demodulated

The Pirate Bay, everyone’s favourite Bittorrent tracker and conglomerate of filesharing sites, is known for taking delight in ruffling the feathers of the establishment. In the same spirit as their legal threats page and blase retort to their insignificant police-sanctioned downtime, The Pirate Bay took another jab at big media early this October when they leased the expired ifpi.com domain. This domain, until early this year, was under the employ of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

Though the IFPI would have us believe otherwise, The Pirate Bay isn’t the only other proprietor of this namespace. The trusty Wayback Machine shows a seemingly independent blog hosted at this domain in April of this year. This is odd since domains are rarely leased for shorter periods than one year.

This acquiry was significant for a few reasons. First and foremost, it’s obviously an attempt to tweak the noses of John Law. Second, the domain was acquired legally and fairly and was only possible because the IFPI organisation allowed their lease to lapse, returning the domain to the public market. Third, The Pirate Bay makes it well known, as illustrated in the screenshot below, that the site is under new ownership and that if you’ve arrived at the site looking for the IFPI organisation you should click the clearly labelled warning.

The commandeering of this domain has caused some headaches and embarrassment for the IFPI. For instance, for some untold reason, they’d opted to accept emails to both their ifpi.org and ifpi.com addresses, and of course, as is their right, The Pirate Bay has opted to activate a catchall email address which presents to them all emails sent to any @ifpi.com address. Truth be told, if this situation has caused any other confusion or inconvenience the IFPI has been too gentlemanly to complain about it publicly.

However, this hasn’t stopped them from crying foul to the World Intellectual Property Organisation - an appointed collective of global representatives whose job is to debate and encourage worldwide creativity and respect of copyrights. It is quizzical, then, that WIPO would show such disdain for their own field by overriding the American ICANN, the body in charge of the world’s domain names, by awarding the IFPI.com domain to the IFPI organisation, even though American law states that domain names cannot be copyrighted:

Can I copyright my domain name?
Copyright law does not protect domain names. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit organization that has assumed the responsibility for domain name system management, administers the assignation of domain names through accredited registers.

P2Pnet reports that the notice of appeal, granting The Pirate Bay 10 days to contest the ruling, was tardy in its delivery. I certainly hope they’ll contest this to bring the decision and the entire WIPO under further public scrutiny.

Until then, the IFPI and WIPO have given us much to ponder. For instance, the concepts of fair use and legal entitlement. These organisations argue that the law doesn’t always represent the best interests of the truly entitled party, and if not, can be overruled. As I’ve discussed in the past, American law is often proven to submit to 800-pound gorillas even in the face of overwhelming entitlement, prior art, and the stifling of local business versus foreign interests.

Will The Pirate Bay lose steam thanks to this debacle? Nah. Quite the opposite, I’d wager. I can’t imagine such salty dogs not foreseeing such a rocky shore. Nay, they’ll doubtless sing many a shanty about the one that got away; about the time big media let its true colours show and finally proclaimed in plain language what we’ve all known them to be whispering under their collective breath - do as we say, not as we do.

I was a customer of Fido, a cellular carrier in Toronto, for about 10 years. They started out as the little company that could - relatively cheap rates, by-the-second billing, and no contracts. I definitely stayed with them for longer because there was no obligation.

However, after several years of operation, Fido enacted a “Government Licensing Fee”, or some such, of about $30 per year. This gave way to a monthly fee of about $6.95 per month. Naturally, these fees were charged on top of the ordinary monthly fee, yet Fido had the nerve to omit this amount from all advertising.

I read a Toronto Star article a few years ago discussing the controversy surrounding this suspicious government licensing fee that had appeared on nearly all of Toronto’s cell carriers as of late. The most noteworthy points were that the government enforced no such fee, not all carriers asked for it, and it was highly suspicious that the fee appeared almost simultaneously on the major carriers’ invoices, never advertising any increase in subscription price. Also noteworthy was mention of a class action lawsuit that dissolved after the carriers each assigned new names to this fee, removing the implication that it was required by law, but not omitting or reducing the fee.

It’s been years since I read that article. Fido has changed hands and is now owned by Rogers - a lumbering brontosaur of a Canadian media company with a reputation of harbouring very helpful sales staff and useless support reps. I quickly got fed up with the new Fido, endured the remainder of my contract (which was requisite in order to buy a replacement phone - an ordeal I discuss here and here), and ditched them with many harsh words.

I left Fido for Virgin Mobile. I approached Virgin with much skepticism as their low prices and many included features seemed too good to be true. Most suspicious of all was the exclusion of any fees above and beyond the advertised price. Lo and behold, to my astonishment, the service is all it claims to be and more.

After several months of cellular bliss I’d almost forgotten about the other carriers altogether. A Toronto Star article reminded me of the plight of my brethren. The topic of a class action suit is on the table again - a move that is sure to make a couple of lawyers rich on behalf of the majority of Canada’s cellular subscribership.

I’m not satisfied. Not only is this story similar to the one I read years ago, it’s by the same Star columnist! If the requisite parties are aware of the problem, where’s the solution?

Can I expect to be reimbursed for the 5-odd years I had to pay this fee? Why is this massive scam taking nearly a decade to resolve? If impersonating a police officer is a jailable offense why is it legal to impersonate the government in demanding fraudulent fees?

Where’s the justice? In someone’s pocket?

Since Canada has no DMCA is it illegal for me to post this?

Really, I’m just curious. I’ll take it down if it is.

Crazy-Long Hacker Sentence Upheld (by Kevin Poulsen aka Dark Dante)
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,71358-0.html

Brian Salcedo and Adam Botbyl, ages 23 and 22, have been sentenced 9 years for breaking into a Lowe’s grocery store WiFi network and snooping for credit card information with a custom-modified version of a commercial transaction auditing tool, tcpcredit.

This sentence is ridiculous. 9 years for friggin network intrusion? True it’s not a first offense conviction, but this poor 23 year old kid’s life is ruined - not by his actions but by his “justice” system.

He connected to a publicly accessible WiFi network! He tuned his stereo into KLOW public access radio - all Lowe’s, all the time. The manager of the store should get 9 years in jail for putting thousands of customers’ private data at stake! But no, it’s not grandma’s fault she cooled her pie on the window, it’s the dog’s fault for smelling and eating it.

Do you know how easy it is to get credit card information? Dumpster diving behind the store would yield more numbers in 5 minutes than 24-hours of WiFi packet capture. This is a crime of curiosity. This is REAL hacking - modifying publicly accessible resources to see how functionality can be extended. This kid should go directly to college, do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

Oh no, a kid knows the TCP stack. That’s a classified protocol only used on private intranets. Obviously he is a TERRORIST conspiring with Gary fucking McKinnon to reveal the government’s secret plot to bury free energy at Lowes superstores. Lock him up for a third of his life and throw away the key - his unquenchable thirst for computer science will be worse than 40 Nagasakis in a dairy case.

The Michigan justice system is run by old men who are amazed at the lifelike puppets wiggling inside their televisions.

Freedom downtime.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about digital entertainment piracy, and I have some insights to share. A wake-up call to the games industry is overdue.

I read a poignant response by law professor Michael Geist on a CRIA (Canadian RIAA) study identifying the demographics of the the worst offenders of music piracy. Geist notes that the group that pirates the most music (18-24) also purchases the second-largest quantity (after 13-17 year-olds). He subsequently postulates that music “piracy” is in fact an effective, free marketing tool - send a song to a friend and she is that much more likely to buy it.

Of course, there are technological differences between music and game piracy:
- Music is downgraded in quality to make it more easily downloadable, while games are usually duplicated bit-for-bit.
- You can download any song from an album but you can’t download any level of a game.

Then again, thanks to copy protection measures, pirated products are far more versatile than storebought originals:
- You can make as many copies on whatever format you wish.
- You don’t need to keep the original medium in the drive.

And due to the marketplace, games are particularly attractive targets for piracy:
- Software refunds are rare, so if an intense level not featured in the demo runs slowly on your PC you’re not out $60.
- Game demos often use the same copy protection as the final version to thwart crackers.
- Game prices are initially inflated.

That last point is one that is very important to me. I admit I downloaded a cracked copy of Half Life 2 after hearing many tumultuous tales of woe about Steam. Half the reason I play single-player games is because my internet connection is unstable, so the hassle of remote authentication before each session wasn’t worth $70 (Canadian) to me. I adored the game and played it over and over, feeling a little twinge of guilt about my crime. I bought the game when the price came down, as I’ve done with Dungeon Siege and its sequel, Unreal 2, NHL 2006, and countless other titles.

I often wait months to play (or pay for) anticipated titles until the second-hand price is palatable. Is it so wrong to pay a lower price later on, “retroactively”? I want to vote with my pocketbook on what I feel is a fair price, at the risk of breaking the law in the interim.

And even when I buy games nowadays I usually don’t get the sense of value that I used to. My old Wing Commander box came with a clever manual designed like a space-naval (ships, not bellybuttons) magazine as well as huge detailed blueprint posters of allied starships. The old Infocom text adventure Wishbringer came with a glow-in-the-dark rock, a creepy tattered envelope (the protagonist is a postal worker) containing a letter from one of the game characters, and a rudamentary map. Half Life 2 came with 6 CDs in paper sleeves and a quick reference card, and my friend’s Civ 4 manual is a PDF (I hear only a limited number of first edition copies had no printed manual, but more compete packages cost the same).

I think pirates would feel worse about their crimes if they felt better about their legal purchases. Prices have barely changed in 15 years even though boxes are smaller and media are lighter and cheaper to duplicate. Boxed bonuses and even printed manuals are almost extinct. Publishers punish their paying customers more than thieves with crippling copy protection.

To combat rampant movie piracy in China, publishers have begun selling “light” versions of DVDs (with no extras) for about 20% of their former cost. Games have started doing something similar with various collectors editions, but an extra-expensive alternative won’t coerce many to buy the regular priced version any faster. If physically owning a game was more meaningful to the consumer, more consumers would consume!

Conversely, I just preordered and downloaded Half Life 2: Episode 1. This expansion is only $20 but it’s about the same price per entertainment hour as the boxed copy of the original. I can’t really feel cheated before playing the game (especially considering the 10% preorder discount) but I simply don’t understand why they price isn’t lower. There’s no box, discs, manuals, or shipping.

PC games will evolve somewhere along the chain or die. The industry needs better packaged products and\or cheaper digital distribution, and more respect for its paying customers. I can’t really supply solutions, only symptoms. I hope the up-and-ups of PC gaming take note from larger industries that you can only pump your lifeblood so hard until an artery bursts.