Geographical boundaries on the internet just encourage piracy

The biggest thing I can think of that actually encourages piracy is the locking of content due to your location in the world.  Netflix does it, Hulu, Amazon ... the list goes on.  Many services that people across the world will happily give up money for are locked to American users.

This is partly because of the whole has to be censored for your area of the world type deal.  Every country has different censorship laws.  So every item of media has to be censored to that country before release.

But what if, this is a novel idea here, we did this crazy thing of letting people decide for themselves what is appropriate to watch.  I can understand censorship in wanting to censor things like kiddie porn, seriously only sick people look up that stuff and frankly if your caught doing it you should be turned over to the community you reside in for punishment (I'm sure that community can come up with some very creative ways to punish someone who would even think of doing that to their children).

But lets be honest here.  Legal pornography (you know the type between two consenting of age adults) isn't exactly hard to find.  There is endless websites now dedicated to the amateur porn stars of the world.  Most of them free.  And there is a very long line of people wanting their two minutes of porn fame.  This fact is actually killing the porn industry but that's something for another day and probably not a rant I will do.

But my point is I have seen a penis in a video tape.  I have seen a boob.  I have seen a vagina.  These are not new sights.  I'm married.  I've seen my husband's.  Hell I've had to look at my own bits in the mirror my whole life.  I've seen pornography.  So none of this is new.

As for violence ... well most movies now days take the cake.  There is very few movies that can make my stomach churn now days.  I would have to say the saw series is about my limit.  Most people would say I'm a pussy for admitting that, but hell have you actually watched the brutality in those movies?  Not my cup of tea but you know its someone else's.  The human centipede comes to mind as another movie that I don't really care for.  I think South Park did a much better job anyway with that movie.

Then again movie studios are putting out dribble like Twilight.  That's probably worse that the two examples above.  Bout the only movies that make me want to puke.  Yet those pieces of trash which destroy the whole movie making industry by being mass produced money making machines rather than true art (or failing true art something that doesn't kill brain cells for an hour and a half).  So I don't know which is more scary ... the destruction of ever known piece of vampire mythology by a woman who cared more about her bank account or a line of surgically grafted together humans giving permanent ass to mouth.

So the real point I'm working towards here is that censorship laws are a bit out dated when you consider what they are really for.  Limiting the amount of filth on your TV screen.  Its not hard to legitimately find alternative sources of some of the most horrific or sexual ideas around.  Movie studios have been pumping these out for years.  All censorship laws are doing is preventing access to services that the world is crying out for.

So if I want to go on to Netflix and pay and be a good little bunny and give up my money to view media content, if I'm outside America I have to trust these dodgy VPN networks to mask my physical location.  Not all VPNs are dodgy, but lets face it you are routing every piece of your internet usage via a third unknown party that doesn't really have to adhere to legalities like large corporations do.  You have to select probably a bit of a fringe VPN because ones supplied by large corporations would quickly pick up on you being dodgy and ban you or send around the FBI to cart you of to Guantanamo Bay.

Strictly speaking using a VPN to access Netflix for instance from another country is a legal grey area.  Companies like Netflix will say that its against their policies but in all honesty if they catch someone doing it what are they going to do?  If I was them, I was give them a warning and then forget about them.  Why do I really care where in the world someone is as long as I'm getting my fees?  They are paying for it, the only issue is they aren't in the right part of the world.  And is that really enough to turn away a paying customer?

And movie studios ... what are they going to do?  Come down hard on someone who is actually paying for their content?  They weren't popular when they were suing kids for copyright infringement or old ladies for downloading porn (old ladies who had trouble switching on the computer in the first place let alone finding a torrent site) so how popular do you think they will be if they sued someone who was paying for their content?

At the end of the day, services like Netflix and Hulu and so on are the way of the future.  And I still think we should consider this - let the people choose what is appropriate for them to view.  And until these services are equal everywhere, piracy will exist because placing a boundary only means that users have to find another way around it.

Then again I worked for a retailer who sold video games.  The number of parents that abused us for not selling R18 rated games to them for their 5 year old child was unbelievable.  So maybe the human race is not quite ready to be responsible and decide for themselves ...

A case for piracy in games being bad

What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?

So I came by this little article in my travels.  It made me smile.  This fits right in with an earlier post about creative ways that game development companies have come up with to screw over pirates.  Of course this is a sort of in your face this is what you are doing to us.  A bit of what goes around comes around.

We will all admit that piracy has now become so common place that if a person doesn't pirate stuff then they at least know someone who does and where to get it.  I recall one company I worked for where on night shift it unusual for there not to be a large hard drive of pirated content being passed around.  And by large we are talking in excess of 100 gig.  Everyone else brought in their own large hard drive and the work computers soon became content copying machines.  No one even thought about it.  Occasionally there was the odd joke about the sheer amount of piracy that went on in the company but no one even blinked.  Even management was in on the act, they would actively look for people with the best content.

There was no need to download it yourself in this situation, the chances are someone else had done so already and was willing to share.  What better way to earn brownie points with management than to be the source of their favorite TV shows, movies, music and so on.

I believe now days you would be hard pressed to find any person who hasn't pirated at least one item in their life time.  Copying a CD for instance.  The grandparents who didn't know any better when their grand kids put something on their computer.  The kids who pass around copies of their fave songs.  Its everywhere.

What this article attempts to highlight is that given the chance people would rather steal something that pay for it.  Fair enough, given half the chance we would rather keep our few dollars in our pockets and get it for free.  And who wouldn't rather get something for free.  A lot of people have to work an hour to pay $8 USD  for the game mentioned in the article.  A lot of people in the US however would probably have to work a couple hours to make that money.  When you think like that then you realize why people would be reluctant to shell out for a game that's only a couple dollars in value.

The game industry however is like a lot of media industries.  Every country has its own rules.  So what flies in America might not in Britain for instance.  So if you want to view this release in its original format (The latest iteration of the Mortal Kombat series comes to mind here) you don't have much choice but to pirate if you live in a country that has a stricter system in place for media.  For instance a number of games that were popular (Grand Theft Auto 4, Mortal Kombat) but initially banned in Australia until they were censored because of their graphic content were available through places like eBay or other online stores based in other countries.  If you ordered from one of these locations then you could get thrown in jail in Australia for importing explicit banned content.  However if you illegally download it then the chances they will catch you out are slim to none.

These are a couple of the motivating factors for piracy.  There are many more.  Being cheap right up there.  But if you consider the second motivation, the one where the pirate doesn't want a censored version, then there will always be a market for pirated media because lets face it, not everyone wants the sanitized church version and they would like to be able to make up their own minds about things.  Its the ones who don't actually play the games but blab on about kids getting access to this stuff that sanitize things.  See a previous post here for a rant on that one.

However I do have sympathy for the indie developer.  Games, unlike other media content, don't really have any other streams of income other than charging players for a copy.  Music has their tours, movies have movie theaters  TV shows have their adverts.  Games don't really have a lot else.  In fact a lot of software doesn't.  Unless they go the path of the whole social pay per play route.  Then I just walk away from the game.  If I'm gonna give my hard earned money for a game at least make it something worth my time and not the time wasters that games like Farmville are.  Farmville is just to fill in the void that exists between the cradle and grave and I frankly have better things to do with my time.  (I was unemployed once and sunk a great deal of time into this game and have now seen the light.  Luckily I was too broke to sink any money into it)

So in the case of games I would actually be on the side of the developer.  Especially an indie developer.  Indie game houses are the ones that give us the best and freshest ideas.  They don't have the stock standard formulas in place, the can experiment and play and give us a game that is worthy of our time.  They deserve our support and our $8.  They are the ones that will save us from the void of pay per play Farmville like games and save our Facebook news feeds from endless spam about how such and such got a new cow for their farm.

In the case of a game with DRM ... that is just crying out to be hacked to teach anyone with online DRM not to mess with their player base.

MMO RPGs - how to make the anti social members of society even more so

I play World of Warcraft.  I have since about a month after it came out.  That's nearly 10 years of my life I have dedicated (in parts) to this game.  Like a smoker trying to give up cigarettes I tell myself "I'm cancelling my account for good now" only to return next patch/expansion etc.

I owe World of Warcraft a lot.  I met my husband in this game.  When I was a lonely girl stuck at home I had a world full of horny nerds who's only requirement for a girl friend was A) a World of Warcraft account and B) breathing.  The breathing part was probably optional in a lot of cases.  Sometimes I wish that was a joke.  Having played the roles of healer, main tank, off tank, dps, raid leader, healer leader, dps leader, guild master etc (there's probably others) at various points in the game I can speak with alot of authority on how a single female fares when chucked into a mass of horny, lonely single guys who can only get kicks from their computers.

To be fair some of them were actually good looking.  Some of them well we'll move on.  Most of them fell in love in all of two seconds.  Like I said ... breathing is optional if they meet one of the fictitious women who are single and play WoW.

But I digress.  My rant today is how this game (and probably other MMOs) are making this anti society section of society worse.

While I was pottering away in an instance on my hunter I was watching the snappy remarks scrolling up my screen.  The tank of the group didn't really know what he was doing.  Which gave the other members of the group (an instance group contains five people for those who don't know - a tank (someone to run around basically yelling "Kill me!  Kill me!", a meat shield effectively), a healer (person who keeps everyone else alive and is generally very squishy) and three DPS (damage per second aka the people who get shit done)) licence to be utter arse holes to the tank.

The tank was one of this green crop that has been coming through the game.  They didn't play each expansion to death because they have joined when the level cap is higher than said expansion.  Therefore they are unfamiliar with the fights.  And some fights just cannot be face rolled.  Most but you know if your experienced (or out gear the instance) enough you can get away with it.

They were calling him stupid, wanting to kick him from the group and generally being wankers.

So why can they do this?

Well because of a handy little tool called dungeon finder.  You sign into a queue, which is across multiple servers, and you are randomly assigned to a group.  The chances are you all come from different servers (realms what ever) so the chances you have of interacting again are almost nil.

So for about 10-20 mins (depending on the group) you are with four other people who are littered somewhere in the world.  You will never know anything more about them than their names and classes in World of Warcraft.  Then you will abandon the group after you have completed your instance (dungeon or what ever) and probably never encounter that person again.

I have noticed that there is a distinct increase in the wanker as a result.  The troll.  The A hole.  The prick you would never give time to in real life.

Why?  Because after those 10-20 mins you'll never ever see said person again.  Unless you have a photographic memory to remember all the names of all the people you have ever played against and just happen to stumble upon this person again, you are probably never going to interact again.  So why be polite and civil?

These people that play this game, on the whole, are usually egotistical at best.  I would say around 90% of the players I have spent any real amount of time with in raids or what not have been egotistical narcissistic pricks who get off on measuring their e-peens compared with others.  If you're not good enough you get kicked out of the play group (guild).  If they get bored, you get kicked out.  Or picked one.  Even I, as a female (which you think would give me untouchable status (and to be honest most of the time it does)) have suffered from the brutal attacks of people who just see a few pixels on the screen.

My husband, who is considered one of the best paladins on our server (not many can beat him in healing or tanking ... I'm talking only maybe a couple of people) has suffered from the narcissistic personalities in the game.  He was often used and blackmailed into raiding or performing in game tasks so that others could further their agendas.  When your tank or healer carries and entire raid ... why not?

Now with these queues ... civility is out the window.  If your a troll in one raid, you get kicked, you wait half an hour, then go back and do it again.  When there was no queue like this and you had to rely on your guild to get into a raid, well this thing didn't happen ... much.  One of the first guilds I was in there was a bug that took all the armor from a raid boss and put it on free for all (anyone can roll for it).  One lovely person rolled need while everyone else politely passed.  He took all the armor from a difficult boss and left the guild and logged off.  Needless to say his raiding career ended there as word quickly spreads in an isolated group of people and other guilds soon learned of his betrayal.

But take away this feed back loop and what do you have?  You just have a system where people can get jerks ... and get away with it.

I propose this makes people who don't have a lot of social skills to begin with worse.  Because humans don't seem to be happy unless they can push the boundaries of decency and morality.  In a world with none of that then I can't see how humans can win.

A change of name ... but not a change of content

Hi all.

I have decided to update the name of this blog to something for relevant.

It seems I get more attention for my rants on digital content ie DRM and piracy.  So I have changed the name to reflect this a bit better.  And hopefully get a few more hits.

Don't worry, if I see something I think needs addressing that's important in the news I certainly won't hesitate.  But I give what the masses ask for.

Same great content, just a new label.

In a couple days I will change the link to this blog.

Cheers and thanks for all the fish.

A little bit more on DRM

I think this more than makes it's point.  You have a busy life, you get only a few minutes to use it wisely.  Then that game you brought the other day that you thought would be a great way to fill in a couple minutes of your time does this to you.  That one little tiny spark of happiness in the otherwise bleak world.

Ultimately I have seen better ways to protect content then DRM.  This punishes the working man who gets up and goes to work for his family.  He can grab a couple mins here and there and the last thing he needs is a half hour wait to play a game that shouldn't really be online in the first place.  The gaming company gets the cash but the user gets no experience.

The best way I saw to protect content was used in the Batman game Arkham Asylum.  When the game was pirated, there was a piece of code that figured this out and Batman's cloak repeatedly opened and closed when you attempted to fly.  Which meant you could no longer fly.  Which meant you could no longer complete certain aspects of the game.  The game is still usable to other people who actually shelled out for the game and the pirate gets the crap copy.  This creativity I actually applaud   Its just the sort of thing that makes you smile.  Especially when reading forums of pirates seeking help to resolve the problem.

Another anti piracy tactic used what in Command and Conquer, Red Alert 2.  After 30 seconds of loading a map all your bases would explode.  But then again this sort of thing just feeds the trolls and pirates of the world by them making it their epic quest in life to see how fast they can destroy their bases before the anti piracy script kicks in.

Nintendo probably came up with the cruelest anti piracy option.  In Earthbound, they created a game that was nearly impossible to play if it was detected that it was a pirated game.  Fair enough, some people would have enjoyed the challenge.  That was until the last boss.  When the game crashes, then deletes all the saved files.  Ouch.  I imagine there was a few broken gameboys at this point.

You can check out some other hilarious anti piracy options here : 6 Hilarious Ways Game Designers Are Screwing With Pirates

My point here today is that always on DRM in games is sloppy and lazy.  Its like "well we couldn't be bothered coming up with anything else so we are forcing everyone who wants to buy a copy of our game to get an internet connection just to play it".  On the whole, the casual player (which by the way would probably make up the larger chunk of a games audience) is the one that is screwed over by always on DRM rather than the actual pirate.

Actual pirates of games will probably code a hack for said game to remove the always on DRM.  Computer programming is an easily accessible skill now days.  All you need is a computer, the internet and Google.   You can teach yourself a hell of a lot with those three things.  Youtube is a great source too.  Those things alone will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about hacking.  And you don't even have to be that good at it to achieve it.

I can find anything I like in about 2 minutes from Google.  It could be a key logger, a virus, a torrent, anything.  If you know how to look, search engines will spit out what you want with the right question.  And learning to program from the "little black book of programming"?  You could probably sign up to 4Chan and they will give you step by step instructions and sign you up to Anonymous so that within half an hour you're an expert hacker.  Though why anyone would want to put up with the trolls on 4Chan ...

The game market is no longer about some 10 year old with a hand held playing Pokemon.  That was twenty years ago.  These people have grown up and they still want to capture their youth.  I watch cartoons because when I watch a cartoon I escape from the world and go to a better time.  When I didn't have to worry about paying bills or rent or cleaning the house or going to work.  I can pretend I'm five again where the biggest worry I had was how to get mum and dad to buy me that cool toy I saw on TV or if I would ever grow tall enough to reach the cookies on the kitchen counter.

Ultimately always on DRM is like the commercialization of Christmas.  The digital raping of what is left of our childhood innocence and wonder so some fat cats can ensure a couple more sales.

How to lose a customer base with three letters ... DRM

Digital Rights Management.  You have to be online to always play your game you just shelled out big money for.

And here is someone from Microsoft bagging out those of us in the world that live outside of a city where internet is at best choppy.

If I'm going to buy a game that I play on my desktop BY MYSELF, then I don't really want to have to connect to the internet.

Let's look at things this way.  When I brought Diablo 3 (yes I paid money for it), I had to wait to log into a game that I then bummed around in for about three hours and then never logged back into because well who wants to wait to log into play with themselves.  For guys I imagine it would be like having a raging boner but you can't do anything about it because your mum is in the room.  All you can do it cover it up and hope for an opportunity later to get a release.

And lets not even start on the internet quality when you live outside of a city.  I live in a rural area.  We still get crappy ADSL (yeah I bet most people thought that didn't exist in westernised countries any more).  What's more the internet provider I pay a fair proportion of my household's income to each month has admitted to us they have oversold our exchange.  Therefore when everyone gets home from work its good bye bandwidth.

Try playing a game that needs a good ping on an internet connection that is struggling on loading sites like facebook or even a news website.  And as there is only one company that supplies internet in our area (any other company is just reselling this one company's product) there is no point trying to churn to another internet provider.  They are just reselling the same product with a different label slapped on.

But you should be happy to have internet the bleeding hearts of this world cry.  Well I'm going to stop you there.  I might be lucky enough to live in a country where internet is possible and my household income is high enough we can afford to pay for entertainment like computer games.  But bloody hell if I'm going to shell out for this stuff I want to at least get a good go of it.  I have better things to spend my money on if I'm going to have an experience that is less than the value of the game.

And certainly I'm not going to buy another game from said game producer if they give me crap.  What this Microsoft dickhead has done has pissed me off.  I have literally no power over the quality of my internet.  I would kill for some fiber to be laid in my area.  Hell I would settle for our exchange being upgraded so that we can have a stable unwavering connection.  But you know this costs money and why is big business going to invest in giving my area better internet when I don't have a choice.  Its them or nothing.

So while this DRM stuff that keeps games online and stores all this content online so you have to always be online sounds really great, it just alienates a huge chunk of the audience.  In a town like what I live in where there is not really a lot to do, computer games keep you sane.  People in cities can fill their time with other stuff like restaurants, music concerts, movie theaters etc.  We just wait for the tumble weeds to pass us by.  And our internet to get better.

Or it could be worse.  I know a lot of cashed up guys who fly to the middle of nowhere to work with zero internet connection that need entertaining in their down time.  They aren't going to buy a game that needs to be always online.  Same with soldiers   There are many situations and places I know of that internet is out of the question.  Yet these gaming companies would rather please a few than everyone.

PS:  we don't play sim city for the online part.  We play for the god like feeling we get when we crush a couple hours of hard work with a meteorite.

The world cries out for better entertainment

I figured today I would continue the theme of internet piracy.

But instead of a rant today, I think I might give a better business model to the corporations out there.  I, as a consumer of multimedia as a form of entertainment, feel I am qualified to speak on this subject as this is what I want to see happen.  And from what I've read around the internet, I'm probably not the only one.

The fact of the matter is the old delivery systems for getting media into a household are failing.  Who buys a CD now days?  Or a DVD?  You can't very well fit a CD or DVD into a smartphone can you?  And VHS? who even knows what that is any more.  I have to smile at the fact that when I have children I will be recalling tales of when there was no such thing as the internet (or probably more to the point when all there was was dial up), when a 1 gig flash drive cost $300 (yip I remember those days), when I brought movies on VHS and a TV took up a small corner of your room instead of fitting neatly on the wall.  I will be telling them about mobile phones the size of bricks (and just as indestructible) and how laptops were the size of suitcases with less power than the clock on my wall.  Sometimes its a wonder what has happened in my life time alone.  What I'm describing here is the last 20 years of technology ... what will it look like in 20 years time from now?

Back to the point.  There is no CD drive on my smartphone.  Its more of a pain in the butt to buy a CD, rip it, then convert it, then upload it to my phone.  I can do all that from my phone.  Or I can skip the CD part and just download from someone who has done it for me then upload to my phone.  This option being a lot cheaper of course.  If you use a service like iTunes then you pay a fee, if you use bit torrents ...

CDs, DVDs, even Blurays, these are all forms of media that will die out soon.  Probably in the next 5 years.  DVDs are knocking on that door already because a Bluray player will only set you back a couple dollars more than a DVD player (if you can find a DVD player).  CDs are all but extinct from services like iTunes.

This is not a piece on the extinction of physical media.  This is to show that in a very short time, we are looking at the extinction of any media that is not digital.  And any company that produces media, whether it be movies, TV shows, music ... what ever, will need to accept this.  Its already happened effectively.  Bit torrents and piracy now allow the user to download say a TV show, watch it at their leisure, watch said TV show over and over again at the user's convenience and be ad free.  How can classical TV channels compete with that?  A user watching a show without those annoying ads (which are on at exactly the same time on every channel so you can't just flip between shows) and enjoying the show when they have time to watch it.

How dare we do anything that is makes our lives easier.

What is needed is a service that allows people access to this.  I currently pay for subscription TV.  Me and my husband do so because he wants to watch his sports games.  They are only available on this service.  Which I think is wrong but hey that's another rant.  This service is terrible.  I love to watch documentaries.  But channels that were typically known for their documentaries have now deteriorated into a mass of hillbilly reality shows.  What I really want to watch is hidden deep in amongst the steaming piles of crap reality TV that they fill these channels with.  And often these shows are on at 2am in the morning.  Hello ... I sleep at this time of the day.

I watch documentaries so I can increase my knowledge and expand my mind.  Watching hillbillies fish for cat fish by getting them to bite of their arms feels more like killing my brain cells.  Or watching a bunch of guys with no jobs fight over a storage locker.  I'm sure that appeals to those who didn't finish high school.

If bango music would make a suitable sound track ... I turn it off.  So the subscription service I pay for often goes unwatched for long periods of time as usually there is only one game a week my husband wants to watch and even then its only for a couple months a year.  I feel a bit ripped off.

What me and so many others want is a service where we could pay say a flat fee and get to download and or stream what ever we wanted and watch it when we wanted.  Kind of like Netflix.  Or Hulu.  But for the whole world.  I already pay an arm and a leg for the crappy internet in my country.  Why can't I have an account somewhere that lets me watch all this stuff and view it when I want as I want?

Because too many big name companies are afraid they will loose money.

Tough titties ... your already loosing money so to speak with every download because you would rather ignore what the people want, label them criminals, and not take their money than give them what they are starving for.

I have no sympathy.