Real ID and the Internet

by | Society
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Blizzard recently added “Real ID” to their forums system. What this means is that people who post on the forums are identified by their real names rather than pseudonyms. I’ve seen some movement on the internet towards a “real name” type of system. More and more websites allow people to post using their Facebook account, and there’s even been a few suggestions by politicians that web-postings should identify their author (at least in the run up to an election). While I can see some benefit in forcing people to post using their real name (people tend to be more civil with each other when their opinion is linked to their real-self), I’m actually against these types of setups. If I’m required to post a comment under my own name, then I’m much less likely to post a comment at all.

Some might argue that if I’m not willing to post a comment under my own name, then maybe it’s something I shouldn’t be saying in the first place. I disagree. For one thing, I don’t need my comments living forever on the internet for anyone to find with a simple google search. Real-name systems require me to think about everyone who might ever do a search on my name – friends, family members, potential employers, bosses, girlfriends, etc. Is my comment suitable for everyone in all of those groups? What about my comments about politics, religion, gay-marriage, evolution, global warming, foreign policy, and so on? Nobody agrees with me on every issue, and I don’t need potential employeers getting turned off because we’re on different sides of a political or religious debate. I specifically avoid having discussions at work on certain topics because they’re likely to inflame people. I don’t need my immediate or extended family giving me trouble because I disagree with them on religion or politics. Real-name systems would let people do google searches and get angry with my opinion.

In the end, the real-name systems will either cause people to be quiet about all kinds of controversial topics, or they’ll tie people to comments they made – causing trouble for them years later. Even though pseudonyms might give people a little too much freedom to unload vitriol on other people, it’s better than a real-name system.

Related Article: Why Real ID is a Really Bad Idea

Update July 9th: Blizzard retracted their plans to roll out the Real ID system.

One Tablet PC Per Child [Video]

by | Cool Stuff, Video
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I really like this video. I think because it makes me feel like I’m living in the future. Not only are they giving tablet PCs to children all over the world (which seems like it has amazing educational possibilities), but tablet PCs are actually pretty cool. It’s like the video comes from some kind of Star Trek alternate universe.

Getting It Wrong: Johanna Blakely [TED Video]

by | Copyfight, Copyright, Getting It Wrong, Intellectual Property, Video
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I generally like TED videos, although it seems like on the issue of intellectual property, they skew towards being against IP. In this video, Johanna Blakely talks about the relatively low amounts of intellectual property law in the fashion industry – there are trademarks, a few patents, and no copyrights. She goes on to argue that the rest of the world can learn from this – i.e. they should reduce or eliminate intellectual property laws because it will lead to innovation, like it does in the fashion industry. Of course, she’s got it all wrong.

I could go on about the numerous problems I see in her argument, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll point to just two:

The number one problem with her talk is this: she equates designers copying each other’s designs with copyright protection. In fact, what she’s talking about is more similar to patents, not copyrights. If I see an application that does “X”, and I think “I’m going to make a product just like that” — guess what? That’s totally legal. For example, if I see Quattro Pro, and think “I’ll make something called Microsoft Excel” – 100% legal. If I play a game called “Dune 2“, and think “I’ll make a game called Starcraft” – 100% legal. That’s the intellectual equivalent of a “fashion knockoff” – and it’s 100% legal in both the software industry and the fashion industry.

She supports that view in her own video when she says:

5:45-6:10
The counterfeit customer was not our customer.
…
Blakely: This is a very different demographic. And, you know a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design. At least in terms of the materials; they’re always made of cheaper materials.

Yup. Which is exactly why the software industry isn’t that worried about someone making a ‘clone’ of their software product — because when someone copies a piece of software, they never do it quite right, it always has it’s own personality which is different, and often inferior to the original. On the other hand, copyright is used to stop exact duplicates. Exact duplicates do not exist in the fashion industry. There is no such thing as “I pirated a copy of Microsoft Office and Starcraft, but they are inferior versions of the official versions of Microsoft Office and Starcraft.” There is no such thing as “pirated bits are cheaper/inferior to authentic ones”.

So, her entire talk could really be summed up as “software patents shouldn’t exist because the fashion industry survives just fine with the existence of knock-offs”. Personally, I have no problem with that lesson.

A second major problem I wanted to point out is this misleading chart. At 12:35, she shows this chart comparing the sales of “low IP industries” (food, cars, fashion, furniture) and “high IP industries” (films, books, music).

He suggestion here is that lower IP protection results in more production and more revenue. That’s an interesting conclusion.

There’s a variety of interpretations someone could make from that chart.

Since everything in the left section is physical products, everything in the right section is digital products, maybe the lesson is that physical products bring in more revenue than digital ones. Maybe the lesson is that physical products don’t need much intellectual property protection because they’re always tethered to physical items. Or maybe the lesson is that people just don’t/won’t ever spend as much money on books, music, and movies as they spend on necessities like food, automobiles, clothing, and furniture – regardless of the intellectual property protection. I have a hard time believing that eliminating intellectual property protection would somehow cause spending on books, movies, and music to skyrocket 20 or 50 fold – so that they could rival the gross sales of the food and automobile industries. Yet, that seems to be exactly what Blakely is suggesting with this chart. Can you imagine spending as much on music as you spend on food each and every week?

Here’s another little fact: the software industry, which is not shown on her chart, had a worldwide revenue of $304 billion dollars in 2008. This would place it below food and automobiles, but higher than fashion and furniture. I wonder why she left it off her chart.

Update: Another problem I wanted to point out in this video is the fact that one fashion designer copies another designer, the general public is still paying the fashion industry. Now, maybe the second designer can complain about someone else getting paid for their own work, but the consumer is still paying money to the fashion industry (since both designers are part of the fashion industry). On the other hand, when piracy happens with digital media, it’s not creators copying from creators. Rather, it’s consumers getting the products for free — it means the consumer is not paying into the industry. This is another reason why the “high IP / low IP” chart is particularly wrong: because when the fashion industry has low IP protection, the consumer is still paying the fashion industry. In contrast, when digital media has low IP protection, it means the consumer is not paying money to the digital media industry. This suggests that the fashion industry would not be particularly harmed by low IP protection (as measured by the amount of revenue flowing into the industry), but revenue would decrease if digital media had no IP protection.

Platforms

by | Uncategorized
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A friend of mine suggested bringing the game to XBox arcade. Probably not a bad idea, though I’d have to think about the use of typing in the game. Also, XBox doesn’t support OpenGL. Fortunately, none of the EoS graphics code is particularly complex. It’s too bad that technologies don’t work better cross-platform. OpenGL runs everywhere except on the XBox (where Microsoft prefers it’s own DirectX technology). EoS uses MFC, which only runs on Windows. A friend of mine does a lot of work in Flash, which runs everywhere – except the iPhone and iPad. It’s never fun to write secondary code to get applications ported to other platforms.

EFF: Helping the Pirates

by | EFF, Piracy
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I’ve long accused the EFF of being on the side of the pirates. They downplay the effects of piracy, do their best to throw up legal challenges to prevent any possible enforcement of copyright on the internet, hire vocal advocates of legalized filesharing, and even created tools to detect if ISPs were throttling BitTorrent traffic so ISPs could be dragged into court. Now a new CNet article is making the connection even more clear. Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney and author of numerous EFF articles has been instructing pirate groups on how to facilitate piracy, but avoid legal responsibility.

A few quotes:

According to Wood, LimeWire founder Mark Gorton testified that he and former company Chief Technology Officer Greg Bildson received questionable advice from von Lohmann. “Gorton states that another attorney, [von Lohmann], gave [LimeWire], including Bildson, confidential legal advice regarding the need to establish a document retention program to purge incriminating information about LimeWire users’ activities,” Wood wrote in her decision.
…
In his zeal to keep some of these services from being sued out of existence, von Lohmann has gone too far, say critics. During the Grokster trial, MGM’s lawyers noted that von Lohmann in 2001 wrote a primer called “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Copyright Law After Napster.” In the piece, von Lohmann advised that to “avoid liability,” operators should create “plausible deniability” by “choosing an architecture that will convince a judge…monitoring and control is impossible.”

In a paper titled “What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law,” von Lohmann wrote, “The court also found that Napster had a duty to monitor the activities of its users “to the fullest extent” possible. Accordingly, in order to avoid vicarious liability, a P2P developer would be wise to choose an architecture that makes control over end-user activities impossible.”

Is von Lohmann instructing file-sharing services on how to avoid violating the law here, or is he teaching them how to violate the law and avoid responsibility?

This isn’t surprising at all. It’s clear that the EFF and von Lohmann has always had an interest in helping pirates evade legal responsibility for copyright violations.

It’s worth reiterating what Dave Winer, creator of RSS and an early supporter of the EFF said about the EFF years ago:

I gave $5000 to the EFF when they started, I think it was in 1990, with the noble goal of protecting freedoms as our technology and culture move online. I think I have supported every cause the EFF has adopted since then, but that’s no longer true. I gave this a lot of thought, believe me, and had a long email exchange with Brad Templeton, the chairman of the EFF board of directors, and think they have become as radically polarized as the entertainment industry, and like Hollywood are now working against the interests of those they were meant to serve. The issue appears to be copyright, and it appears that the EFF believes there should be no copyright….

The problem with the EFF position is that in order to remain consistent, they have had to say that copyright doesn’t exist — if a policy or law restricts what a user can do on the Internet then that is a bad policy or law. The courts can’t agree with the EFF. I don’t agree with the EFF.

Interesting Piracy Statistic

by | Piracy
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I’ve heard people argue about PC piracy and XBox piracy in the past – saying that PCs are getting hurt badly by piracy, followed by the retort that piracy exists on the XBox as well, but it’s a lot harder and riskier (you have to install a mod-chip, and you risk being locked out of the XBox network).

According to a recent GamesRadar article, the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 was pirated 4.1 million times and sold 270,000 copies. Meanwhile, the XBox 360 version was pirated 970,000 times and sold 6 million copies. That’s a pretty stark contrast. To put it another way, 6% of the people playing Modern Warfare 2 on the PC actually paid for it, while 86% of the people playing the game on the XBox 360 payed for it. Partially as a result of this, Modern Warfare 2 sold 22x better on the XBox than on the PC.

The disparity might be due to a number of factors. Other than the fact that the XBox games are more difficult to pirate, there’s also the fact that Microsoft did a major crackdown on XBox pirates right before the Modern Warfare launch, banning 1 million players – which probably put the fear of god into players considering pirating the game.

This actually reminded me of an article I saw some time ago on a pro-piracy website. They argued that the fact that Modern Warfare 2 was the most pirated game of the year, but still managed to be the best-selling game of the year meant that piracy had no effect on sales. What they neglected to notice, based on these numbers, is that the piracy, the ease of piracy, and the fear of getting caught seems to have played a large role in the disparity in PC vs XBox sales.