Farewell.

More Damage 8tracks

Decided to put up another.

1. The Jesus Lizard - Seasick (Goat LP)
2. Brainbombs - Die You Fuck (Obey LP)
3. Drive Like Jehu - Bullet Train to Vegas (S/T 7")
4. Sonic Youth - Swimsuit Issue (Dirty LP)
5. Big Black - Shotgun (Racer-X LP)
6. Kilslug - Autospy Performing (Necktie Party 7")
7. Angel Hair - Space Ape (Insect Mortality LP)
8. The New Flesh - Scratch & Bleed (Parasite! LP)
   

New 8tracks

It's been a while, but I've got a new 8tracks mix up, titled Damage. It's just stuff I've been listening to recently.

1. Clockcleaner - Hand are for Holding (The Hassler LP)
2. Black Dice - Untitled (Semen of the Sun 7")
3. XBXRX - Song 6 (Gop Ist Minee LP)
4. DrunkDriver - January 02 (Knife Day 7")
5. Pissed Jeans - Caught Licking Leather (Hope for Men LP)
6. The Hope Conspiracy - Nervous Breakdown (Black on Black: Tribute to Black Flag LP)
7. Slavescene - High School Head (Heaven Only Knows Cassette)
8. Warsaw - They Walked in Line (Warsaw LP)
   

Resident Evil 5 Fucks Gamers

Turns out that the extra "content" for Resident Evil 5, a downloadable "Versus" mode that Capcom is charging an extra $5 for, is already on the disc:

The total download size for RE5 Versus Mode is 1.86MB. You are not, in fact, downloading the content from Xbox Live Marketplace or PlayStation Network. Instead, you are downloading a key that unlocks content already on the RE5 retail disc. The same disc you paid $60 for a month ago.

This is total bullshit. Words fail me. Is this the new trend? From one-time use codes to unique CD keys, it seems like the games industry is doing everything in its power to nickle-and-dime gamers.

DRM and EULAs for PC Games

Great read over at Ars Technica about the Entertainment Consumers Association pushing for the requirement of full disclosure of DRM on PC game boxes, as well as the standardization of EULA agreements. Hal Halpin of the ECA told Ars Technica:

We suggested a few things to the FTC, one of which was we'd like to see DRM disclosed. So when people go to the store and buy the packaged good, the PC game, they'll see something on the front of the box saying there is DRM inside, and to what degree it will be invasive.

The second thing that we recommended was that EULAs get standardized, so again, rather than have 30 or 40 types of agreements, there would be one standard one for all different types of computer games. People go into the store, buy the game, open it, and they can no longer return it... by standardizing the EULA, consumers will have the confidence to know what it is they're agreeing to before they buy the product.

That didn't go over so well. There was a room of attorneys that kind of gasped when we suggested standardization. One panelist commented that the EULA really were there as consumer information, and that was the one and only time that the FTC jumped in and said "wait a second, this has nothing to do with consumer information, this is purely IP protection." I pointed out that when we ran the IEMA (Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association) we were able to get the size of the boxes standardized, and to get the PC CD-ROM logo on the box. These were not herculean undertakings, and they didn't require legislation. So if we can do those things, then certainly we can do these.

This can only be good for consumers, and I'm particularly pleased to see the ECA raising the conflicts that digital distribution channels like Steam have with the concept of ownership.

This Is Bullshit

Leaving aside the troubling racial imagery in Capcom's Resident Evil 5, I read this on Ars Techinca:

Capcom has sent word that a Versus mode will be added to the game... for a price.

[...]

Other than a screenshot or two, that's all we know about the content, except for price: the new mode will cost 400 MS points on the Xbox 360, and $5 on the PS3. We should expect the content "a few weeks after Resident Evil 5 is available." [emphasis mine]

Resident Evil 5 was released in Japan last week, and releases here, in North America, today. Ars Techinca reported this yesterday, before the game went on sale over here. I cannot believe that this is simply "extra content"; it seems a lot more like this "Versus" mode was intentionally left out of the initial release. It feels like milking the consumer. Downloadable content is getting out-of-fucking-hand.

Gamers should not be charged extra for modes of play that, for all intents and purposes, should have been released with the original game! Whatever you want to call this "Versus" mode, it most definitely is not an expansion pack. Beyond the Sword is an expansion pack for Civilization IV. Broodwar is an expansion pack for Starcraft. Capcom's "expansion" for Resident Evil 5 is more like the developer deciding to release an online tournament mode for Street Fighter IV, a noted omission from the initial release, as a $5 download (don't get any ideas, Capcom!)

I really hope no one buys this and Capcom realizes that gamers won't be swindled, but I know I'll be wrong. The popularity of XBox Live is enough to prove that there are a lot of suckers out there.

[UPDATE]: This is downloadable content done right:

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin fans are in for a treat next month, as Monolith has announced that it's going to be releasing "Toy Soldiers," the game's first new map pack, in mid-April. Of course, the biggest part of the news, though, is that the DLC is going to be free. [emphasis mine]

Amazon Caves to Copyright Fear Mongers

Last week Author's Guild president Roy Blount Jr. wrote a column for the New York Times arguing that Amazon's Kindle 2 is in violation of copyright law because of the unit's text-to-speech functionality. Blount argued that such functionality was a derivative work -- I won't get into why that is incorrect, since BoingBoing has a nice refutation of Blount's argument.

Today, I read an Associated Press article which reports that Amazon has caved to the Author's Guild:

Amazon.com Inc. changed course Friday and said it would allow copyright holders to decide whether they will permit their works to be read aloud using the second-generation Kindle electronic reader's new text-to-speech feature.

The worst part, though, is this:

The Web retailer also said the text-to-speech feature is legal — and wouldn't require Amazon to pay out additional royalties — because a book read aloud doesn't constitute a copy, a derivative work or a performance.

If the feature is legal, why cave to the Author's Guild? Allowing the author of a work to disable the functionality of Amazon's Kindle isn't good for users of the product. That would be like VCR manufacturers giving television broadcasters the ability to disable home recording for any particular program. Amazon's move here doesn't make any sense. Giving in to the unreasonable demands of overly-restrictive copyright proponents will only give credence to their arguments. Amazon should take a stand; the fact that Amazon's position is clearly of the right side of the law should have made this an easy decision.

I hope this blows up in the face of the Author's Guild and that e-books which allow the text-to-speech feature sell far beyond those that don't.

Blackberry: The Tool of Choice for Big Brother

You may have seen this new Blackberry commercial in which Research In Motion Limited (RIM) asks, "What if delivery people ran the world?" All I have to say is that I hope they never do.

The commercial begins with a teacher taking roll. One student, Callahan, is absent. The teacher uses his new Blackberry phone/walkie-talkie to ask around the school for the student. First he asks the bus driver, who "delivers" children from the back of trucks rather than using buses, who states that the kid was dropped off already. The image of children coming out of the back of the trucks adds a kind of police state flavor to the commercial, as well. The teacher rings the gym and the hallway, looking for Callahan (the hallway monitor just finds a rather nerdy-looking freshman in a locker...) but is told that the student cannot be found. The teacher then uses his Blackberry to check for any emails from the kid's parents. When none are found, the teacher informs drivers on the street to find and detain Callahan to be brought back for detention.

What message is this commercial really sending? Technology can solve problems, and the side effects of such technologies are inconsequential to getting the job done.

Blackberry is ready to bring the Orwellian nightmare one step closer to reality. Imagine living in a world in which your every action was monitored and your freedom of choice removed. This is what RIM thinks would be a better way, all brought to you by a communications device.

Neil Postman would find this an example of the technopoly; we are so utterly in love with the belief that technology can solve problems, that we forget about the cultural values our technologies make obsolete.

For reference, here is the commercial:

Breaking Conventional Wisdom On Sharing, Remixing, and Reusing Content

Nine Inch Nails' CC-licensed mp3 album, Ghosts I-IV, is also the best selling mp3 album on Amazon. A perfect summary is already available, here.

In other words, despite the fact that NIN's CC license meant that the digital album could be freely shared, remixed and reused, it was still the #1 selling album on Amazon.

RIAA, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Patent Law Absurdity: Worlds.com Claims Ownership of the Concept of MMOs

I came across this Penny Arcade comic today, which is troubling. Worlds.com is suing NCsoft for patent infringement, claiming that the game developer has infringed on their "System and Method for Enabling Users to Interact in a Virtual Space" patent. Yeah, you read that right. More information can be read here and here.

If the suit is successful, I'd suspect Worlds.com to go after all other developers of MMOs. What will happen to World of Warcraft? The new Warhammer: Age of Reckoning? Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures? And the dozens of other existing MMOs?

Constitutionality of RIAA Lawsuits Being Challenged

Joel Tennenbaum is currently being sued by the RIAA for having 7 songs in a shared folder when he was 17 years old. Tennenbaum is now in his 3rd year of graduate school. The RIAA is asking for damages amounting to more than $1,000,000.

Charlie Nesson is representing Tennenbaum and challenging the constitutionality of such lawsuits in the hope of stopping any similar lawsuits in the future. If successful, individuals who have shared music in a personal, noncommercial fashion could no longer be targets in the RIAA's sights.

Nesson and Tennenbaum were interviewed by David Weinberger, Harvard law professor, yesterday. Nesson lays out the grounds on which the lawsuits are being challenged. He makes the comparison between file-sharers today and radio broadcasters in the '50s; both individuals engaged in a similar activity -- sharing music for free. The difference, Nesson points out, is that the broadcasters were given payola, while file-sharers are sued ridiculous amounts of money. He also states that the RIAA's tactics are constitutional because they are a private company using the federal court system to enforce civil lawsuits through coercion, threats, and fear, amounting to extortion tactics.

Both Nesson and Tennenbaum recognize and articulate the concept that the music industry has decided to fight against file-sharing and digital technology in order to continue using their old business model rather than embrace these new technological and cultural changes by adopting a new business model.

I'll be watching their case to see how it develops.

Disintegration Nation 8tracks

I finally had some time to think about a new mix for 8tracks, and I decided on a post-apocalyptic theme this time around. Enjoy Disintegration Nation:

1. Resistance 77 - Nuclear Attack (Nuclear Attack EP 7")
   
2. The Flesh Eaters - Disintegration Nation (Self-Titled 7")
   
3. Crass - They've Got a Bomb (The Feeding of the 5000 LP)
   
4. Conflict - Mighty and Superior (The Battle Continues 7")
5. Crucifix - Annihilation (Dehumanization LP)
   
6. Chaos UK - Four Minute Warning (Burning Britain 7")
   
7. Legion of Parasites - Sea of Desecration (We Don't Want Your Fucking War LP)
   
8. The Weirdos - We Got the Neutron Bomb (We Got the Neutron Bomb 7")
   

Georgia's Criminalization of Consensual Sex Continues

I first saw this story on Scienceblogs, and now on BoingBoing, about Wendy Whitaker of Georgia who is required to be a registered sex offender because she gave a nearly 16-year-old boy a blow job when she was 17 years old. Both students were high school sophomores. Previously, the law in Georgia made any sex act between an individual 16 years or older with another individual under the age of 16 a criminal act of child molestation.

Now, she's being evicted from her home because of an unadvertised childcare center located in a local Catholic church. Her and her family have until thanksgiving to move out.

I'm reminded of the Genarlow Wilson case, which I wrote about before. Nearly identical circumstances -- Wilson was the 17-year-old who received a blow job from a 15-year-old classmate. The publicity and controversy that generated from the case when Wilson refused to take the plea bargain forced the Georgian legislature to rethink its sex offender laws. Eventually, the legislature repealed the law; however, the decision was not retroactive and did not apply to the Wilson case. When the state Supreme Court heard Wilson's case, though, they decided that his 10 year prison sentence was cruel and unusual punishment for the "crime" committed. Wilson was released after serving 2 years, and he was not required to be a registered sex offender.

But this now repealed law, this injustice, is still affecting Georgian residents. I think that Whitaker's case should be enough to convince the legislature that their decision to repeal the law should be applied retroactively to all similar cases.

DRM-Free v. DRM-Stricken

World of Goo, a puzzle game, has a 90% piracy rate -- a rough estimate by the developer 2D Boy. What's interesting to note is that the developers reference the Russell Carroll study that I've written about before to show that the piracy rates between DRM-free and DRM-stricken games aren't any different:

this is in line with a previous estimate by russell carroll (director of marketing at reflexive) for the game ricochet infinity. russell estimated a 92% piracy rate and i found his analysis quite interesting (check it out here if you’re curious). one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale. this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying.

in our case, we might have even converted more than 1 in a 1000 pirates into legit purchases. either way, ricochet shipped with DRM, world of goo shipped without it, and there seems to be no difference in the outcomes. we can’t draw any conclusions based on two data points, but i’m hoping that others will release information about piracy rates so that everyone could see if DRM is the waste of time and money that we think it is. [emphasis/grammar in original]

I think the more important sentence in the quoted text is this: "people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying."

Game developers and publishers should keep this in mind because it means that file-sharing isn't the same thing as lost sales, which is the opposite of what most developers and publishers assume to be the truth.

Epic Games Would Charge Extra to Fight Final Boss

Epic Games is at it again, this time it's in an interview with company president Michael Capps:

Q: How do you see downloadable content evolving over the next few years?

Michael Capps: I'm not sure how big it is here [in Europe], but the secondary market is a huge issue in the United States. Our primary retailer makes the majority of its money off of secondary sales, and so you're starting to see games taking proactive steps toward that by... if you buy the retail version you get the unlock code.

I've talked to some developers who are saying "If you want to fight the final boss you go online and pay USD 20, but if you bought the retail version you got it for free". We don't make any money when someone rents it, and we don't make any money when someone buys it used -- way more than twice as many people played Gears than bought it...

As I've said before, Epic doesn't make money on a used sale because they've already made money on that sale, the first sale. Ownership has transferred.

But you don't see libraries (where you can get content for free! Imagine that!) tanking the book publishing industry. The film industry is making money hand over fist despite the existence of Blockbuster and Netflix. Why does the gaming industry believe that it's in a unique situation?

Ah, here's why:

Q: Do you see an enemy in this equation? Is it the retailer, or the purchaser of second-hand games?

Michael Capps: I'd hate to say my players are my enemies - that doesn't make any sense! But we certainly have a rule at Epic that we don't buy any used games - sure as hell you're not going to be recognised as an Epic artist going in and buying used videogames - because this is how we make our money and how all our friends in the industry make money.

I think a little bit of it is education so people realise that the reason there's no PC market right now is piracy. I mean, Crytek just put out some numbers saying the ratio was 20:1 on Crysis, for pirated to non-pirated use. So guess what? That's why there's no Gears of War 2 on PC, because there's no market, because copying killed it - and that's gruesome to a company like ours that's been in the PC market for so long.

We're trying to fix it, there's a new alliance of companies trying to make PC gaming work again. But if people are playing games without buying them, then the games aren't going to keep coming.

Piracy, the ultimate scapegoat. Yeah, people who would never have bought your product in the first place are costing you sales. All those lost sales from people who wouldn't ever buy games.

The PC gaming market isn't in decline because of piracy, in fact, I'm unaware of any hard evidence that shows that the PC gaming market is in decline at all. Games still sell millions of copies, copy-protection or not. What will kill the PC gaming industry is shit like the president of Epic Games floating around the idea that developers should charge used game buyers extra money just to be able to finish their games. This kind of behavior is blatantly anti-consumer, and people will react negatively to that kind of treatment by not purchasing any of your games.

What we're seeing from Epic is a content publisher's dream-- to have ultimate control over how copies of their distributed content are used. Before digital content, these publishers had little they could do regarding the secondhand market. But the gaming industry is inherently digital. It's software; code. They have the ability to easily include schemes like this because of the nature of their medium. I'm not surprised that Epic Games (and lets not forget EA) is attacking the secondhand market for games; however, that doesn't make their intentions any less of an assault on people's expectations about what they can do with their purchased content.

[UPDATE]: Soren Johnson, game designer and programmer, offers several insightful observations on this topic.

Tom Chick, games journalist, mused on this topic as well:

Without any segue or distinction, Capps conflates renting games with pirating them. He goes straight from "buying used games" to "PC games are dead because of piracy." Amazing. [emphasis in original]

Fallout 3 Sales and Piracy

Wired reported yesterday that Fallout 3 earned Bethesda $300 million, with 4.7 million units shipped between the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 versions. The game was released on October 28, 2008.

But with just about 3 weeks before launch, the game had already been leaked and pirated on the Xbox 360. If we are to believe PC developers who claim that piracy of PC games makes them unprofitable, how are we to interpret this information? PC games are usually pirated the day of release, maybe a few days prior. Fallout 3 was pirated on a console almost 3 weeks before release!

I don't know the breakdown of sales between platforms, as that information doesn't seem to be available. So it's hard to say exactly, but I'll hedge my bets and say that piracy of Fallout 3 on the Xbox 360 did not negatively impact sales in the way that PC developers claim that such piracy impacts PC sales. I'd even go so far as to say that this is the kind of evidence that really puts that entire line of reasoning into question.

[UPDATE]: I just found this article in PC World, which states that the Xbox version of the game accounts for 55% of sales. This only further supports my conclusion.

An Obama Administration and Copyright

Before the election, a former college professor of mine mentioned that Joe Biden was a big RIAA supporter. I did a little digging, and Biden's record on copyright is pretty distressing.

Today, though, I read this post over at Scienceblogs, which states that Barack Obama has placed coverage of election night under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license. Good news, indeed!

If this is any indication of how Obama views copyright, I hope that Obama will follow his own leanings on copyright law and not those of Biden.

Obama Wins!

Vote!

Electoral map prediction as of today, 10:33 AM:

Get out and vote!

Teenage Lobotomy

Meghan McCain defines Punk Rock^TM:

STEVE DOOCY: I'm looking -- I'm looking at your website, I had no idea that the Ramones were your, uh, favorite group of all time --

MEGHAN MCCAIN: [laughs]

CINDY MCCAIN: [laughs]

DOOCY: -- because right now, you've got this thing with, uh, with Linda Ramone [Cummings], if people are interested, check it out --

M. MCCAIN: Yeah.

DOOCY: -- because you two travel around.

M. MCCAIN: She's incredible.

DOOCY: Yeah. Go --

M. MCCAIN: She's so cool, and we're going out on this whole new thing that the only way to be be Punk Rock^TM anymore is to be conservative.

GRETCHEN CARLSON: In your --

M. MCCAIN: So only Punk Rock^TM [indeciferable]

CARLSON: In your book, Meghan...

[edits mine]

Hmm... not quite.