[Piracy] - Greedy industry

Say what you will about Courtney Love but her analysis on the record industry and filesharing is quite a thought out one. It's about time we empowered the creators of culture, not the parasites:

Courtney Love's analysis

[Piracy] - The other side

The debate surrounding internet piracy’s be or not to be is raging all over the world. But the focus of this debate has allways been on the filesharers and not the organisations that are trying to stop them. The reason for this is because the whole debate is orchestrated by the organisations themselves. I think it’s frightening how much of a witchhunt this whole deal has become and the ignorance those in power are displaying. Private corporations are throwing money at polititians in order to reserve the right to persecute filesharers that disturb their mindset.

The examples of this are many but the most scandalous I can think of is the bust on Pirate Bay’s servers. In mars 22 2006 a letter from the american lobby organisation MPA was recieved by the swedish government. MPA demanded that the filesharing site Pirate Bay had to be shut down. If this was not done, MPA threatened to perform sanctions within the frame of WTO against Sweden. In the 10:th of april, Sweden’s answer came. They agreed to do anything in their power to stop the site. The bust realized on 31:st of May, the servers hosting Pirate Bay and the site Piratbyrån along with numerous other unrelated sites were confiscated. The discontent spread rapidly throughout Sweden. Whithin 24 hours, the Pirate Party had recieved 2000 new members. When the chock had settled, rumours began spreading that the american government was really behind the bust. Thomas Bodström, at that time minister of justice, lied and answered that he never had any contact with USA regarding the bust, they where not involved at all. But then SVT began investigating the events and the whole story was unveiled for the people to see.

How can something like this happen? How can a private foreign organisation tell Sweden’s government what to do? Things like these leads me to question Swedens sovereinty, I mean are we really a nation if we don’t controll it ourselves? Had the public had their say on this question, the servers would never have been confiscated. Even people within the government had their doubts about the bust and warned that a convicting sentence would be hard to get against a Bittorrent index site since there is nothing illegal going on. Yet Bodström still persisted.

I feel that the discussion about filesharing should be viewed from all sides and get the priority the people demands, not private lobby organisations. If not, we won’t be a democratic nation anymore but a nation run by Microsoft, Sony and the rest of the greedy corporations...

SVT:s discovery

[Piracy] - My take

The piracy phenomenon is a vast collection of different yet related realities, too large to fully document in a blogg. The term is surrounded by lies, greyzones and no absolute truths. In a course on ethical issues in technology the most obvious question is: is internet piracy ethically sound? There is no single answer to that question, but I will give my take on it.

At the very first glance, downloading something like a music album for free that is intended to be sold for money immediately feels wrong. In reality the question isn’t nearly as easily solved. Some call this stealing while the only thing you do is actually making a copy of the file. It can be argued that it however becomes related to stealing when you originally intended to buy the song/film/program but decided to copy it for free instead. Still, nothing has actually been stolen, the CD safely stays in the store. The main reason I think people are against piracy is because they believe that it makes the creator lose money. My main concern is to make sure there is a lasting culture flow, to make sure artists still have the same opportunity to produce culture. If everyone illegally copied every CD and never paid for it, the artist would obviously lose some of his/her income. That is ofcourse not the case but does that still make filesharing as a whole a bad thing? Let’s take a look on it from another perspective. The vast majority of the world’s music artists does not make a living producing music. Most aren’t even signed to any record label so buying their records immediately becomes impossible. The only way for these bands to reach the whole world with their music is through filesharing. There are numerous bands that never sold a record in their life but still has an audience large enough to perform live shows. So as more and more people download their records, more people go to their concert. Without the filesharing networks, these artists would often at most have a local fanbase. In it’s extremes, this means that the music culture climate is enriched and broadened by filesharing, not reduced. So what about those poor artists that actually had a record contract and lost tons of income because of the piracy? Well, in reality the record sales hasn’t decreased but increased (2004) globally contradictory to what the record companies will have us believe. The reason I believe is because people can now freely explore music in a way they never could before. By downloading an album with a new artist, people can get a taste for new music freely and decide for themselves if the record is worth buying or not. The record industry have a hard time accepting this reality, unwilling to let a penny fall through their hand even if they would earn 2 pennys later.

But this is just the music industry. Filesharing is so much more. What about the movies industry? Actually, roughly the same priciples are applicable here. By applying free exploration, a broader selection of movies will be able to make it. It is true that movie theatres are reporting less revenues but that is largely because of the popularity and availability of home theatres has increased greatly recently. In fact a survey performed by SF (Swedish Filmindustry) showed that active filesharers more frequently go to the theatres than non-filesharers.

Last but not least, the games industry. Once again I believe that filesharing will broaden the selection and distinguish good games from bad. Year after year the games industry increases it’s sales and has long since surpassed the movies industry. In 2005 the games industry revenues was $32.6 billion and the business expects it to double by 2011. All the while pirated copies of games are increasingly made available, often before they are even released. Some companies are now beginning to embrace piracy like game publisher giant EA. Representative Gerhard Florin stated that Piracy have helped open up the online market for the company. I hope more companies open their eyes to this in the future, allthough I doubt it will happen anytime soon.

All in all, I don’t believe that filesharing are any threat to the culture climate on any plane. On the contrary I believe it benfits greatly from it. But in order to fully take advantage of this the many companies business models have to change as it has through all times. If they don’t and stay stagnant, they will surely die like all the discarded and forgotten technologies they promote.

[Web 2.0] - Future in a sandbox

I’ve allready brought up the bad things about the informationsharing properties of web 2.0. This post will be about the good stuff and where web 2.0 is heading...web 3.0 if you will. I read a rather interesting article the other day about web 2.0 heading. The author stated that the future of web 2.0 is allready here, albeit in it’s beta stage. He was talking about the sandbox portion of the MMO:games genre. These games have no perticular goal but to hang around and interact with other players. The world is created and controlled by the players, not the developers and the players are free to create whatever they want in the virtual universe. Games that fit into this description are for example Second Life, Project Entropia and even in some ways the HOME-feature on Playstation 3.

The author, who had spent a week in Second Life’s virtual world, motivated his claims with a number of reasons. He described these worlds as a graphical internet. Everyone is represented graphically by an avatar aswell as larger organisations and companies. Walking around in the world is like traversing the internet but in 3d. Want to visit a friends blog or homepage? Just go to his house and you can find it all there. This deepens the notion of the internet as a actual world and allows for interacting with other users in a more profound way. Ofcourse you can also log on to the “regular” internet from inside the game via virtual screens but the true experience comes from actually seeing pictures and videos as if you were still in your own home and not staring on a screen. Even watching a concert in the game as if you were in the crowd.

Another reason or crossreference to the concept of web 2.0 is the contribution of the users. In these sandbox games the users are the ones that add new content. Everything from museums to exploding panncakes (the authors invention) are created and the world boundries expands as users create new landmarks. Arcitecture classes, conferances, exhibitions and concerts, all are held inside the world. I truely believe that this will be the new internet, not just some passing trend. But how is this going to affect the rise of ethical issues in the future? I think this leap grants new ways of acting on ethical grounds. Protesting on the internet can take on a new form as users gather and protest with their avatars in front of the targets office in the game. I also believe people will be able to merge better with their online representation, taking their ethical values with them online to a much higher degree then normally.

This suddenly extends the ethical issues to a new level and even if this isn’t the future of web 2.0 I bet we will increasingly become more online than offline. We will develop more distinguished online personalities making us more fragile in a ethical perspective.

[Web 2.0] - The fragile onliners

Web 2.0 is a tricky concept to define. Often the definition is so vague that it covers most parts of our web. Wikipedia mentions “clean URL” and “CSS usage” as important proporties of a web 2.0 site. Would you consider any such page a web 2.0 wonder? Point is, web 2.0 is hard if possible to define. Two keywords I came up with when looking at famous web 2.0 sites though are involvement and exposure. A large portion of the web 2.0 site I’ve come across is based around the concept of encouraging people to put their life and others on display. People are bloging to share their opinions, uploading videos of their personal life on Youtube and displaying party pictures on Flickr.

That’s all great when seeing it as broadening our ways of communication but I think we are increasingly becoming more and more oblivious to the privacy we once held so high. What happened with that? People are taking close to naked pictures of themselves and posting them on the internet just to get acknowledgement. I would be quite surprised if the same person spread flyers with the same pictures at school. Same thing with videos when people post small clips picturing themselves doing the most idiotic things just to get a few seconds of celebricy. Do people really feel that anonymous on the internet that they can separate themselves from their offline personalities? I don’t expect people to be paranoid loners but I don’t expect them to be schizophrenic either.

Aside from reality TV and all it’s trends, I think the numerous web 2.0 sites themselves are partly to blame for this. It encourages people, minors, to do stuff without grasping the consequences. A example from discussions I’ve had is the risk of exposure. When one person posts a picture or video of another person doing something embarassing that moment is going to be broadcasted all over the world. It is no longer contained to a joke for your friends or even a single school but the whole world. Even if the person depicted give his/her consent, is he/she fully aware of the consequences? A sad example is the swedish kid Anton Maiden (fake name) who commited suicide after recieving spiteful reactions to his Iron Maiden covers from people all over the internet. Anton had a crappy voice but he enjoyed singing playback to Iron Maiden and posting recordings on the internet for anybody to download. Some people thought of it as a joke and laughed at him while others projected their hete towards him for “making fun” of their favourite band. However Anton was sincere with his recordings and hurt to the point of suicide from peoples comments, letters and phonecalls(!).

Is it society’s matter to stop these kinds of additions to the internet? Ofcourse not. It’s impossible to stop since it’s allready too late the moment a video/picture/mp3 etc is posted. But even if it were possible, I don’t believe it is the government’s responsability to decide what is potentially harmfull to post on the internet nor is it their job to interfer with peoples own free decisions. It is their job however to inform people of the risks and show people what might happen. With the growing web 2.0 people are more exposed than ever before. It is time people realised that their offline person is the same as the online one.

[Online Gaming] - Real crimes in virtual worlds

Read some interesting news today. Apparently police in Belgium has been assigned a case of virtual rape in the MMO Second Life. So let me get this clear, somebody’s avatar got “raped” by someone elses avatar. How is this possible? And does it even constitute as a crime? Well atleast the police in Belgium thinks so. The history of rape in games actually goes back a bit and is done by something called voodoo dolls. These objects allows a person to control the avatar that has the doll in it’s possession. These “dolls” (they can actually take the form of whatever object the owner wishes) has been used frequently by a community of BDSM players in SL but as of now they have been reported to have been used to rape avatars against their players will. This is quite a bizarre situation. The real world phenomenons are crossing over to the virtual world. How should we react to this? I don’t believe the psychological trauma can really compare to the real world rapes but clearly some sort of punishment is appropriate. Is the banning of the player commiting the crime enough? Tough questions these, especially since the game in question has a real currency and people, more so than in other games, rely on it for a stable real life income. It is a documented fact that raped people in real life in many cases are frozen out and isolated by other people. Should this be a factor when considering the punishment? I can’t decide for myself, the situation are just to weird to grasp. Clearly we are facing more crossovers between virtual worlds and the real one in the future. Might aswell brace ourselves...

Virtually Blind article

[Digital Resistance] - Knowledge wants to be free!

Recently a key useful for cracking the protection on the next gen movieformats, HDDVD and Bluray has been discovered and spread around the internet. The organisation Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS-LA) has done everything in their power to stop the spread, including threatening to close down news sites for even mentioning the key. Needless to say, the threats didn’t have much effect other than people wanting to spread the key even more. Everywhere people are spreading the key, not so much because ordinary people could find usage for it but rather to prove a point: Knowledge should be free. Some guy wrote a song with the numbers as lyrics and posted it on Youtube. Another guy created a T-shirt with the numbers printed on it. Thought I should do my part aswell. Keep the knowledge free!

Key: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0