As many of you know, Australia has a strict censorship policy on video games, not allowing anything it classifies as being solely for adults into the country. This has always seemed like an odd decision, since it seems like if you just clearly marked or classified the games as being for those over 18, then adults could decide for themselves what games to play. And, indeed, an effort has been underway for a long time to add an AU-R18 rating for video games. For a while, every attempt to get that passed was blocked by the video game hating Attorney General in South Australia, Michael Atkinson. However, he recently stepped down, potentially clearing the path to allowing “mature” video games into Australia.
However, Slashdot alerts us to the news that the process is being held up, because politicians are concerned that so many people wrote in to support the proposal. Yes, you read that correctly. Because so many people supported the proposal, the government wants to go out and get “more views from the community” from people who don’t like the idea.
Now, I recognize the concern that the consultation process was potentially overrun by “interest groups” (i.e., people who play games), but this is one of those situations where those would really be the people who are impacted most by this ruling — and the fact that they turned out by the tens of thousands, while those on the flip side couldn’t muster up anywhere near the same level of support, suggests that for those this rule would actually impact, the majority would like to knock down that censorship wall.
It is notoriously difficult to be successful in the restaurant business (though the popular adage that “9 out of 10 restaurants fail within the first year” may actually be false). That said, a restaurant is a business like any other, so experimentation with new business models is important, especially in tough economic times like we have been facing in recent years. Traditionally, restaurant reservations can be canceled at the whim of the diner without penalty, but for an industry, whose margins are continually squeezed, canceled reservations could make the difference between a profitable night and an unprofitable one. Restaurants sell a limited amount of daily perishable goods and services, which draws many parallels to both the theater and airline businesses. So, perhaps restaurateurs took note of these similarities for themselves when they started selling “tickets” for their nightly dinners instead of taking reservations. In addition to tickets to individual dinners, the restaurants also offer subscriptions to a whole season of dinners — another tactic lifted right out of the playbook of theaters. These restaurateurs correctly recognize that dining out is not just about the food; it is a social experience just like a concert, the movies, or a sporting event.
The benefit for the restaurant is that even if the diner doesn’t show up for the meal, the restaurant isn’t stuck holding the bag — the responsibility to offload an unwanted dinner ticket then shifts to the diner rather than the business. Furthermore with a guarantee of revenue for the evening, shopping for expensive perishables in preparation for an evening’s dinner service is much easier. That said, pre-paying for a night’s meal is a complete departure from the regular dining out experience, so at first, I can really only see this tactic working for a set of exclusive restaurants. After all, online reservation marketplace TableXchange folded last year, citing empty tables at even the most popular dining hotspots.
A couple years ago, we wrote about Ubisoft apparently using an internet crack to get around its own DRM after an Ubisoft patch screwed up the system and tried to require gamers, who had bought the downloaded version, to place the (non-existent) CD in the tray to prove that they had bought the game. It looks like Rockstar Games has now been caught doing something similar. BigKeithO points us to a forum discussion that suggests Rockstar is using a cracked version of its game Max Payne 2 on Steam, for the same reason (to get around the CD check). Apparently, in examining the code with a hex editor, someone discovered that the official Steam release is ascii tagged by the Scene release group Myth (which hasn’t been around for many, many years). No one’s quite sure what happened exactly, but the obvious suggestion is that Rockstar chose the easy way out in trying to remove the CD check DRM in the game to put it on Steam, and just found a cracked version online.
With Apple and Nokia already locked in a patent nuclear war involving lawsuits filed back and forth and back and forth, it looks like the same thing may be happening now in the Apple-HTC dispute. The difference, of course, is that Apple initiated the lawsuit against HTC. But now HTC has responded in kind, claiming that Apple violates a bunch of its patents, while using the ITC loophole to get the iPhone barred from the US.
What we’re really seeing is what happens when you get a patent thicket in a highly competitive, dynamic area. Suddenly, rather than focusing on competing in the marketplace, and continually outpacing each other by offering new innovations and benefits to consumers, companies start wasting millions upon millions of dollars trying to block competitors from doing the same thing. It leads to a massive net negative impact on society and consumer benefit. What a shame.
At the very least, it appears that HTC recognizes this:
“As the innovator of the original Windows Mobile PocketPC Phone Edition in 2002 and the first Android smartphone in 2008, HTC believes the industry should be driven by healthy competition and innovation that offer consumers the best, most accessible mobile experiences possible.”
Either way, it’s yet another nuclear war in the patent world, taking money away from actual innovation. What a shame.
After about a year or so of very public questions over the incredible level of secrecy of ACTA (including the patently ridiculous claim that details couldn’t be revealed for national security reasons), including a complete smackdown by the EU Parliament concerning the whole ACTA process, the negotiators finally (and very reluctantly) released the latest draft in April. Of course, by then, the full document had already leaked. Still, the officially released document left out some of the key parts that were in the leaked draft. Funny how that works.
But, of course, the negotiators pushing for ACTA pretended that the only concerns people had with ACTA were over the transparency issue, and now that a draft has been released, apparently they think that there should be no more complaints about ACTA. Uh huh. Except, of course, those who actually understand these issues, have pointed out some serious problems in the way ACTA is written, in that it locks in certain parts of copyright law that are very much in flux, and seems to export only the limits of copyright law, with none of the very important exceptions.
And, now it’s coming out that this new “transparency” may have been a one-time deal. The head negotiator from the EU, Luc Devigne (the guy who planned to ignore the rebuke from the EU Parliament), has apparently told people that the April release is all that they planned on releasing. So, after the next round of negotiations happens (next month), the latest document will not be released again.
However, the rest of Devigne’s comments reinforce some of the earlier reports from the field that we’ve heard, suggesting that large parts of the negotiation are still in dispute:
There is still no agreement on the ISP safe harbour provisions.
Major disagreements in the criminal chapter include the definition of “commercial scale” (the U.S. wants it defined, the EU wants it left to national judges) and the inclusion of an anti-camcording provision.
Disagreements on the civil enforcement chapter includes damages and scope.
Of course, those are some very key points that will determine just how bad ACTA may be. The fact that the negotiators won’t be releasing updated drafts when these points are still very much in flux is quite troubling.
This is hardly a surprise, given earlier rulings on various file sharing systems, but a court has ruled in favor of the RIAA and against Limewire, saying that Limewire “engaged in unfair competition, and induced copyright infringement.”
You can read the full decision here:
As you can see from the ruling, LimeWire never really had a chance. It basically did everything that Grokster did (and potentially more), so under the Grokster ruling, it’s a pretty open and shut case. Of course that doesn’t mean this isn’t troubling in many ways. In fact, it reiterates many of the problems with the original Grokster ruling. For example, it mentions things like the fact that LimeWire folks knew that LimeWire could be used to transfer copyrighted works. But that’s meaningless. Email can be used for transferring copyrighted works. FTP too. The web as well.
Either way, I’m still wondering if, based on the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Grokster case, which solidified this non-legislative concept of “inducement” for copyright infringement (something that Congress had chosen not to put into the law — despite having the opportunity), if it’s possible to create a system for more efficiently sharing files that doesn’t violate the inducement standard. In most of these cases, part of the problem is that these sites advertise themselves for the ability to infringe on copyrights, and employees at the sites were active in helping users infringe. As such, you can see how that’s clear inducement. But what if a site was set up that didn’t do all of those things, but was still widely used for infringement. Would that still be inducement? If so, that seems incredibly troubling. The law should not be set up in a way to outright ban a technology that has a wide variety of useful applications, and is used for plenty of legitimate purposes, even if it’s also used (even if regularly used) for infringing purposes.
Miranda Neubauer was the first of a few of you to send in the news of a bizarre German court ruling that makes it effectively illegal to offer open WiFi. Seriously:
Germany’s top criminal court ruled Wednesday that Internet users need to secure their private wireless connections by password to prevent unauthorized people from using their Web access to illegally download data.
Internet users can be fined up to euro100 ($126) if a third party takes advantage of their unprotected WLAN connection to illegally download music or other files, the Karlsruhe-based court said in its verdict.
“Private users are obligated to check whether their wireless connection is adequately secured to the danger of unauthorized third parties abusing it to commit copyright violation,” the court said.
This is backwards in so many ways. First, open WiFi is quite useful, and requiring a password can be a huge pain, limiting all sorts of individuals and organizations who have perfectly good reasons for offering free and open WiFi. Second, fining the WiFi hotspot owner for actions of users of the service is highly troubling from a third party liability standpoint. The operator of the WiFi hotspot should not be responsible for the actions of users, and it’s troubling that the German court would find otherwise. This is an unfortunate ruling no matter how you look at it.
Apparently, the producers of the Oscar-winning movie Hurt Locker haven’t paid attention to what’s happened on the internet over the past decade. Despite the massive levels of backlash against the RIAA for its “sue consumers” strategy, the folks behind Hurt Locker are preparing to sue tens of thousands of people for unauthorized file sharing of the movie. Apparently, they’ve signed up with the relatively new operation US Copyright Group, that is trying to copy the strategy used by ACS:Law and Davenport Lyons in the UK, where they send out thousands upon thousands of “pre-settlement” offers to get people to pay up. This process has lead to condemnation from politicians (who have called it a scam) and lawyers being barred from practice and being disciplined by regulatory boards.
But, apparently, that’s of no concern to Hurt Locker’s producers, or to Thomas Dunlap, the lawyer behind this scorched earth sue ’em all campaign. They may learn — quite quickly — about the backlash suing your biggest fans can cause. It’s hard to think of a strategic move that will make things worse than this particular move. Have they not noticed what happened to Metallica after that band tried to sue its fans? Lots of people were interested in the movie after it won the Oscar, and plenty of people have been renting it. Yes, lots of people have been downloading it and sharing it as well, but that’s not going to stop one way or the other. But in attacking people who want to watch your movie not just with legal threats, but with a full on lawsuit is ridiculous on any level. I actually had Hurt Locker in my rental queue, but there’s no way I’m renting it now. I have no desire to support movie makers who would go to such ridiculous lengths for no good reason.
In the meantime, Dunlap and US Copyright Group are now claiming that 75% of ISPs have “cooperated fully.” That’s a very different story than we heard back in March — at which time only one ISP had cooperated, and others seemed pretty skeptical. In fact, in that original case, the fact that ISPs cooperated was even more questionable after it came to light that the copyright in question was not registered in time. If it’s true that most ISPs are cooperating and handing over IP address info, based on such sketchy proof, that would be a dangerous precedent. What happened to ISPs insisting they would never just hand over such information?
This was pretty predictable, but it’s still unfortunate that it’s happening. We’ve complained in the past that both sides on the net neutrality debate are exaggerating and making absolutely ridiculous arguments, and even though I agree that putting net neutrality in the law in some manner is a bad, bad idea, I have to admit that the arguments by most of those against such rules is so ridiculous that it makes me wonder they’re thinking. There were the outright lies — such as the ridiculous claim that Google gets its bandwidth for free (to which I asked if the lobbyist who made that statement would pay Google’s broadband bill — and he never responded). Then there are the claims that net neutrality would mean the end of the internet or no more iPhones, both of which are ridiculous hyperbole that have no basis in truth.
Given that there actually are perfectly good arguments against regulations on this issue without resorting to such ridiculous lies, I actually think that such claims really hurt the case of those who are worried about the unintended consequences of opening up the internet to regulation.
However, with the FCC’s recent decision to sorta, kinda, partially reclassify broadband access, it seems like the lobbyists, sock puppets and shills are going into overdrive, and it’s not helping anyone. In fact, part of the mess is that everyone now is looking for big “gotchas” on either side. For example, the website Think Progress got its hands on a PowerPoint apparently coordinating the ridiculously over-the-top anti-net-neutrality campaign, which they’re apparently trying to rebrand “net brutality.”
The whole thing reads like what you’d expect from a lobbying effort… but it turns out that it was just a student project, though, the attention given it by Think Progress may have just catapulted it into something more. That said, the project itself is filled with questionable activities, where they even admit that the whole goal is to create the impression that it’s a grass roots effort. And, not surprisingly, the project’s blog links to some highly questionable sources that have been shown to be sock puppetry and astroturfing in the past.
Of course, the other side isn’t immune to questionable activities either. It didn’t take long for the press to realize that a letter that was being passed around by Rep. Jay Inslee in support of the FCC’s move had metadata indicating it was actually written by the policy director of Free Press, a group that has been ferociously pushing for net neutrality regulations for quite some time. Ridiculously, Inslee is trying to pretend that the document wasn’t written by Free Press by claiming a staffer had just typed over a Word doc sent by Free Press:
Inslee’s office told Hillicon Valley on Tuesday that Scott did not, in fact, draft the letter on behalf of the congressman. Rather, as Inslee’s staff scrambled to put out something last week in support of the FCC’s goals, it consulted old documents and industry talking points for ideas. A staff member ultimately typed the new letter on top of the Word document that Free Press previously sent Inslee — the date of which was May 7 — meaning the meta-data still reflected Scott as its author.
“Yep, that’s it, in our haste we typed over a word document with someone else’s meta tag,” said communications director Robert Kellar. “There is no plot and we created the letter.”
I mean, it even sounds like Kellar knows he’s not fooling anyone with the “Yep, that’s it” part of the statement. It’s about this far away from “Yeah… that’s the ticket…”
Either way, as we predicted, the whole thing is becoming a political food fight being manhandled by lobbyists and special interests, with little regard for the deeper, important, underlying issues. Even when moves are being made by people outside of the beltway, it’s being dissected for the driving forces behind it, rather than what actually makes sense. What comes out in the end is going to be shaped by those lobbyists and special interests. And that’s my big fear with all of this. The end result isn’t going to have anything to do with actually looking at what’s best for the internet or the American people, but who can game the system better and turn this into a hotter political football.
Back in January, we wrote about the story of a guy in the UK who was arrested and banned from his local airport after making a (bad) joke on Twitter about blowing the place up. His tweet was:
“Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
As we said at the time, it was a really dumb statement, and I have no problem with police checking it out, but once they realized it was just a dumb joke, it seems reasonable to leave the guy alone. However, some more details are now coming to light that make the story even more questionable, and raise some issues that could impact pretty much anyone who makes a bad joke on Twitter, should someone in power want to cause them serious trouble.
Andrew sent over a few more articles about the story, that highlight that the guy wasn’t actually charged for making a fake bomb threat. There actually is a law for that… but the authorities didn’t charge him with that because they knew that his joke would never actually be seen as a bomb threat. Charging him under that law would require evidence that he intended to make people actually think he was intending to blow the airport up — but no reasonable person would think that.
Instead, it appears that the police used a little-known part of the UK’s Communications Act that outlaws sending a “message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.” Sound broad enough? Yeah. Suddenly, you realize he wasn’t charged with making a bomb threat. He was charged with making a bad joke, that someone misinterpreted as being “menacing.” The link above to TheLawyer.com goes through all this in great detail, including a pretty scary discussion with the officials who decided which law to charge the guy with, where they basically dance around the issue, even though it’s pointed out to them that they’re clearly stretching the meaning of that particular law well beyond what it’s supposed to cover, while ignoring the actual law concerning bomb threats.
No matter, it appears that the guy has now been officially found guilty and fined £385 plus £600 costs (though, Stephen Fry has offered to pay). The fine isn’t huge, but the guy now has a criminal conviction on his record for making a bad joke (not for making a bomb threat). That doesn’t seem reasonable no matter how you look at it.
