Today, Penny-Arcade had a very interesting comic about second hand games.

And it’s the usual controversy about the second-hand market you have come to expect. Developers and Publishers hate second hand games, they don’t see any money from it. While end users love it because they can obtain titles for sometimes half of what you’d have to pay typically for a brand new title. Now, I do understand where developers are coming from as a content creator. I get it. You want to make as much money as you can with what you have. It makes sense.

But, as with every other industry that sells information or an experience: they forgot about the needs of their clientele. This move does absolutely nothing but showcase how out-of touch they are with their audience. They often think that $80 dollars for a game isn’t expensive, but it is. It is so out-of-line that it’s kind of staggering on how little developers and publishers seem to think about the wallets or bank accounts of their “customers” unless it’s how much they can drain from them. They continually hammer you over the head about YOU should care about THEIR fragile little careers (I live in Vancouver, there’s a few developers here. They don’t have to worry about rent or bills, I can tell you that.) while they openly and shamelessly treat you, the “customer” like nothing more than a walking sack of money that’s waiting to be cut open and drained. That’s if they don’t openly imply you a thief for trying to make ends meet and still play their game.

I’ve brought this up before, but the fact bears reiteration: Gaming is more expensive than developers realize and they are at a point where they don’t even really remember how much it costs. lets take a look at the breakdown of it:

• Firstly you need a gaming platform. For the sake of argument we are going to go with the cheaper option: consoles. So an Xbox 360 will set you back $200.00 at the cheapest option.
• Secondly, you need an entertainment rig, or at the very least just a Television. Tube sets are essentially obsolete, so lets take a look at an affordable flat screen that isn’t a pile of un-viewable junk. $600.00. (and were leaving a stereo out of the equation, just to play Devil’s Advocate)
• Microsoft and Valve would really like you to have an Xbox Live account to play with friends, purchase DLC as well as a low-cost way of generating income. They give you the option to try it out, but it’s $19.99 for a few months to get started.

So now we’re coming up on a thousand dollars and we haven’t even bought one damn game yet. And if you’re playing on a PC? you can easily tack on an extra $1000.00 – $2000.00 depending on how nice you want your rig to be. What other kind of pass-time requires a minimum of $1000 in investments as a starting point before you can even go out and get going? I can tell you right now, my guitar is a decent make and, in comparison, is looking mighty attractive right now considering it cost about 1/3 of my gaming setup and is usually more rewarding to spend time with.

Developers: your games are only ONE option of many for a person like me to spend their time with. You have to remember that you are competing with all manner of other pass-times & hobbies for my limited amount of dollars to be spent on and I’m choosing to buy your games instead of pirating them outright because I think it’s a just cause to pay for good content, but I am not made of money, and it’s ridiculous to think that I am. You have to remember that my choice is simply that: a choice. If you make it any more difficult to play your games, I’m going to just walk away to any one of the other forms of entertainment that I enjoy.

My DVD collection won’t stop me from watching my movies because I didn’t buy a band new copy, nor will Gibson stop my guitar from making music if I had bought it from my dad.

I like your games. And I’m willing to pay money for them. But right now, the bottom line is that you’re looking at me pulling cash out of my wallet and parting with money to play your games and you’re telling me that I can’t do that. I will walk away from your business unless you change your attitude.

A post of Copyright Bill C-61 has been floating around the web for some time now and to be honest, I’m not too sure if I find it useful to anybody. If  we look at what Jim Prentice had to say about it, the Industry Minister has stated you get this:

“Our government has committed to ensuring Canada’s copyright law is up-to-date, and today we are delivering by introducing this ‘made-in-Canada’ bill that balances the interests of Canadians who use digital technology and those who create content”

And, so… basically we can copy legally acquired music, television shows, ebooks, photographs and movies to digital devices like iPods and the like. Call me crazy, but that’s what I thought people were already doing for years, now. I know I have. Although, I have to admit that the “timeshifting” term is a bit silly. I mean, the whole idea is that you’re temporarily saving a recording of a program that you can view at a time that fits your schedule better. Jesus, we’ve been doing this exact same thing since the personal videocassette recorder and VHS tapes were introduced the public. Why is this even an issue now? just because it’s being saved sooner and to a hard drive instead of a spool of tape?

Actually, I imagine that it’s because you could rip these saved videos and throw them up on all sorts of legally questionable websites.

This bill does have an air of positivity and a lot of it is spun in such a way to make us feel that we’re gaining all manners of new freedoms that haven’t been addressed before, but at the end of the day, the gist I can derive out of the bill is to allow Canadians the ability to copy and save and store digital media in their own libraries at home and to move them to portable digital devices and players with enough freedom to match what would be the equivalent to a creative commons licence…  unless it has had some form of DRM on it when you bought it. And giving content producers and providers enough of a heads-up to put DRM on anything and everything.

This doesn’t give balance to anyone. It is turning this whole situation into the same stupid cat & mouse game we’ve already had to deal with, just with a newer rulebook. And none of the major rules had changed.

the great scourge of the information age. I’ve tried many times to express why I feel piracy is so important, and I think I may have hit a nerve:

Piracy, right now, is important because it makes it difficult to make money in media. and that’s important. because by making it harder to cut a living in multimedia, it forcefully weeds out the entities that have no interest the medium as art, but as a source of income.

think of it like a human body in the grips of a fever: it is forcefully making it’s own body uninhabitable so it can drive out malicious agents.

that’s essentially my personal take on priacy and how it should be seen as a natural reaction to the *LACK* of a competitive marketplace since the 1970’s.

and it’s my opinion that this is only really at a start and has a lot farther to go and a lot more damage to do before things even begin to solidify.

the OiNK admin on trial has finally left as a free man, since his endeavours began back in 2007/2008.

I just think it’s such a shame that this had to take so long and that now that the man has been let free, all of his efforts with OiNK have been largely forgotten.

Over the past few months the government of Canada is holding a national forum to try and get a feel for what it’s citizens think of the current state of copyright in our country. Even though initially I thought this was a brilliant opportunity, our representatives seem to value the opinions of big business more than taxpayers with the trends swinging over to support implied draconian copyright law extensions and imposing a DMCA clone. 

Though, as citizens, there is something you can do about it if you don’t agree with that notion. (something tells me that most don’t)  The Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights or CCER have a letter template and submission form that you can use and even customize to write your opinion on the matter and it will email and snail-mail your letter to the Copyright Consultations administrator, Tony Clement, James Moore, Marc Garneau, Pablo Rodriguez, Charlie Angus and Stephen Harper. 

I wrote my own and sent it in. I would suggest that you do, as well.

So it seems that almost none of the required funds that Global Gaming Factory needs in order to buy The Pirate Bay have been raised thus far. This, to be honest, isn’t shaping up to be a great situation for file sharers and fans of The Pirate Bay. The way the TPB staff are going to be able to pay off their legal expenditures and fines, is obviously going to be way of selling the site. But the only interested buyer can’t get the money and the clock seems to be ticking. In an interview Wayne Rosso has been quoted to say: 

“We decided that we’re not going risk our reputation further. The more time we spent with Mr. Pandeya, the less confident we were. I don’t think there’s going to be any money raised with GGF’s current plans.”

And when confronted with the news, Pirate Bay founders have been said to arrogantly state that GGF have a week to raise the necessary funds or “the deal is off”. You see, to me that seems like a very slippery stance to take when you’re piled down with legal debts and the only real way out is to sell your site. I really don’t think they should be so picky about who is willing to buy that site as, if one were to ask me, isn’t actually worth much of anything. I mean, yeah it’s an internet icon, but it’s core foundation is based on distributing content that they don’t own the copyright to. In all actuality, it’s probably going to cost you out-of-pocket to run that site and anything you pay for it is going to be an enormous loss. That is, unless you have an idea that can take a user-base of media consumers that aren’t willing to pay for content under the guise of bootlegging and be able to draw an income from it behind the scenes, with the risk of 75 – 90 % of the users migrating away from your site on the sole fact that you are a new owner. If the kids over that The Pirate Bay were really serious about paying off their legal debt, they’d be sharpening their pencils every damn day for a buyer dumb enough to invest in a bombshell that’s past her prime. 

It’s not looking good, out there.

The RIAA has been stated to say over the weekend to officially say, at least in terms of commercial music, that digital rights management is dead. 

I guess that it’s good that they’ve realized this, but I also think that it’s atrocious that it took this long for them to realize it. I mean, after the Sony/BMG rootkit debacle and the countless horrid jukebox players that would embed themselves on a legitimate purchaser’s PC with no safe way to remove them? you would think that they would have, by process of elimination, figured out that DRM has never stopped anyone from bootlegging any kind of music and has only made it difficult for the people who paid to enjoy the music they’ve invested in.

So, my obvious reaction is be “good riddance to bad rubbish.” Developing a new business model means you actually have to build a new one, not just hamhandedly enforce your existing one and calling it a new business model.

Some large discussion has been happening lately on the fact The Pirate Bay sold last week to a company called Global Gaming Factory X. This is pretty big news as the icons of file-sharing on the web seemed to give in to the force of financial woes related to their recent trial. With The Pirate Bay seeming to pull a Napster and legit media sales on the horizon, the open source community of The ‘Bay are furious. Demands for a system to deactivate accounts and separate all ties to The Pirate Bay are coming at the site admin in large numbers, unrelenting. To the average person, it would seem that the good ol’ days are over and the sun might actually be setting over at The ‘Bay. 

But I have a different take on the whole situation. Yes, this could be the end of www.thepiratebay.org as we know it… but in a recent interview Rasmus Fleischer points out a very interesting fact: 

The web site that the visitor of the domain is directed to could be said to be ownable, in the sense that any new owner can change its contents. But it is also copyable, meaning that the “original” version can pop up again at another domain name. Actually, it is very simple to copy. You can fit all of The Pirate Bay, including the software and every torrent, on a USB stick.

A single USB stick, you say? that’s small. that’s really small. In fact, I’d say it’s small enough to easily be made into a .torrent file and put up on the web to be distributed at whim. So, with that in mind, I get the sneaking suspicion that a backup of the site will flood the internet if the previous owners aren’t happy with the way the new owners are running it. That’s if they don’t just let the dog off the chain right off the bat. 

Just imagine that after all this strife and struggle and law to put a leash & collar on The Pirate Bay…  All the money, effort and controversy that’s lead up to this point when the IFPI, MPAA and RIAA have thrown resources at it like the world was about to end and struggled to emerge victorious and start to feel the relief that The Pirate Bay is about to close it’s doors?  Imagine that overnight, 5 to 50 to 500 to 5000 more Pirate Bay Clones show up, every last one of them identical in capacity and functionality to the original Pirate Bay, all sharing the same trackers and databases. 

Copy & Paste. Such a simple concept, but so infinitely versatile when put into practice. People need to realize that once you let something loose into the web, it’s going to exist and migrate from user to user in an organic and unstoppable way that I don’t think that the world has actually realized is possible, yet.

So now not only France but Spain has struck down the “3 Strikes” proposition for file sharers that’s been circulating throughout western Europe. ISPs have stated that it’s ludicrous to demand that they punish their customers without a viable, legal alternative to use. And I have to agree with them, because it simply is ridiculous to demand such a thing.

It’s kind of sad to see it when groups of people who think that they have some kind of authoritative position trying to come to grips with a situation that they do not understand in any remote capacity. I mean, it’s as simple as this: hen people see a problem and they understand what is happening and what can be done about it to fix or modify things to turn it into a positive event, they simply test and implement what needs to be done whereas people who have no idea what’s wrong with their business model or how to go about fixing it, they simply start barking orders and issuing stiff ultimatums at staff as well as customers.

I have to wonder if the entertainment industry knows that they don’t have all the time in the world to come to grips with the reality they’re facing and develop new models for distribution and generating revenue. Because if they don’t get their heads out of their asses, someone is going to beat them to the punch and that will be the final nail in the coffin.