The latest big boost to open access has come from in UK government's "Innovation and research strategy for growth" (pdf), which says:

The Government, in line with our overarching commitment to transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge. Free and open access to taxpayer-funded research offers significant social and economic benefits by spreading knowledge, raising the prestige of UK research and encouraging technology transfer. At the moment, such research is often difficult to find and expensive to access. This can defeat the original purpose of taxpayer-funded academic research and limits understanding and innovation. We have already committed, in our response to Ian Hargreaves’s review of intellectual property, to facilitate data mining of published research. This could have substantial benefits, for example in tackling diseases. But we need to go much further if, as a nation, we are to gain the full potential benefits of publicly-funded research.

That sounds like great news. But one of the leading proponents of openness in science, Peter Murray-Rust, thinks that the open access movement is being short-changed with existing open access publications. His concerns arose when he attended the annual general meeting of the UK version of PubMed Central, which is "a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the US National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM)".

Here's what happened:

I was at the AGM of UK PubMedCentral last Monday and asked about the Open Access subset of PMC – those papers where authors/funders have paid large amounts of money to ensure their papers are “Open Access”. I asked about the licence, fully expecting these to be all CC-BY and was appalled to hear that most of them were only available as CC-NC. This appears to be near universal – most major publishers only allow “Open Access” to be CC-NC.

Very simply, this is a disaster.

Because CC-NC gives the reader or re-user almost no additional rights. The author is paying anything up to 3000 currency units for something which is little more than permission to put the article on their web page.

The issues surrounding the use of non-commercial licenses have been discussed on Techdirt before. Some people feel that open content released under a non-commercial license such as cc-nc is not really open, because you are severely limited in terms of what you can do with it. The Open Source Definition, for example, does not allow limitations of this kind. Others, by contrast, think that something is better than nothing, and that non-commercial uses are important enough that cc-nc materials are still valuable.

Murray-Rust explains the problems of cc-nc in the field of science:

I and others have written at length on the restrictions imposed by NC. NC forbids any commercial use. Commercial is not related to motivation – profit/non-profit, etc. It is whether there is an exchange of some form of goods. Among the things NC forbids are:

Public text- and data-mining. A third party could make commercial use of the results

Republication of diagrams, etc. in journals. Publication is a commercial act.

Creation of learning materials. Students pay for their education.

The key thing here is that publishers have been paid for full open access, not a watered-down version, so there's no justification for holding back rights that reduce the scientific value of papers considerably. It looks like the funding organizations that mandate open access need to be more specific in forbidding limited, non-commercial licensing. If they don't, it may turn out that all those open access resources that are starting to appear will deliver rather less than the "full potential benefits of publicly-funded research" the UK government and others are hoping for.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

This is definitely a surprise, but it looks like AT&T finally read all the writing on the wall, and realized it was unlikely to win its fight with the DOJ and FCC and has officially killed its plan to try to purchase T-Mobile... meaning that it now has to pay the $4 billion breakup fee. While the trend of where this was heading was becoming increasingly obvious over the past few months, it's still pretty shocking on the whole. Getting big mergers like this through had become pretty standard, and AT&T (especially) excelled at the political dealing to make such things work. However, the growing public outcry and concerns over the lack of competition that would result seemed to finally have had a real impact.

You almost can't make it to the cover of a major scientific publication like Science or Nature without a really cool picture to present your data. It seems that everyone likes pretty pictures, even scientists. So here are a few science projects with some interesting camera equipment.

• The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has created the largest digital camera ever -- at a cost of about $165 million. This 3.2 gigapixel camera will be used in a new telescope being built on a Chilean mountaintop. [url]
• Modifying a cheap digital camera to take infrared pictures was only part of a project aimed at mapping the photosynthetic activity around Asheville, North Carolina. Putting the cameras on balloons and merging the pictures together with Photosynth has created a nice collection of data for studying environmental and economic sustainability issues. [url]
• MIT researchers have created a camera system capable of capturing images at a trillion frames per second. It's so fast it can actually track the movement of light as it travels -- under specific conditions, of course. [url]
• To discover more interesting photography-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

The contentious nature of the "three strikes" response to unauthorized sharing of copyright materials can be seen by the legal battles being fought around it across Europe. That's particularly the case in Ireland, which has emerged as a key testing ground for the approach and its legality.

Back in 2009, the IFPI sued the ISP Eircom for copyright infringement, and the latter settled by agreeing to implement a three strikes policy. The Irish Recorded Music Association then started sending letters to other Irish ISPs demanding they do the same. One Irish judge approved the three strikes approach, but another judge ruled ISPs were under no legal obligation to implement it.

And now we have the latest twist in this continuing saga: Eircom has been ordered to halt its three strikes scheme in a ruling by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner because of concerns about users' privacy. This follows an investigation that was triggered by the earlier incident in which Eircom sent out first warning letters to innocent account holders.

However, this is by no means the end of the story. The Irish government is now considering how to plug perceived gaps in existing laws:

Minister of State for Enterprise Seán Sherlock is to publish an order early in the new year that is expected to allow music publishers, film producers and other parties to go to court to prevent internet service providers from allowing their customers access to pirate websites.

But as usual, the recording industry's demands are for ever-more extreme powers:

EMI Ireland recently warned the Government that it would take legal action against the State if the Government did not address the problem.

Its chief executive, Willie Kavanagh, is not ruling out going ahead with this if the statutory order does not give companies such as his a clear right to seek court injunctions against internet service providers that allow access to music and video piracy websites.

This attempt to pressure a national government into changing the law for the convenience of a group of companies unwilling to move with the times is troubling. The logical conclusion of this kind of thinking is to turn ISPs into the content industry's private police force, letting the former do the dirty work and get the blame, while the latter sit back and enjoy the benefits of their monopoly pricing.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Over the last few months, MPAA boss Chris Dodd has been promoting SOPA and PIPA by repeating the refrain that Hollywood and Silicon Valley shouldn't be fighting each other, and they need to work together. However, the reality is something entirely different. By "working together" he seems to mean "the tech community should just agree to everything Hollywood wants, no matter how counterproductive." He's missed no opportunity to exclude the input of the tech industry (and even the wider content industry). This isn't a huge surprise. Dodd has a history of playing fast and loose with the facts, as well as flip-flopping when politically convenient. This includes his promise not to work as a lobbyist just a short while before taking over the MPAA -- a lobbying organization.

But it's nice to see that some have finally had enough of Chris Dodd's claims here -- and even from within his supposed "supporters." CBS has been a supporter of SOPA/PIPA, but CBS News has an opinion piece by Brad Chase, about how the tech world and Hollywood need to work more closely together, and the first key point they make is that Chris Dodd has been obstructionist on this point and needs to go:

Like the American Civil War, a polarizing figure is at the heart of the rift between North and South. Whereas Abraham Lincoln recognized the inherent need for a united house, MPAA chairman Chris Dodd has no such noble intent or practical understanding. The intransigent former senator - no stranger to putting self-interest above the cause from his days pandering to the banking industry - has done everything possible to widen the rift between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. He's made a huge mistake systematically shutting the tech industry out of the conversation and trying to unilaterally push through new regulation. The 21st century merging of content and delivery platforms creates a natural partnership in this fight, but Dodd stands in the way. It's time the MPAA gives Dodd a one-way ticket back to Washington.

Well, well. While their names may be fading into history, Morpheus and Kazaa were the two big file sharing apps after Napster was shut down. They were both built on the same basic platform (which came from Kazaa), and at some point the two actually got into a fight, leading Kazaa to shut off Morpheus, and years later there were still some lawsuits going on. However, it appears that two former execs associated with those two file sharing systems have teamed up... to become patent trolls who are now suing Google, Amazon and others for infringement.

Kevin Bermeister is being described in the article linked above as a "founder" of Kazaa, but I'm pretty sure that's not true at all. Bermeister, instead, founded Brilliant Digital Entertainment, which was an attempt to build a questionable business model into Kazaa, which originally looked a lot like adware. Brilliant Digital ended up buying Kazaa much later in the process. He's teamed up with Michael Weiss, who was the CEO of Streamcast, in this patent trolling adventure that they're calling PersonalWeb Technologies (based in -- you guessed it -- East Texas). While some are making it out like it's a big deal that these former "pirates" are now trying to enforce patent claims, it's really not new or surprising. Bermeister has been doing this for a while. In fact, all the way back in 2003, he claimed a patent on identifying files with a hash and threatened to sue every other file sharing company. In 2004, he even sued the RIAA for violating the patent. In 2006 he... sued Weiss' Streamcast for patent infringement. I'm not sure how that lawsuit turned out, but apparently the former adversaries are now on the same side of things.

The folks over at M-CAM have taken a look at the patents that PersonalWeb is now using to sue, and has found them lacking. Turns out that a bunch of them are continuations -- the sneaky trick of patent holders to change an earlier patent application later, such that the eventual patent still has the earlier priority date, even if the invention wasn't really described until much later. This has been used repeatedly in the past by companies to see what others are doing, patent it, and then be able to pretend they came up with it first. The M-CAM analysis is not kind, especially to the examiner who approved some of the patents, Khanh B. Pham. They declare:

After reviewing PersonalWeb's patents, we propose that the USPTO indeed mold a "Pham" award to best commemorate the ultimate, the outrageous, the most horrifically unacceptable patent examination performance of the current patent system.

So there's that.

If you're interested, here are the patents in question:

• 8,001,096: Computer file system using content‐dependent file identifiers
• 7,949,662: De‐duplication of data in a data processing system
• 7,945,544: Similarity‐based access control of data in a data processing system
• 7,945,539: Distributing and accessing data in a data processing system
• 7,802,310: Controlling access to data in a data processing system
• 6,928,442: Enforcement and policing of licensed content using content‐based identifiers
• 6,415,280: Identifying and requesting data in network using identifiers which are based on contents of data
• 5,978,791: Data processing system using substantially unique identifiers to identify data items, whereby identical data items have the same identifiers

Venkat Balasubramani and Eric Goldman (who are also posting occasionally on Techdirt these days) are doing an amazing job uncovering a series of lawsuits that suggest many courts are already issuing widespread and questionable injunctions against third party service providers when intellectual property holders come to them demanding vengeance. We've already covered the True Religion case and the Chanel case. It seems worth noting that both True Religion and Chanel have come out in favor of censoring the internet, having sent a letter cheering on both domain seizures by ICE and earlier versions of SOPA and PIPA. And it looks like they figured why wait for the law to change, when they could just convince courts to give them those remedies already.

The link above highlights yet another such case, this time involving Philip Morris. The pattern in all three cases is quite similar. Company claims website is offering infringing works and sues. Court -- without hearing from the site owners (and usually not making any effort to see if the sites are all owned by the same owner) -- issues massive injunctions against third party service providers to take down or otherwise block those sites. As Venkat summarizes, the Philip Morris restraining order includes:

• Defendants are enjoined from using any Philip Morris marks, in websites, domain name extensions, links to other websites, search engine databases.
• The domain name registrars are directed to transfer the domain name certificates to plaintiff (for deposit with the court).
• The registrars are directed to transfer the domain names to GoDaddy, who will "hold the registrations for the . . . domain names in trust . . . during the pendency of [the] action."
• GoDaddy shall also update the DNS data so it points to a copy of the complaint, summons, and court documents.
• Finally, Western Union is directed to "divert" transfers made by US consumers to three named individuals

All without hearing from the other side. Seem excessive? It sure does. Venkat notes how extraordinary these remedies are. Think about it for a second: based solely on the declaration of a Philip Morris employee, the court is ordering the full transfer not just of websites, but of any funds being sent to a website. That's insane and a clear violation of any reasonable due process.

At the same link, Eric Goldman notes that the sudden appearance of three of these cases suggests that there are probably many more in the system. And he points out that this information certainly seems like it should be relevant to those currently debating these bills in Congress. Do they even realize that the remedies they're describing are already being used by courts?

Separately, he notes the ridiculousness of such extreme punishment when only one side is heard:

From my perspective, the three cases demonstrate the problems with ex parte judicial oversight. Only hearing one side of the story isn't enough to trigger the kind of draconian remedies the courts are granting. In particular, in this case, interdicting money being sent via Western Union is quite troubling. Basically, the court says that money being sent by customers who may have done nothing wrong goes into a holding tank--the customers don't get their money back now (and maybe never?) even if the transaction didn't consummate. It seems like rejecting the money transfers, rather than interdicting the money, would have a lot fairer to the buyers caught in the middle. But they aren't in court to defend their interests, and no one else is speaking up on their behalf, so the rightsowner can make a pure cash grab from potentially innocent buyers. That kind of result wouldn't happen with real due process.

He wonders if there's a way to fix these kinds of abuses of process. In fact, I would suggest that the House Judiciary Committee (and the Senate) would be much better served dealing with the problem of such one-sided extreme court rulings, rather than encouraging more of that with SOPA and PIPA.

As we continue the fight over SOPA and PROTECT IP (PIPA), the MPAA and the politicians supporting these bills are ratcheting up the ridiculousness. You may recall that we recently highlighted the absolutely ridiculous paper by Daniel Castro for the shill shop ITIF, supposedly responding to SOPA/PIPA critics, but really showing just how weak and ridiculous the arguments on the pro-censorship side are. One of the points Castro raises is that DNS filtering "works." How does he know? Because, he points out, thirteen countries already do DNS filtering and research from Harvard suggests not too many people try to get around the filters.

Of course, Castro doesn't happen to name those thirteen countries, so you have to go digging for them, which is how you come up with the following list:

• China
• Iran
• United Arab Emirates
• Armenia
• Ethiopia
• Saudi Arabia
• Yemen
• Bahrain
• Burma (Myanmar)
• Syria
• Turkmenistan
• Uzbekistan
• Vietnam

Yes, it's a sort of a who's who of the most repressive regimes on the planet. I think the only reason North Korea didn't make the list is because no one has internet access there. So this raises two key points. Perhaps the reason the filtering has worked in those countries, and not too many people try to get around the filters, is because they know if they're caught, they might get locked up or killed.

But, more to the point: is this really the list of countries that Lamar Smith, Patrick Leahy, the MPAA and Daniel Castro think that the US ought to go about emulating? Really?

Via Darrell Issa's Twitter feed we learn of a poll asking for people's opinion of SOPA. The results are pretty striking, in that the opposition is pretty universal, across pretty much every measure: Now, to be clear: this is an online (or, rather, on phone) survey, and there are certainly questions you can raise about whether it's a representative sample of Americans. However, we've yet to see any real indication that the American populace is happy about this bill. Every single effort to get American people to speak out in favor of this bill has failed. Hollywood is spending a ton on advertising in favor of these bills, and yet it doesn't seem to be having any effect at all. Instead, tons of people are coming out of the woodwork against these bills. And the momentum keeps growing. Congress may keep trying to rush these bills through, but at some point they have to realize their constituents are not at all happy.

At the end of last week, the Council of the European Union – which is where national ministers from each EU country meet to adopt laws and coordinate policies – had a meeting. A group of some 40 ministers for agriculture and fisheries signed off on a range of important matters, including:

Total allowable catches (TACs) and quotas for 2012
Fishing opportunities for 2012 in the Black Sea
Authorisation of four genetically modified varieties
Aid for processed citrus fruit
Welfare of animals during transport
Vaccination against bluetongue
Excess CO2 emissions from new cars
Temporary reception of certain Palestinians

Actually, there was another item, but from its penultimate position on the agenda it was clearly not really regarded as very important, and was just waved through. Here's how the official press release (pdf) reported it:

The Council adopted a decision authorising the signing of an anti-counterfeiting trade agreement (ACTA) with Australia, Canada, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland and the United States.

ACTA is aimed at establishing an international framework to improve the enforcement of intellectual property right laws and create improved international standards for actions against large-scale infringements of intellectual property. Negotiations were concluded in November 2010.

So, continuing the tradition of denying European citizens any opportunity to offer their views on ACTA, the Council of national ministers employed the shabby trick of pushing the treaty through by adopting it without debate at a meeting whose main business had nothing to do with international trade.

Interestingly, this is not the first time European politicians have used this subterfuge. In 2002 the European Commission presented a proposal that would allow software patents in Europe (currently, the European Patent Convention forbids patenting programs for computers "as such").

This saga was still going on in 2005 when the software patent proposal was added to the agenda of a fisheries meeting – just like ACTA. On that occasion, the ploy failed, but the Council Presidency went on to adopt the agreement in violation of the procedural rules. The proposal was then passed to the European Parliament, where it was definitively rejected.

Similarly, ACTA will now be passed to the European Parliament for a vote. Although there have been no indications that it will be thrown out there, the same was true of the software patents session, which was expected to approve the measure. One thing is for sure: there is going to be plenty of lobbying for and against ACTA between now and whenever that final vote takes place.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Proponents of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart PROTECT-IP often affect incredulity that anyone would "defend piracy" by describing their valiant attempts to stamp out "rogue sites" as a threat to free speech or innovation. Recording Industry Association of America head Cary Sherman, for instance, recently insisted to The New York Times that the bills are "specifically designed to focus on the worst of the worst sites whose model is predicated on theft." This would be more convincing if the content industries weren't so clearly continuing their long, proud tradition of making aggressive and overbroad copyright claims that would impede speech and innovation.

In the 80s, Universal Studios famously sued Sony to block the sale of Betamax VCRs, which could be used to "facilitate" the infringement of copyrights in shows and movies aired on broadcast television. Blocking VCR sales, of course, might also have strengthened the market position of the DiscoVision laserdisc system being developed by MCA, Universal's parent company. The Supreme Court eventually vindicated Sony, but Universal did manage to persuade one lower court to rule in their favor. If SOPA's blocking provisions could be implemented in the physical world, every VCR (and maybe every Sony product) would have stopped working after that first favorable ruling, until Sony could meet the burden of proving its innocence in a U.S. court. Of course, under a rule like that, consumers might have been wary of buying a VCR in the first place.

And today? It's the Universal Music Group heading to court, after using a dubious copyright claim to take down an embarrassing video in which pop stars sing the praises of the site Megaupload. Megaupload, you see, is a file locker site, and the recording industry has made it crystal clear that it's at the top of the industry's list of "rogue sites" that should be targeted under SOPA. Indeed, when the content industries talk about why SOPA is needed, they invariably cite file lockers generally as the very epitome of a "rogue site." It is, therefore, a little awkward to have their own artists pointing out the obvious: File lockers can be used by pirates to share infringing files, but also host an enormous amount of perfectly legitimate content, uploaded by users who would be effectively silenced (and cut off from their own files) if the entire site were blocked. Similarly, the recording industry thinks copyright gives it the power to veto cloud-based music storage services, which serve as a kind of virtual hard drive from which users can remotely access and play their own legally purchased and uploaded music. It's a great convenience for consumers—but the labels think they can use copyright to stop it unless they're paid a cut.

We might also look to some of the seizures of U.S.-registered sites by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The sports site Rojadirecta—registered in the U.S. but based in Spain—was seized on the theory that linking to infringing video of sporting events hosted elsewhere on the Internet is enough to trigger forfeiture, even though Spanish courts have repeatedly ruled that such conduct (however shady it might seem) is legal in Spain. As lawyers for the government argued, invoking the very same statute that would provide the basis for SOPA censorship:

"[A]ny property used ... in any manner or part to commit or facilitate the commission of an offense [such as criminal copyright infringement]" is subject to forfeiture.... Moreover, it is "[i]rrelevant whether the property's role in the crime is integral, essential or indispensable,"... and a single incident of facilitating criminal activity is sufficient to trigger forfeiture.

The government further notes that they're not directly charging Rojadirecta with criminal infringement (nor indeed do they ever have to bring such charges), which means no need to meet that pesky "beyond reasonable doubt" standard—or even "probable cause". All the government needs for forfeiture, they assert, is a "reasonable belief" that a domain is being used to "facilitate" criminal infringement. This despite the fact that, in the context of obscenity laws, the Supreme Court has held that "Mere probable cause to believe a violation has transpired is not adequate to remove books or film from circulation." Now, Rojadirecta's business model is certainly shady, and maybe they're even guilty of criminal infringement. But are we really comfortable with an entire domain, including vibrant discussion forums that clearly enable protected, non-infringing speech, being blocked pursuant to a "reasonable belief" standard, forcing the company to hire U.S. lawyers and prove their innocence to win the right to speak to U.S. users?

Then there's the case of Dajaz1.com, a hip hop blog seized for over a year by the government for hosting infringing music files. Except it turned out that those files had actually been provided by PR firms, working for the music labels, who hoped blogs like Dajaz1 would circulate them to create buzz for up-and-coming artists. Oops!

As legal scholar Jason Mazzone has amply documented, the use of dubious copyright claims to chill legitimate speech is depressingly common. The voting machine manufacturer Diebold has tried to use copyright to shut down whistleblower sites that published internal e-mails highlighting security vulnerabilities in software that could determine the outcome of elections. The Church of Scientology has similarly invoked copyright to stifle criticism. In Russia, political opposition groups are routinely raided under the pretext of searching for copyrighted software. Research suggests that most copyright takedown claims to search engines like Google are issued by companies targeting their competitors, and that nearly a third of takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act lack a clear basis.

I could easily fill a dozen long blog posts with examples, but let's cut to the chase. Major movie studios and music labels draw a lot of water in D.C.: the fact that a bill as massively unpopular as SOPA is even being seriously considered, let alone likely to pass, is proof of that. They will effectively control which foreign domains the Justice Department chooses to block directly, and shop around for friendly judges amenable to rubber-stamping orders in civil litigation that require payment providers and ad networks to cut off disfavored sites. The likely targets are their competitors, whether the copyright claims are valid or not. Sites like YouTube that provide entertaining user-generated videos are one less reason to pony up for the next lackluster Adam Sandler movie. Sites that give musicians a way to gain exposure to fans and market their albums without giving a cut to the increasingly redundant middleman threaten to make the labels obsolete. And if open platforms invariably end up hosting some infringing content uploaded by users? Well, that's as good a pretext as any for shutting down the competition.

Why do critics of SOPA worry that the bill will threaten legitimate speech and innovation? Because its supporters have spent three decades providing overwhelming justification for that fear at every opportunity. If I may end by making a bit of "fair use" of the genius of former Smiths' front-man Morrisey:

He was a sweet and tender hooligan, hooligan

He said that he'd never, never do it again

And of course he won't, oh, not until the next time

Empowered with the ability to threaten blocking of entire domains, I'd rather not see what the copyright hooligans do "next time."

Apparently ignoring the widespread protests about both SOPA and PROTECT IP (PIPA) from the last few months (and the momentum growing against both bills), it was announced over the weekend that Harry Reid is seeking to override the hold on PIPA put forth by Senator Ron Wyden (along with Senators Jerry Moran, Maria Cantwell and Rand Paul) by seeking cloture. This isn't a huge surprise. Last week Senator Reid had informed other Democratic Senators that he intended PROTECT IP to be the first bill he brought to the floor when the Senate returns for business in January. So, now the cloture vote will happen January 24th, 2012 just as the Senate comes back into session. That means there's a little over a month where Hollywood is going to make every effort it can to get Senators over to its side. They need 60 Senators to betray the Constitution and to undermine a decade and a half's work on online security for a plan that won't actually help Hollywood at all. But, with Hollywood flinging money around DC like they're making record revenues at the box office (which... um... they are), they've already got 40 Senators signed on. That means there's a month to make sure 20 other Senators don't betray their country, their economy and the internet.

The really disappointing part in all of this is that these Senators appear to remain totally out of touch to the public opinion on these bills. They simply look at Hollywood, the US Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO and see dollar signs. These groups fund campaigns, and 2012 is an election season. So, might as well try to make them happy. Public will be damned. Of course, the one way to defeat dollars is with voters. The more constituents who reach out and call their Senators, or (better yet) go and visit them and explain how this bill is a disaster that undermines everything America stands for, the better. So, start calling...

DRM is often an ugly thing. Many software companies have crippled perfectly good software in hopes of deterring piracy, only to find themselves alienating their paying customers while only momentarily inconveniencing their non-paying nemeses. Ubisoft, in particular, has waged war against pirates at the expense of its own reputation, deploying unpopular anti-piracy schemes such as requiring an internet connection to play its games, even in offline, single player modes.

But not every company is interested in doing the same old "internet connection required" or "original disc in drive" or "x number of installs" copy protection. Many have tried other, less draconian, methods to hamper the gaming experience of those operating pirated versions. Not only are these anti-piracy schemes less likely to affect legitimate users, but they're also infused with a welcome sense of humor. Or a jet black mean streak. Either way, it's refreshing to see some creative thinking in the DRM department, which often suffers from the touch of unimaginative spreadsheet operators, rather than the somewhat anarchic spirit of the actual game creators.

Blowing up all over at the moment is the recently released FPS Serious Sam 3. There's DRM in that baby (not counting anything Steam-related), and if you've pirated the game, it's out to kill you. Starting about 10 minutes into the game, the pirating player is suddenly presented with a "giant invincible armoured scorpion" which relentlessly pursues them for the rest of the game.



This has led to paying players expressing an interest in downloading the pirated version in order to play the game with this additional level of challenge. It's DRM as "dare" and no doubt someone is off polishing a deadly-DRM-scorpion speed run at this very moment.

By no means is this the first gameplay element added/subtracted as a way to push players towards purchasing the game. Bohemia Interactive has been experimenting with gameplay degradation (called DEGRADE, obviously) as DRM for a few years now, starting with its Arma series. Players with pirated versions were treated to wildly inaccurate weapons, hallucinogenic landscapes and even occasionally turned into birds and greeted with the message, "Good birds do not fly away from this game, you have only yourself to blame." Bohemia's latest title, Take On Helicopters, features the same protection scheme which led to the banning of forum members who asked for tech support on this "graphics issue."



Crysis: Warhead took the same route as Arma, but with a twist. Not only is your gun a bit more inaccurate, but all of your ammo (including your grenades) is made entirely out of live chickens.



Uber-Half Life 2 playground Garry's Mod utilized faux graphical problems to deter pirates as well. However, illicit copies didn't get much further than the loading screen before kicking out an error message about being "unable to shade polygon normals." Creator Garry Newman admits that this additional "feature" will probably do little to increase sales, rather that he added it to give paying customers "something to be smug about." (Presumably followed by "TROLOLOLOLOL.")

Another recent release, Batman: Arkham Asylum featured a "bug" inherent to unofficial copies: a broken "Glide" function, which led to Batman collapsing in a cloud of poisonous gas rather than floating gracefully (you know, like a bat) from ledge to ledge. Once again, tech support was sought at the official forum, only to be greeted by a reply that the actual "bug" was in the user's "moral code." (Protip: when seeking tech support for your pirated game, it's probably best to wait until after the game is officially released.)

And it's not just FPS games getting into the act. Even software developers for systems not exactly swarming with pirates have added additional "content" solely with the purpose of harshing pirates' mellows. Big-in-Japan Nintendo DS dating simulator LovePlus+ utilized DRM that completely removed the sole reason for the game's existence. Gamers with pirated copies found themselves completely unable to get any of the virtual girlfriends to return their affections, putting them in the awkward (but possibly not unfamiliar) situation of having to pay money for female attention.

Ultra-hardcore action-RPG Dark Souls further punished its masochistic crowd by sending "maximum level Black Phantoms" (level 145 monsters with 1900 hit points and all of their abilities set to maximum) out en masse to greet early purchasers who broke the official street date, taking the game from merely "Nintendo hard" to "Nothing but SNK Bosses all the way down." This would be one of those incredibly rare instances where DRM is instituted to prevent paying players from playing the game and giving themselves an advantage over other online players who waited (or were forced to wait) until the street date to get in on the action.

Speaking of "Nintendo hard," cult classic RPG Mother 2 (a.k.a. Earthbound) used multiple layers of DRM to nudge pirates towards a purchase. The DRM first makes itself known by simply popping up a FBI-esque warning, reminding the user that it's a "serious crime to copy video games." If this first self-check was cracked, a second line of defense would kick in, greatly increasing the number of enemies in any given area. If all the self-checks fail, the gamer is cruelly allowed to proceed through the enemy-laden deathtrap and into a final boss battle, at which point the knife is fully inserted, twisted and yanked out through the gamer's virtual spine. During the climatic battle, the game freezes, deletes all saved games and resets. Ow.



And who can forget the godawful, skull-piercing sound of the vuvuzuela, which heralded a new era of obnoxiousness in both soccer fans and DRM, courtesy of none other than DRM-poster boy Ubisoft in its Nintendo DS game, Michael Jackson: The Experience. (Have you forgotten it? Click through to bring it back to horrible life.)

Obviously, any DRM scheme will net itself some legitimate users. But the more developers look to targeted deterrents like these rather than broad "everyone's a thief" copy protection, the less chance they run of pissing off their paying customers by delivering a product that is less usable than the cracked version.

Here's one last link to attempt to scrub that nightmarish vuvuzuela out of your brain. Here's a jaunty little anti-piracy theme that showed up in "Worms 2D." It's short, catchy and may even make you lawl a bit. Enjoy.

Well, well, well. We've noted in the past that while the serious concerns about SOPA and PROTECT IP (PIPA) have been all over the web and newspapers, they've mostly been mostly been absent from cable news... companies that are owned by the biggest supporters of these bills (the one "exception" was Colbert). But can cable news really continue to ignore the story while so many people are speaking out about it? Looks like the tide may be shifting. On Friday, Fox Business Channel had on Jim Harper from the Cato Institute to explain why these are terrible ideas and how Congress is trying to rush it through despite so many concerns: Similarly, it sounds like MSNBC is planning something as well. Will Congress really still be able to pretend that people don't care about these bills?