I generally like TED videos, although it seems like on the issue of intellectual property, they skew towards being against IP. In this video, Johanna Blakely talks about the relatively low amounts of intellectual property law in the fashion industry - there are trademarks, a few patents, and no copyrights. She goes on to argue that the rest of the world can learn from this - i.e. they should reduce or eliminate intellectual property laws because it will lead to innovation, like it does in the fashion industry. Of course, she’s got it all wrong.

I could go on about the numerous problems I see in her argument, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll point to just two:

The number one problem with her talk is this: she equates designers copying each other’s designs with copyright protection. In fact, what she’s talking about is more similar to patents, not copyrights. If I see an application that does “X”, and I think “I’m going to make a product just like that” — guess what? That’s totally legal. For example, if I see Quattro Pro, and think “I’ll make something called Microsoft Excel” - 100% legal. If I play a game called “Dune 2“, and think “I’ll make a game called Starcraft” - 100% legal. That’s the intellectual equivalent of a “fashion knockoff” - and it’s 100% legal in both the software industry and the fashion industry.

She supports that view in her own video when she says:

5:45-6:10
The counterfeit customer was not our customer.
…
Blakely: This is a very different demographic. And, you know a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design. At least in terms of the materials; they’re always made of cheaper materials.

Yup. Which is exactly why the software industry isn’t that worried about someone making a ‘clone’ of their software product — because when someone copies a piece of software, they never do it quite right, it always has it’s own personality which is different, and often inferior to the original. On the other hand, copyright is used to stop exact duplicates. Exact duplicates do not exist in the fashion industry. There is no such thing as “I pirated a copy of Microsoft Office and Starcraft, but they are inferior versions of the official versions of Microsoft Office and Starcraft.” There is no such thing as “pirated bits are cheaper/inferior to authentic ones”.

So, her entire talk could really be summed up as “software patents shouldn’t exist because the fashion industry survives just fine with the existence of knock-offs”. Personally, I have no problem with that lesson.

A second major problem I wanted to point out is this misleading chart. At 12:35, she shows this chart comparing the sales of “low IP industries” (food, cars, fashion, furniture) and “high IP industries” (films, books, music).

He suggestion here is that lower IP protection results in more production and more revenue. That’s an interesting conclusion.

There’s a variety of interpretations someone could make from that chart.

Since everything in the left section is physical products, everything in the right section is digital products, maybe the lesson is that physical products bring in more revenue than digital ones. Maybe the lesson is that physical products don’t need much intellectual property protection because they’re always tethered to physical items. Or maybe the lesson is that people just don’t/won’t ever spend as much money on books, music, and movies as they spend on necessities like food, automobiles, clothing, and furniture - regardless of the intellectual property protection. I have a hard time believing that eliminating intellectual property protection would somehow cause spending on books, movies, and music to skyrocket 20 or 50 fold - so that they could rival the gross sales of the food and automobile industries. Yet, that seems to be exactly what Blakely is suggesting with this chart. Can you imagine spending as much on music as you spend on food each and every week?

Here’s another little fact: the software industry, which is not shown on her chart, had a worldwide revenue of $304 billion dollars in 2008. This would place it below food and automobiles, but higher than fashion and furniture. I wonder why she left it off her chart.

Yup, this is how the industry works - from what I hear. (I’m not famous enough to actually know first-hand that this is how the games industry works.)

More 1Up Whiteboard Videos.

A friend of mine suggested bringing the game to XBox arcade. Probably not a bad idea, though I’d have to think about the use of typing in the game. Also, XBox doesn’t support OpenGL. Fortunately, none of the EoS graphics code is particularly complex. It’s too bad that technologies don’t work better cross-platform. OpenGL runs everywhere except on the XBox (where Microsoft prefers it’s own DirectX technology). EoS uses MFC, which only runs on Windows. A friend of mine does a lot of work in Flash, which runs everywhere - except the iPhone and iPad. It’s never fun to write secondary code to get applications ported to other platforms.

I’ve long accused the EFF of being on the side of the pirates. They downplay the effects of piracy, do their best to throw up legal challenges to prevent any possible enforcement of copyright on the internet, hire vocal advocates of legalized filesharing, and even created tools to detect if ISPs were throttling BitTorrent traffic so ISPs could be dragged into court. Now a new CNet article is making the connection even more clear. Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney and author of numerous EFF articles has been instructing pirate groups on how to facilitate piracy, but avoid legal responsibility.

A few quotes:

According to Wood, LimeWire founder Mark Gorton testified that he and former company Chief Technology Officer Greg Bildson received questionable advice from von Lohmann. “Gorton states that another attorney, [von Lohmann], gave [LimeWire], including Bildson, confidential legal advice regarding the need to establish a document retention program to purge incriminating information about LimeWire users’ activities,” Wood wrote in her decision.
…
In his zeal to keep some of these services from being sued out of existence, von Lohmann has gone too far, say critics. During the Grokster trial, MGM’s lawyers noted that von Lohmann in 2001 wrote a primer called “Peer-to-Peer File Sharing and Copyright Law After Napster.” In the piece, von Lohmann advised that to “avoid liability,” operators should create “plausible deniability” by “choosing an architecture that will convince a judge…monitoring and control is impossible.”

In a paper titled “What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law,” von Lohmann wrote, “The court also found that Napster had a duty to monitor the activities of its users “to the fullest extent” possible. Accordingly, in order to avoid vicarious liability, a P2P developer would be wise to choose an architecture that makes control over end-user activities impossible.”

Is von Lohmann instructing file-sharing services on how to avoid violating the law here, or is he teaching them how to violate the law and avoid responsibility?

This isn’t surprising at all. It’s clear that the EFF and von Lohmann has always had an interest in helping pirates evade legal responsibility for copyright violations.

It’s worth reiterating what Dave Winer, creator of RSS and an early supporter of the EFF said about the EFF years ago:

I gave $5000 to the EFF when they started, I think it was in 1990, with the noble goal of protecting freedoms as our technology and culture move online. I think I have supported every cause the EFF has adopted since then, but that’s no longer true. I gave this a lot of thought, believe me, and had a long email exchange with Brad Templeton, the chairman of the EFF board of directors, and think they have become as radically polarized as the entertainment industry, and like Hollywood are now working against the interests of those they were meant to serve. The issue appears to be copyright, and it appears that the EFF believes there should be no copyright….

The problem with the EFF position is that in order to remain consistent, they have had to say that copyright doesn’t exist — if a policy or law restricts what a user can do on the Internet then that is a bad policy or law. The courts can’t agree with the EFF. I don’t agree with the EFF.

I’ve heard people argue about PC piracy and XBox piracy in the past - saying that PCs are getting hurt badly by piracy, followed by the retort that piracy exists on the XBox as well, but it’s a lot harder and riskier (you have to install a mod-chip, and you risk being locked out of the XBox network).

According to a recent GamesRadar article, the PC version of Modern Warfare 2 was pirated 4.1 million times and sold 270,000 copies. Meanwhile, the XBox 360 version was pirated 970,000 times and sold 6 million copies. That’s a pretty stark contrast. To put it another way, 6% of the people playing Modern Warfare 2 on the PC actually paid for it, while 86% of the people playing the game on the XBox 360 payed for it. Partially as a result of this, Modern Warfare 2 sold 22x better on the XBox than on the PC.

The disparity might be due to a number of factors. Other than the fact that the XBox games are more difficult to pirate, there’s also the fact that Microsoft did a major crackdown on XBox pirates right before the Modern Warfare launch, banning 1 million players - which probably put the fear of god into players considering pirating the game.

This actually reminded me of an article I saw some time ago on a pro-piracy website. They argued that the fact that Modern Warfare 2 was the most pirated game of the year, but still managed to be the best-selling game of the year meant that piracy had no effect on sales. What they neglected to notice, based on these numbers, is that the piracy, the ease of piracy, and the fear of getting caught seems to have played a large role in the disparity in PC vs XBox sales.

Mark Morgan put together a free hi-quality version of the soundtracks to Fallout 1 & 2:

Mark Morgan’s “Vault Archives” is remastered and mixed full-bandwidth soundtrack from old-classic “Fallout” games (24 tracks).

I think he copied the original music and recorded it in much higher quality. For anyone who spent way too much time playing the Fallout series (like I did), this will bring back some memories. You can download it here or here, and listen to a few tracks using the embedded player here.

[Hat tip to Octopus Overlords]

Recently, I was working at the library with my earbuds in, when I noticed a buzzing noise. Strange, I bought these things less than a month ago. I considered bringing them back for a refund, but I procrastinated.

Today, I was noticing the buzz again, and I started thinking: I don’t remember hearing this buzz when I’m anywhere but the library. I tried moving the cord around, trying to get the buzz to stop. It was intermittent. The wiring must be bad somewhere, but I couldn’t figure out where.

I moved my legs a little bit, and noticed that the buzzing would stop and start again based on the positions of my legs - which made no sense. Then I noticed that picking my feet up off the ground made a difference in the buzzing noise. How weird. Then it occurred to me: maybe the buzz had nothing to do with the wire. Maybe it was due to a bad electrical ground. I pulled the laptop plug out of the wall, and the buzz disappeared. No wonder I hadn’t noticed the buzz anywhere except the library - it was due to a bad ground.

I was just wandering around a local GameStop. It took me a minute to find their PC Gaming section - and it was tiny. They had a 3 foot x 3 foot section for PC games priced at $20 or less (apparently inventory they’re trying to clear-out), and an even smaller section for regular-priced PC games. It was literally about one foot of shelf space for all their PC games selling for $30 or more.

I asked a salesman about this, and he said that between piracy and download services like Steam, there just wasn’t much of a market for selling PC Games.

- I was talking to another game developer last week. He’s a big, big fan of Apple products. He does all his work on a Mac, and he’s the only person I know with an iPad. He also makes Flash games, and has been porting them to the iPhone and iPad. Apple recently decided to ban ports of Flash games being sold in the App store, cutting him off from the market. Google really wants more developers on the Droid. They’ve been talking to him about getting his games on the Droid phone, and asked him if he had one. He didn’t, so they sent him a free phone, and mailed to him overnight. Google is really working hard to knock the iPhone off it’s top position. Looks like Google might’ve just stolen-away the biggest Mac-fan I know.

- Talked to a guy last week that started playing the new D&D Online. It’s a free-to-play MMO, but their revenue model is that players can buy in-game items. He said he’s spent about $150 on in-game items. Wow. I don’t know how many months he’s been playing, but they went free-to-play 7 months ago. If we assume he’s been playing for the past seven months (and it’s probably less than that), then he’s been paying an average of $21 per month.

- Talked to three different people within the last week who brought up the fact that they torrented something. One girl said she was having trouble installing some torrented software and a movie on her computer, and asked if I could help her. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I ended up politely explaining that I couldn’t in good conscience help her with pirated material.