Wrestler Booker T Sues Activision For Copyright Infringement Over Fairly Generic Character Depiction

from the no-bro dept

It's old hat by now to point out that on matters of copyright far too many people are unaware of the nuances of the law as to what constitutes infringement and what doesn't. While this is generally true, it's all the more so when it comes to how copyright covers specific characters or settings. For instance, George Lucas may have a copyright claim on the specific character of Darth Vader, but he most certainly does not have any claim to the more generic black-armored space-magician with a laser sword and a bad attitude. Copyright covers expression, in other words, not mere ideas.

Which brings us to ex-WWE wrestler Booker T and his lawsuit against Activision over a G.I. Bro character he created and a character in Black Ops 4.

Booker T. Huffman has filed a lawsuit against video game publisher Activision for allegedly stealing his “G.I Bro” character in the Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 video game.

Huffman filed a lawsuit today against Activision Publishing, Inc, Activision Blizzard, Inc., and Major League Gaming Corp.

The lawsuit alleges that Booker T’s character G.I Bro was copied by the Black Ops character David “Prophet” Wilkes. Booker T used the G.I Bro character in the 90s as a professional wrestler, and also created a comic book based on the character in 2015.

You can read the entire filing below, but I will tell you right up front that this isn't a strong case. Booker T is asserting copyright infringement over a character that does not share a name with his, does not share a backstory with his, and does not exist in the same setting as his. Instead, it appears the only thing the two characters do share is that both are African American gunslingers in combat gear with long hair. Seriously, that's about it. The filing itself uses these side by side images to demonstrate the "blatant copying" that has occurred.

If you think there is any kind of unique identifier in Activision's image on the right that somehow makes it a clear copy of Booker T's character, you're a crazy person. Again, to put it bluntly, it's just an African American guy with long hair in combat gear. Complicating Booker T's suit further, this is an established character in the Black Ops ethos, with this supposedly infringing depiction being simply some imagery around when Prophet was younger. The character is Prophet, full stop. It's not G.I. Bro at all and nobody is going to think otherwise, except apparently for Booker T and whatever lawyers he convinced to file this lawsuit.

And none of that even touches Booker T's own character's name, a clear homage and reference to G.I. Joe. One wonders if Hasbro wants to get involved at this point, given the stink that's being made over intellectual property rights.

Filed Under: black ops 4, booker t, characters, copyright, g.i. bro, video games
Companies: activision

Appeals Court Takes No Time At All In Rejecting Patent Troll's Ridiculous Lawsuit Against Cloudflare

from the buh-bye-now dept

You may recall that back in May of 2017, a patent trolling operation called Blackbird Technologies picked on the wrong internet company to troll. Having built up some success blasting frivolous lawsuits at other internet companies, it chose to go after Cloudflare. That was a mistake. Cloudflare didn't just hit back, it promised to destroy the patent trolling firm, Blackbird Technologies. It opened up a campaign to crowdsource prior art not just on the patent at issue in its lawsuit but on every patent that Blackbird Technology claimed to hold.

Almost exactly a year ago, Cloudflare won its case with the court invalidating the patent. It was such an easy decision that it took US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria barely over a page explaining why the patent was so clearly invalid and the case was dismissed.

Blackbird, for reasons that escape me, decided to appeal to the Federal Circuit. Now, we've spent the better part of two decades mocking the Federal Circuit and its history of nutty decisions, but there are some cases so obviously bad that even the CAFC can't fuck them up. This is one. A CAFC panel heard the case last week and found the situation so utterly stupid that it only took a few days for it to affirm the lower court ruling. Indeed, its ruling is even shorter than the district court's ruling. The CAFC opinion doesn't even say anything other than: "Affirmed."

Ouch.

According to Cloudflare's General Counsel, Doug Kramer, in a blog post on Cloudflare's site, the CAFC panel didn't have a single question for the company's lawyers (which is nearly unheard of), leaving him with tons of extra time:

A panel of three judges from that court heard arguments on the appeal last Friday, but didn’t ask our attorney a single question about the substance of our argument on the abstractness of the patent. He sat down with almost half of his 15 minutes of argument time left because there was nothing more to say. Yesterday, just three business days after that hearing, the court affirmed the lower court’s decision in summary fashion, which means they didn’t even write about the claims or arguments, they just said “Affirmed” (see below).

Of course, as Kramer further notes in the post, even "easy victories" take a ton of time and resources, not to mention other kinds of costs that can impact a business in lots of ways:

Blackbird filed this case in March 16, 2017. For nearly two years, anyone doing due diligence on Cloudflare might have had questions about whether there was a cloud over our rights to our technology. And we had to go through a lot of briefing, and the related legal expenses, to get to this point. Blackbird’s combined legal filings at the district court and appellate court amounted to more than 650 pages, our responsive briefs were more than 900 pages.

The two courts spent less than two pages describing a result that was obvious to them, but it took us two years of uncertainty and cost to get there. Federal court litigation doesn’t make anything easy. Even if Blackbird had won the case, it is not clear they would have been able to collect significant damages. Our allegedly infringing use was not a product or feature that we charged for or made money from – it was essentially posting interstitial messages for various errors. Even though we were able to win this case early in the legal process and keep our costs as low as possible, it’s possible we spent more money resolving this matter than Blackbird would have been able to collect from us after trial.

This is why trolling works. This is why so many plaintiffs use the judicial system as a weapon, even when their lawsuits clearly have no merit. Even to get an "easy win" you can lose, big time.

Filed Under: cafc, patent trolling, patents
Companies: blackbird technologies, cloudflare

Can Russia Actually 'Unplug' From The Internet?

from the it-won't-be-easy dept

As you may have heard, Russia recently announced a plan to run a "test" by which it would disconnect from the internet:

Russia is considering a plan to temporarily disconnect from the Internet as a way to gauge how the country's cyberdefenses would fare in the face of foreign aggression, according to Russian media.

The general idea behind this is to see what would happen if other countries (such as the US...) decided to try to cut Russia off from the internet:

The bill would require Internet providers to make sure they can operate if foreign countries attempt to isolate the Runet, or Russian Internet. It was introduced after the White House published its 2018 National Security Strategy, which attributed cyberattacks on the United States to Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

As part of the experiment, communications oversight agency Roskomnadzor would examine whether data transmitted between Russia's users can remain in the country without being rerouted to servers abroad, where it could be subjected to interception.

Of course, this shouldn't come as a huge surprise. Over the past few years, Russia has made a bunch of fairly significant moves leading up to this. In 2014, it passed a new law demanding that user data remain on Russian soil, and threatened multiple US companies for failing to do so. Also, almost exactly two years ago, a top Putin adviser hinted at a similar plan to experiment with disconnecting the country from the internet to see how resilient a domestic Russian internet would be.

So the real question is whether or not this would actually work. Wired has a pretty thorough analysis of just how difficult this might prove for Russia:

“What we have seen so far is that it tends to be much harder to turn off the internet, once you built a resilient internet infrastructure, than you’d think,” says Andrew Sullivan, CEO of Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes the open development of the internet.

[....]

The process by which it would do so remains challenging. “In short, Russia would need to do two things: Ensure that the content Russians seek to access is actually located somewhere in the country, and ensure that routing and exchanges could all occur domestically,” says Nicole Starosielski a professor at New York University and author of The Undersea Network.

[...]

No matter how much Russia has prepared, however, unanticipated issues will almost certainly arise if it tries to dissever from the rest of the world. “I’m absolutely sure that’s the case. It may not break from the perspective of their major infrastructure grinding to a halt, but that’s a risk that they’re taking,” says Paul Barford, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies computer networking. It’s difficult for internet service providers to know precisely how reliant they are on every piece of infrastructure outside their borders. “Because of the complexity across all levels of the protocol stack, there could be catastrophic failures somewhere,” says Barford.

There's a lot more in the Wired piece, but it certainly suggests that Russia might find it more difficult than it expects -- but I guess that's the reason why the country is considering this as a "test," rather than finding out how well it works out of necessity at some later date. To some extent, this sounds like a nation-state level experiment along the lines of Kashmir Hill's recently journalistic experiment in cutting out the various tech giants, which alone proved to be significantly harder than most people would have expected.

There is, of course, a larger point here. The value and importance of the internet is built quite heavily into the fact that it is a borderless, global network that allows information sharing and communication nearly anywhere. There have, obviously, been some limited challenges to that (China being the most notable), but it still remains mostly true. There have been increasing fears of a "fragmenting" internet, and Russia toying with this "test" only drives home how real that fragmentation may become in the very near future.

Filed Under: data localization, disconnect, fragmentation, internet, localization, russia

Good Luck, Japan: Government About To Make All Copyright Infringement A Criminal Offense

from the this-should-go-well dept

We often bemoan the sheer volume of copyright infringement lawsuits that occur here in America. With an overly protectionist mentality coupled with a culture of ownership, the civil courts are frankly bursting with these lawsuits when there are so, so many more efficient ways we could do things. But we can at least take some comfort in the fact that in America copyright infringement is largely a civil matter, with criminal copyright infractions being relegated to true commercial uses of infringing activities, or those over a certain dollar amount. This saves an insane amount of undue headache for our criminal justice system.

But not every country does it this way. In Japan, for instance, copyright law has long been such that any copyright infringement having to do with music and movies has been the subject to potential criminal prosecution. This has already resulted in citizens being hauled into court by the government under potential sentences of two years in prison for the downloading of a single movie or music file. That outlandish disparity in crime and punishment has resulted in call outs from groups like the EFF. And, yet, despite such clapback, the Japanese government is currently recommending that this exact same criminalization and punishment regime be rolled out to every instance of copyright infringement, rather than relating only to music and movies.

Last year it was reported that an advisory panel for the Cultural Affairs Agency was considering the possibility of rendering the downloading of a broader range of content as a criminal offense, roughly in line with laws passed in 2012 outlawing various forms of file-sharing. This week, those plans took a significant step forward.

According to local sources, a government panel adopted the new policy on Wednesday, recommending to the Cultural Affairs Agency that current anti-downloading legislation should be expanded to cover all copyrighted content. The Agency is now expected to submit a bill to amend the Copyright Act.

While the exact punishment guidelines are currently being debated as I write this, that two-year sentence guideline from the 2012 law is very much being looked at as the standard. To roll this out to copyright infringement writ large is flatly crazy. As we and many others have stated over and over again, many people casually engage in copyright infringement in their daily lives without even realizing it. To subject such behavior to multi-year prison sentences is both pernicious and misguided. If criminal cases are pursued uniformly for copyright infringement, it's going to put nothing short of a stranglehold on the Japanese courts.

It's also worth noting that all of this is being done in a way vague enough that it's almost certain to cause confusion and chaos.

Additionally, these sentences would only be handed down in the event that victims of infringement file criminal complaints. However, the threshold for a criminal complaint is unclear and could cause issues for the legal system if there are large numbers of referrals.

Now, Japanese copyright law has steadily become more restrictive over time. But this move, if enacted, would represent a giant leap forward into a real age of restriction and undue punishment for the Japanese public. So, good luck to my Japanese friends. I can't wait to see the fallout.

Filed Under: copyright, criminal copyright, japan

Calling Out Copyright Troll Mathew Higbee

from the copyright-trollin'-trollin'-trollin' dept

Over the last few months, I've been hearing an awful lot about a copyright trolling operation that goes by the name Higbee and Associates. We had written about them years back when they (incredibly) threatened Something Awful for using a photo in a movie review (which was clear fair use). A few months back we wrote about them again when they (you guessed it) threatened Something Awful again over someone in its forums hotlinking a picture of Hitler that was actually hosted on Imgur.

While that's all we've written about the firm on Techdirt, Higbee's name keeps coming up in other conversations -- among copyright lawyers who have been seeing a massive increase in Higbee demand letters, and even from some friends who have received such letters (which nearly always involve clearly bogus threats). One thing that has happened over and over with Higbee claims that I've been privy to is that they are over unregistered images, meaning that Higbee is unlikely to actually be able to sue over those images, and even if they could, it wouldn't be for statutory damages. And yet, the threat letters tend to allude to statutory damages are part of the scare tactic.

Public Citizen's Paul Levy has apparently seen enough of Higbee and Associates and their trolling activity that he's done a pretty thorough investigation of Higbee's activities and written up a long description calling out many of the sketchy practices of the firm and its principal, Mathew Higbee:

Either in concert with a specialized search firm or using his own firm’s software, this firm patrols the Internet looking for graphics (especially photographs) that have been copied improperly from online sources. The firm then sends a demand letter bearing Higbee's signature, threatening to seek up to $150,000 in statutory damages as well as attorney fees unless the target of the letter promptly agrees to pay a specified amount. Deploying a tactic that is all too familiar from the depredations of Evan Stone and Prenda Law, the specified amount is low enough – usually in the low four figures, but I have seen high three figures —that it is not likely to be cost-effective for the target to hire a knowledgeable copyright lawyer to litigate an infringement lawsuit, even if the claim is bunk or, at least, if there is good reason to believe that the claim can easily be defended. The letter encloses a document identifying the allegedly infringing use as well as the online location where the work was found; another document that purports to authorize the firm to represent the copyright holder in seeking damages in connection with the work; a proposed “settlement agreement”; and a credit card payment form. If the target of the letter does not respond, or responds without agreeing to pay, then the Higbee firm increases the pressure: a non-lawyer who calls herself a “claim resolution specialist” sends an email warning that the claim is going to be “escalated to the attorneys,” at which point “[t]claim gets more stressful and expensive,” and an assurance that “my goal is to not let that happen to you.”

The documents linked above all relate to a single Higbee demand to a single target, but I have seen a number of other demand letters and ensuing emails from this firm, and spoken to several other copyright lawyers who have helped clients respond to Higbee’s blustering and threats, and it appears to me that these are pretty standard exemplars. Indeed, when I was reaching out to some other copyright lawyers to try to get their sense of some of the documents I was reviewing, a number of them guessed that it was Higbee based only on what I said I wanted to ask about, based on work they had done for their clients trying to address his threats against them. Plainly, this is a copyright troll with an outsized reputation.

Levy took on a client who had received one such letter from Higbee and noticed a bunch of problems with Higbee's standard practices:

More than six years later, on January 2, 2019, Mathew Higbee sent HUFF his demand letter, accompanied by the other documents described above. Several things jumped out at me. First, instead of reciting that the copyright in the photograph had been registered, and either attaching the registration or at least citing the registration number, the letter recited the photo’s “PicRights Claim Number” – a matter of utterly no consequence for the recipient of the demand. The registration number, by contrast, is far more significant in this context, because, for most copyrighted works (the exception is discussed below), a copyright holder cannot bring suit for infringement until the copyright has been registered, and regardless of the exception, a copyright holder cannot seek statutory damages or attorney fees for infringements that take place before registration, or even for infringements that continue after registration unless the copyright was registered promptly after the work was first published. Because this photograph appeared in the New York Times within a day after the photo was taken, and more than six years before the demand letter was sent, a failure to register would have meant that the letter’s warning about statutory damages and attorney fees was an empty bluff meant to intimidate.

Second, the letter was plainly a boilerplate form, containing somewhat stilted language that was poorly adapted to the specifics of HUFF’s claimed infringement. For example, the letter varies back and forth between referring to the recipient in the second and third person singular, suggests that HUFF might have its wages garnished, warns of action against “the business owner,” and refers to “the attached exhibits” even though only one exhibit was attached. Indeed, the “representation agreement” that was provided along with the demand letter, purporting to show that Agence France-Presse, PicRights and a European version of PicRights had authorized Higbee to pursue claims on its behalf about HUFF’s alleged infringement with respect to this specific photograph, did not identify the photograph but simply indicated that Higbee was handling “a copyright infringement matter.”

Third, the exhibit revealed Higbee’s recognition that the “infringing location” for the copyrighted work was not HUFF’s own web site but rather the web site of the New York Times which, presumably had licensed the photograph (I was able to confirm that assumption by contacting the Times’ legal department). And the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has decided, in Perfect 10 v. Amazon, that Google does not infringe a photographer’s copyright by including images in its search results, because American copyright law does not prevent the “framing” of deep-linked images that actually sit on the server of a party that is entitled to display the photograph and serve copies of the image to visiting viewers; it is only displaying and distributing from the defendant’s own server that violates the copyright laws (the “server test”).

Levy goes into great detail about his interactions with Higbee that are well worth reading. I will only post a snippet here, but I recommend going through and reading the whole thing. Levy first told Higbee that he planned to go to court ahead of Higbee and file for declaratory judgment of non-infringement, and suddenly Higbee started throwing everything he could at the wall:

What followed was a rapid retreat by Higbee, accompanied by some truculence while, at the same time, he signaled his recognition both that he had no basis for seeking any monetary relief for his client, and that I knew that he hadn’t a leg to stand on. First, he sent me an email on February 1, dropping PicRights as a client, insisting that he had a viable basis for suing on the image (while implicitly admitting that his client had not registered the copyright), and implicitly dropping as well the demand for $1775; instead, he asked me to make “some reasonable offer” comparable to the cost of filing a federal court complaint ($400) as well as service costs (which would have been free under the waiver of service procedure”). The redacted email address on the cc line was my client’s email, violating his ethical obligations given that the client was represented by counsel. (In a separate email chain, Higbee tried to excuse this violation by claiming that he had no idea I was a lawyer, but I found that statement less than credible, particularly considering that I know of at least one other situation in which his firm made contact with a party after an attorney contacted the Higbee firm on the party's behalf in in response to the demand. Higbee also asked me how a lawyer not belonging to the California Bar could help a California client in a copyright matter. The mere fact that he thought he had to make this point told me how desperate he was getting to avoid the merits).

Levy also details another case, in which another recipient of a Higbee letter tried to take Higbee (not Higbee's client) to small claims court, and Higbee then dragged the case into federal court while at the same time insisting he had closed the case:

In the meantime, I learned about some astonishing developments regarding a demand letter that Higbee had made to a community college professor named Claudia Eckelmann relating to the inclusion of a cartoon in the online syllabus that she had provided for her students’ edification. She responded to Higbee’s demand letter and subsequent bullying emails by filing a complaint against Higbee’s firremoving the state-court proceeding to federal court, asserting both that the court had subject-matter jurisdiction because the dispute was really about copyright infringement (Higbee seems to have ignored the rule that, for a removal to be proper, federal jurisdiction has to be shown on the face of the state-court complaint, and the state complaint does not make clear whether Eckelmann seeks a declaration of non-infringement or a judgment under state unfair business practices law). Indeed, his notice implicitly suggests, at the same time, that there was no case or controversy because, given Eckelmann’s recalcitrance, his firm had decided to “close” the case. Of course, if there was no case or controversy there would be no Article III jurisdiction to hear the removed case.

There's a lot more in the post, but it pretty thoroughly demonstrates the sketchy nature of many Higbee letters, which appear designed to do little more than just get people to pay up over exaggerated claims. Somewhat incredibly, Levy got one of the people who work for Higbee to be a lot more honest about the situation than Higbee himself. Of course, this only occurred after Higbee claimed the case was "closed" and yet his employee was still demanding money...

The HUFF matter would have ended with Higbee’s statement to me that he had “closed" the case, as he claimed to have done with respect to Eckelmann, except that, a couple of days later, I received this remarkable email from one of Higbee’s "claims resolution specialisists," Rebecca Alvarado. Here she was, AFTER her boss had "closed the case," responding to my initial email to Higbee on behalf of HUFF, and warning that, despite my points, the “fact is there is a copyright claim on the table” and that she was “willing to work with me to see that the claim is resolved.” She gave me her direct line, so I called her to find out just what resolution she had in mind, as well as what she might tell me about the nature of the firm’s practice.

The call was enlightening. Unlike Higbee, who never directly responded to my question about whether the copyright was reg..., defensively, that the demand letter did not say that statutory damages would be sought, but only that these might be “possible” in some circumstances. She told me that her client was only seeking actual damages, in terms of the lost licensing fee — but she could not tell me what that licensing fee was (so, how could she “resolve” the copyright claim?). And she admitted that her firm’s business model involves paying its clients a fractional share of the moneys that they wring out of their victims. She told me that she did not know what the fraction was, but Higbee told Fast Company that clients who came to him through a no-longer-existing service called “Copypants” received 50% of the financial gain. Moreover, he boasted as well that some 75% to 80% of the targets who receive his demand letters pay him without having to be taken to court.

I recognize that photographers who hire Higbee may think they're getting in on some new revenue stream, but when that comes at the expense of ethically dubious shakedowns, they might want to think twice.

Meanwhile, Higbee has shown up in the comments to Levy's post to "defend" himself by insisting that everything his firm does is totally aboveboard, and sometimes things just fall through the cracks in deciding who to send shakedown letters to (that would be more convincing if we didn't keep seeing more and more of them from Higbee, with nearly all of them being questionable):

Our clients choose which cases we pursue. Generally, our clients choose to have us only pursue unauthorized use of their work by persons or entities that provide or promote goods or services for a fee, generate ad revenue, or solicit contributions. We never intentionally pursue private non-commercial infringements. That being said, often times it is difficult to accurately assess an infringer based on the limited information available, especially when the natural tendency of most websites is to make the entity look bigger and more successful than it is. Whenever we discover a case is outside our firm’s or our client’s enforcement parameters, we close it (even if offers to settle have been received) and take any necessary steps to prevent similar errors in the future.

While this may be true in some cases, in at least a few cases I'm aware of (including the SomethingAwful cases), I find this nearly impossible to believe. And, of course, we've heard similar pleadings from the likes of earlier copyright trolls like John Steele of Prenda and Evan Stone. Higbee is building up a reputation and it's not a particularly good one.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright troll, mathew higbee, shakedown

Daily Deal: CuriosityStream 2 Year Subscription

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

CuriosityStream is the award-winning streaming and on-demand destination where you can journey through our world and beyond. Its immersive experiences feature experts like Stephen Hawking and David Attenborough, stunning visuals, and unrivaled storytelling to demystify science, nature, history, technology, society and lifestyle. With over 2,000 documentary features and series, including exclusive originals, CuriosityStream is available worldwide to watch on TV, desktop, mobile and tablets. A 2 year subscription is on sale for $30.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Georgia Gov't Employee Somehow Manages To Get Criminally Charged For Violating Public Records Laws

from the protections-for-records-requesters-no-longer-listed-as-'NIB' dept

In an event rarer than the stripping of qualified immunity from a police officer, a public official is being criminally charged for violating open records laws.

The press secretary for former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has been cited for allegedly violating the Georgia Open Records Act in the first-ever criminal complaint filed in connection with the law, the state attorney general’s office announced Monday.

Jenna Garland, 34, the press secretary during Reed’s second term, is accused of ordering a subordinate in the city’s watershed department in March 2017 to delay handing over public records that contained information damaging to Reed and other city officials. The records were requested by Channel 2 Action News.

Both misdemeanor charges are potentially worth $1,000 in fines and a year in jail, but we're probably not going to see anyone locked up for screwing the public. We've only seen one other case like this in the history of Techdirt, and there's nothing indicating any of the politicians indicted for public records law violations have been jailed for breaking the law. In fact, one felt so unthreatened by the charges, she filed for re-election while still under indictment.

In this case, a pair of records requests led to the criminal charges. The first request was for water billing records, filed by journalists at Channel 2. The second request -- filed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution(AJC) and Channel 2 -- sought communications discussing the water billing records request. The second request was a goldmine for journalists and the impetus for criminal charges against Jenna Garland.

In March 2018, the AJC and Channel 2 published text messages Garland sent a year earlier to then-watershed spokeswoman Lillian Govus.

[...]

In the messages, Garland instructed Govus to “drag this out,” “be as unhelpful as possible” and to “provide the information in the most confusing format available.”

Garland later instructed Govus to “hold all” records until a Channel 2 producer contacted Govus for an update.

The records originally sought showed large amounts owed to the city's water department by a number of city politicians, including a councilwoman attempting to run for mayor. Those records were finally released to Channel 2 after it threatened to sue the agency.

There may be more charges coming, based on what's been seen in the text messages AJC obtained. Garland didn't work alone to withhold requested documents and quite possibly was following instructions from those above her when she started telling city employees to violate open records law.

This sort of thing should be happening more frequently, but it's difficult to convince prosecutors to go after fellow government employees. The laws themselves usually aren't much help, snaring only the most egregious violators. Still, it does show it's not impossible to punish government employees for violating open records laws, which should generate at least some minimal deterrent effect.

Filed Under: criminal charges, foia, georgia, jenna garland, public records

5G Has Become The Magic Pixie Dust Of Tech Policy Conversations

from the hype-parade dept

Fifth generation wireless (5G) has quickly become a sort of magical carrot on a stick in tech and telecom policy circles. Telecom lobbyists and the Ajit Pai FCC have spent the better part of the last two years trying to claim that unless we gut consumer protections like net neutrality, America will somehow fall behind in the "race" to 5G. U.S. companies have also convinced the government that if America doesn't want to lose said race (whatever that means), we most assuredly should ban cheaper Chinese networking gear from the country (the protectionism angle of this is entirely coincidental, they'll insist).

More recently, Sprint and T-Mobile have been telling anybody who'll listen that their competition and job eroding merger is the only way to ensure that America doesn't fall behind on 5G. Despite the fact that both companies are on record clearly stating they both could have easily deployed 5G independently, that same argument popped up again this week during merger hearings on Capitol Hill. As did the well-weathered claim that the merger is essential if America wants to beat China in the rush to 5G and avoid being laughed at by the other kids on the 5G playground:

"In prepared remarks, T-Mobile CEO John Legere ties the proposed merger to “American innovation and national security,” and specifically argues that the merger will be necessary to make the United States a leader on next-generation 5G network technology. “The stakes are high — nothing less than preserving our edge in innovation and maintaining our security,” he plans to say.

The CEO plans to say that the US is “falling behind” China on 5G, which he says “has taken a global lead in the race.” He says in the remarks that only a newly merged T-Mobile will be able to compete.

Of course this is all bullshit. As we've noted previously, the "race to 5G" rhetoric is largely nonsense crafted by hardware vendors looking to sell more network hardware and wireless carriers looking to justify high US mobile data prices and spur lagging phone and tablet sales. It's not a race, there's no way to measure a winner (especially given our broadband maps are hot garbage due to regulatory capture), and the only folks likely to win this particular game are the companies selling the hype and related products.

5G is important, but it's not paradigm-rattling important.

5G will be a very useful evolution in wireless in that it will provide faster, lower latency networks that are more easily managed (in large part due to virtualization technology). But 5G is not some mystical fucking panacea. It can't, for example, magically compensate for the reduction in competition in the wake of the T-Mobile deal, a bit of mathematics that never ends well for consumers (go ask a Canadian or the Irish). It won't miraculously compensate for regulatory capture at the Ajit Pai FCC. Given these and other broken market realities, it's unlikely to result in what consumers really want: lower prices.

In tech policy circles, 5G has become the equivalent of lobbying and policy mysticism, entirely untethered from factual reality. You just sprinkle a little bit on your argument and you can use it to justify pretty much anything. Blake Reid, a Professor at Colorado Law, probably put it best:

Again, it's perfectly fine if you're realistically enthusiastic about the modest but important improvements 5G networks are going to bring. But carriers have been trying to pass the technology off as the next industrial revolution and some kind of deus ex machina. Not just because they want to sell product, but because they're using it as a regulatory carrot on a stick, claiming that unless you give big telecom "X" (X=less oversight, more subsidies, merger approval, the death of net neutrality), America will somehow fall behind an arbitrary measurement they've entirely pulled out of their collective ass.

If we follow down the rabbit hole hyping 5G without addressing the massive problems in both the fixed and wireless US broadband markets, this race ends with all of us crying and nursing a pulled hamstring.

Filed Under: 5g, hype, overhype, wireless

Sony Using Copyright To Take Down Its Own Anti-Piracy Propaganda

from the copyright-inception dept

Sony has apparently decided that you can't see its anti-piracy propaganda, because it might be pirated.

There are a few iconic sitcoms I remember from my childhood and What's Happening!! is probably near the top of that list. What I had forgotten, is that the show once included a two part episode all about the evils of bootlegging, with guest stars, the Doobie Brothers. In that "very special episode," the character of Rerun is caught trying to secretly tape the Doobie Brothers playing a show at their high school. Or as Mental Floss puts it:

The band, who are so upstanding they named themselves after an illegal drug, proceed to lecture the youngsters on morality and righteousness.

So, that's cool. Either way, DC policy advocate Josh Lamel recently went looking for clips of that episode and discovered that they've all been taken down:

Indeed, if you try to visit any of the clips of that episode, you get this following:

And, obviously, this is Sony's choice. The clips may, indeed, be infringing. But it does seem to show the level of insane protectionism that the copyright maximalist mentality leads to, where you hyper vigilant focus on taking down all the things includes you sending copyright takedowns of your own propaganda on why piracy and bootlegging is so bad...

Filed Under: copyright, doobie brothers, propaganda, sitcoms, takedown, what's happening
Companies: sony

Sony: We Are Totally Open For Crossplay, Game Developers: No, You Totally Are Not

from the cross-purposes dept

It's a really dumb saga that has gone on for far too long, but Sony has built for itself a public history of not allowing gamers to cross-play multiplayer games on their Playstations with players on other consoles. This is all an attempt to get Playstation owners to convince their friends to also buy Playstations so that they can game together, which is exactly the kind of protectionist hardball that makes Sony, you know, Sony. The backlash against Sony last summer was bad enough that Microsoft and Nintendo, rivals in the console space, decided to put out joint advertisements together along with a social media campaign essentially trolling Sony over the issue, while pointing out to gamers worldwide that owners of Nintendo and Xbox consoles very much could play with one another.

In one of the all-time underwhelming responses to a PR crisis in the history of gaming, Sony did enable crossplay... for exactly two games. Fortnite and Rocket League have crossplay enabled, but literally nothing else. Which made it somewhat baffling that the Chairman of Sony Interactive managed to claim in a recent interview that the lack of crossplay at this point was all the developers' fault.

“People keep saying, ‘Why doesn’t Sony allow more people to have it,’” Sony’s Shawn Layden told Game Informer. “All it takes is for publishers and developers who wish to permission it. As ever, just work with your PlayStation account manager, and they will walk you through the steps that we’ve learned through our partnership with Epic on how this works. I don’t believe right now there is any gating factor on that. I think they’re open to make proposals, because the Fortnite thing worked pretty well.”

It's a striking claim in many ways. First, the inclusion of a phrase like "as ever" must surely be infuriating to any developer or gamer who knows the history of crossplay on Sony's hardware. It's not "as ever." At best, it's "as very, very recently." Second, the claim makes no sense. Developers and publishers across the spectrum have managed to get crossplay enabled on Xbox and Nintendo hardware, but the claim is that they've just been too lazy to do so with Sony? All while they're screaming that they want their games to be crossplay enabled? Come on.

And it's not just me saying so. Layden's comments were met with immediate backlash from developers.

Finn Brice, the CEO of Chucklefish, which developed and published the recent Advance Wars-inspired hit Wargroove, took issue with Layden’s characterization in a thread about the interview on the gaming forum ResetEra.

“We made many requests for crossplay (both through our account manager and directly with higher ups) all the way up until release month,” Brice wrote. “We were told in no uncertain terms that it was not going to happen.”

Wargroove is currently available, with cross-play, on Switch, Xbox One, and PC. The game is slated to launch later this year on PlayStation 4. Brice added that while it might be more complicated from a policy standpoint on PlayStation’s part, for Chucklefish, implementing cross-play is as easy as flipping a switch, something people have speculated about ever since Fortnite maker Epic Games accidentally enabled cross-play between Xbox One and PS4 back in September of 2017.

In other words, Sony is Sonying all over this. Why in the world this kind of comment should be thought to do anything other than anger both gamers and game developers alike is beyond me. Blame developers for your own protectionist behavior that refuses what your own customers want? That's ballsy, even for Sony.

Filed Under: crossplay, playstation, video games
Companies: sony