Tech IT Easy » Piracy

Can we accept piracy as a necessary evil already? [Cranky Rant]

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:39:59 +0000

I have a general philosophy on the evolution of the B2C and B2B relationship, one that is inspired by history. Let’s look at some examples. Money first took the form of barter, then gold, then coins, then paper, and now bits and bytes. Transport: on foot (great shoe-sales), animals (great stable-sales), cars (great garage sales), planes (great duty free sales), and finally tele-conferencing (great device sales). Books: handwritten, handprinted, printing-press, mass-media, internet, iPad / Kindle. At every turn, something was replaced, an industry was destroyed, yet it was for the purpose of evolution. Don’t get me started on evolution itself, as that is all about destructive replacement.

The point about all of these is not about destructive replacement. It’s about improving a product in the eyes of the consumer. And what enabled this improvement? Common standards, collaboration, user-feedback, guts, ruthlessness, innovation, progress, etc. Why producers don’t like to cooperate with that? Because every technology requires an investment to make it work.

Think of the poor embroiderer, which is what inspired this post (bound to get a lot of flack). It’s a funny industry. I wasn’t aware that needlework designs are being sold over the internet and thus at the risk of piracy. I suppose I always thought an embroiderer embroids, then sells their product and ships it to consumers. Instead, they seem to go to the simplest side-product of their work, the one that becomes a foundation for potential mass-production, the “design-chart,” which is then being “shipped,” via download, to customers. Interesting! It kinds of makes sense from a distribution standpoint. Customers are not willing to pay for the shipment of needlework, instead they prefer producing locally, which really is a great idea. The only problem here is the way it is distributed.

In a B2C relationship over the internet, I think, it always comes down to eliminating as many barriers as possible. When you buy from an online shop, you really want the product in your house as quickly as possible. If I could reach my arm into the screen in front of me and pull out the product that I just ordered, that would be just perfect. It’s worse when the product is digital, because the customer knows that it’s just bits & bytes really not worth anything tangible (I’m just talking about the 1s & 0s here) and it could be in the customer’s home in a millisecond. Instead, business erect as many barriers as they possibly can, whether it’s a big ‘copyrighted’ sign across a picture, an overly complex signup/payme page, or the somewhat convoluted iTunes-model, where it really is easier to pay than to pirate.

But in the light of evolution, these barriers are bound to be broken! The same reason why gold is no longer a form of payment, because it’s really heavy and annoying to handle, the world of commerce has a way of evolving towards something easier and easier and easier, until finally I pay by waving a magic wand (eh RFID chip) across a panel.

Let’s get back to embroidery. The problem is two-fold. 1. fragmentation, because any solution that I am about to propose will not get blanket acceptance. 2. the silly notion that selling designs, which seems like the most valuable thing an embroiderer has to offer (actual IP), is something that should be done in a direct B2C relationship. In the light of consumers constantly wanting to break barriers, this offering of valuable IP seems like an industry-defeating purpose.

So what are possible solutions?

consolidation & protection. Basically the iTunes model, where everything is placed behind a secure window that can preferably only be accessed via a specific device (my personal belief is that anything bits & bytes will eventually be free as that is not where the real value lies).
selling designs via local shops. If the problem is distribution, why not partner with local shops that keep your designs behind bars and just print out the end-product for consumers.
selling designs via the machines that produce needlework. No idea what they are called, but they have a strong incentive to keep their machines being used and have a direct line to consumers.

I’m sure any of the above is a solution with problems, but my point is the following:

Piracy will continue to exist and will become worse if you make it easy for people to pirate.
Consumer products evolve in a fashion that keeps pushing out inefficiencies and piracy is one of the quickest ways online to remove these inefficiencies.
The only way to prevent privacy is to not distribute anything that can be distributed via bits & bytes.

Case in point: the idiot that just walked into an Apple store and jailbroke every damn iPhone 4 on display.

Last point: I am not advocating piracy. I run a company myself, I have a business degree, and I believe in getting paid for your work. But I do believe silly strategies deserve to get punished. And there are plenty, plenty, plenty of them that I have mentioned on this blog over the years.

Valve’s Steam and Mac gaming

Kari Silvennoinen — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 09:27:10 +0000

I was attending a LAN gaming session (aka. real “social gaming”) with a group of friends a while ago. Last time, we spent a lot of time installing (and updating) games and trying to get computers to find each other and I had to borrow someone else’s computer. This time, we were quickly up and running and I could proudly play on my MacBook Pro.

Sure, I had installed Windows 7 using Bootcamp on my Mac, because while VMware Fusion was okay for Tales of Monkey Island and even Torchlight, it just doesn’t cut it for hardcore gaming. The only game that I had any problems running over Bootcamp was, oddly enough, Postal 2. Otherwise, I was equal among my PC using peers. I had dreamed about this day.

But what really made things easy for all of us was Valve’s Steam, a gaming portal/service.

The iTunes model strikes again.

Steam ...for the rest of us

We have passed a long time the point where new games are automatically better than older just due to technological improvements. We were still playing games we played over 3 years ago, and some of them were “old” even by then, like Unreal Tournament 2004. The reasons for this are Windows XP and DirectX. These two technologies have enabled a decade of games that are still playable almost without any emulation. The biggest change is happening right now with multicore and 64bit CPUs.

What Steam has done is basically something that other forms of entertainment could learn a lot about, if they could get over their stone age business logic and hunting down their customers. PC game piracy has always been a problem and one reason why PC gaming today seems to be an afterthought to console gaming. Steam (and other similar services, like Impulse) mostly eliminates the piracy problem with a central authorization structure, but yet provides added value to the customer. You only need to install Steam on any computer and log in and you have access to all your games (provided that you have the bandwidth to download the over 2 GB that most games today use). This is something that isn’t possible with iTunes and only recently was possible with Spotify.

What really sets Steam apart here from other entertainment industry offerings is actual value for users. What Steam has done, is really catch the long tail of ecommerce, even though the concept of long tail has long since gone out of fashion. By being able to sell couple of years old games that are virtually impossible to find anywhere (legally) and for a fraction of the price is just amazing. I was able to buy Psychonauts, the most amazing game ever, for just 2 euros and even at the normal price of 9,99 euros it’s 1/4th of what it did cost on the shelves (and it still costs around 15 euros on Amazon). After the Steam’s holiday sales during Christmas, I found out that I had bought many games, mostly because the price was right.

Other benefits from using Steam is that all your games are automatically updated and even for some games, your progress and settings are saved in the “Steam Cloud” – allowing you to play seamlessly on multiple computers.

But there aren’t any games for Mac

The year 2010 turned to be a pleasant surprise for gamers, especially for those, like me, who have switched to Mac. First, Telltale Games announced that their games would be available for Mac as well. This was excellent news for all Sam & Max and Monkey Island fans who would no longer need to boot up VMware Fusion.

And, sure, there have always been Civilization IV and The Sims 3 for Mac, but having new, native games for Mac was excellent news. Clearly a certain threshold has been breached and the amount of gamers living in self-denial on Mac is now large enough that the market is suddenly viable.

Nothing could have prepared us, the people who still reflexively keep our left fingers on WASD and use multi-button mice, for the announcement from Valve that both Steam and Valve’s game engine Source would be available for Mac.

Now, I don’t see that this will mean that soon Mac OS X would be equal gaming platform with Windows, but it does warm my heart. I know that I still need to boot to Windows to really enjoy gaming. The reason Telltale and Valve have been able to pull this out is based on their choices to use cross-platform frameworks (like OpenGL) instead of Windows-only technologies like DirectX. You also need to keep in mind that both Telltale and Valve seem to have target audiences that use Macs and have both targeted certain niches, the former makes high quality “casual” adventure games and the latter high quality first person shooters for more “hardcore” crowd. It is unlikely that other game developers or publishers will follow suit. For a true revolution, Microsoft would need to not only port DirectX to Mac OS X but also develop it at same pace with Windows. Looking at Microsoft’s track record with Mac software, this is even less likely than playing Left 4 Dead natively on Mac looked a couple of months ago. The more likely scenario is that as hardware gets faster and emulating a graphics card gets more efficient, running even the most recent 3D games in VMware Fusion starts to be feasible. A possible scenario is also that through technologies like OpenCL, PC games aren’t as dependent on GPUs and DirectX as they are today.

On the other hand, this shows how Apple’s decision to invest in cross-platform frameworks like OpenGL, OpenCL and WebKit can really pay off in the long term. It also shows that being nice and having something like Bootcamp can be an advantage. I was really surprised how easily I could install Windows 7 on my Mac and how Apple had provided drivers for everything.

What Steam proves is that to succeed on the internet, you really need to be familiar with your customers and understand their needs and truly deliver superior experience and added value to them. This is nothing new, but somehow the rest of the entertainment industry seems to think that they can still get away with last century tactics.

Media’s Basic Duty to tell the Truth (P.S. Blogs are not Media)

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:27:30 +0000

This in reference to the accusations (1, 2) that Techcrunch made towards Last.fm, which have been criticised by many, not least by Last.fm and CBS itself. For those that haven’t been following it, accusations were raised at Last.fm for sharing (private) user-data with the RIAA, the US institution best known for suing old ladies for sharing music on their PCs. Recently, CBS/Last.fm issued another statement that these accusation are completely false. More recently, today in fact, news was released that the Last.fm founders quit. Now, I, as a blogger and not a media-person (there is a difference), don’t think that this last piece of circumstantial evidence bodes well for CBS/Last.fm.

Let’s first define media and truth as I think its relevant to the discussion. By media, I mean any publication that has it in their core-statutes (or whatever they are called) to inform the public as accurately and honestly as possible. This excludes blogs, in my opinion, as most of us have made no such agreements with our readers (sorry, guys!). Instead, some of us use it as a diary, others as a commentary, and others as a pseudo reporting service (on Tech IT Easy, we try to restrict ourselves to two and three). Techcrunch, on the other hand, while having started as a blog, can now easily be called an organisation reporting the news, with all the conditions that come with it.

Truth: in the media, truths are verifiable facts. You can verify facts in two ways. One, by quoting your source, preferably primary, short and simple. Two, by being a reputable source yourself. In other words, the Financial Times can tell us that an anonymous source has told them that Martians have visited the president and that statement will hold more value than if I told you that Martians have visited the president. Why? Because the Financial Times has more to lose than me (perhaps).

While Techcrunch is obviously not the 121-year old institution that is the Financial Times, it is in many ways it’s equivalent in this time of new online-focussed media. It has a lot to lose by giving out the wrong information. Techcrunch repeated its allegations several times even, without quoting sources I should mention, which leads me to believe them.

So why not trust CBS/Last.fm over Techcrunch? One, a corporation stating that it hasn’t done harm to its customers is simple self-preservation. Two, while I have been following Last.fm even before it was Last.fm, and while I actually find its founders very sympathetic, I think that they experienced the hypocrisy that corporations sometimes live by (it may be in their statutes even), and decided to quit. If this happened to my baby, I would quit too.

I am not saying that everything Techcrunch writes should be taken at their word (nor even the Financial Times), but as recent history has shown us, there is something wrong in the world of the music- and video-industry (you know, that other media-industry), and the only protection we regular people seem to have, is the media calling them out on the sometimes very nasty things they do. And while we should keep double- and tripple-checking the facts, if only to keep the Techcrunches et al. on their toes, if the RIAA is involved and a big company like CBS, I think I’ll side with public media.

End blog post.

Vincent

P.S. the irony: I think that CBS is also a news reporting organisation. However, in the case of the Last.fm “business unit,” it is not!

Unlike