Some 20-something sitting outside a coffeeshop on his phone:
I was really into World Of Warcraft for a while. I was spending a lot of time leveling-up my character. One day, I thought about what my life would be like if I spent that much time improving my own life. I ended up quitting World Of Warcraft.
Just thought this mash-up of Pitfall and Fallout was funny. Click here to see the second image.
Er – in case you don’t know the plot of Doubt, it’s about a catholic priest and what seems to be an inappropriate relationship with an altar boy.
Interesting interview with the Plants Vs. Zombies creator in the latest issue of Edge. You can read it online here. The game designer says four people were involved in creating the game: a game designer, programmer, artist, and musician, and it took three years to develop. My guess is that it’s about 8 to 10 man-years of work. I also like the fact that he made the game easy to learn because he doesn’t like opening a game manual (and I can certainly relate to that kind of game design).
It’s an addictive little game. You can get the demo (one hour of play) or buy it on Steam for $10.
Just as I was starting to warm-up to Brutal Legend, it occurred to me that I should check whether or not it comes out on Windows. Nope. Just XBox360 and PS3. That’s too bad, since I don’t own any consoles. Maybe they’ll eventually get around to releasing it on the PC. Afterall, an XBox360 is pretty much just a stripped-down PC.
Ah well. Zombieland comes out that same week. It looks pretty funny. Maybe I can go watch that instead.
MINNEAPOLIS – A replay of the nation’s only file-sharing case to go to trial has ended with the same result — a Minnesota woman was found to have violated music copyrights and must pay huge damages to the recording industry.
A federal jury ruled Thursday that Jammie Thomas-Rasset willfully violated the copyrights on 24 songs, and awarded recording companies $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song.
[Source: Yahoo News]
I really don’t know why the RIAA hits people with these kinds of fines. I’m obviously no fan of pirates, but when I was a kid, I remember hearing that shoplifting carried a fine of 7x the value of goods you stole. But, $80,000 per song is a 80,000x fine. The RIAA and is also in another case against Brittany English aiming for 150,000:1 damages. Personally, I think piracy should carry a lesser penalty than shoplifting. I know that opens up problems for when trying to pursue court-cases, because small-fines aren’t really worth the time or effort, but oh well. (I’ve heard that some stores won’t even try to prosecute you if you shoplift small dollar-value items; it’s not worth their time. That’s the unfortunate side of small-penalties.)
The justice system exists not just to punish crime, but to punish it appropriately. This punishment is out of proportion to her crime (does anyone think she did $1.92 million worth of damage to the music industry?), which is an injustice in itself. I think everyone has a sense that say, shoplifting $24 worth of merchandise should carry a penalty, but it shouldn’t be an excessive penalty. We’d all be aghast if Walmart hit a shoplifter with a $1.92 million fine. This injustice just fuels dislike of the recording industry (and entire copyright-industry by association), and allows pirates to pretend that they’re the “good guys” here – as if the other side being “bad” somehow makes you “good”.
In general, I think people’s motivation for sharing digital media on the internet is to be nice to their fellow man. I think it feels completely different than, say, shoplifting. I’ve had pirates offer me pirated copies of this or that software because I happened to mention it, and it’s done with a “hey let me help you out” attitude. (And, no, I never take pirated media.) For that reason, I think uploading-pirates see themselves as helping out their fellow man – even if it hurts the big, evil, faceless corporation (assuming they think about the creator at all). I mean – how much more evil can you get than trying to stop people from “sharing”. It’s like the corporations are run by Gargamel. I’m kidding, of course. I don’t believe piracy can be reasonably compared to sharing, although, I think pirates probably view the world that way.
My guess is that the recording industry wants to cover their court costs, and paying lawyers to get a couple-hundred dollar ruling isn’t worth it. But, $1.92 million is still outside the range of reasonable lawyer costs. Or maybe their strategy is to scare the bejesus out of pirates – to send a message? Is that the purpose of these trials?
There are some hints that the recording industry won’t try to make her pay – and why would they, it’s not like she has the money. But, what does that mean? That a bad credit rating for the next seven years is her punishment?
Now, of course, she was uploading songs on Kazaa (rather than downloading them). Which means that she could potentially have shared with hundreds of people. But, I think any fine against her should be the minimum sufficient to stop her activity. Heck, she’d probably stop if she got a cease and desist letter in the mail. She also tried to get out of the accusations by claiming that someone else (her ex-husband or kids) did it, or that someone hacked into her wifi connection (even though she doesn’t have a wifi connection). I doubt that helped her case – the jury was probably insulted about being lied to. I’ve also read that her lawyer was trying to argue (in another case) that filesharing was “fair use” – which almost everyone (including anti-copyright activists) thought was a very bad argument. And the fact that she opted out of paying a settlement, and then keeps appealing the verdict (this is her second appeal and she plans for a third) probably isn’t helping at all.
There’s also something bizarre in the fact that she had a $1.92 million fine, but the PirateBay was hit with only a $3.6 Million fine (plus a year’s jail time). They’ve done far more damage to the creative industries than this woman.
The whole situation just leaves me feeling confused with a sense of injustice.
Over the weekend, there was a tornado scare in downtown Denver. It was forming about four or five blocks from where I live. (I live near the capitol, which is clearly visible below the funnel cloud in the first video.) Fortunately, it dissipated without touching down.
I was actually more concerned about the idea of losing software (which is years of work), than losing my home to a tornado. Makes me glad I do off-site backups.
Wow. This isn’t a fictional story – it’s a real email conversation.
Richard Stallman (2005-04-23, Link):
Stefan, can you work on that [change to Emacs]?Stefan Monnier (2005-04-25, Link):
I just got a baby girl and am kind of swamped.Richard Stallman (2005-04-26, Link):
I am sorry to hear it. Unless someone else can figure these things out, I guess the release has to wait until you have time.Nick Roberts (2005-04-26, Link):
Congratulations, Stefan! I suggest that you spend any spare time with your daughter as she will grow up before you know it. Emacs, on the other hand, will still be around after she has left home.Richard Stallman (2005-04-27, Link):
It doesn’t take special talents to reproduce–even plants can do it. On the other hand, contributing to a program like Emacs takes real skill. That is really something to be proud of.It helps more people, too.
Original Source: Edward O’Connor’s blog, Links listed above.
Even more bizarrely, a number of Stallman fans comment on the thread to defend him and his disregard for anyone or anything other than Emacs. It’s odd how some people view everything Stallman says with religious reverence. On a similar note, I saw this the other day while looking around at open-source video editing software:
Richard M. Stallman has said, more than once, that the one justifiable reason to use proprietary software is that there is no free software equivalent available. I’m afraid that this is the case in the video editing world — and will be for a long time to come. Video editing is an incredibly complex computer task. (Source)
How strange – as if this guy has to get permission from Stallman before he decides what software to use.
Just thought this was odd/funny:
Beginning with the upcoming New Super Mario Bros. Wii (due this holiday season), players will be able to pause a game during a particularly difficult level and let the game take over to complete the level. Press a button at any time to resume playing. This will help reduce barriers of entry for new or younger players – without purchasing a strategy guide or resorting to websites that list cheat codes.
When I first heard about this feature, I thought that the game would play-through the level by itself to show you how to do it, but wouldn’t actually move you through the game.
Nintendo even got a patent on it.
Wow, the past few days Slashdot has been putting up quite a few pro-piracy articles. I think it’s been one a day for the past few days. It’s generally dismal to read some of the comments there.
First, there was “Slashdot: The Pirates Will Always Win, Says UK ISP” / The Guardian: The pirates will always win, says Carphone’s Dunstone
Slashdot summary:
“The head of UK ISP TalkTalk, Charles Dunstone, has made the comment ahead of the communications minister’s Digital Britain report that illegal downloading cannot be stopped. He said ‘If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.’ Instead he advocates allowing users ‘to get content easily and cheaply.'”
First of all – he’s right in saying that it’s impossible at the ISP level to stop pirates for any length of time. As far as I can tell from the article, that’s what Dunstone’s argument was. Unfortunately, most people have generalized this correct observation into the incorrect claim (in the Slashdot summary) that “illegal downloading cannot be stopped”. Even the Guardian gets their headline wrong (“The pirates will always win, says Carphone’s Dunstone”), which again misrepresents what Dunstone said. I agree with Dunstone that legal downloading services are part of the fight against piracy – although, most of those are already in place. ITunes, Netflix Download service, Amazon Video-on-demand, etc are already there. Additionally, with sufficient legal pressure – we could also drive piracy down. The most obvious method is to go after filesharing hubs – like Pirate Bay. That’s a different method of attack than sifting internet traffic for illegal filesharing. What would happen then, is that piracy is marginalized. People don’t want to jump from one website to another every few months – so most people will just stop trying to skirt the law, and do it the legal way. Only the die-hard pirates will stick with it. The fact of the matter is that you don’t have to stop 100% of piracy. This isn’t a war that has one of two outcomes: you “win” or you “lose”. A world with 95% or 100% piracy is a very different world than one with 10% or 20% piracy. In both cases, piracy exists, but in the first case, creativity gets smothered.
What’s odd is the number of people who buy-in to the false dichotomy. They wouldn’t buy-in to similar dichotomies like: “shoplifting cannot be stopped” or “littering cannot be stopped”. We can do the same thing to piracy that we do to shoplifting or littering: minimize it so that its damage is minimized.
I read an article by Clay Shirky recently that seemed to imply that piracy cannot be eliminated because, if they have to, pirates will resort to the “sneakernet” – i.e. manually sending a hard-drive from one location to the other for duplication. The whole thing takes place without the internet involved. I couldn’t help but think, “well, duh – if pirates have to resort to those kinds of actions to pirate stuff, then piracy rates will be extremely low because it’s just too inconvenient for a large majority of people. That means it won’t be very threatening”.
Slashdot, of course, leaves out the fact that Charles Dunstone doesn’t call for the elimination of copyright or surrender to pirates, but, rather:
Charles Dunstone said, the solution is education about the benefits of respecting copyright coupled with services that allow consumers “to get content easily and cheaply”.
Obviously, his comment about “getting content easily and cheaply” means legal download services – like iTunes.
Then, Ben Goldacre’s article in the Guardian got posted: (Slashdot: Lies, Damned Lies, and the UK Copyright Industry, “Illegal downloads and dodgy figures”, BadScience: Home taping didn’t kill music). I generally like Ben Goldacre. He’s probably most famous for combating the anti-vaccination groups. Most of his article dealt with unrealistic numbers of lost sales due to piracy. I think it’s perfectly fine to raise issues about bad numbers. Unfortunately, he makes some jabs at the whole copyright system, implying that piracy isn’t a bad thing. He seem to buy-in to the questionable results of the Norwegian “pirate” study. And the title of his article is rather odd (“Home taping didn’t kill music”) since his article has nothing to do with home taping. The problem, of course with the “Home taping didn’t kill music” argument is that home-taping is really inconvenient. It’s like the “sneakernet”. Internet piracy gives you free copies of digital media (read: perfect copying) and everything is there (often hours after its release). Home-taping on the other hand, gives you a degraded copy, you have to get a physical copy to duplicate in the first place, and you have to borrow that copy from someone else who has it. This means you probably can’t get what you want because your friend doesn’t have it either, and if he does have it, you feel like a leech when you ask to borrow lots of music.
Then comes the article saying that the Pirate Party has won a seat in the EU Parliament. (Link to my article examining the Pirate Party’s arguments) At least it’s only one seat out of 736. They’re hoping to make the most of it though, by being a one-issue party. They’re also hoping that other political parties chase votes by taking up their cause. It’s rather sad. The Pirate Party / Pirate Bay always remind me of the “killing the golden goose” story. They’re sharpening up their knives without understanding the economic issues going on with digital media. For a real treat, and to raise your blood pressure, just read some of the Slashdot comments. I feel frequently insulted by slashdot comments whenever the issue of piracy comes up. A few favorites:
All works intellectual creativity of should be given away free. We should only have to pay for retail services, and stuff that China and the rest of the world manufactures… not for what America does best. (Source)
Copyright is the antithesis of free speech. (Source)
Everyone who applies copyright restrictions, deep inside, knows doing so is wrong and screws all humanity over.
If you don’t want something copied, don’t release it. (Source)
Sigh. I never would’ve guess that working hard to make great software and earn a living would’ve provoked these kinds of reactions, just because I won’t give away years of work.