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Posts Tagged ‘piracy’

The value of ‘Fair Use’

April 28th, 2010

Brad McGraw

Piracy ruins the economy! You’ve heard it from the RIAA, the MPAA, Senators, Congressmen and the news media. Industry funded studies claiming piracy impact numbers of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars lost every year. However, a report (PDF) released a few weeks ago by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has thrown those wild numbers out the door, basically saying that there is no real way to definitively quantify the impact of piracy. It has always been claimed by these industry reports that piracy has costs thousands of jobs every year, billions of dollars lost, and the economy gets damaged because of it. For example, if someone pirates a $60 video game or $20 CD or DVD, that doesn’t necessarily mean that money isn’t being spent elsewhere in the economy. It also calls out the previous ‘studies’ that the RIAA, MPAA, etc have been using saying that the model used to come up with industry supporting numbers has serious flaws. Something pretty much everybody else has known for awhile, but we don’t have lobbyists.

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Posted in Just my Opinion

Tags: CCIA, Fair Use, GAO, MPAA, piracy, RIAA

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A chat with Fredrik Wester

April 13th, 2010

Brad McGraw

Paradox Interactive is best known for its Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis series of games, both deep historical strategy games and this is an area where Paradox shines. When I have described the Hearts of Iron series to people its very easy to do, it’s Axis & Allies on crack. It is as addicting too, ‘just one more turn’ turns into an all night affair. If you are a strategy gamer and you haven’t picked up a Paradox game, you are definitely missing out.

Paradox is a company of gamers who are in the business of making games, not businessmen running a game company. This shows up in the amount of interaction they have with their fans. This is one of the things that sets Paradox apart from other game companies; the time they spend on their own forums.

Recently the Paradox forums passed their 200,000 user mark and to celebrate they offered discounts, had contests to win free games and an ‘Ask Paradox (almost) anything’ thread. In fact even though the 200k celebration is over, they are still answering questions, and it seems they intend to keep this as an active thread. While I never asked for an interview in the thread itself, I did see it as an opportunity to approach them and see if we could grab an interview. Fredrik Wester, CEO of Paradox, was kind enough to answer our questions.

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Posted in Games, Interviews

Tags: DRM, Eurpoa Universalis, Fredrik Wester, Hearts of Iron, Paradox Interactive, piracy, Victoria 2

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ACTA : Why You Should Be Concerned

February 6th, 2010

Kathy McGraw

ACTA, or the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is an international trade agreement that would standardize intellectual property rights (IP) enforcement amongst all signatories.

The problem with ACTA is that it is being hammered out in complete secrecy and some of the information that has gotten out about it points to some very scary stuff. Why is it scary? It’s scary because some of the provisions would pretty much violate civil liberties, the right of privacy and the presumption of innocence that constitute the backbone the judicial systems in most modern democracies.

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Posted in Miscellaneous

Tags: ACTA, graduated response, piracy, RIAA, treaty

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Do you own your digital property?

January 18th, 2010

Brad McGraw

In a recent blog post at Public Knowledge Jef Pearlman quoted Michael Robertson who asked, ‘Do you own your digital property?’, and went on to say, ‘I know I sold you that, but you can’t play it on a portable device or put it on the Internet’ you’ve turned everything into a rental or a lease.’. This is exactly what the video game companies are saying. We now ‘license’ games, we do not own them.

Now there is an organization (DECE) that wants to start a ‘service’ that allows you to cross platform your media. That could mean music, movies, video games, etc. I would suggest going to my first link and reading that article for what that means. I am going to focus on video games and what I think DRM is supposed to be doing for the video game industry.

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Posted in Games, Just my Opinion

Tags: DECE, DRM, piracy, Second hand sales

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Netflix stops carrying Warner Bros. new releases due to studio piracy concerns

January 7th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

For years, movie studios have cried poverty due in large part to piracy of their movies. And one of the suspected culprits in the rapid appearance of new DVD releases on to torrent sites is Netflix.

Basically, for $16.99 per month, Netflix customers get access to up to three movies simultaneously with the ability to exchange movies at any time for any other film in the Netflix catalogue. The movie studios have decided that this rapid and regular exchange of titles explains in part the speed with which new movie releases appear on popular download sites.

Well, Netflix has begun to cave.

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Posted in Movies and TV

Tags: Netflix, piracy, Warner

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