Ubisoft has this bizarre and misguided obsession with DRM. Rather than focusing on providing value, it’s always looking to take it away in a fruitless battle to “stop piracy.” The company doesn’t seem to understand that if it gives people a reason to buy, they will. But limiting value doesn’t help anyone. In the past, the company has made a series of bad choices about DRM and suffered because of it. The company also seems to misunderstand how unauthorized file distribution occurs and what it means. In cases where it finally came around to scaling back its DRM, it seemed to do so petulantly, with a passive-aggressive “open letter” about it.

The latest move, sent in by a whole bunch of you, is to require copies of games to call back home to Ubisoft every time they’re used. Yes, you will need to be online, and the game will need to phone home before you can use it. Of course, if Ubisoft actually thinks this is going to hold back those getting unauthorized copies of the game, it’s mistaken. The Ars Technica article above quotes one file-sharing gamer:

“This is fine. I only have to access the Internet once to get Ubisoft games. You’re the ones paying for a broken copy.”

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

You may recall back in December that we wrote about the oddity of EMI suing Vimeo, claiming that by creating its own “lipdub” videos of people singing along to a song, it was actively encouraging (i.e., “inducing”) copyright infringement. The main example, of course, was the company’s first lipdub, which kicked off the craze, to the song Flagpole Sitta by the band Harvey Danger:

Lip Dub – Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri on Vimeo.

To claim that this is somehow harmful to EMI is flat-out ridiculous. The song got a lot more attention because of this video (which currently has over 2.3 million views) — and almost certainly helped the band and EMI out in terms of sales. And yet, EMI says it was harmful. The Citizen Media Law Project points out that the lead singer of Harvey Danger appears to disagree in a big way, having sent Vimeo an email after that lipdub video came out:

That Flagpole Sitta video made me incredibly happy, just when I thought there was NOTHING that could make me listen to that song again. A thousand thank you’s.

A thousand thank yous… and a lawsuit from your label.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

Apple’s new iPhone SDK gives the go-ahead for 3G VoIP calls. We tested it out using Fring’s video calling feature.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

Continue reading →

Matt writes in with a great example of how the concept that content is advertising and advertising is content is moving to the iPhone in the most recent iPhone app for NPR:

In this app, the mobile analytics and advertising company Medialets is serving up an ad for the new album, Contra, by the band Vampire Weekend. At first, the ad just peeks out at the bottom of the NPR app, but if you click to expand it, it quickly takes up the entire device. So why would you want to do this? Because it’s a video for Vampire Weekend’s new song “Cousins” — and thanks to some of the iPhone’s unique features, you can actually interact with the ad, shaking your iPhone to change how the video looks.

Seems like a perfect example of how both content is advertising and advertising is content. In this case, the “ad” is actually valuable content that people want to see. And yet, that content is also advertising the band and its new album, and doing so in a fun and compelling way. Of course, separately, I have to ask if the band is both paying for the ad and getting paid royalties for the ad? After all, this is clearly an advertisement for the band and its new album, but we’re always told by the recording industry that any usage — even those like radio that act as advertising — need to be paid for with royalties.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

One of the more recent “moral panics” that we’ve seen is around this concept of “sexting,” where people (often youngsters who might not fully recognize the consequences of what they’re doing) send either naked or at least revealing images of themselves to others. In the last year or so the press has written about it quite a bit, and while it seems like it’s really just a situation that requires more education for kids to recognize what a bad idea this is, once you get a moral panic going, it’s never long before politicians feel the need to “help deal with” the issue, “for the children,” of course. Mark sends in the news that some politicians in Indiana have decided to tackle the issue with new legislation, though it’s not at all clear that the state Senators debating the subject even understand what sexting means:

“Until some terrible tragedy happens where a child or teenager commits suicide because they have been bullied by e-mail, texting or sexting,” said Rep. Sandra Blanton.

Bullied by sexting will lead to suicide? How? And how do you create a law to prevent that? Then there’s the politician who wants to ban mobile phones in schools to deal with this issue:

“Keep them in lockers and not allow them in the classroom or on school property to do the sexting,” Rep. Blanton said.

Really? The sexting happens on school property? If that’s the case, then wouldn’t the issue be public nudity — for which I would imagine there are already laws — rather than “sexting”? If he just means that the sending of these photos continues on school property, I’m not really sure how keeping the phones in lockers fixes anything. It just means those messages will be sent after school when there’s even less supervision of what the kids are doing. I guess that’s the head-in-the-sand approach to dealing with things, but I’m not sure how it helps any.

Certainly the issue of sexting is one worth educating kids about, so they recognize the dangers of passing on such photos which can quickly multiply and be spread further in amazingly embarrassing ways. But I don’t see how any law helps the issue at all — but plenty of ways laws can make things worse — especially when the politicians writing and voting on the laws don’t even seem to understand what the issue is beyond “sexting = bad!”

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

Apparently times are hard over at ECN Magazine. Rather than come up with compelling content to draw people in, its Technical Editor decided to pen the mother of all troll-baiting editorials. NSILMike points us to Jason Lomberg’s recent rant on The Internet Entitlement Mentality, which I think may set a record for repeating pretty much every long-debunked fallacy about online content and business models, as well as how it describes those folks who actually understand basic economics, and how free works as part of an economic ecosystem. It’s really not worth debunking all those points over again. Honestly, reading it makes me wonder if it’s pure satire instead of troll-bait, given the number of old debunked cliches it tosses out. I mean, you name it, it’s got it. Unauthorized access is “theft,” the publishing and music industries are dying, other business models simply cannot fund stuff, paywalls will solve everything for newspapers, and suing music fans is a reasonable solution. It’s all in there.

But as I read it, it again made me wonder which is the real “entitlement mentality”? Is it those who recognize what the technology enables and uses that to better share and spread culture and information? Or is it those who insist that business models should go back to the way things used to be, and that governments should change and enforce laws to prop up those failing business models? It seems like you could make a very strong case that it’s the latter position that is the true “entitlement mentality.”

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

Once again, deadline looms in the Google Book Search settlement process, as a new round of objections to the revised settlement must be filed by the end of Thursday.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

Continue reading →

While lots of newspapers have been talking up the idea of putting up a paywall (even as early results look really, really bad), the Guardian has been one publication that has been pretty adamant that paywalls for online news make no sense. This view was put forth again, quite eloquently, as Editor Alan Rusbridger detailed why it makes little sense not just from a business perspective, but from a journalism perspective:

It removes you from the way people the world over now connect with each other. You cannot control distribution or create scarcity without becoming isolated from this new networked world.

At the same time, he points out how paywalls also try to position papers as an “authority” rather than being involved in a wider story:

The second issue it raises is the one of ‘authority’ versus ‘involvement’. Or, more crudely, ‘Us versus Them’. Again, this is similar to the other two forks in the road, but not quite the same. Here the tension is between a world in which journalists considered themselves — and were perhaps considered by others — special figures of authority. We had the information and the access; you didn’t. You trusted us filter news and information and to prioritise it — and to pass it on accurately, fairly, readably and quickly. That state of affairs is now in tension with a world in which many (but not all) readers want to have the ability to make their own judgments; express their own priorities; create their own content; articulate their own views; learn from peers as much as from traditional sources of authority. Journalists may remain one source of authority, but people may also be less interested to receive journalism in an inert context — ie which can’t be responded to, challenged, or knitted in with other sources. It intersects with the pay question in an obvious way: does our journalism carry sufficient authority for people to pay — both online (where it competes in an open market of information) and print?

Putting up a paywall is really just newspapers pretending they can go back to being “authority” figures without realizing that this is not what people look to them to be, nor is it what they want them to be. And this actually brings up a really important point. Beyond the business model issues, paywalls impact journalism in the connected age:

As an editor, I worry about how a universal pay wall would change the way we do our journalism. We have taken 10 or more years to learn how to tell stories in different media — ie not simply text and still pictures. Some stories are told most effectively by a combination of print and web. That’s how we now plan our journalism. As my colleague Emily Bell is fond of saying we want it to be linked in with the web — be “of the web”, not simply be on the web.

Some stories can be told in one sentence plus a link. Some journalists are fascinated by the potential of the running, linked blog. Andrew Sparrow’s minute by minute blog of Alastair Campbell’s appearance before the Chilcott inquiry was a dazzling example of this new form of reporting, which relies on the ability to link out to sources and other media, including original documents and even (in the lunch break) Campbell’s own Twitter feed….

This, journalistically, is immensely challenging and rich. Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response — harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media. If ever there was a route to building audience, trust and relevance, it is by embracing all the capabilities of this new world, not walling yourself away from them.

As he notes, this open linking and sharing policy leads to better journalism, and that could be hurt in a paywall world. Not only that, but it would cut off the one part of the business that is actually growing and improving:

In an industry in which we get used to every trend line pointing to the floor, the growth of newspapers’ digital audience should be a beacon of hope. During the last three months of 2009 the Guardian was being read by 40% more people than during the same period in 2008. That’s right, a mainstream media company — you know, the ones that should admit the game’s up because they are so irrelevant and don’t know what they are doing in this new media landscape — has grown its audience by 40% in a year. More Americans are now reading the Guardian than read the Los Angeles Times. This readership has found us, rather than the other way round. Our total marketing spend in America in the past 10 years has been $34,000.

He also effectively points out that the argument shouldn’t be about “new media” vs. “old media,” but about how the two work together:

We are edging away from the binary sterility of the debate between mainstream media and new forms which were supposed to replace us. We feel as if we are edging towards a new world in which we bring important things to the table — editing; reporting; areas of expertise; access; a title, or brand, that people trust; ethical professional standards and an extremely large community of readers. The members of that community could not hope to aspire to anything like that audience or reach on their own; they bring us a rich diversity, specialist expertise and on the ground reporting that we couldn’t possibly hope to achieve without including them in what we do.

There is a mutualised interest here. We are reaching towards the idea of a mutualised news organisation.

The whole speech is much, much longer and well worth reading. But it adds a rather important element to the debate. Most of the argument has really focused on the business question, and whether or not paywalls would even work (or if they would just hasten the decline of newspapers). But this speech points out how paywalls also seem to get in the way of doing the type of journalism that the world now craves, and which the technology now allows.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →

The government agency’s original investigation was part of why Facebook cleaned up its controls in the first place, and now it’s dissatisfied with the results.

Originally posted at The Social

Continue reading →

One of the major concerns about various “three strikes” laws that kick people off the internet based on three accusations (not convictions) of copyright infringement, is that beyond being a stunningly disproportionate punishment to the action, it also potentially punishes many others: for example, a teenager can be accused three times of file sharing and his parents and siblings all lose their internet access because of it, that does not seem reasonable nor fair. And yet, in a rather odd statement, an IFPI representative, Shira Perlmutter, seems to be claiming some sort of magical ability to just block the single user from accessing the internet, saying to conference attendees that three strikes would only require cutting off “one account.” Perhaps the folks at the IFPI don’t quite understand how the internet works (or perhaps that’s a given) but generally speaking, when you have internet access at your house, you don’t set up separate access accounts for every family member… And if others in the family have access, what’s to stop the “cut off” one from using the other’s access?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Continue reading →