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- Arthur B on Ho There Jim Lad at 14:04 on 14-05-2013 - link Netflix have some interesting stats that demonstrate that when they set up their streaming service in a territory, BitTorrent use in the same country/area goes down dramatically. So hopefully studios will get the hint and start putting things on Netflix in a more timely manner in the near future.
- Andy G on Ho There Jim Lad at 13:40 on 14-05-2013 - link With regard to film/TV rather than music, I've found it frustrating that although I'm perfectly happy to pay for DVDs/subscription services, the studios nonetheless seem to want to encourage me to pirate their product by (a) making me wait upwards of a year from broadcast to DVD release (b) restricting my paid-for streaming services so they won't work on my operating system (Linux). Music I actually find much more straightforward to buy/stream legally, and I'm happy to pay unless an album or track is inexplicably not available to buy anywhere online.
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Arthur B on Ho There Jim Lad
at 13:00 on 14-05-2013 - link
For an example, games that require you to be online to play them, despite having no multiplayer component. Red Alert 3 is the worst example of this - if you lose your internet connection, only for a minute, it'll let you keep playing, but it won't save your progress anymore.
And of course there's the recent Sim City debacle, where the multiplayer aspects of the game add very little beyond a source of griefing, required a scaling-back of the scale of the simulation so you're actually dealing with a substantially smaller city than you were in the previous game, and relied on servers that proved not to be up to the task, forcing EA to excise vital features from the game like turning the speed up... all because someone, somewhere, decided that a series that had been a 100% single-player-only experience to date really needed a mandatory internet connection and multiplayer aspects in today's market.
Then EA literally showered everyone with poo. It's almost as though their board of directors has been replaced by a cabal of very skilled trolls or something. - Robinson L on Ferretbrain Presents the teXt Factor Episode 1 - Monotheism at 12:36 on 14-05-2013 - link @Cheriola: Personally, I've only read the first three Dresden books, and I found them, on the whole, decent fluff (though with significantly more sexual content than you describe in "Codex Alera," and all of it highly juvenile). In fact, I'll even go to the wall for Butcher's ability to dig his protagonist in deeper and deeper and making his situation look utterly hopeless (multiple times in the same book, even), and then pulling him back out without resorting to Deus Ex Machina. Granted, I often got frustrated by just how bleak it got sometimes (it undermined the whole "disposable fun" aspect for me), but I can't say it was effective.
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Axiomatic on Ho There Jim Lad
at 11:41 on 14-05-2013 - link
With videogames, at least, it's sometimes not even a question of getting the same product for free, it's a question of either paying for an inferior product, or getting a superior one for free.
Because the anti-piracy measures used sometimes actively make the game worse. For an example, games that require you to be online to play them, despite having no multiplayer component. Red Alert 3 is the worst example of this - if you lose your internet connection, only for a minute, it'll let you keep playing, but it won't save your progress anymore. So you'll finish a mission, and SURPRISE! You have to do it over again, because you lost your internet connection at some point.
The thing with anti-piracy measures is that they only ruin the fun of the people who ACTUALLY GAVE YOU MONEY.
That said, there was a pretty clever anti-piracy thing in a recent game, which simulates running a videogame company. The pirate version of the game is basically impossible to win, because you always go bankrupt because pirates destroy your profits. -
http://foghawk.livejournal.com/ on Ho There Jim Lad
at 10:12 on 14-05-2013 - link
I read a very interesting article the other day about the distinction between piracy and bootlegging, but I can't seem to find the link now. Ho hum. Anyway, I found it a striking point of discussion. There really is a difference between depriving a corporation of some amount of income and knowingly allowing a bootlegger to turn a profit off stolen ("stolen") goods—in fact, and in people's reactions.
I'm sure that the majority of torrenters are happy to hop on, grab a copy of something they want, and hop off, but of the habitual uploaders—the ones who make sure the material gets onto the web in the first place—a substantial proportion seem to regard what they do as a sort of public service. There are private music trackers with incredibly strict self-policing systems, the better to ensure maximum sound quality, and members who deliberately track down and buy forgotten junk CDs or vinyl presses, the better to broaden the catalog. There are server hosts in ebook-sharing communities who habitually buy, scan, OCR, proofread, and format books, even books they would otherwise have no interest in, because hey—somebody might want that. From what I've gathered, the urge to give back to that kind of community is really, really common, even if it only means correcting the typos in a book you wanted to read anyway or rifling through your dad's music collection just in case.
But you can't take money for that. Nobody takes money for that.
(Okay, that's not strictly true. Occasionally TV shows on filehosting sites will show up in links hidden behind ad redirectors or the like. But putting ads on something isn't quite like charging for it, in one of those ways that seems (is) economically irrational but makes a difference to people. Besides, those aren't peer-to-peer networks; by definition there isn't the same kind of community there. You couldn't put ads on a torrent if you wanted to.)
Filesharing sites are basically gift economies—to make a tactless comparison, rather like open-source software projects. Nobody owes anyone anything else, but people are supposed to seed when they can. The fastest, most prolific, best-quality, or most helpful rippers and uploaders gain trust and status in proportion to their contributions—as do the groups they align themselves with. Scene groups compete furiously to release desirable new files. And they all pretty much do it for nothing.
I suspect I'm waffling on here, but the long and short of it is that I suspect heavy torrenters are even less likely to buy, support, or even tolerate unlicensed merchandise (in whatever form) than the average Joe. It's against the ideology; it's against the culture—and why would you ever let someone charge you for what you could do yourself for free?
I suppose that's all only tangentially related to the issue under discussion—the fact that copies cost nothing to make is probably much more relevant. But it interested me anyway. -
James D on Ho There Jim Lad
at 05:54 on 14-05-2013 - link
I feel like some of the smaller music niches have a pretty good handle on how to deal with piracy. As Arthur mentioned above, thanks to huge strides in technology, it's very possible for bands today to produce a fairly professional-sounding album in their free time, without needing to pay to use a professional studio (which usually requires being signed to a decent-sized label who can front them the money). This means that in most niche music genres, the vast bulk of the bands putting out albums are comprised of people with day jobs, who don't expect to ever make their living off of their music and would be perfectly happy to continue making albums in their spare time. They play shows on the weekends and hope their ticket and album sales will let them break even. These aren't bands whose sales figures are factored into those music industry reports.
Fans know this; unlike with major bands, for small bands the cost of one $10 album sale goes mostly into their pockets, and it can actually make a noticeable difference to the band if I choose not to buy an album. The rest of the money would likely go to a niche distro and label that definitely would feel that loss as well. So, I operate on a strict "try before I buy" policy. I'm not going to gamble $10 without hearing an album, just like I wouldn't buy a tomato without checking it for bruises or buy a car without taking it for a test drive. But if I listen to the album and like it, I'm definitely going to buy it.
This attitude is pretty widespread, and it results in fairly strong social criticism of people who download only, which seems pretty effective at encouraging people to support their bands. Of course not everyone can afford to buy every album they like, but it is well within the means of most to spend $10 here and there, especially if they can already afford the computer and internet connection required to pirate music. Thanks in part to technological developments and the increased exposure the internet provides, many niche music genres have experiences a huge upswing in sales and popularity for smaller bands, despite whatever sales they've lost due to piracy. These are the bands I care about, and I'm not worried. - Andy G on Ho There Jim Lad at 15:34 on 13-05-2013 - link As an aside, did anyone hear the amusing story that the makers of the "You wouldn't steal a handbag" ad were themselves sued for unauthorised use of the backing music?
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Shimmin on Ho There Jim Lad
at 15:28 on 13-05-2013 - link
If animal rights activists put together adverts that said "Meat is murder. Murder is against the law" you'd think they were nuts.
Actually, I'm astonished if they haven't already done that.
I agree that when the industry explicitly invokes the law they should be held to it. In the context of more general pro/anti-piracy discussions I think it's less clear-cut.
Can we perhaps agree that:
a) piracy does not meet the legal definition of "theft" under the jurisdictions we tend to talk about;
b) discussing the issue in terms of theft is not constructive, withstanding a) or otherwise.
? :) -
Arthur B on Ho There Jim Lad
at 15:28 on 13-05-2013 - link
If animal rights activists put together adverts that said "Meat is murder. Murder is against the law" you'd think they were nuts.
Or Morrissey! <3 <3 <3 -
Dan Hemmens on Ho There Jim Lad
at 15:20 on 13-05-2013 - link
In legal terminology (of jurisdiction X), sure, but legal and common-language definitions don't necessarily match up, and coming out with "I think you'll find the legal definition of X is..." tends not to improve matters in arguments.
I'd normally agree, but the industry explicitly invokes the law, so I don't think it's unreasonable to hold it to legally correct definitions. The classic example here being the "you wouldn't steal a car..." advert which took over from the "piracy funds terrorism" adverts. FACT still, as far as I know, ends most of its ads with "Piracy is stealing. Stealing is against the law." It specifically equates piracy with theft on a technical, legal level. If animal rights activists put together adverts that said "Meat is murder. Murder is against the law" you'd think they were nuts. -
Arthur B on Ho There Jim Lad
at 15:12 on 13-05-2013 - link
As with a lot of things, people don't necessarily care whether piracy is "theft" under the current local legal definition of the term (especially when they're arguing over what that definition should be), they mostly care whether it's "theft" under some fuzzy notion of their own, partly because it's not clear how else to express that idea.
Sure, but I've rarely if ever seen people use the term "piracy is theft" outside of the context of a scaremongering campaign based on ignorance of the law. -
Shimmin on Ho There Jim Lad
at 13:42 on 13-05-2013 - link
@Dan, alilou-skiff:
I've now worked out that the "possessing" bit does actually create a contrast, so forget that.As other people who know more about this than me have pointed out, the definition of theft is fairly specifically *both* of those things - that is, getting something by removing it from someone else without permission.
In legal terminology (of jurisdiction X), sure, but legal and common-language definitions don't necessarily match up, and coming out with "I think you'll find the legal definition of X is..." tends not to improve matters in arguments. As with a lot of things, people don't necessarily care whether piracy is "theft" under the current local legal definition of the term (especially when they're arguing over what that definition should be), they mostly care whether it's "theft" under some fuzzy notion of their own, partly because it's not clear how else to express that idea.
Basically I think this is a Games/Art situation where the problem is that talking about theft at all just confuses the issue, which is fundamentally "is this okay, is it legal, and should it be?". -
Arthur B on Ho There Jim Lad
at 11:27 on 13-05-2013 - link
I'd be a lot more hostile towards piracy if the arguments that the industry made against it were not so patently false.
There's entire departments full of PR people in the record industry who just need to be fired en masse over this nonsense, because all it does is make the various industry bodies look like precisely the sort of profit-crazed deceitful fascists the piracy lobby makes them out to be.
Of all the many things you can blame the record industry for, one of them has to be the fact that Kim fucking Dotcom can make himself to be some sort of amazing hero-martyr and people actually believe him. -
Dan Hemmens on Ho There Jim Lad
at 10:57 on 13-05-2013 - link
@arilou-skiff
Precisely. It is illegal, but it falls under "breach of copyright" ("upphovsrättsbrott") not theft.
Exactly. This is basically the problem with the "piracy is theft" rhetoric - it's based on a false premise. If your argument against piracy is simply:
* Piracy is theft
* Theft is wrong
* Therefore piracy is wrong
Then the fact that piracy is not actually theft at all leaves you out in the cold. I'd be a lot more hostile towards piracy if the arguments that the industry made against it were not so patently false.
@shimminI'm actually not sure that's a contrast. The distinction I was trying to draw was Theft as Removing Property From Someone Else vs. Theft as Getting Stuff Without Permission.
As other people who know more about this than me have pointed out, the definition of theft is fairly specifically *both* of those things - that is, getting something by removing it from someone else without permission.
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http://arilou-skiff.livejournal.com/ on Ho There Jim Lad
at 08:21 on 13-05-2013 - link
Precisely. It is illegal, but it falls under "breach of copyright" ("upphovsrättsbrott") not theft.
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Arthur B on Ho There Jim Lad
at 08:08 on 13-05-2013 - link
IANAL so I have no idea how the judgement would go, but I'm not convinced that pirating music wouldn't fall foul of that law, even though you're not actually depriving the owner of the track?
It wouldn't because when you pirate something you aren't taking anything, you are making an unauthorised copy. And a lot of the time in Internet piracy it'll be an unauthorised copy of an unauthorised copy, and maybe even several copies down the chain, before you actually get to an authorised copy of the work in question. -
Shimmin on Ho There Jim Lad
at 08:02 on 13-05-2013 - link
Which, y'know, is the actual legal definition of theft here. (actually it's even stricter than that, a person sentenced to theft is one who "Takes what belongs to another with the intent of possessing it." (if the intent is NOT to possess it then it's something else, destruction of property, illegal borrowing, etc.)
I'm actually not sure that's a contrast. The distinction I was trying to draw was Theft as Removing Property From Someone Else vs. Theft as Getting Stuff Without Permission. IANAL so I have no idea how the judgement would go, but I'm not convinced that pirating music wouldn't fall foul of that law, even though you're not actually depriving the owner of the track? -
http://arilou-skiff.livejournal.com/ on Ho There Jim Lad
at 07:44 on 13-05-2013 - link
I've currentlyreading The Serious Game which is set in the 1890's and onwards, and one of the interesting thing is how people relate to music (at least among the bourgeisie that is both the audience for and subject of the book) basically with recording in it's infancy, performance is pretty much everything, and most of it is done by people themselves. Eg. singing together is a thing. Perfectly acceptable activities for a bunch of middle-class men is to get together and form a singing group just for kicks.
"Piracy isn't theft if you define theft as something like: removing property from someone else without their permission."
Which, y'know, is the actual legal definition of theft here. (actually it's even stricter than that, a person sentenced to theft is one who "Takes what belongs to another with the intent of possessing it." (if the intent is NOT to possess it then it's something else, destruction of property, illegal borrowing, etc.)
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Arthur B on Ho There Jim Lad
at 01:43 on 13-05-2013 - link
I should also add that as far as I’m concerned the most important thing about copyright is that it protects individuals from corporations, not the other way around.
That's the way it was designed, that's not the way it's worked for a few decades, but that's the way it's starting to work again now for those individuals who are in the know.
Back in the day music existed in precisely two formats: paper and performance. Then, things were nice and simple. Composers relied on copyright to make money out of their compositions. Performers didn't need copyright in the first place because there was no way to record and copy their performances, so Liszt could enjoy Lisztomania to the hilt without competing with bootleg copies of Liszt concerts on CD.
Then recording media were invented and things changed. Suddenly, there was a market for selling recorded performances to the general public. Over the years - peaking in the 1950s-1980s - the technology evolved to a point where if you wanted the sort of production values the competition were enjoying you needed expensive studio equipment, and likewise if you wanted to distribute your music beyond a few home-recorded demo tapes you needed to get a factory to spend time pressing your material onto vinyl or CD; in other words, you needed to be in the record company system so that you could enjoy their sort of budget. And quite often, one of the things they would do is ask you to assign them the copyright in the work you produced for them, so that you couldn't walk away and take your albums with you and leave them with no product.
The record companies have tried to keep this system alive to this day, leading to silliness like them forcing MySpace to pull tracks uploaded by the artist in question: they can do that because the artist isn't actually the copyright owner on the track, the record company is. Unfortunately for them, the technology is out there for people to write them out of the narrative entirely. DIY recording isn't something for lo-fi punk or underground hip-hop artists these days: the price of producing a decent-sounding album has gone way down too, and thanks to sites like Bandcamp you can monetise your own music fairly easily. Internet communities keep entire subgenres alive and thriving which would have been left on the shelf by the major record companies and word of mouth is really quite a powerful way to get the word out about an artist: I've been listening to a lot of iamthemorning, a Russian outfit who probably would never get radio play in the UK and I would never have heard of without the Internet but who seem to be doing well with the whole pay-what-you-want deal.
Now, the downside of this of course is that you need a certain level of wealth to actually do the whole self-published musician thing, so it's less viable to do the whole rags-to-riches thing through that route than it might be if a record company picks you out of obscurity and propels you to megastardom. But they did that to a vanishingly small number of people anyway, and the hurdle of getting something recorded and uploaded to bandcamp is much lower than the hurdle of getting noticed by a record company and the overall process is less Faustian. (Of course, you have to do a lot of your own promotion, but that's increasingly true in The Industry these days.)
Basically, music has hit the point where listeners don't need The Industry these days and artists don't really need it either. Less people are going to be able to make a living out of music, but more people are going to be able to put out albums as a hobby and the proliferation of niche styles the hobbyist approach lends itself to means that there's probably someone out there right now producing music which is far more in tune with your personal tastes than whatever the current mass market selections are offering.
It is going to be a crap time to be an A&R person or a record company executive or someone who cleans the office or makes the tea for those guys, but The Industry sustained itself on a weird technological bubble anyway. It is going to be harder and may one day be impossible to be the next Music Billionaire, but barely any musicians who sold their souls to the industry got to that level of success anyway and it isn't a human right to be able to become a millionaire on your art. And I think more and more artists are going to discover that the self-publishing route means that a sufficiently larger portion of their income comes to them (and not the A&R folks or the executives or the peeps who make the coffee) that the record company arrangement becomes profoundly unattractive unless people are married to the idea of attaining fame as per the traditional rock star model. And I think people are seeing through that these days. -
Arthur B on The Beat of a Wing Makes All the Difference
at 00:58 on 13-05-2013 - link
Necro'ing because I just gave up on Project Zero III: The Tormented and my thoughts on it don't really merit a full article.
So, for the third game in the series they try to go for an interesting day/night cycle deal where rather than exploring a physical location in the waking world you spend your nights trawling through a weird dream-manor whilst in the daytime you research the stuff you discover through your dreams.
In principle that's a good idea, the problem is that the day half of the day-night cycle is really woefully underdeveloped and sparse, whilst the episodic nature of the night stuff makes a nonsense of the resource management aspect of the game, because it tops up your inventory at the beginning of each night section. They try to correct this by making the expanse of each night sequence increasingly unpredictable as the game goes on, but instead of restoring a sense of scarcity this just meant I often ended up blowing all my supplies on a very tough fight that I was sure had to be the end of a particular night sequence, only to find that there was more to go.
Also, the fights are more difficult to an extent which is irritating rather than challenging, and the designers start obviously cutting corners partway in by simply recycling locations from past games along with stuffing the plot with callbacks to previous game (which, amongst other things, makes a nonsense of the first game's branching structure by imposing a single canon ending on it). I don't recommend it. -
Cheriola on Ferretbrain Presents the teXt Factor Episode 1 - Monotheism
at 00:23 on 13-05-2013 - link
Since this site is an echo chamber with regards to Jim Butcher, you'll probably rip my head off for this, but... whatever. *shrug*
I liked the Codex Alera books. Were they high brow literature or particularly well written stylistically? Were they terribly original or were the early plot 'secret' reveals at all surprising? Will I re-read them again and again? No. But the books were entertaining me well enough on first read through, they had engaging and consistently ethical protagonists on the good side (unlike, say, Harry Potter), and they didn't require me to pull out a dictionary. That's all I ask for sometimes and Butcher never gave me the impression that it was supposed to be more than easy-reading fluff (unlike, say, Tolkien, which made his black-and-white narrative annoying after a while). I appreciate a hero whose heroism consist of making peace between warring cultures, making a decent attempt at improving the gender/class politics of his society, and who at least tries to solve diplomatic conflicts with brains and guile instead of military power, because the enemies are people, too. (Yes, it reads like an After School Special sometimes. But with YA fantasy, I think that's important. You don't want something like Doctor Who to go all grim-dark and cynical.) And I think Roman culture + elemental bending + non-tolkienesque fantasy races was an interesting change from the standard high middle ages + magic + elves or modern city + magic + vampires setting. Tavi was also one of the least sexually focused teen/twen male protagonists I've ever encountered outside of a Pratchett novel. He's got a steady girlfriend with very little romantic drama and that's it. As an aro-ace reader, I appreciated that. Plus, the books feature a few decently characterised female POV characters who struggle with the severely patriarchal nature of the culture they live in, among other political issues. Yeah, I kept rolling my eyes at the way both major female protagonists went on about the broad-shoulderedness, physical strength and emotional steadiness of their respective love interests, and the 'babies for everyone' ending was a bit much, but... Meh. At least the women got half of the plot focus, had a few opportunities to be sufficiently badass, and the male love interests attached to them weren't creepy assholes. That doesn't make the books particularly recommendable, but it raises them above what I'd call "bad".
And given your usual complaint about Butcher: I honestly don't remember that these books were more focused on the sexual attractiveness of the female characters than any other fantasy series (excepting Discworld, and even those have had some really embarrassing covers). I remember Isana having some body image issues, and one of Tavi's friends being a bit of a womanizer, and Kitai coming from a culture that doesn't believe in the notion that women should cover up more than men. But maybe my filters for this kind of thing have just gotten so strong that I don't notice it anymore. It was too exhausting to react with "verisexual people are weird" to virtually everything I read and watch, no matter if it was written by a man or a woman. You start to accept it as something alien that other people pay a lot of attention to but which you'll never understand, like a person born blind reading descriptions of colours, and so you just tune it out. Besides, it would be unfair of me to argue that verisexual people shouldn't get their fan service just because I can't appreciate it and feel alienated.
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Dan Hemmens on Ho There Jim Lad
at 22:46 on 12-05-2013 - link
@shimmin
Perhaps piracy is less like stealing property and more like skipping tickets on the train?
Pretty much that. More specifically, skipping tickets on a train which is mostly empty, making extra-specially certain that you inflict zero wear and tear on the train's facilities.
Basically what annoys me about the "piracy is theft" rhetoric is that it's a terrible, terrible analogy. "Piracy is sort of like tagging along with a tour group" is a much better comparison, it just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Heck, you could argue that piracy is like playing Warhammer with cardboard tokens. GW want you to buy their miniatures to play their games, but you can get around this restriction with a pair of scissors and a ruler.
@scipiosmithwhat the pirates need to do is go on television and the newspapers pontificating about how the music industry is on its last legs anyway, it's really the unions that are to blame and they are really doing the country a service by not spending taxpayers money to keep it on life support.
Good idea. Then a couple of decades later they can all have massively expensive state funerals. -
Melanie on Ferretbrain Presents the teXt Factor Episode 1 - Monotheism
at 20:15 on 12-05-2013 - link
Also, as well as having a silly premise, Furies of Calderon is *just bad*.
Haha, yes. I think I probably have a little bit of a double-standard there. If I dislike something, then it having a silly premise is an additional mark against it (maybe because my suspension of disbelief is already shot and being asked to suspend my disbelief "too far" irritates me?), but if I like it then the premise can even be a point in its favor (novelty! fun! seeing how they can make it work! etc.).
