the prestigious Loser of the Year award, from Sony’s PSN SNAFU, to recent events involving GoDaddy being pwned by Reddit, but there can only be one winner, and of course, it’s Righthaven. The group that helped to redefine the term Copyright Troll has had a horrible year, not only losing court cases, but eventually their shirt (and domain name), as the company is now on the verge of bankruptcy. Will they still be around to compete for next year’s award. Doubtful.

SOPA: winner of our Villain of the Year award

Competition for the always popular Villain of the Year award has been fierce this year, as individuals and companies fight to be total d*cks (hint: not “docks” or “ducks”), in the field of copyright, gaming and beyond. But this year’s award winner is neither an individual, nor a company (and it’s not a duck either). It is, of course, SOPA. The always controversial Stop Online Piracy Act stormed to a clear lead in the voting for the award, at the very last minute I might add. SOPA has managed to unite all against it, be it the conservative Heritage Foundation, Republican as well as Democrats, and even the sworn blood enemies, Reddit and 4chan, and that’s quite an achievement.

The Best Blu-ray of the Year award goes to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, mainly because it was split into two parts and both parts still managed to not only get released in the same year, but both also topped the sales charts. Star Wars just misses out due to a point deduction for George Lucas being a total d*ck (hint: not a duck, named Howard or otherwise).

Skyrim wins our Game of the Year award, for wasting time that could have been used to cure diseases and save the planet

The Best Game of the Year should probably go to the best seller, which would be Modern Warfare 3, but that wouldn’t be fair to the game that everyone is talking about. The amazing world of Skyrim has drawn in thousands of gamers, most of whom have spent hours upon hours arrowing people, and assorted creatures, in the knee, and as a result, the game would have been responsible for breaking up thousands upon thousands of relationships if only gamers actually had real life relationships.

And finally, the Hero of the Year award goes to, in a lame effort to appease my readers, You! For helping to fight SOPA and to punish companies for not agreeing that SOPA is the worst thing to happen to the Internet since Rickrolling, for not buying into the Ultraviolet hype that, I have to admit, I was sucked into when I first heard the phrase “your movie library in the cloud”, for putting up with Sony’s PSN outage and that $600 invoice for adult toys that hackers charged to your credit card account when your details were stolen from PSN, for fighting the likes of Rigthhaven and the US Copyright Group and actually winning, and most courageously of all, for keeping on reading the WNR, rant after rant. You’re a deserving winner!

And as you can probably guess by now, it wasn’t exactly a very newsworthy week. The only real notable piece of news was the GoDaddy anti-SOPA boycott, which Digital Digest was proud to join in, having moved 22 domains out from GoDaddy. It would be easy to feel sorry for GoDaddy right now, as there’s almost nothing they can do or say to repair the damage caused by their ill advised support for SOPA in the first place – even their statement of “we oppose SOPA” was attacked by people claiming the company was opposing SOPA for the wrong reasons (not because SOPA is bad, but because GoDaddy was losing money because of supporting SOPA). Namecheap, hosting the Move Your Domain Day event by offering discounted, below cost domain transfers out of GoDaddy, also managed to raise $64,180 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, $2 for every domain transfer – not bad work for a day, considering how much of a pain moving a domain (especially an active, website hosting one) is.

And that was it for the week really, so I probably shouldn’t babble on any further, especially on a day most of you will be nursing hangovers of varying degrees. So there’s nothing left to do except wish you a great new year, a prosperous one, a safe one, and one that’s heaps better than the awful, awful, 2011. See you next week.

Further evidence of me being naughty in 2011 is the fact that all I seems to be getting from the Steam “Winter” Holiday Sale’s Great Gift Pile are lumps and lumps of coal. Other people are getting free games, or really useful coupons, but all I get is coal, and coupons for games I already have. Just in case anyone asks, here’s my Steam profile, so you can check out the games I have and the ones I’ve been playing. Add me as a friend if you like, but I must admit that while I love Steam games, I’ve not been a very active member of the community (and I’ve only just figured out how to create a custom URL for my profile).

Anyhow, let’s not waste too much time, as I’d hate to be still writing come Boxing/St. Stephen’s Day. Starting with copyright news, let’s first cover the fallout from last week’s revelation that IP addresses belonging to the RIAA have been used to download pirated songs, movies and even software.

RIAA caught pirating, but they say somebody else did it

The RIAA responded to the allegations with that old excuse of “someone else did it”. Having long argued that a single IP address is evidence enough to identify web pirates, the RIAA did not like being on the other end of the pointy stick, instead coming out with some vague explanation about “third party vendors” and the like. Did these “third party vendors” also only have a single intact arm?

But I’m going to do something controversial and believe in the RIAA’s explanation. Large organisations often have IP addresses within a leased IP block that they provide to third party vendors in order to obtain some kind of service, and so the RIAA’s excuse may very well be valid. Other organisations also caught recently came up with other explanations, such as their IP being spoofed, or that they were downloading only as part of research. And you know what, in the giving mood I’m in, I’m going to believe them all. Because all of these explanations, and some are improbable, are all not impossible, and this is why IP addresses should not be used as evidence of copyright infringement, without knowing the exact intent and establishing that significant downloading (and uploading) has actually occurred. You don’t go ahead an charge a car’s owner just because their car’s plate identified during the commission of a crime – you investigate the owner, see if there’s motive/intent, and of course, see if the car or the plate was stolen.

There's something perverse about seeing a million dollars in a PayPal account - Louis better get it out of there before PayPal does something naughty

Before we get to all the SOPA stuff, which again dominated the week, let’s continue the follow-ups to last week’s stories. Louis CK’s DRM-free experiment has had an update, and after 12 days of sales, Louis has revealed that sales have reached the million dollar mark (with a screenshot of a PayPal account with the said million dollars – better get the money out of there quick Louis, you know what PayPal is like). So that’s a lot of money, despite rampant piracy, which just goes to show that piracy can never really be stopped, but you can still make decent money if you do the right things. The hype over the experiment has obviously increased the visibility of the show, which explains the high piracy rate, but for artists and performers, reaching people sometimes is just as important, if not more important, than actually making money. And through piracy, Louis CK might have just gained quite a few more fans, and that can only be good for business in the long run. And with Louis donating a large chunk of the money to charity, another large chunk to employees as a bonus, this experiment definitely has a happy ending (for Louis as well, as he’s keeping $220,000 for himself to, in his own words, to “do terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business”). If Louis wants to continue the experiment, perhaps the next time, he can use a “pay what you want” model like the Humble Bundles, as this may help to convert more pirates to payers, as $5, while not expensive, is still quite a lot for a lot of people in this economy, to spend on comedy videos.

So while Louis, his staff, and his charities are all having a merry Christmas, there’s been one naughty boy that’s not having such a nice one. Righthaven’s long, excruciating death continues this week, with news that their website’s domain name has just been seized. And not only that, it may very well be auctioned off to pay creditors. If I had money, I would buy the domain name, and put up a DHS style seizure notice on it warning others from trying to profit using the sue-for-settlement approach. Maybe even linking to a cheesy video explaining why you’re even just for thinking about getting into the sue-for-settlement business. And for Righthaven to lose their own domain name, when they’ve been (without standing) threatening to take away other people’s domain names – I don’t know if that’s justice, or irony. Probably both.

Now for the SOPA stuff. With SOPA under intense pressure, the boss of the MPAA, former US Congressman and Senator Chris Dodd gets back to what politicians (and lawyers) are best at doing to defend SOPA: lying (or at least exaggerating the truth). Dodd, who recently said that China should a model the US should refer to for Internet censorship, now says that if we don’t do something about piracy, the US could end up like Sweden, Egypt or Spain, where their local film industries are “gone”. Not just shrunk, or hurt, but “gone”. And of course, none of it is actually true. These countries still churn out tons of films, and in Sweden’s case, films that have made more than a hundred million worldwide, which is rare for non US based films. Ever heard of ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ or ‘Let the Right One In’? The original Swedish productions, which has “inspired” recent remakes, were all big hits. And both Egypt and Spain have produced more films in the last few years, not less (or at least up to 2011 for Egypt, when domestic conflict probably will have reduced film production). And this was probably the last notable defence of SOPA for the week, as the rest of the stories are all about the opposition to SOPA.

If the Internet is good at producing one thing, it’s comedic music videos. And the anti-SOPA protest movement were enriched with not one, but two new protest songs this week. One is from activist Dan Bull, while the other is from the composer of the “Obama Girl” hit. This is the kind of creativity, the kind of freedom of speech, that may very well be endangered if SOPA is passed into law, because the very sites that help to host and promote these kind of original videos, will be the ones under attack by SOPA – the same platform that allows for creativity,  can often also allow pirated content to be hosted as well (in fact, I think you can safely say that YouTube wouldn’t have a been a hit had it not been for the pirated stuff that were dominant during the website’s early days).

Also joining in the protest was Scribd, a document upload and sharing website that has become incredibly useful as a way to embed documents in the same easy manner as videos. But it too would be under attack by SOPA, as it operates on a business model not too different from “rogue” sites such as Megaupload or Rapidshare. I’m sure there are lots of copyrighted content on Scribd, but SOPA punishes an entire website for the act of a very small minority of individuals (outside of the control of the website), and Scribd has a lot to lose if SOPA becomes law. Which is why on Wednesday, Scribd chose to randomly censor words from the billions of documents they hosts, an act of protest to hopefully get people to understand the threat posed by SOPA, and its likely impact on the Internet.

Reddit may have to close if SOPA is passed, due to the compliance cost associated with the controversial legislation

Joining Scribd on the potential list of sites that will be hurt by SOPA is Reddit, one of the Internet’s largest communities. The general manager of the website says that if SOPA passes, then Reddit would probably have to close down, due to the legal requirement to make the website compliant with SOPA. With millions of new posts to go through, the team of roughly 11 staff, mostly engineers, would not be able to keep up with the moderation duties required and there would be no choice but to close the website down. This is because, under SOPA, just a single bad link out of the millions of posts would be enough to mark the entire domain for seizure, and with millions and millions of posts, no doubt containing potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of links to infringing content, that’s probably enough to mark the site as “dedicated to piracy” under the SOPA terms. And when that happens, all that would be then needed would be a content owner to request Reddit.com be blocked, and that would be that. Multiply that by however many user-generated websites there are on the Internet, and you can start to see the full damage that SOPA could cause.

But one tech company that has been outspoken in its support for SOPA has been domain registration and hosting company, GoDaddy. And ironically with Reddit being threatened, it was a post on Reddit that has now helped to reverse the company’s stance on SOPA. A post asking for a boycott of GoDaddy quickly gained popularity, with the likes of the Cheezeburger company (as in “I can has cheezeburger”), and even Wikipedia, all threatened to move their domain registration from GoDaddy to other providers on the 29th. Facing the prospect of losing potentially thousands of customers, GoDaddy relented and dropped their support for SOPA, although they have not formally dropped their support for the equally dangerous Protect IP Act, so the protest could be still on. Update: Apparently, tens of thousands of domain names have already been moved away from GoDaddy, as people are still not convinced of GoDaddy’s position on SOPA (they’re not anti-SOPA, they’re just not supporting it “right now”).

And so GoDaddy joins the list of companies and organisations not backing SOPA, but it was company that should have never supported it anyway. But when the Heritage Foundation also expressed their disapproval of SOPA, that was my “WTF” moment of the week. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank, has been as pro-copyright as anyone, and so for them to speak out against SOPA, and as influential as they are amongst conservatives (having just hosted a presidential nominee debate for the Republicans), they must have had some serious reservations about SOPA. And they did. Mainly with how the government will given the power to censor websites, and also search engine results, in effect, censoring the flow of information. Hopefully, Republicans in the House and Senate will now think twice about voting for SOPA, or face being chastised by the Heritage Foundation for being anti free speech.

And in the same news article that I wrote, there was also a bit about Ashton Kutcher coming out against SOPA, but he was never really going to support it, considering his profile on the Internet, and his involvement with start-ups.

But probably the best argument against SOPA, and one that even content holders can possible agree with, is that SOPA probably won’t even work, despite the threat of collateral damage it poses. This week, we had the news of another Firefox add-on that looks set to defeat SOPA’s DNS filtering before it’s even launched, so for anyone serious about pirating, SOPA stops nothing. Nothing except actually ensure that new DNS protocols, designed to prevent DNS spoofing, cannot be implemented. As I’ve mentioned before, if the government was as serious about defeating Internet fraud as they are about helping to prop up a dying business model, then there could be a lot more economic gain to be made by preventing Internet fraud.

Okay, the rain is really coming down now, and the thunder appears to be getting closer. That’s probably a good sign that I should end this edition of the WNR, before the power goes out.  Merry Christmas, and see you next week.

The US video game sales figures for November was also released during the week, and you can read the full analysis here.

Before we talk more about video games, let’s go through the week’s copyright news first. Once again, we see why money and politics shouldn’t really mix, as news that two Congressional staffers largely responsible for drafting SOPA/PIPA have now “managed” to get better jobs at the MPAA and the National Music Publishers’ Association, two copyright lobbying organisations.

While laws prevent these two from coming back and lobbying their former employees (as if that’s even needed), there are the usual Washington loopholes that still allow the two to have influence on Capitol Hill. The MPAA and the NMPA will argue that this is how it’s supposed to work, that the organisations have managed to secure the service of two very capable, and knowledgeable, people who are already familiar with the issues at hand. Everyone else will be made uncomfortable at yet another incident that highlights the incestuous relationship between lobbyists and politicians. While only the MPAA/NMPA and the two new employees will know what the real deal was, the reality is that the two helped to draft bills that (intentionally, or just incidentally) gave their future employers exactly what they wanted, convinced their old bosses to go along with it, and got new, higher paying jobs as a reward. Whether this was just the unintentional consequence of their actions, or something more troubling that involved more coordination between the involved parties, I don’t want to comment, but sometimes just the appearance of something like this is unacceptable for a truly democratic society, or at least it should be.

A mock up of what Wikipedia's anti-SOPA protest could look like, with sections or even entire pages blanked to show the dangers of Internet censorship

With breaking (well, by the WNR’s  standards anyway) news that further discussion of SOPA will have to wait until after the Congressional break, the anti-SOPA movement main gain an important ally before then, with Wikipedia threatening a day of action to protest the controversial copyright bill. The founder of Wikipedia, the man whose photo you see every couple of months on every Wikipedia page, Jimmy Wales, has suggested that Wikipedia might blank all of its pages, for a short period, to demonstrate against SOPA, something the Italian version of the encyclopaedia has already attempted to great success over a local issue. Right now, it’s all just discussions, because, as Wales rightly points out, doing something like this could have a huge impact on the web. I mean, would somebody please think of the children … who have to write school reports, and what the hell would they do without Wikipedia (and the copy/paste function)? Use another online encyclopaedia, or heavens forbid, go to the library?

And for the anti-SOPA brigade (for all the work I’ve put into the cause, I must be a lance corporal by now, which ironically is also my rank in BF3 – I’m really really not good at the game), Christmas has come early thanks to Universal Music Group’s Scrooge-tastic act that helped to prove why content holders cannot be trusted with the power to censor the Internet. The story begins with the YouTube upload of Megaupload’s cheesy promotional video, starring some of today’s biggest stars, such as Kim Kardashian, P. Diddy, Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg, Chris Brown, and sung by Macy Gray. Using an original song, and with written agreements signed for all the stars, what Megaupload didn’t expect was for Universal Music Group (UMG) to abuse YouTube’s anti-piracy tool, to file an infringement report against the music video and have it censored. But that’s exactly what UMG did, although they now deny they did it for copyright reasons, hinting at some unknown agreement between two private companies (possibly relating to recordings of live performances), YouTube and Universal. Not that this makes it any better, of course, as the end result is that a perfectly legal video that presented views that UMG did not approve of (or rather, they don’t approve of Megaupload, period), and UMG had it taken down, which is the very definition of censorship. And because of an agreement between two other private companies (something SOPA would allow, as content holders can make agreements with financial providers to “kill” websites outside of the legal justice system), the tools/rules designed to handle copyright disputes was “abused” to censor free speech, however cheesy it was. What a wonderful demonstration of what a post-SOPA Internet world could be like.

Megaupload's Mega Song was blocked on YouTube by UMG - innocent mistake, or censorship masquerading as a copyright take-down?

Megaupload was quick to file a lawsuit against UMG, and YouTube eventually did reinstate the video with the explanation that, yes, UMG did abuse its tool: “Our partners do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they own the rights to them or they are live performances controlled through exclusive agreements with their artists, which is why we reinstated it.”

But the Streisand Effect ensures just the YouTube version, which was blocked for quite a while, now has over half a million views, and made #Megaupload a trending tag for a while on Twitter. Nice one UMG. And who knew controversy is such a great way to promote a music video, perhaps it’s something UMG can leverage to its own benefit the next time.

Speaking of promoting videos, very funny comedian Louis CK has done something that traditional media won’t be laughing at – he’s bypassing the normal distribution channels, and releasing his own video for $5, and without DRM. And it’s proven to be somewhat of a success, with CK taking in over $200,000 (profit after cost) in just 4 days. According to CK himself, that’s less than what he would have gotten from a traditional distributor, but he’s happy because more people have managed to get a legal version of his video, and nobody had to endure horrible DRM or annoying marketing (register here, register there, give us all your personal info, and then get spammed in your inbox forever). Some have argued that this is a bad development for media distribution, since by taking out the middle men, that’s fewer people being employed. And that argument has some merit, and I’ve long argued that the whole wholesale/distribution/retail chain will suffer, if it isn’t suffering already, due to the digital revolution. But there are strategies to adapt, but those too slow, too paranoid or too stubborn to change, that is the companies that insist on charging digital downloads at the same price as retail boxed version, and those that insist on DRM, will not survive this revolution. And the more they try to hold on to the dying model, the more artists will release themselves from the clutches of traditional media and do it their own way – the truth is that nobody wants to do it alone, unless they have to, and through DRM, bad pricing, and incessant marketing and all the things they’ve done to alienate consumers, traditional media are forcing artists to go it alone.

For now, Louis CK’s video is still selling, despite widespread piracy (not that DRM would have lessened it or anything), and Louis urges everyone to keep buying, as so he “can have shitloads of money”.

And buying, as opposed to torrenting, might also help you avoid public embarrassment, as a new website has been launched to try and embarrass torrenters by listing their IP address and the stuff they’ve downloaded, even the videos of the naughty kind. While downloading from a public tracker does have this risk, those with dynamic IPs may not care too much, still, I don’t think I can support any service that publishes data like this. It would be like if a website, say Google, decided to public its web logs, of which IP address searched for what and when, and that has huge privacy implications. Just because this website is seeking to expose illegal behaviour, doesn’t mean it isn’t a privacy violation.

With that said, it was funny that the website would be used to put anti-piracy groups under pressure, as opposed to the people who actually pirate. This is because the website allows you to search for any IP address, including say the IP address of movie studios, or anti-piracy lobbyists, or even the anti-piracy domain seizing Department of Homeland Security. It certainly was interesting to see staff at NBC-Universal downloading the excellent Game of Thrones, perhaps proving that network TV does know a good series when they see one, even if they don’t actually know (or dare) to reproduce it for their own networks. How about someone at Fox downloading Super 8, produced by another studio? Or the RIAA downloading the latest Kanye West album?

Of course, the right argument is that you cannot really hold the RIAA responsible just because one of their IP addresses was used to illegally download something. It could be by an employee, an ex-employee, a visitor who managed to get access to a network connection, or as some have already claimed, be an unlikely case of IP spoofing. And as long as the RIAA has an appropriate anti-piracy policy, and enforces it, then they shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of individuals. But since the RIAA don’t think any of this applies to, say Google or ISPs, and that they need to pass tough legislation to punish these organisations, I can only conclude that, yes, the RIAA is guilty of copyright infringement, possibly on a massive scale, and they should be punished accordingly.

Not much happening in 3D/HD, so let’s skip to gaming. The NPD sales figures for November presented no big surprises in the Xbox 360 outselling everything else, and I think it’s safe to say that it is currently the dominant console in the US, for this generation.

To be fair (or unfair), the PS3 is really the only loser in this generation, in the US or elsewhere, despite PS3 sales doing pretty well worldwide. I say this not to incite fanboy-on-fanboy violence, although that would be an effective way to cull their numbers, but simply because neither Nintendo nor Microsoft could have predicted their respective successes in this generation, which has come largely at the expense of the PlayStation brand. The fact that the PS3 will likely never outsell the PS2 is disappointing given the huge advantage the brand had over the offerings by Nintendo and Microsoft in the last generation, plus the advantage of also being a Blu-ray player (the DVD player in the PS2 being partially responsible for the unit’s success).

It was also interesting to see Modern Warfare 3 break all sales records, despite a struggling economy, wide spread piracy and everything. I’ve only secured my (PC) version recently, and only because it was below retail pricing, so pricing is important as ever. One issue that’s becoming more and more important is regional pricing, especially on Steam for non US buyers. Here in Australia, we get ripped off due to publishers (not Steam) setting higher prices than compared to say the US or the UK. This has led to others using VPNs to buy games from overseas (with the high risk of getting their Steam account banned), or buying from Russian based CD-key sites. It’s a lot of trouble for people to have to go through just so they can hand money to game publishers, and it’s easy to see why some might see piracy as a legitimate source for games, until prices drop to more reasonable levels. The globalised price competition is one of the downsides of a globalised marketplace for sellers, but they benefit from being able to access more markets and more customers than ever, and digital distribution strips away almost all of the manufacturing cost from things, so it should all even out in the end. But only if reasonable pricing policies are put in place, one that is fair to countries like Australia, and can also compete against piracy ($80 vs free is not competition, but $30 to make the guilt go away, plus access online services without fear of having an illegitimate key, might be).

I think that’s enough for this week. See you next week (maybe).

Let’s not waste more of 2011, and let’s started with this week’s copyright rants. We start with a scary peak into the future, if the likes of SOPA and PIPA are made into law, with the story of website that was seized as part of last year’s “Cyber Monday” seizures by the Department of Homeland Security.

I’ll leave you to read the full story for all the details, but suffice to say, domain was seized on the instance of music industry executives, website owner argues fair use, government, probably knowing that they didn’t have justification to make the seizure in the first place, stalls, and a full year later, domain name is returned to owners. Website ruined, financial costs incurred, and all for nothing.

Seized domains displayed this message, except it now seems some of the seizures were improper

The website in question was DaJaz1.com, who offered leaked music for downloads. The record labels told the government to seize the website, but the owners of DaJaz1.com says that the songs they linked to (not hosted) were often provided to them by employees of the record labels, for promotional purposes. But you have government agents too stupid to realise they’ve become pawns of the record (and movie) industry, too lazy to do any real research on the list of “bad” websites handed to them, and a justice system too biased towards rights holders. The full financial cost to DaJaz1.com is incalculable, and for most websites, being offline for a whole year basically means the end.

I do have my little theory about why the RIAA wanted DaJaz1.com shut down, as they also took down a few similar websites during the same operation. At its heart, the job of the RIAA companies is to help promote artists. But these days, the Internet can be leveraged by artists themselves for promotional purposes, and even music distribution, once relying on manufacturing/distribution/retail chain, can be all done digitally these days. In other words, there’s little justification these days for studios to be taking as much from artists as they are, and for all the talk of web piracy, this is what scares the RIAA companies the most. So any website that helps artists to directly promote their work, generate hype by using leaked music, and thus bypassing the studio system, will be seen as a major threat. Maybe not today, but soon enough. And PIPA/SOPA will then allow the record companies to get their dirty hands around the Internet, close down websites that threatens their outdated business model.

But even if the mistake was just an innocent one, how many websites will have to become collateral damage in this un-winnable war against downloads, before a real innovative website, like the next YouTube, will be the ultimate victim (it if hasn’t already occurred). The rights holders keep on saying that websites like YouTube getting blocked is hyperbole, and they may be right at present, because nobody is going to shut down YouTube without facing a mighty smashing courtesy of Google’s legal hammer, but would YouTube have been so safe in its infancy had SOPA/PIPA existed then? People uploading copyrighted clips was what the early days of YouTube was all about, before people realised they could create their own videos and it would be even more popular than a re-upload of something people can get on BitTorrent anyway. While it is now the bastion of creativity, it once was a haven for pirates (at least according to Viacom, in their lawsuit against YouTube), and it might just fall into the “dedicated to piracy” category of SOPA/PIPA. And if YouTube had been destroyed back then, would the web, and creativity and innovation, and the economy, be better off, or much much worse off? Is this a risk we should be taking?

It seems many are finally realising that, SOPA/PIPA, is very very dangerous. And it was a pleasure to read the quotes attributed to the CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, Gary Shapiro. Not only does the CEA produce the excellent CES exhibition, and represents all the major electronic manufacturers, it appears they’ve joined the anti-SOPA brigade as well. Shapiro used language that even I might be a bit scared to used in the WNR, for fear of appearing too biased, but he’s absolutely right that SOPA will kill “innovation, wealth and jobs”, and that SOPA is nothing more than “a bunch of Hollywood and music industry lobbyists destroying the Internet”. Couldn’t have put it better myself (really, I couldn’t). I wonder if Sony, the only company to actually both belong to the pro-SOPA RIAA, and anti-SOPA CEA, might reconsider their CEA membership, although Shapiro did mention quite clearly that his views had wide ranging support amongst CEA members.

Other trade groups, some staunch supporters of SOPA, are also now reconsidering their support following the public backlash. The BSA, the anti-piracy lobby group for software makers, has in recent days, softened their support for SOPA, basically calling it overreaching. No doubt after many of their members complained about the group’s position of a bill aimed directly at tech companies, and one which ultimately only benefits the music and movie industries. But if the BSA continues to even partially support SOPA, then other companies could join Kaspersky in withdrawing from the group in protest over SOPA. The threat to Internet security posed by SOPA is well known, but it’s nice seeing a security company take a significant step in their protest of SOPA and the damage it could unleash on the Internet.

The MPAA has launched a stern defence of SOPA, by first attacking an alternate, less controversial bill as being too friendly to dirty old web pirates. As the MPAA was most likely the people who actually came up with SOPA, it’s no surprise they aren’t accommodating to any alternatives.  But the MPAA’s Chairman, Chris Dodd, also added fuel to the fire with a couple of curious comments. First up, he question why Google is not accommodating when it comes to filtering search results, by saying “When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.”

That comment is simply too stupid to even come up with a reply, it would just be too easy to point out everything that’s wrong with the statement (and at the same time, it’s hard to resist point out the fact that Google pulled out of China for being forced to censor results, are we really comparing the US to China when it comes to web censorship, of all issues). To be fair to Dodd, he was probably referring to the technical aspects of result filtering, but it’s one thing to filter the BBC or CNN, but it’s another when you have to filter the thousands upon thousands of website the MPAA deems “bad”, as well as pre-emptively blocking “red flag” sites.

In Chris Dodd, the MPAA's chairman's eyes, downloading is the same as bank robbery

But Dodd wasn’t finished, because he had an analogy to share as well. Still referring to Google, he added “A guy that drives the getaway car didn’t rob the bank necessarily, but they got you to the bank and they got you out of it, so they are accessories in my view”. You see, in Dodd’s scenario, Google is the getaway driver, while Internet users are the robbers, and the MPAA studios are the bank. Again, too stupid to pull apart, but … can’t … resist. First of all, downloading a movie is not like a bank robbery, and I’m guessing it would be armed robbery as well. Downloading a copy of a movie, isn’t the same as stealing real money from a bank either. And if Google has some role to play in the analogy, it is not the get-away driver. It’s a stupid analogy to compare to downloading, because none the roles match up to anything related to downloading, but at best, the getaway driver would be the guy that transports or shares the burnt DVD copy of The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (in analogy: the bags of money) to your friends after it has been downloaded (in analogy: stolen at gunpoint), and even then, it doesn’t really make much sense. As for Google’s role in all of this? It’s the phone book company that helped the robbers to find the bank they robbed. The ISP would be the manufacturer of the car or the people responsible for the roads. Are they all “accessories” too, Chris?

The RIAA has been busy too, “helping” copyright troll Righthaven. Or rather, they’re trying to hurt Righthaven’s opponent by making sure Wayne Hoehn and his lawyers do not win the case based on fair use issues, which could hurt the RIAA’s stance (which is that there’s not such thing as fair use). At the same time, the RIAA is also trying to hurt Righthaven’s case by agreeing with the court that Righthaven don’t have standing to sue, and because this automatically throws the case out, there’s no need to consider the fair use issues. So the RIAA is basically out to hurt everyone in order to protect their own self interest, and you know, that’s totally within their M.O, and I guess it is kind of “neutral” if you think about it, even though Hoehn’s lawyers would disagree.

Speaking of fair use, the US Copyright Office entertains new suggestions for exemptions to existing copyright laws every couple of years, in the spirit of not allowing copyright to hamper innovation and consumer rights. A couple of years ago, the issue of smart phone jailbreaking was one of the exemption suggestions, and the US Copyright Office last year approved the exemption, to the disgust of Apple. Now, Public Knowledge and the EFF are submitting briefs that call for the exemption of DVD ripping and game console hacking. PK says that DVD ripping should be legal because so many devices these days don’t have DVD drives any more (eg. the iPad), and so in order for consumers to watch the movies they purchased, they should be allowed to bypass CSS and the DMCA restrictions, and rip for personal use. Makes sense. EFF, following their successful application of the smart phone jailbreaking exemption, say the exemption should be extended to game consoles (probably muttering “take that, Sony” while they were preparing the brief). And it also makes sense, because the same issues exist for smart phones and game consoles, being able to run your own apps (like, oh I don’t know, Linux), and both have issues with piracy if jailbreaking is allowed (but if it’s okay for smart phones, then it should be okay for game consoles).

This anti-piracy message was brought to you by the RIAA, and it's not at all an exaggeration or anything

But perhaps the US Copyright Office should take note of the Swiss’s decision to exempt “piracy” for all personal use. The Swiss government found that there was hardly any financial damage from piracy for personal use (as opposed to re-selling the pirated copies for profit), as people’s spending on entertainment products have not been reduced, merely shifted to other things that can’t be pirated, such as concerts or merchandise. And as there’s no financial loss, the Swiss didn’t feel it was right to have laws that hamper innovation, or help protect outdated business models. And they also made note that the industry’s “Chicken Little” response to web piracy is not new, and that these industries should just get over it and find ways to profit from it. Remember when the music industry warned us that hope taping, on cassette tapes, would kill the music industry, and when the MPAA compared VCR taping to leaving a woman alone in a house with the Boston Strangler? Yeah, those industries.

I haven’t had a HD/3D section for a while, so I thought I would add one for this issue. I could talk about the Black Friday sales week sales figures, which were somewhat disappointing for Blu-ray (only a 5% gain compared to last year’s Black Friday), but I really wanted to rant about two, slightly disturbing trends, when it comes to Blu-ray.

The trailers you find at the start of discs is beginning to really annoy me, mainly due to the quantity present, and two (not so new) developments. I’m a big fan of movie trailers, evident by Digital Digest’s growing collection of movie trailer downloads, but when you insert a disc to watch a movie, you don’t want to have to skip through half a dozen trailers mostly for movies you’ve already purchased, or have no interest in. Luckily, most can be skipped, but there’s the odd annoying one that can only be fast forwarded.

But the two developments are non movie related advertising, and BD-Live trailer downloads. The first one is particularly annoying, and a trend that has gotten worse in paid for content. I mean, I’ve already paid for the disc, or for the cable TV subscription, why should I still have to sit through ads? They’re not even funny ads, or ads related to movies, or the movie in question, and that to me is unacceptable.

BD-Live trailers is also extremely annoying, as it uses your Internet connection to download an average quality trailer from the Internet to show you. Supposedly, this is to guarantee “fresh” trailers, but in reality, it’s the movie studio’s way to make you pay (via your Internet connection charges) for its own advertising. And the trailers aren’t so fresh anyway, and sometimes you get the odd effect of having the same trailer show up twice. And again, it cannot be skipped, only fast forwarded.

Add these with the anti-piracy trailers, the “Blu-ray is a new format blah blah blah” disclaimer for badly produced, incompatible discs, the other disclaimers for commentaries and stuff, plus studio logos (which gets shown again at the start of the movie anyway), it’s minutes wasted just so I can get to the movie I paid to watch. It’s probably faster to download a pirated copy, than to sit through all of that crap without skipping, and they wonder why people pirate movies.

And on that rant, we come the end of another WNR. See you next week.

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.

Steam's Autumn Sale is on, and if you're like me, then credit card (or PayPal account) will take a pounding as a result - and to make things worse, Steam's holiday sale is just around the corner!

Hope you’ve had a nice week, perhaps even a night Black Friday deals week. If you’re like me, then your wallet has taken a pounding, despite the Blu-ray and game deals being not all that great so far. The Amazon US/UK Black Friday Blu-ray sales, especially the spotlight/lightning sale items, have been generally disappoint though, not that it has stopped me buying a dozen or two Blu-ray’s, mostly from the BF general sales categories. Steam’s Autumn Sale is a bit more interesting, still has one more day to run, but the titles I really want haven’t really come up yet (snatched up Portal 2 and Orcs Must Die so far). Speaking of Steam and bargains, would you like some free Steam games? If so, and if you have luck with competitions and stuff, then you should try Steam Gifts, which is now open to sign-ups (no more invitations). The way it works is that you periodically get “points” which you can use to enter competitions for games gifted by other users, and if you’re lucky, then you can get lots of free games (I’m not so lucky, 0 win out of 33 entries so far). Most competitions have a couple of hundred to a few thousand entries, so it’s not easy, but it’s probably easier than most other competitions, plus it’s all free. Just realised that it’s actually counter-productive for me to tell you about Steam Gifts, since more people will make it harder for me to win – so, if you can, forget what I just wrote, and whatever you do, *don’t* sign up. Thanks.

Continuing on from last week’s anti-SOPA stories, remember when Nancy Pelosi tweeted in support of opposition to SOPA. It seems an important endorsement of a growing movement, and as a progressive politician, it seems like the right thing to support.

Unfortunately though, it seems Pelosi is yet another politician in the pockets of the movie industry, as the “backflip”, or what Washington politicians call a “clarification” came soon after the tweet, declaring Pelosi’s continued support for the film industry’s fight against web piracy, blah blah blah. And people wonder why Congress only has a 9% approval rating, or why if it suits some lobbying agenda, that even tomato paste on pizzas can be declared a vegetable, made more ridiculous by the fact that tomatoes are a fruit.

But one politician sticking to true convictions is Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. He as the only senator to stand up PROTECT IP when it pass through the Senate’s own judiciary committee, and he did it by placing a hold on the bill, delaying the vote until 60 other senators get together to vote the hold down. PROTECT IP, if you don’t know, is SOPA’s uglier older brother, and both try to do the same thing – make the government responsible for the copyright enforcement of the movie and music industry, at tax payer expense, by destroying due process and possibly the entire Internet.

Senator Ron Wyden is fighting the good fight to preserve the Internet and your freedoms

Unfortunately, Senator Wyden concedes that the 60 votes needed may not be far away, and he is now going to use a more common tactic to delay the voting – a filibuster! Not only that, he’s asking those opposed to PROTECT IP (and SOPA) to submit their names to stopcensorship.org, and Senator Wyden will read out people’s names during the filibuster. It’s a nice touch, and I hope there are enough names submitted for Senator Wyden to have enough to read during his filibuster. If only all politicians were like Senator Wyden, and actually stood up for the public’s interest, as opposed to that of corporations, the US and the world would not be in the state it is.

For those that think there’s too much hyperbole when it comes to the threats attached to SOPA and PROTECT IP, that these aren’t really that dangerous and “normal” people won’t get affected by it, then if you want examples what governments that are too copyright-friendly can get up to, then here’s a story from Denmark. Like what SOPA and PROTECT IP will allow the US government to do, Denmark banned The Pirate Bay, and now, a blogger who simply posted instructions on bypassing the block has had his home searched, and could face up to 5 years in prison. You see, in order to allow for the enforcement of website bans, the government has also had to ban tools and techniques that bypass the ban, something that’s in SOPA as well. But many of tools that bypass website blocks are industry standard tools, and the techniques are fairly straight forward and are used for other things as well (such as trying to stay anonymous online), and  just as the EFF warned the other week, something that’s not thought out like SOPA could make a whole host of perfectly legal, and extremely useful tools and techniques for engineers and Internet businesses, illegal.

And so 19-year old law student Halfdan Timm found himself facing arrest by police at his school if he did not cooperate with a search of his flat, and police ransacked through everything, including his roommate’s room, and even through his dirty laundry. All of this was based on a “hunch” by the film industry’s anti-piracy agency in the country, and this could very well happen to more people in the US if SOPA or PROTECT IP passes.

Ironically, while "the pirate bay" related terms are removed from the suggestion list, the actual domain name is still the top linked recommendation due to its number one position on the search ranks

And while Google was doing its best to put some at least some kind of resistance to SOPA at the Congressional hearings, they’re again walking the tight rope between giving the film/music industry what it wants, and ensuring their own interests (and that of web searchers) are not compromised. So this week, Google added more “piracy related” keywords to its auto-suggest/complete blacklist, now including the term “the pirate bay”, “isohunt”, “fileserve” and basically all the major file-sharing websites. When a keyword is black listed, it will no longer come up as a suggested or auto-completed keyword in Google search, but the search result is not affected. But as I said when Google first introduced this “do no evil” feature back at the start of the year, it won’t really appease the rights holders, because what they’ve wanted from the start was for Google to actually filter the results (and SOPA/PROTECT IP will give them that). Google’s policy of appeasement was never going to work, and I think they should just stick to their guns and don’t accept blame for what people are searching for.

With SOPA/PROTECT IP, and the government intervening in copyright cases, the future of mass copyright lawsuits will become even more uncertain. Most of damage to their cause is being done by Righthaven these days, with their scattergun approach and their ability to pick the absolute worse people to sue (plus the whole suing people for newspaper articles repostings, is just not as “sexy” as suing big bad pirates for downloading illegal movies). Probably their worst target so far has been Democratic Underground, a progressive political forum where they simply love to be in this kind of fight, and choosing people *not* willing to put up a fight is exactly what mass copyright, pre-trial settlement fee extracting lawsuits are all about. Anyway, this week, Stephens Media, the backers of Righthaven and also their only major client left, conceded that Democratic Underground had fair use rights to use a five-sentence reposting of a Las- Vegas Review-Journal article. The admittance to fair use rights is actually kind of a biggie, since the other cases Righthaven lost have been mostly on procedural issues (the question whether Righthaven even had the right to sue on behalf of Stephens Media). A five-sentence posting, to me, is definitely fair use, as if it isn’t then even just posting a link with a headline for an article may become the target of a lawsuit in the future, and that’s just counter-productive for all involved. If anything, a 5-sentence excerpt is really free advertising for the newspaper, as people, if interested in the story, will click on the accompanying link to read more, while those not too interested will get the gist of the article without wasting the bandwidth of the newspaper website – a win win, really. So I have no idea why Righthaven even sued in the first place, it was a loser from the get go.

And with Righthaven dying a slow death, the Australian version of mass copyright lawsuits seems to have hit a snag before it has even started, with the VP of Movie Rights Group leaving the company, and the website for the firm going down. It’s definitely been quiet the last couple of weeks, ever since the first stories surfaced of MRG’s attempt to sue thousands. We’ve only really heard from ISPs about what they intend to do, but nothing much from MRG. And since Australian law is different from US law, perhaps MRG has hit some hurdles in their attempt to get customer data, or to approach them with settlement offers based on the threat of statutory and punitive damages. Nobody will shed any tears if MRG does disappear into the wilderness.

Technically still a copyright story, but I wanted to give a bit more variety to this WNR, so into the gaming section it goes.

Ubisoft may withdraw from the PC market, says senior company employees, due to piracy. Or not. The confusion comes from Ubisoft creative director Stanislas Mettra, and his rather angry rant at “bitching” PC gamers, although he later retracted his statements saying that as English wasn’t his first language, he probably meant something else when using the term “bitching”. But I’m sure he wasn’t trying to say that all PC gamers were female dogs, although that would explain why nobody is paying for anything (dogs don’t have pockets to put their wallets in, you see). But Ubisoft producer Sébastien Arnoult didn’t retract his statement that “95% of our consumers” are pirates (and consume as in play the game, as opposed “consumer” in the normal sense of the word), and saying that is the reason why Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will not be getting a PC version.

Ubisoft may stop making PC games because of piracy

Ubisoft’s own “bitching” about piracy is really getting stupid now, and it looks like they’re more than willing to shoot themselves in the foot once more by ditching the PC market. But to be fair, their stupid DRM probably already drove away their last remaining loyal PC gamers, so they really have nothing much left to lose.

But it’s ironic that two game retailers, Steam and Good Old Gaming, both came out to attack Ubisoft’s stance, and both are companies that have been very successful selling PC games even when everyone else was saying that the market is completely dead due to piracy. Steam’s Gabe Newell says that piracy is more of a service issue than a pricing issue, and that’s definitely true. He again points to markets like Russia which had been abandoned by companies like Ubisoft due to high piracy rates, but by abandoning the market and not producing a regional version of the game (with the right language), it left gamers with only a single choice – piracy. By providing faster regionalisation and better services, Russian is now Steam’s second largest market in Europe. Trevor Longino from Good Old Gaming agrees, because he sees piracy as an easier way to get and play games than the current loopholes that publishers want paying customers to jump through, via creating multiple accounts, and offline and online validation.

But I think pricing is definitely also an issue. Steam themselves have pointed to higher total revenue when games are priced significantly lower. With digital distribution, there’s no actual cost increase associated with selling more copies, the only extra cost comes from tech support and perhaps support for online features. Publishers don’t pay much attention to tech support anyway, so it’s not as if more gamers would strain their (lack of) service too much. And online features can have their own marketplaces, where gamers can buy additional items, and so more gamers equals more revenue normally. And this is why free-to-play seems to be a new business model, and even Ubisoft is getting in on the act with Ghost Recon Online.

But I think there’s a good balance between free-to-play, and “pre-paid” games that also have purchasable optional online content, and done in a better way than DLCs that add nothing to the game experience, which sadly is the case far too often these days.

My finger hurts, so it tells me it’s probably time to stop typing. See you next week.