[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

[Online Gaming] - polygon sword of doom!

MMOG:s offers something quite unique to it’s players in comparison to other genres. It offers immersion, the chance to escape into another reality which in many cases can seem more compelling than the real thing. Some people can handle this attraction with care but others drown and spend more time of their life in the virtual universe than in the physical one. This is something people must learn to understand when cases like the following just keeps on appearing.

Legend of Mir 2 is a MMOG set in an oriental fantasy setting. The game is mostly popular in China and South Korea but has in some cases even found it’s way into American/European hearts. In some cases the playing has sadly taken tragic turns though. In 2005 the chinese LoM2-player Qui Chengwei was sentenced to life in prison for stabbing his friend Zhu Caoyuan to death. As it plays out Qui had found a really valuable and powerful sword named “the Sable of the Dragon” in the game. For some reason he loaned the sword to his fellow player Zhu. When Zhu realised how valuable the sword was he sold it for £480 online and ran. Qui was furious. He contacted the police (the real one) and reported the theft of his virtual sword but they wouldn’t understand. Qui then decided to take matters in his own hands and went to Zhu’s home and took his life.

Is £480 worth it to kill another man? Ofcourse that money translates to a lot more in China but as scrupleless some people are, I think there is something more behind. As I said before, MMOG worlds can for some people be more preferable than the real world, in some cases it becomes the true world. The world where your friends are, your family hangs out and your life revolves around. Who are others to say it’s wrong? People devote their whole lives to sports. Equally “wrong” in my opinion. Still, as any activity are a springboard to violence and intense feelings when the interest is taken far enough. A lot of discussions around videogames are about violence and how games affect peoples likelyhood of going on a killing spree after playing them. I don’t believe violence in videogames is a major trigger for this. What I do believe is that games, and certainly MMOG:s, while so immersive that you choose to spend a large portion of your life playing them, also offers a place where people can ruin other peoples life and get away with it. Strong statement but the fact that most MMOG:s somewhat lack regulations, laws or restrictions of what you can and can’t do leaves some people defenceless. I am not saying games should be changed to conform to any law. Neither am I saying people should be restricted to play only a set mount of time. All I’m saying is that games sometimes are more than games and should be taken seriously. If people don’t stop ignoring some games for what they are, cases like Chui’s are going to be a lot more frequent.

[Online Gaming] - Scammers paradise

Eve Online is a MMO set in space. Every player controlls his own avatar and is able to buy different ships, everything from small shuttles to enormous planetsized starships, join a corporation, which is the term for player made teams, engineer, manufactor or collect raw materials for new products, or hunt spacepirates alternatively becoming one themselves. The game has probably one of the largest areas in the MMO-genre, spanning over a whole galaxy including countless starsystems. The space is indeed needed though, since all players reside on the on the same server or shard. Eve now holds the record for number of concurrent online players with over 30.000 individuals at the same time. The game is almost solely controlled by the players and the company behind the game, CCP, seldom interfers the gameplay. Borders between factions constantly moves between factions and war between corporations is fought daily. Optimizing of traderoutes have made entire starsystems obsolete, all by the hands of players and the player controlled economic system. This truely makes Eve a social experiment of enormous magnitude. Since CCP don’t meddle in players business, everything can happen, and happens. But when has the freedom become too great? Can it ever become too great? An example where a LOT of people really got mad at CCP for NOT meddling was the following.

In early 2006 a avatar named Cally announced the opening of the first intergalactical bank in Eve. The bank named Eve Intergalactic Bank promised favourable rates and a plenty of tied-in services like checking balances online, trading stocks and serious newsletters. The bank slowly grew and large investors chose to deposit their corporations saved up money in it. Months passed and rumours began spreading that the bank was a scam. At about that time in late august, Cally (or the player behind Cally) decided enough was enough and cleared the bank containing 700 billion ISK (the currency in Eve). The value in real money has been estimated around 180.000 U.S. dollars. Needless to say, a lot of people who were affected complained to CCP but they just shrugged. Nothing in the EULA said anything about this kind of scam and it was acording to them, perfectly legal.

CCP has during the game’s whole life encouraged this type of inventive scams and trickery in the game. It can be argued that it adds a new layer to the game but how far can you take it? In this example a lot of peoples paid for gaming time, collecting resources was stolen. Half a years work generating $180.000. When should you start proctecting people from this? When the bounty exceeds 1 million dollars? When someone takes his own or someone elses life? Virtually none of these MMOGs have any laws or regulations against these sorts of scams and their absence is clear in the EULA. Yet people are equally surprised each time something like this happens. In this example noones actual living is stolen but some people play these games allmost like a second job, investing several hours a day in the world. For these people, this scam was allmost as hard a blow as if actual money were stolen. Should these people be protected? Ofcourse individual games and cases must be judged seperatly but in this case I don’t think so. In the end it is still a game, and at that one that thrives on the possibilities of creating your own gaming experience. With rules against these sort of possibilities the game would be a lot less appealing. Different gaming companies act differently in these issues. While CCP is extremely liberal, Blizzard – creater of World of Warcraft, is equally harsh with their rules. Had this occured in WoW, I am completely convinced that Blizzard would have acted by banning the scammers account. Who is right?

[Online Gaming]

Online gaming is growing at an enormous rate. As technology advances, larger, more realistic and more immersive games are created that spawns equally large communities devoted to the games. At the frontier are the MMO-games (Massive Multiplayer Online games), games where thousands of people play together in huge virtual worlds. Social gameplay is one of the cornerstones and a big provider for all the ethical issues present in the still young genre. The problems are inevitable when you look at the premises but hard to predict. These worlds are often microuniverses with cultural clashes between people from all over the world, gathered in a space not larger than Manhattan. On the following posts I will pick examples from some of the games in the MMO-genre, describing ethical dilemmas that heralds problems to come...

[Integrity]-I spy...Warcraft spy

Spyware is everywhere and as the net has grown, we have learned to be cautious to the point of paranoia against anything that might be a distributor of these malicious software, anything from e-mails to free or paid software. But how cautious do you need to be to be totally safe? What happens when corporations you trust, corporations overflowing with goodwill break all their trust and decides to go behind customers backs, planting spyware without notice? Thomas has allready written in his blog about the rootkit hidden in Sony’s copyprotected records. This time I write about the game company Blizzard.

With every game a bestseller and truckloads of fans, the company has plenty of goodwill to spend. In late 2005 Greg Hoglund, an engineer and Blizzard fan, discovered a spyware hidden in Blizzards latest success World of Warcraft. The spyware checked every program Hoglund had opened while running the game, it checked e-mail adresses of people on MSN, titles of word documents, even minimized applications, everything. Blizzard allready had it covered from a legal point of view though, as a small fine print in the EULA. Hoglund started to blog about his discoveries and the news (noone had apparently read and understood the EULA) soon reached the official forums of the game. The reactions wasn’t however what you’d expect. After some displeased grunting and a promise from Blizzard to not use the information for anything that would violate privacy, the players accepted the intrusion. At the time World of Warcraft had around 4,5 million users. Today that number exceeds 8,5 million. Have people gone numb and ignorant? Apparently peoples trust in some companys are limitless. Blizzard stated that the reason they employed the spyware was to make sure noone cheated in the game. Wouldn’t it then be easy to limit the spyware’s search area around executable files?

Nevermind the good will of the company or their original intended purpose for the spyware. In every case where spyware is used, the information gathered could be used in a way that we do not approve of. To trust blindly in a company and never question their methods can in my opinion never be a good thing.

As a funny sidenote, people have now found a way to work around Blizzard’s spyware och run cheating programs undetected. The hackers ironically used Sony’s infamous spyware/rootkit in order to mask their programs. The procedure is simple, just put your files in the right folder and add $sys$ to the filename. The trick is on you Blizzard!

[Integrity]-Darknet vs Lightnet

One of the great things about the internet is the possibility to act anonymously to a greater extent than in real life. This has made life a lot easier for people engage in activities ranging from political discussions to filesharing and has provided safehouse for people with differing opinions. This has changed a lot through the years though and as it is now, several nations in europe are introducing laws and regulations heavily jeopardizing the integrity of it’s citizens. Goverments are given full authority to gather and collect information of each everyones habits on the net. Companies are given the right to persecute people and violate their integrity for the sole sake of profit. Sweden is no exception to this. The human rights-group “Privacy International” has published a report on how well europe’s nations are handling peoples integrity each year since 1997. On the latest index of 2006, Sweden was left almost last on the list, only second to Brittain when it comes to violating peoples privacy. As a citizen of Sweden I had no idea things were this bad mostly because we are kept in the dark when it comes to these changes. Our politicians try to tone down every new law contributing to the big brother society we are clearly heading towards.

Slowly people are realizing this though, and countermeasures have been taken. As the open internet slowly turns into a censored, surveiled proporty, more and more people are turning to darknets. The traditional definition of a darknet is an isolated community of people trusting each other, closed to everyone else. Anonymity is maintained by keeping unwelcomed people out rendering surveillance impossible. Several different software tools that help setting up and using such a community are available freely in the internet. Most software can only handle small groups of people but some software, like Freenet is said to support millions of users.

On a larger scale, services are popping up that allows for anonymously switching IP. This enables users to have total anonymity independent of ISP. Some people say that this is a perfectly good solution in order to reestablish users integrity on the internet. The problem with these anonymous darknets is that they work indiscriminatly. Terrorists, rapists, pedophiles aswell as filesharers and political activists all hide under the same umbrella with no distinction between them from the outside. On the open internet, “lightnet” if you will, heavier criminals such as terrorists and sexual predators could still be traced. I believe the lobby organisations representing record companys and the movies industry are largely to blame for this devlopment. With so many filesharers scared to be persecuted the development of darknet services are inevitably driven forward. In many ways it is a choice between security and privacy. On one hand we have a big brother society monitoring our every move, on the other, a lawless darknet where criminals do as they please. At this time I see no middle path. As more people will understand the extent of the privacy invasion currently being performed, whether it is a lobbyorganisation looking for filesharers, a marketing company logging your behavior or a goverment looking for unwanted opinions, they will consider darknets as a viable option.

Privacy is a precious thing and as long as darknets are our only option, I am totally for it. Question is what it will take for our goverment to fully understand darknets potential. Are they really ready to lose what little controll they still have left?

Tor - online anonymity
Privacy International
Relakks - ip-switcher
Freenet - online anonymity

[Digital Resistance]-Internet, the grey zone

When I first started to write about digital resistance through websites I mixed up digital resistance with ethics. Instead of thinking about what this technology means for the people that uses it to protest, I started to debate with myself wheter or not the medium in itself was ethically viable. I realize I made the same mistake with the post about Floodnet. That debate is going nowhere. Ethics have nothing to do specificly with internet webpages. Just as any medium, be it books, movies, posters or games, it may contain questionable content. But content is protected under the freedom of speech and rightfully so. The question is not what ethics have to do with the web but rather how the web has affected the way we spread and recieve ethically charged content. That is a question I am much more comfortable with.

I feel amazed every day at what a beast the internet has become. News become history in a matter of seconds, we are forced to devour information in such a ridiculous speed it is a wonder anything sticks at all. I think this flow is what define internet as a united medium best, no matter if we’re dealing with filesharing or a passive webpage about digital resistance. It has made so many things possible it’s hard to even begin thinking about it. Still, a digital resistance movement close to me, since I was there from the beginning and saw it happen, would have to be the rise of Sweden´s Pirate Party. Their organisation wouldn’t be possible without the internet. Everything happened in a matter of hours, days. The first 6 hours the project was announced, their site had over 75.000 hits. They now have close to 9.000 members in their fold and an infrastructure allmost exclusively based around the internet.

But the information flow can be both a good and a bad thing. While news travel fast on the internet I believe we aren’t as fast to filter it. I think we are drowning in information and it’s getting harder to find the right one. I read Sofies blog yesterday and she pointed out something something absurd but true. We have too much information to form any clear opinion. We seldom encounter anything anymore that is clearly “good” or “evil”. A loving single father can still be a murderer, bankrupting a “evil” company will leave thousands innocent people unemployed, which is better, improving eldercare or daycare? These are issues that the internet, with it’s flow of information, is extremely good at enlighting and it states a problem with resistance based content on websites: which is one to believe?

While there is no doubt the internet with it’s speed and sheer amount of information is ideal to spread a message and form a community around, I think increasingly less people are willing to choose any one side with all the grey zones present.

[Digital Resistance]-Zapatista Floodnet

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Blog started!

Well, my first blog is officially started. This blog will serve as a gathering place for my thoughts around ethic issues in technology during a class, revolving around the very same subject. That is also the reason I chose the name "Biotech is godzilla". This is a song written by the band Sepultura, dealing with what happens when bio technology, or for that matter all technology, is driven forward by interests too strongly rooted in profit. Human lives on one side of the scale, big bags of money on the other. In the hands of the wrong people, that scale is easily tipped to the wrong side...

"Biotech is godzilla"

/Olof