DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

We’re in the final stretch of 2011 now, so soon, I will have to mentally note to write 2012 instead of 2011 whenever I need to write a date. Plus there’s the whole world ending thing. A few interesting news items to go through, so let’s get started.

There can’t be a copyright section without discussing SOPA, and while the Internet public once again showed how awesome they are on American Censorship Day, what with the 80,000+ phone calls made to Congress, the fight is still very much on.

And that’s the message Mozilla has been reminding people of this week, as they’re hoping for another day of action next Tuesday, and want people to commit to calling their Senators to oppose the senate version of SOPA, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Like SOPA, PIPA aims to do the same things, by making tax payers responsible for protecting the outdated business model of the music and entertainment industries, and sacrificing the stability and safety of the Internet to do it. I don’t like to discourage people from taking part, but I think we all know down in our hearts that these attempts will be futile, as Washington politicians are driven by their pursuit of corporate campaign donations, and have long since stopped fulfilling their duties to the people who actually put them in office (by voting, not buy paying for campaign ads). But it’s the only option we have, and it’s one we must exercise.

Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX) compares download a movie from the Internet to child pornography

What I find most disturbing about SOPA/PIPA, or maybe just predictable, is not that the RIAA/MPAA are pushing for it, but the others supporters. The involvement of the US Chamber of Commerce, in particular, because their M.O. has been to be the public face for corporations to behind. In this case, I think Big Pharma are involved, and they’re more interested in the counterfeiting part of SOPA. Counterfeit drugs should be stopped, as they’re either dangerous, or they do violate the earning rights of pharmaceutical companies, or both. But what Big Pharma may really be trying to achieve with SOPA is to block cheap, but perfectly legal (at least in other countries), alternative drugs. In the end, it always boil down to money. To greed. The fact that is SOPA/PIPA is passed, and the US government will be able to seize domain names of websites that are “dedicated” to selling cheap drugs for those who can’t afford it, and to force search engines to filter out results to these websites, is probably why Big Pharma are involved, why Pfizer was one of only 6 groups asked to testify at the SOPA hearings. We can also see Big Pharm’s involvement via their political lap dogs, and one of the co-sponsors of the bill, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas has perhaps revealed too much this week in a written rebuttal of criticism of his beloved SOPA bill. Completely dismissing concerns about censorship and freedom of speech (it’s not a core issue for our supposed democratically elected politicians these days), what interested me the most was how Smith chided Google for actively promoting “rogue foreign pharmacies that sold counterfeit and illegal drugs to U.S. patients”, and Smith has a history of introducing or supporting bills that would benefit Big Pharma.

Smith, like many other clueless politicians before him, also once again linked web piracy to child pornography. “Like online piracy, child pornography is a billion-dollar business operated online. It is also illegal. That’s why law enforcement officials are authorized to block access to child-porn sites,” Smith wrote in support of introducing new laws to block online piracy. I find this statement quite incredible really. Does Lamar Smith of Texas think that the only reason law enforcement take action against child-porn sites is because it’s a “billion-dollar business”? I think there are other issues involved, which Smith appears to not care about at all, such as the actual welfare of the exploited children perhaps? And any time a politicians tries to link web piracy to child porn, it doesn’t elevate the seriousness of web piracy, it only serves to devalue the serious of child exploitation. So unless Rep. Smith really thinks that child porn is no more serious than college students downloading the latest Harold & Kumar movie, he should retract his statement, or face being accused of downplaying the seriousness of a truly heinous crime.

But while the moral opposition to SOPA/PIPA is well justified, and the technical opposition that has mainly focussed on the dangers of messing with DNS is also quite valid, one aspect overlooked is that, like most plans to stop piracy, SOPA/PIPA may just not work, particularly the highly controversial search engine filtering part! TechDirt dug up some stats that showed websites that will be prime targets for SOPA/PIPA, like The Pirate Bay, only rely on search engines for a small part of their overall traffic. So even if Google introduced a block to remove all results from all suspected piracy websites, the majority of web pirates would not be affected. And blocking the large sites on Google will just encourage many more smaller sites to take their place, to fill up the holes in the search rankings for terms that carry lots of traffic. And stopping thousands and thousands of smaller websites is going to be a lot harder than stopping a single The Pirate Bay (and we know rights holders don’t want to do the work, so they’re not going to track down each domain name and fill in the right forms to get Google to remove them), and this fragmentation will actually make web piracy easier. And this is actually the preferred scenario – the likely scenario is that malware sites will probably move in, and all those piracy newbs that don’t know the domain name of the The Pirate Bay or don’t know that you can type it directly into your browser, will get redirected to malware sites and billions will be lost as a result (see, I can make up monetary loss figures too).

And the DNS/IP filtering, as I’ve explained before, can be easily bypassed as well by people who don’t mind putting in the extra work, and I’m never surprised at things people are willing to do for free stuff (I mean, just figuring out how to use BitTorrent, including port redirections and stuff, is much harder than switching to a non filtered DNS). And the group responsible for “defeating” Google’s anti-piracy auto-suggest filter is back, as MAFIAA Fire releases a new add-on for Firefox called The Pirate Bay Dancing, which aims to circumvent blocking and filtering by randomly using one of thousands of proxy servers. It promises to work with any blocked site, even ones that are banned for political reasons, in countries that the US is now trying to emulate.

And it is all about the money. RIAA and MPAA money, and money from corporations in general, have corrupted the American political system, but the same money corrupts the copyright system too, it seems. This follows a breaking scandal in the Netherlands where, ironically, an anti-piracy firm stole the music it used in those anti-piracy ads you find at the start of DVDs, and it follows the plight of the poor artist trying to recoup what he’s owed, only to come face to face with the corrupt copyright business. The composer, Melchior Rietveldt, was given a “deal” in which he would have to give 33% of his royalties to the boss of a royalty collection agency, or face the possibility of not getting any money back. So you have anti-piracy firms performing commercial piracy, and you have copyright licensing firms doing backdoor deals and pocketing the real artist’s money for themselves.

Skipping ahead to gaming, but still within the topic of copyright, we have Sony revealing details about the memory card for its upcoming PlayStation Vita portable console, and once again, it’s exactly what you would expect from a company like Sony.

Sony will force gamers to buy new proprietary memory cards for the PS Vita, at $120 for 32GB

The PlayStation Vita’s memory cards will be yet again another Sony proprietary format, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s a new proprietary format that only works with the Vita – even Sony’s own proprietary MemoryStick format was apparently not good enough. Sony says this has been for performance reasons, and that may be partly true, but everyone knows that security is the real concern here (if performance was such a big problem, then why not dictate that only class 10 high speed SD cards can be used, and perhaps even run a speed test on cards before they’re allowed to be used on the Vita). By making the Vita memory card a proprietary format stuffed with DRM, and removing compatibility for the card to be used as a mass storage device (so that the card can only be accessed via Sony’s proprietary software), Sony hopes that hackers can’t use the memory card as a platform to launch a hack into the system, to avoid what did happen with the PSP.

But Sony’s actions may have the opposite effect, as hackers will see this new system that appears to be harder to hack, and see it as a challenge. But if there’s a way to use something, there’s a way to hack it to do something else, and I don’t think this will change regardless of how difficult you make it for legitimate gamers, now forced to pay a premium for Sony’s memory cards ($120 for 32GB).

Following up last week’s story about game retailers such as Steam and Good Old Games urging publishers to compete with pirates on service, not just on price, I have my own personal story this week with just how difficult paying customers have it compared to pirates. I purchased the game Sins of a Solar Empire a while back, it’s a game that doesn’t have DRM and I thought I would show my support (but mainly because it was on sale – pricing is still very important, more on that later). I had played the game a while back, but that was on XP, and now that I wanted to get the game running on Windows 7. While the game is DRM free, the full purchase process involves buying from Stardock’s Impulse platform, which has recently been sold to GameStop, registering within Impulse to download the game – Impulse was not required when I originally installed the game in XP, as it was only needed for updates. The Impulse platform is an app like Steam, that allows you to purchase, download and organize your game collection. Unfortunately, the serial code for the game I had would not register on Impulse, and searching the web, this appears to be a common problem. The only solution is to email Impulse tech support, and that’s what I did. But the problem is that it left me with a game that I purchased, that I wanted to play right now, and I’m unable to as a paying customer. So instead, I did what many would have done in my position – I downloaded a pirated version of the game, from a file hosting/sharing website without having to commit any illegal “uploads”, so I could play it right away. It took Impulse tech support 3 days to answer my query, which was to provide a new serial that would register.

Crappy games, like Duke Nukem Forever, is still popular with game buyers because it's been heavily discounted

And pricing, I have to say, plays a big part in game purchases. And I’m not talking about must-have games, but rather, the games that you might think you’re interested in, but not so much that you would want to pay full prices for. Right now, piracy seems to be the most popular way to get these types of games, but for me, the various Steam sales have become the better alternative. I’ve bought a lot of games just because they’re cheap, and for $5, you can’t really go wrong. It’s this type of thinking and impulse buy that could drive the PC gaming market, and also prevent piracy (or monetize piracy, as downloaders “legalize” their pirated copies by buying a legit one on the cheap). I understand that you can’t release new games at this low price point, but for games that have received less than positive reviews, the price drop should happen much more quickly than it does right now (to be fair, some publishers have already started embracing this principle – badly received games are often now purchased up despite the bad reviews if the price is right – that’s money the publisher otherwise wouldn’t have had, or wouldn’t even deserve for publishing a bad game).

Alright, enough ranting for this week – gotta save something for next week. See you then.

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.