How do I know this? After all I wasn’t there. That is true my friends, but I do sometimes read the blogs of The Enemy to better know their goals, aims and strategies. Despite the popular belief, people who work in copyright protection industry are not stupid. I may not agree with their philosophy, their morals and their conduct but I am not ready to dismiss them as complete nincompoops. Note that I’m not talking about entertainment industry execs (incompetents who failed upwards via nepotism and favoritism) or politicians on their payroll (corrupt sociopaths). I’m talking about the folks working in the so called “takedown industry”.

You see, the above mentioned copyright moguls don’t really know how to use computers. They are really good at calling law makers, pulling the “don’t you know who I am” card, and threatening to stop handing out bribes. Those strategies do not work against file sharing sites. You can’t just call up Kim Dotcom and try to scare him with your fancy looking Armani suit and your scary looking lawyer friend, because he has two of each, plus he does not care. To deal with digital piracy, you often have to use digital means – ie submit online DMCA takedowns. If you have ever watched a Hollywood movie, you have probably noticed that none of the movie makers have actually ever used a real computer. So they would rather hire someone to do that for them, rather tan try to learn the internet themselves.

Enter takedown industry: companies that specialize in automated DMCA takedowns. It is still a niche market – one that most geeks would not touch with a ten foot pole. As such, it is desperate for technological know-how. A semi-competent programmer or sysadmin can easily break into it make a decent salary and a name for himself there. And thus many of our brothers and sisters end up gravitating there, and building tools and systems designed to abuse DMCA and stretch it to it’s limits.

The concept is simple – DMCA works quite well against casual infringement. If someone uploads copyrighted material on their blog, or on Youtube you can easily bring it down with a single request. The problem is with organized file sharing sites – torrent communities, cyberlockers, file sharing forums, etc… When you have a large community of people committed to infringe your copyright no matter what, then takedown notices become mostly useless. As soon as you get your IP taken down, someone else will “re-up” it in the same forum. So you have to issue another DMCA request, and another, and another. If you want to suppress the availability of the file in said forum, you need to be faster than the pirates. You must request a take-down as soon as the file re-surfaces, and you have to make sure it goes down before the bulk of sites users can find it.

Use of automated takedown tools becomes a necessity. And once you have these tools in place, guess what happens? Yup – script kiddie instincts take over. DMCA is broken enough not to require any proof of ownership. You can request takedowns on any files, whether or not you are authorized to do so or not. If you set your search parameters wide enough, and have enough machines, running automated scripts 24-7 you can more or less cripple the pirate site by repeatedly nuking everything on it’s front page.

So over the last few years or so, the small cottage industry of copyright protection has been slowly shifting from “we protect your files” to “we will nuke your enemies from the orbit” type services. And they have been getting better at it.

This does not surprise me. If there is a tool to be built, someone will build it. In fact, I find this industry somewhat fascinating because it actually follows what Charles Stross predicted in Accelerando. He came up with an idea of a “legal DDOS attack” in which bunch of expert systems would gang up against a legal entity to inundate it with threats, civil suits, inquiries and etc… Unless you had an equally potent legal system in place, your company would drown in the sea of legal paperwork in a matter of days, if not hours. And just like IRL, the first use of such systems in Stross’ book was to aid the failing entertainment industry.

But if you don’t believe me, here is a quote taken directly from the horse’s mouth: an owner of take-down company boasting about his contribution in the destruction of adult torrent tracker known as Cheggit:

At first the site tried hiding in numerous offshore countries where they would not have to comply with DMCAs but eventually they tried to become DMCA compliant by hiring DMCANotice.com to handle DMCAs. Once word got around that Cheggit was complying, myself and at least one other removal company began a carpet-bombing attack where literally 100s if not 1000s of torrents were being reported every day. The site complied with these notices quickly and without incident. This immediately resulted in panic on the forum as users pleaded with the site to move offshore again and to stop removing torrents. (…) Myself and the other removal company were literally removing content within minutes of it being posted.

Eventually it was revealed that the site was going dark and shutting down. The owner, was vague as to the exact reasoning but mentioned that starting in December 11 (when our carpet bombing started) it became too difficult to keep the site compliant. I’m sure there was legal pressure as well and I know my company wasn’t the only one involved in takedowns so a big kudos to everyone else involved. I know both myself and Eric from RemoveYourContent were on this one like white on rice. I can’t stress this enough how much effort both Eric and myself put into this from our end. I’m sure more will come out in the coming weeks and we’ll learn about others who were involved in taking this site down.

No doubt the freeloaders will migrate somewhere else and try and reestablish their den of thieves. But we will be there waiting.

As you can see, the author mentions a coordinated “carpet bombing” attack executed by several companies with a clear aim of crippling the website, and forcing it to shut down under the pressure. They were not really interested in protecting their client’s intellectual property – they were out to cause disruption and damage to their target community. And they did it using classic script kiddie tactics – via a coordinated DDOS. And this is just an example involving few tiny companies ganging up against a low profile pr0n tracker. The adult industry is not really known for spending exuberant amounts of money on chasing pirates. They don’t have the same resources as MPAA for example. So you can imagine how this scales when dealing with general purpose trackers and cyber-lockers.

Instead of a handful one-man shops like the one above, imagine dozens of big companies with dedicated server farms mounting all-out attack on Megaupload. Do you still wonder why Kim Dotcom instituted a DMCA takdown cap? Most likely it was the only way he could keep the site afloat, without dedicating all his resources to processing and fielding the barrage of requests.

Because of the brokenness of DMCA, the entertainment industry has turned it into a potent weapon of suppression. It can be used to take down just about any site in a one-two punch combo. The first stage is legal pressure – they send their lawyers against the site owners and pressure them to become DMCA compliant. The promise is that once you put in a DMCA tak-down system and let them remove their latest releases from your site, they will back down. Then as soon as a site becomes compliant the take-down companies enter the picture and pounce on it nuking all the content with extreme prejudice. And you know what? This works. It is astonishingly effective – but it takes time, and costs money.

When SOPA supporters were saying that DMCA is too slow, they did not mean that it is not quick enough at removing requested files. No, it works fine for that – but entertainment industry no longer cares, because it is a Sisyphean work. They no longer use DMCA as a protection tool. They use it as a website takedown weapon. As such DMCA is just too slow at sinking pirate sites – especially ones that don’t care about compliance. This is why they wanted SOPA – an instant “nuke this site” button.

I’m glad SOPA got tabled, but we should not forget that you can do a lot of damage with DMCA alone. I don’t condone piracy as such, but if you happen to run a site with user submitted content, and some of your users turn to piracy, you might one day find yourself in the cross hairs of one of the takedown companies and under a legal pressure to create automated compliance tools. This is a trap. As soon as you allow them to issue take down notices they will pounce and DDOS you. If you refuse, or cap them, they will use it to build a legal case against you that may really hurt you in a civil suit, or lead to a criminal indictment. It seems that the only way to be safe, is not to allow user submitted content. And that makes me worried about the future of the internet.

Dead, buried, there are wilted flowers on it’s grave and no one comes to visit except the creepy grounds keeper doing his rounds every evening.

January 1, 2012 was the annual, international Public Domain day. Many Europeans (depending on country of origin of course) celebrated it, welcoming the entrance of the works of Louis Brandeis, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf to the public commons. Hundreds of quality books just now became, or will soon become a shared cultural asset in many, many countries across the globe. It will be possible to freely translate, adapt, remix, turn them into stage plays, movies and copy without restrictions. They works will become timeless. They will be copied, and preserved by constant use, from now, into perpetuity.

Except in United States of course. Here we don’t preserve our culture – we lock it in a box, and hide it away from public. The sentence? Life plus seventy years, with no parole.

How many wonderful cultural treasures entered public domain this year? Take a wild guess kids. Just think about a number – any number. How many books, movies and or songs do you think became property of the people this year?

If the number you thinking about has two or more digits, you are a wrong. It’s a single digit number: ZERO.

Yes, zero. Nothing. Nill. Empty set. Diddly squat.

How about next year? Surely next year something will slip into the commons, will it? Nope. Not a chance. Nothing will enter the public domain in united states until around 2020. And by that time our beloved congress critters will likely extend the copyright term for another hundred years or so. They have done this three times already. Our copyright term went from 14 years (plus an optional 14 year extension) to life + 70 in just a few short decades. You don’t think they are going to do this again? You don’t know our politicians then.

Let me tell you what happens in United States whenever Mickey Mouse is about to slip into the public domain. Disney corporation opens their large vault (kinda like the one Scrooge McDuck used to bathe in when his cartoon was on the air) and hire few hundred strong men to shovel piles of cash onto large dump trucks. They take those trucks, and they ride on Washington DC, telling people all across the nation how they are on a mission to save Mickey from certain doom. Thousands of producers from Hollywood and heads of major music labels crack open their vaults and join the Disney cavalcade of cash trucks. Once in DC, they barge into congress and ask our law makers:

“How much money do we need to give you to save Mickey Mouse?”

And to prove their case, they whip out laptops, go to Deviant Art, and search for Mickey Mouse, rule 34 and show our elderly politicians who have only heard of internet, but never actually used it, the resulting images saying:

“If you do nothing gentlemen, this will be the future.”

The senators, congressmen and their staff are so impressed by the well dressed, persuasive executives, so tempted by the trucks full of cash and gold bullion, and so disgusted by rule 34 search results that they agree to do it on the spot.

This has happened before, and this will happen again. If we allow things to stay as they are, nothing will ever again enter the public domain in our country.

You could say: “It ain’t so bad Luke! What’s wrong with protecting intellectual property. Why do we need public domain anyway?”

Because without it, we get abandonware and orphaned works. Instead of perpetually re-used and re-made cultural heritage we get legally untouchable works that can never be re-printed and redistributed. We get monumental, ground shattering works that can be suppressed forever by current copyright holder because they do not share same political or moral convictions as their ancestor who created them. We get cultural and economic stagnation.

Public Domain image from a Public Domain Book

Think about all the successful re-makes and re-interpretations of classics such a works as Romeo and Juliet, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and etc. Think about the Disney movies you watched growing up. Without public domain there would be no Snow White, no Little Mermaid, no Alladin, no Beauty and the Beast, no Pinochio, no Jungle Book… Need I continue? It’s ironic that one of the companies that leads the mob of copyright extension lobbyists has built their fortune by creating animated adaptations of famous public domain works.

But don’t take my word for it. Read the Hargraves report, an independent study commissioned by the UK government. Or this empirical study Cambridge and this one from Case Western Reserve University. All of these peer reviewed, well researched papers agree that the costs of long copyright terms outweigh benefits. The type of copyright law we have in US is not economical, culturally damaging and helps no one, save few vocal corporations who have vested interest in perpetually holding on to certain intellectual assets.

But it gets worse. With our government in thrall of media companies, and our technology sector moving away from all purpose home recording technologies we are left without means to preserve our culture. Our cultural heritage is being locked up on proprietary media formats (DVD, BluRay) or held hostage on streaming servers. You can’t legally copy and preserve them, and the copyright holders won’t re-release them on a new medium unless they can profit from it. And the most profitable things usually lack quality – most profitable movies and songs are those who appeal to the lowest common denominator. Valuable, quality stuff is likely to be left behind. The only remaining copy of that thing you love dearly, may look like this:

Archaic Magnetic Data Storage Unit

Chances are you probably don’t even have a device that could play this sort of media anymore. And if you do, it is very likely it will break or get thrown out in the next decade. Even if not, there is no guarantee that your archaic, magnetic data storage unit will stand the test of time.

In the digital age, the only way to preserve data is to copy it forward into the future. Ancients wrote in stone, which is damn near indestructible – and that’s why we have so much information about ancient Egyptians, Persians and etc… We write on paper, which turns into pulp when exposed to moisture, crumbles when it’s to dry and burns easily. We store movies and music on brittle plastic disks that scratch easily and have a guaranteed lifetime of about a decade. We put our data on magnetic disks, with spinning platters, and moving parts that regularly die every few years due to regular wear and tear. Data that isn’t copied, dies.

And yet, our government is doing everything in their power to stop us from copying it. Copyright holders who contribute to their re-election campaigns want us to be a read-only society because it profits them. But it does not profit the people. It is damn right harmful.

The cultural heritage of twenty first century America will likely be a black hole for future archeologists. When they examine the stuff that has survived – what was legally re-released over and over again throughout the next 2-3 centuries they will see world of Idiocracy: dumb action movies, brain dead comedies, tv sitcoms and pop music. Everything of value distilled away and destroyed by the ruthless forces of supply and demand. Except of course the copyleft stuff – truck loads of open source software, and novels of Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, Nail Gaiman and similar authors who had enough foresight to ensure their own immortality by publishing under Creative Commons licenses.

Fortunately this bleak vision of the future in which every significant and meaningful copyrighted work is erased from existence by human greed will not happen. You know why? Piracy.

Yes, piracy!

Now, I do not advocate piracy. I do not want to defend it. I don’t want to be intellectual infringement apologist. But in a world where copying (ie. preserving) cultural goods is strictly prohibited, pirates are the only people implementing Kevin Kelly’s movage – perpetual and endless copying into the future. Big media companies are often perfectly willing to let some of their intellectual properties die and languish. Sometimes because they are unprofitable, and sometimes for completely arbitrary and silly reasons like hubris. For example, Star Wars fans have been asking for a DVD or BluRay release of the original, unedited trilogy – without CGI, and with Solo shooting first. There is demand for it, there is the market, there is hundreds of collectors who would pay premium to get such an item. And yet George Lucas has definitely said that he will never do it. For some strange reason, he wants that version dead and forgotten.

But fear not, most torrent sites on the internet have decent quality DVD rips of the unaltered trilogy for you to download. Even though the current copyright holder has vowed to bury his most famous, and most beloved work, pirates will continue copying it into future. It will survive as long as the people of the internet want it to survive, regardless of who holds the copyright at any given time. And it will not deteriorate over time the way your old VHS copy will. It will not age. It will be preserved. And it ought to be, because under the original copyright term of 14 years (which actually happens to be the most economically optimal length according to the Cambridge paper I linked above) the movies would already be out in the public domain.

When copyright law is broken, pirates become vigilant defenders of culture, diligently unlocking, time shifting, format shifting and mirroring our media for posterity. Yes, they are breaking the law, but what they do has value and cultural significance. If our laws don’t change, their WAREZ will be the sole surviving heritage we will leave to our descendants. When our entire culture is securely wrapped in DRM, temporary internet streams and encrypted media prone to rapid obsolesce future archeologists will turn to archival file sharing sites which will become treasure troves of twenty first century data.

A time may come in some distant future, when museums will have our movies, music and literature cataloged and indexed not by directors, artists or authors but names of scene groups that preserved them.

At a designated time we all filed into the big corner office. The foolhardy and self assured sat down on the two or three available chairs, and the mini couch in the corner. The rest of us decided to remain standing in a respectful pose, as if that somehow made us less prone to managerial wrath. The big boss mad sure that everyone was present and accounted for, and then told us the reason we were summoned:

“Guys,” he said “there is this really good show on financial fraud on TV tonight, and I want to show it during the training next week.”

We were floored. Not sure whether to sigh with relief, or roll our eyes we stood there speechless. The combined power of our company’s technology departments was hijacked from daily duties to help the boss tape a TV show. No one said anything. We just stood, slack jawed and incredulous. Unfazed, big boss continued.

“I set my DVR to tape it for me. So what I need you to do is to figure out how to get it out of my DVR and load it up on the TV in the big conference room.”

The assembled army of sysadmins, network specialists, programmers, dba’s and help desk drones started scratching their heads. While most of us were fairly competent in our respective fields, none of us happened to be an audio/visual geek. The only person I knew in the company who always yabbed about his awesome home theater setup was a guy from accounting who was currently on vacation. So we were all a bit confused as to parameters and requirements of this particular task. Some more than others – after all, while the folks responsible for physical hardware may by chance have some knowledge of DVR’s and transferring their contents, you could hardly expect a Java programmer to know anything about it. But alas, if you work with computers, people automatically assume you can also help them with their DVR’s, their surround sound, house alarm, washing machine and etc..

Still, we were smart people so we would figure this out. We all went back to our desks, and went googling. Within a few minutes we realized that the prospects of making this happen were bleak. First off, big boss had a different cable service than we did. So transferring DVR content between providers would be problematic. Furthermore the DVR he had, was locked down tight. While it hard a USB port on the front panel, the specs specific that this port was dead, and reserved for “future use”. A quick call to the cable support line confirmed that there is no legit way to extract the contents and copy them to external media. Furthermore, we couldn’t find any home-brew hacks for that particular model.

Our next idea was to tape it at the office. We would simply set up the DVR in the conference room to record the show, and we would be all set. The only problem was that there was no DVR there. When the equipment was purchased for the office, the big boss specifically requested no DVR boxes – because it’s not like we would ever use them. We could probably order a DVR box from our cable company, but the fastest we could get it was next business day – which would be to late. One of us could tape it at home and then bring our DVR to work, but those with DVR boxes had them on lease from different cable companies. Not to mention that these boxes were bound to specific accounts making such swaps problematic. To make matters worse, none of us had a working VCR we could use.

So our solutions were as follows:

1. Run out and buy a 3rd party DVR, a DVD recorder or a VCR
2. Run out and buy a TV tuner card for one of the PC’s and rip it that way

Both options required spending money (not a lot of money, but still), so of course they got shot down as quickly as we mentioned them. He kept insisting that there must be a way to transfer the contents between DVR’s and refused to believe his cable company make a product lacking that feature. We ended up calling their tech support again, and quizzing them in his presence and on speaker phone. Big boss remained skeptical, even after two different help desk drones explained to him that they do not allow such a thing. Eventually, he gave up. He decided we were all useless and not deserving our salaries. He kept grumbling about our DVR failure for weeks afterwards, but at least graciously released us and allowed to pursue our regular responsibilities. The whole event was essentially an exercise in high-level office absurdity. But it got me thinking.

If this happened in the 90’s (which is apparently where our boss still resides) any of us could just put a tape into a VCR and then bring it in. We all had these machines in our homes. They were ubiquitous. DVD recorders, while available, and relatively inexpensive never reached such a market penetration. Very few people actually own one, because DVR’s are so much more convenient. In fact the most convenient types of DVR’s are those supplied by your cable company – because they just come with the service. Unfortunately they are also the most locked down ones.

The age of cable issued DVR’s robbed us of our ability to place shift, and format shift our recordings. Cable industry forfeited trying to stop us from time shifting after Sony vs Betamax ruled that it was perfectly legal. Instead they concentrated on place shifting, and format shifting. We got swindled. We have been had. We have been played dirty. We got hoodwinked and we didn’t even notice it.

In 2011 taping a show for someone else is virtually impossible. Not without buying dedicated equipment for that specific purpose. In the 90’s we all had a device hooked up to our TV that recorded our shows and movies onto easily portable media. You could tape something, take it with you and play it anywhere. Today, we have a myriad of proprietary DVR boxes, most of which are bound either to your cable company, or to some other entity (like Tivo) who don’t care about power users. Most of these companies are more than happy to lock down the recorded content in their devices and bind it to a specific account to prevent place shifting and format shifting.

Personally, I haven’t noticed this because I stopped taping stuff from TV around the same time I got broadband internet. High speed connection to the information superhighway gave me “alternative” ways of obtaining movies and TV shows I missed. So this has never particularly bothered me. But while I wasn’t looking the content industry implemented the biggest swindle imaginable. They moved their distribution from read-write media to read only. They graciously allowed us to time shift to our heart’s content, but at the same time making sure we could never move, share or extract our recordings.

In the 90’s the small button labeled “REC” was ubiquitous on home entertainment devices. Your sound system could record to cassette tape. Your home theater set could record to VCR tape. And the tape players were everywhere. Every car had a cassette deck. Every TV in your house likely had an attached VCR. Those times are gone. I dare you to find a single device in your house with a “REC” button that is not a legacy hold-over from the 90’s.

VCR’s are obsolete. So are cassette tapes. And we have nothing to replace them. DVD recorders never took off, and DVR’s are locked down, black boxes we have no control over – bound to the whim of your cable provider and his broadcast flags that tell it which shows it can or cannot record. Average consumer has lost the ability to make permanent, portable records of TV or radio broadcasts.

And while the contend industry dealt a fairly dangerous blow to their customers ability to consume information on their terms, they have not won yet. The only reason why people are not up in arms about this, is because the content they locked up for us, has been liberated by the friendly neighborhood pirates. These “paragons of virtue” make sure that we can actually consume the media we paid for in the way we want to, in spite of entertainment industry’s wishes. The fact that we no longer can tape a movie and take it to a friend’s house seems insignificant when there is a BluRay quality copy available for download on Pirate Bay. Of course not everyone is so lucky.

The people who got fucked by this are the innocents. They are the good guys who have never pirated a thing in their lives. The people who dutifully re-bought their VCR movie collection on DVD, and are now once again re-buying it on BluRay. The technolo-muggles, the clueless and the elderly got the short end of the stick. Back in the 90’s I could tell my grandma to tape a movie for me and she was fully capable of doing it. All it required was putting the TV on the right channel and pressing that little button with the red dot. These days this wouldn’t work. For one, she does not have a DVR because she decided she wouldn’t need one. And even if she had one, I wouldn’t be able to extract it from it. She does not have a DVD recorder, because… Well, who the hell buys these anyway.

This is why the entertainment industry is lobbying so hard to get SOPA signed into law. This is their next logical step – they want to lock down the internet the way they locked down our home theater centers. They want to remove the “REC” button functionality from the the cloud. Of course this will not work, for the simple reason that the internet routes around local damage. Pirates will still exchange liberated content, and most of us will still know where to find it. But it’s not like logic and common sense has ever stopped them.

So a person like Cliff probably won’t really care that piracy is a social problem, and he is already aware that the main reason people pirate is because they can. Being an indie dev selling his games online, he is already hitting a lot of the things on Kevin Kelly’s list of 8 generatives. But if his games are getting pirated, that does not help him to improve the bottom line. It is easy to see how someone like that could look at the very draconian Ubisoft DRM and conclude that while it sucks, it is probably a necessary evil.

I can rant about how DRM is the root of all evil, and how it only affects paying customers but that does not necessarily mean anything to people who just want to sell the product, and are not happy just ignoring the piracy issue. I do understand how DRM may seem attractive option. I only ask that game makers acknowledge the simple fact that no pirate will ever actually see their DRM in action. By the time the game gets to them, it will have been ripped out and exorcised from the final product. You paying customers on the other hand will see it every day. So the more invasive, and restrictive you make it, the more annoying it will be for them.

In other words, DRM is a customer facing toll gate. They have to pay this toll every time they use your product – not in currency, but in time, effort, or by meeting some arbitrary requirement (CD in drive, internet connection active, hardware check, etc…). Most people are willing to tolerate certain tolls without complaining, but for the others these can be deal breakers. Pirates don’t give a fuck, because they are playing your game DRM free. The only thing this toll gate prevents is casual sharing – like when little Bobby lends his game CD to little Jimmy down the street. And if capturing that market is important enough to you to alienate another part of the market (folks who get easily frustrated by restrictive DRM) then that’s fine.

But there are right ways to do DRM, and wrong ways to do it. Valve does it the right way for example. Steam is nothing more than a DRM scheme dressed up as a delivery service. You don’t own your steam games – you basically lend them from Valve, and you have to log in and authenticate with your Steam account every time you want to play them. And like every DRM system, Steam can lock you out of your games forever.

I know a guy who has lost his Steam password. To make matters worse, the yahoo email he used to create it expire due to inactivity, and then snagged by someone else. At some point he also cancelled the credit card he used to make all the purchases, and when he filled out the account information he used dummy data because he was concerned about privacy. Currently he has no way of proving to Valve that he has one owned that account – so he is out a few hundred dollars in games he purchased there. If he purchased these games the old fashioned way, he would still have access to them. This is a good example of what happens when DRM backfires.

But, you can hardly find anyone complaining about Steam these days. Why? Because in addition to being a DRM scheme it also provides it’s users a tremendous value. Valve will actually store your games on their server indefinitely, allowing you to re-download them at will. They provide a built in community tools including in-game chat, screenshot taking utility that allows you to post your action shots online, an in-game web browser, an option to install the same game on multiple machines, and share saves via Valve cloud service. For me this is a perfect tradeoff. I don’t get to own my games, but I get a lot in return. It works.

So to answer Cliff, how could Ubisoft and EA protect their games? Well, they could sell them on Steam. And barring that, they could try be more like Valve in the way they build their DRM. Little less stick, and a little more carrot. That’s really all it takes.

Just please, don’t try to make your own version of Steam. I really don’t need 57 steam like game delivery systems running in my task bar. Especially since most companies who try to copy Steam, have no clue what makes it so awesome – like EA’s Origin which will delete your games after a period of inactivity. You need to embrace the spirit of Steam and it’s long list of cool, user friendly features, not it’s game delivery mechanic which no one really cares about.

I’m not asking anyone to change their business model. I’m not asking developers to change their philosophy, and embrace piracy as free promotion or anything like that. You can do business like you have always done it. Just stop treating your paying customers as dirty thieves that need to be remindd how privileged they are to be allowed to play your games. Hide your DRM from the customers, or make it seem like something they would want to use. Hell, you can use the Ubisoft always-on scheme if you want, but dress it up nicely as a feature that lets me do something with my game that I couldn’t do before and I might give you my money.

What is your take on this? What kinds of DRM are you willing to tolerate, and which kinds are deal breakers for you? What are other ways companies like Ubisoft and EA could protect their software without pissing off their paying customers?

If you recall, Ubisoft are the “pioneers” and “inventors” of the controversial Always-On DRM scheme. You probably heard people raging about this scheme back in March when they ruined Assasin’s Creed 2 with it. You probably also heard how it backfired when the activation servers crashed shortly after launch.

Needless to say, I was skeptical so I decided to do some research and check out what kind of malware they stapled to “From Dust”. Yes, mallware. Let’s face it – all DRM is mallware. Nobody wants it on their system, it usually gets deployed using bundled stealth installation and in some cases it can seriously impact the performance and stability of your system. Oh, and sometimes it stays on your system long after you remove the game it shipped with. To me it sounds like malware.

I didn’t even have to look far to see clear indications of a brewing shitstorm around the game. The range and anger of my fellow gamer geeks started streaming into my Twitter feed, and RSS Reader soon after “From Dust” went live. And it was not just some petty bullshit this time either – it was a genuine customer dissatisfaction.

You see, Ubisoft blatantly lied to it’s customers. During the pre-order phase, it went on record claiming the game will ship with one-time-only online activation. They were very clear about this – you activate once, and then you can play offline as much as you desire. Then, at the 11’th hour, just before release they completely reversed that position. Now all their documentation, and online documents state that you need to activate the game over the internet every time you start it up. Did they issue a formal apology to the customers that might have been mislead by the previous announcements? Did they offer to refund the game to those who foolishly preordered it assuming it will be playable online? No, of course not. Their official stance is a straight up denial that the one-time-only activation announcement has ever even happened. And they are doing it hard-core, 1984 style: “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, and From Dust hat always had Always-On DRM.” And if you would like to complain about this issue, you should do it somewhere outside the official Ubisoft support forums for the game, which are aggressively moderated to remove any and all signs of the DRM controversy.

So I guess I will not be playing From Dust. The game seemed fun, but I really, really don’t want to give Ubisoft any money. I could pirate the game and play it anyway, since it has already been cracked but then I would probably want to blog about it. This in turn would generate publicity for the game, and perhaps compel a few people to actually buy it. And I would loathe to help Ubisoft score even a single sale after reading about their DRM shenanigans. So I choose not to touch the game.

Not because it’s bad. Not even because the DRM sucks (don’t get me wrong, it does – it’s atrocious). I choose to completely ignore it because of the way Ubisoft is treating their customers.

It amazes me that companies such as Ubisoft and EA get away with blatant customer abuse. They moderate their forums and ban anyone who has a legitimate complaint, they completely ignore negative press without even as much acknowledging it and all their press releases are flat out disdainful and insulting. What other industry can actually do this and stay in business? Who can continuously lie to, screw over and insult their customers without loosing their business.

There is only one other line of work in which this sort of behavior works: drug dealing. Which makes me think that we, the gaming community are a little bit at fault here. We are like junkies, jonesing for the next fix – no matter how badly they abuse us, we always come back to them. We might be loud and obnoxious on the internet, but in the real world we have no sting. When a new game comes out, we roll over and throw money at them even though we have been boycotting that very product for the last 6 months. No wonder they don’t give a fuck.

I often wonder whether or not the irony of having your “Always-On” DRM game hit torrent sites before it is even available in the stores ever hit the executives of these companies. I mean, are they really that clueless? Do they not know that their precious anti-piracy software takes about 20 minutes to remove, after which it is free for all?

How can you run a milti-million game company and remain ignorant of the simple fact that DRM does not work as a counter-piracy measure. How can you claim that your Always-On DRM schemes are a success when a simple trip to pirate bay or any other torrent site is enough to verify that it did not protect a single game from being copied and distributed for free. Can you really be that short sighted?

They can’t be that dumb, right? I mean, DRM costs money, right? The guys who run companies like Ubisoft are bean counters – that’s pretty much the only thing they are good at. So I find it really hard to believe that no one actually realized that the whole enterprise might be just a huge money sing. Unless it actually isn’t.

Bear with me on this, but perhaps these guys sat down and figured out that while they can’t do anything to prevent tech-savvy guys like you or me from pirating their software, they still can thwart casual piracy. They can stop soccer moms from buying just a single copy of the game, and then burning copies for their five spoiled beastly brats. It can stop little Jimmy from sharing his copy with little Bobby. And it can stop that guy who can’t figure out “how to run iso file” he downloaded from the internet. Perhaps the reason why Ubisoft is stepping up their game with more and more annoying DRM schemes is that the soccer moms, Jimmy and the iso guy started to catch on. Believe it on not, but the “copy crack to game directory” method has been a staple of piracy for quite a few years now. The pool of people who know how to successfully download and install cracked games is constantly growing, and the number of numbskulls who can be easily fooled by simple DRM is getting smaller. So they are balancing the act, and making sure that only folks who can figure out how to run a spoofed activation server get to play for free.

In other words, they are praying on idiots to generate extra revenue. Their core revenue of course comes from us – the internet loudmouths, but we bend over and take it every single time. So they are concentrating on converting stupidity into cash. And guess what? Their new targets usually don’t frequent gaming forums, or read gaming blogs so all that stink we make about unfair DRM goes right over their heads. They get shafted too, but only after they forked over the cash so it doesn’t matter.

Is there anything we can do about this? I believe we can.

1. Stop bending over and taking it. Let’s vote with our wallets and refuse to buy games with shitty DRM.
2. Stop promoting their games for free. It really does not matter that you didn’t buy the game, if you blogged about it, posted about it on Facebook, and made Youtoube videos of your in game shenanigans. Perhaps you didn’t fork over money, but you helped to spread the hype and indirectly you may have got them a few extra sales. So if you want to send them a message, don’t pirate the game either. Just ignore it.
3. Finally, be nice to n00bs and teach them how to fucking pirate. No, seriously. Somehow, somewhere this DRM bullcrap is generating sales. It shows up on sales reports, and validates their approach. So let’s make sure these sales increases stay low. Let’s make sure everyone knows how to circumvent their DRM. (actually, this may not be the best idea – let’s not do this)

The only way to combat it is to hit them where it hurts: their profit margins. Internet slacktivism is a great past time, and while it may feel like you are making a difference by generating negative PR, companies like Ubisoft clearly do not give a flying fuck about what gaming press and blogosphere says about them. So put your money where your mouth is. Don’t buy their games, don’t talk about them. And make sure your noobish friends don’t give them any money either. That’s the only way to send them a clear message.

Did you buy From Dust, or any other Ubisoft game lately? Did you get screwed over by the DRM, or was it mostly irrelevant?

What piracy is and isn't.

Let me tell you a little story. When I was taught that sharing is inherently a good thing. Nice kids shared their toys with the kids on the playground. Nice kids would always bring enough candy for everyone in the class instead of eating it alone. This message was reinforced not only by parents and teachers but also by Saturday morning cartoons and blockbuster Disney movies. Sharing was inherently good.

This is however no longer the case. Current generations are indoctrinated differently. Sometimes sharing is good, but other times it is evil, reprehensible and illegal. Giving your friend an action figure to play with is a good deed. Giving the same friend a copy of your video game counts as “theft”. It is piracy! What is the difference between these two acts? Very minor. The former involves sharing a physical object that cannot be copied, while the later involves sharing digital information that can be easily copied. In fact, that is the property of information – you share it by copying. Avoiding copying it would actually require extra steps (like deleting it from your computer before you give it to someone else).

That’s exactly what I think of when I hear about piracy. I think about sharing information. There is nothing inherently evil or wrong about it. It only becomes wrong when we factor in the rather modern concepts such as intellectual property and copyright law. Concepts which were invented prior to the digital era and were originally designed to regulate book printing industry. Artifacts of a bygone era.

Of course we could argue the validity and utility of these laws back and forward. There are benefits to having them. For example they help to ensure that content creators get paid for their work. Then again the part of the problem is that we as a society still haven’t figured out how to sell information in a digital ecosystem. We still cling to the same methodologies that worked for books and vinyl records. Sadly, these methods do not work with digital goods, which are inherently different from physical ones. You can’t sell ephemeral information the same way as you sell very physical sack of potatoes. And if you try you will run into the piracy problem. A problem which is very much a social phenomenon which can’t be fixed with technology.

Are there better ways of selling information? Yes there are, but hardly anyone is using them yet because they require a radical change in the way we think about information. For now, content creators and distributors are still trying to figure out how to thwart piracy hoping the find a golden bullet that will convert every file sharer into a paid customer. This of course is a pipe dream. It will never work because there will always be people who just want free stuff, and people who are more than willing to give away their own stuff for free. And since the entertainment industry insists on treating information as physical goods, they follow suit and do the same. Physical goods after all can, and should be shared.

Regardless of what piracy is, and how it works, I often ask myself a question: why do we even have a name for it? And is this name appropriate. Whenever you name something, you give it power and validity. Calling petty copyright infringement “piracy” legitimizes and romanticizes it. It makes it into something grand. Same with calling it theft. You can try to pin negative connotations to the act, but people still instinctively know that what they are doing is not what you implying they are. They know in their guts that copying few bytes of data over the internet is at least somewhat different from taking away someone’s physical possession. Sometimes I think that campaigns such as MPAA’s famous “you wouldn’t steal a car” video clip are counter productive.

Just think about it. When you see that clip in a theater with bunch of strangers you can probably safely assume that nearly all of them at some point illegally downloaded a movie, or watched a bootleg video. You can also probably assume that few, if any of these people have ever stole a car – or even considered such an act. So instead of deterring piracy, such a commercial only reinforces how harmless it is. Instead of implying it is as bad as stealing a car, it clearly shows that it isn’t.

Or maybe I’m looking too much into it.

Anyways, happy pirate day folks! Don’t get caught!

Wolfire did not set any required minimum price, which meant that you could get all the games for $.01 if that was what you wanted. Yep, you could get the full versions of the excellent World of Goo, Samrost 2, Penumbra Overture along with bunch of other less known games for the price of a single penny. Guess what happened?

Well, for one, the bundle was hugely successful generating over $1.2 million in profits (part of which will be donated to charities and EFF). But the bundle also got pirated. By comparing the number of unique downloads with the number of donations Wolfire noticed that people were obviously sharing download keys, posting them on message boards and etc. In other words, quite a few people out there were to cheap, or to lazy to pay even a single penny in order to obtain these games.

This just goes to show that price is not a factor for pirates. You can lower your price down to a single penny if you want to but it wont help. It may convince a fraction of pirates to become paying customers, but majority is not going to care. They are not your customers. They will never be your customers. They don’t care if you lower the price. They don’t care if you put restrictive DRM on your product – I mean, it’s not like they will ever even know about it. The only reason why pirates even know about that crazy Ubisoft DRM because we bitched and moaned about it on the internet for days.

Of course, selling your digital goods at a competitive low price is good for variety of reasons and will definitely increase the number of customers you get. It is just not going to magically convert all the pirates. Nothing will. People who were going to buy your software no matter what will buy it. People who never wanted to buy it, won’t. Those on the fence can and will be influenced by your actions though. You can lure them with an attractive price, promotions, extensive demos, boxed extras. You can also scare them away with crazy DRM scheme that will eat their computer if they smile at it the wrong way. It’s up to you.

Here is an interesting observation – and please correct me if I’m wrong on this. It is my understanding that in the US works are protected by copyright law for a finite term, but the DRM they may be encumbered with is protected by DMCA indefinitely. So it would be entirely possible for something to become public domain, but remain under complete control of the former copyright holder due to a restrictive DRM.

Let me put it this way – if something becomes public domain, it means it belongs to all of us. It becomes property of the people. So if you want, you can purchase, download or borrow a public domain book or movie, digitize it, put it on your website, or make copies and sell them on a street corner. No one will care because it is no longer protected by copyright. This is by design – this way we as a society can retain the most valuable cultural works long after their creators, distributors and estates are gone. Unfortunately DRM puts a twist on this scheme.

Let’s say I make a movie tomorrow and then sell it online after protecting it with some sort of DRM. Since I am paranoid about people stealing my intellectual property I don’t give anyone the original source files because I don’t fucking have to. So the only copies available out there are the ones encumbered by DRM and pirate rips on torrent sites. Now let’s fast forward 120+ years or however long it takes for my movie to go into public domain. I am long gone, and the original source files for my movie may or may not exist – it doesn’t really matter because my surviving family does not have the legal obligation to release these files to the public anyway. They could if they cared, but let’s say they can’t be bothered. This is not an uncommon thing. Since current copyright term is almost a century long it is likely that only the most widely circulated copies of a work will still be around. Original manuscripts, prints and etc may be lost, damaged or simply deteriorate beyond repair.

My work is legally in public domain so you should be able to take it, copy it, modify it and etc… Unfortunately, you don’t have unencumbered copies. The only versions of my movie are sealed within a DRM cocoon that will prevent you from copying, or modifying the content – or perhaps even playing it without a valid license. Now the big question is: is it legal to circumvent DRM that protects a public domain work? Is it legal to use a copy which was made by violating the DMCA by circumventing the DRM while the work was still copyrighted?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. I tried to look it up, but I’m not having any luck finding concrete answers. My limited understanding is that circumventing DRM is ok, if it cannot possibly result in copyright infringement. If the contents are public domain, then there is no harm in breaking the container, no? On the other hand someone could claim that the tools and techniques used to break that DRM are illegal themselves because they could be just as easily applied to a copyrighted work protected by similar DRM scheme. Do we have any lawyerfolk reading this blog? If you could shed some light onto this problem, I’d be grateful.

Assuming that it is legal to “liberate” my work from it’s DRM coffin you would still have to:

1. have the resources or know-how to crack the DRM, or
2. be able to find a live torrent

If you are just an average citizen wanting to access my public domain work, you may not be able to do either. Cracking DRM is not a trivial task – or at least it is not supposed to be. It requires a certain degree of skill, expertise and determination. The people with these skills and expertise usually prefer to “liberate” new releases. So finding someone to help you, or an existing cracked copy may be problematic. In that case, my work will remain locked up forever – or at least until a person resourceful enough comes along and breaks it free.

Because of this, DRM is harmful to the very concept of public domain. It locks up our cultural heritage in locked boxes and then hides the keys by binding them to hardware platforms, making them only available per request and etc. Furthermore, our current laws are very protective of these boxes prohibiting any attempts to crack them open. Our grand-grand children may one day wake up and realize they don’t really know that much about the 20th century popular culture and entertainment because all that is left is bunch of locked boxes with no keys and a law that bans the use of a crowbar as a box opening device. This is not good.

Of course my whole point is moot because everyone knows that anything created in United States after Mickey Mouse will never actually enter public domain. Next time Mickey is about to slip, the corporate owned government will just extend the term for another century or two (I mean they did it twice before – you don’t think they are going to try this again?).

All successful modern societies are built around unrestricted flow of information. This was true since the begging of time. In the good old days, information was spread via word of mouth. If the Duke sharted in his pants at the dinner table, his kitchen staff would probably tell the story to their friends and families. From there it would spread exponentially. The next day the brown stains on Duke’s pantaloons would be the joke of the day in the village, then the nearby city, then the capitol. Eventually the king himself would know about the unfortunate farting incident in a distant province. We call this networking – it is something that people do. They get together, gossip, and exchange information.

Information takes many shapes and forms. Gossip is information. Stories are information. Songs are information. Information is something you can only own if you keep it to yourself. Sharing it with someone copies the information. That is it’s fundamental property and its purpose. Information exists to be replicated. Information that is never replicated is ultimately useless. More than that – it is usually also worthless. Keeping something a secret usually has no value. In most cases the value of a secret lies in the implications of it being revealed to the general public.

We have been honing our information exchange technologies for few centuries. At first we developed writing as a form of storage. Later we invented printing press that allowed us to mass-duplicate our stored wealth of knowledge. We developed ways to record sound, pictures and motion as well. At this point in time, the pinnacle of this evolution is the Internet – a ubiquitous network designed for one thing, and one thing only: transmitting small packets of information between distant points on the globe. The internet revolutionized data exchange because it divorced information from it’s storage media. Data can now be transmitted as digital signals, and exists in a transient state. It is still tied to physical storage anchors but it can readily shift and flow between them.

For a while, we have traded certain types of information the same way we trade physical items. Mostly because that information was tied to physical media, and not feasible to transfer otherwise. This gave rise to a whole industry based on information distribution. The internet made that whole industry irrelevant. Content distribution is a vestigial dying industry. We no longer need to buy a physical CD to listen to music. We no longer need to buy a disk to install software. It can be delivered to us as a stream of electrical impulses. Why do content producers feel the need to share their profits with some middle men? Why do information consumers need to pay distribution fees? It makes no sense. Treating information as physical products is no longer applicable. The rules have changed.

The whole concept of “intellectual property” is one big stinking nonsense. You cannot own information. I do not own the contents of this blog entry. I cannot own it any more than I can own the air I breathe. Once you read this entry, I no longer have control over it. I can ask you not to reproduce it, but you probably will anyway. And I can’t really stop you. I could try, but that would soon turn into a full time job. I actually know people who do this – they troll around online forums and torrent sites, send take down requests to youtube, rapidshare, megaupload and countless other places. But if their content is popular, it just keeps resurfacing within days, sometimes even hours.

There is only one effective way to control information – it is called “web of trust”. Restrict your content and give it only to people who you trust not to release it. Allow them to selectively grant access to it, to people they trust explicitly. If anyone breaks this trust, he or she is out. The person who granted them access is out as well. This is a social solution and it works but only on a limited scale. The bigger your network, the more likely it is that someone will leek the information, despite the peer pressure and social consequences. Unfortunately there is nothing – and I repeat, nothing else that works.

DRM is such a joke that we are not even going to talk about it here. If you think DRM is anything but a joke, you are either stupid or naive – but most likely both. Censorship could work, but only if you had full control over all information exchange channels which is impossible. Just ask every totalitarian government that has ever existed. It does not work. Even if you gain full control over the local telecommunication networks and filter their content, there will always be illegal back-channels used by dissidents and people who just want to get shit done. On the internet there are proxies, tor, freenet, encrypted vpn links and dozens of other methods to circumvent censorship.

The point here is that the internet is not just a dumb data pipe – it is a human collective. The end points of this globe spanning network are manned by human beings who do what they have been doing since the dawn of time – exchange information. It amplifies our ability to share, preserve and disseminate knowledge. You can’t censor the internet any more you can censor human communication in general. Faced with censorship, people will find ways to route around it – whether this censorship is political repression, or content protection does not matter. If it obstructs information flow, we will figure out how to bypass it.

That’s where we are at today. What is tomorrow though? I don’t know, but I can make some predictions.

Right now we have a clear distinction between data and physical loot. Loot is something you can’t download. For example, if I want an apple (a fruit) I need to go to a store and buy it or have it delivered to my house. If I want a new computer I need to purchase it’s physical components. Loot is scarce. It cannot be copied – it must be manufactured. At least for now. In the world of tomorrow however, loot will become data. This is the direction we are going to.

Our descendants won’t actually have to buy an apple. They will download an apple template, and the fruit will be made on the spot by their house’s nano-scale assembler engine one molecule at a time. Yep, we will move from a scarcity based economy to a post-scarcity based one. It will be a hell of a ride, and I am saddened by the fact I will probably not live to see it. People get their panties in a twist right now because of silly notions like “intellectual property” or piracy because they can’t wrap their heads around the fact information is no longer bound to scarce physical media. The shit is really going to hit the fan when it is finally feasible to torrent yourself a new car, or a house.

Judging how backwards we are about the information exchange and content protection this day, the transition to post-scarcity economy will probably cause collapse of many first world nations. Let’s face it, a nation which bans the nano-assembly technology will put itself in a position to be economically out-produced by a single guy with a cornucopia assembler who can convert garbage into dirt cheap, high quality technology products while sitting on his couch and browsing the web.

It will be a mighty interesting time to live in.

I’m pretty sure this fiasco will somehow get blamed on pirates eventually. But right now there are two kinds of AC2 players out there: those who pirated it and didn’t even notice the outage, and legitimate customers who got locked out of their game for no fault of their own. I suspect that many of these people, who did not really care about DRM before buying AC2 will start caring about it now.

Personally I believe that Ubisoft low-balled their figures when they were setting up the DRM framework. That’s the risk you run into when you create a software that needs to call home. It is not enough to just set up a single server in some closet and forget about it – not unless you are a small company with only a handful of customers. When you are the size of Ubisoft, and you release a game as anticipated as Assasin’s Creed 2 you don’t need “a server” – you need “a server farm” complete with load balancing and a dedicated high bandwidth internet hookup. The problem is that this costs money. All the money you spend on that infrastructure cuts directly into your profits. Furthermore, it is an ongoing expense. You have to throw down a huge chunk of cash up front to set it up, and then steadily pour money into bandwidth and maintenance. So if you are Ubisoft, it is in your best interest to spend as little money on it as possible on the whole exercise. So you should get the least amount of servers that can support the estimated sales volume and not one more.

Furthermore, your customers don’t pay you a monthly fee. MMO’s can afford to run their servers indefinitely, because they have a constant source of income. As long as the flow of cash from membership fees covers their maintenance costs it remains feasible for them to keep their infrastructure online. The lifetime maintenance of DRM servers on the other hand must be funded directly from the sales of the game they protect. This means that despite what Ubisoft may tell it’s customers, it is in their best interest to shut down the AC2 servers as soon as it is possible. If you ever looked at sales figures of single player video games, you’ll probably know that they tend to follow a certain pattern – there is a huge sales spike on the release date which gradually tapers off during the next week or so, remains high for some time, and then takes a sharp dip dropping down to almost nothing a month or two after the release. Most of pro-DRM advocates like to bring this up this fact when they try to justify the need for copyright protection. Video game publishers make most of their money in the first few weeks after the release. So what they make in those few weeks must cover all the bandwidth and maintenance expenses for their DRM servers.

Think about this – the cost of keeping a DRM server online forever is technically an infinity dollars. Eventually this cost will eat all your profits from sales, and then cut into profits from your next game and so on. So if you are smart, you will start phasing out the DRM servers as soon as you see the sales take a bigger dip. Eventually you’d probably want to reduce your server farm to a single re purposed desktop PC sitting underneath someone’s desk in the office. Or at least this is the best case scenario you could hope for.

Video game companies have nothing to gain from running DRM servers, and a lot to lose. In fact, having the servers go down few times on the release day is probably preferable to spending huge amount of money on a robust, redundant infrastructure that will need to be scrapped in a few months anyway. If you build a huge DRM server farm and the game does not sell well, you are essentially going to have to pay for the privilege of allowing users to play your game out of your own pocket. It’s actually saver to let your servers melt down under heavy load few times, catch some negative PR and then turn around and say “See, this is all because of pirates. If it wasn’t for them we wouldn’t have to do this”.

In other words, DRM activation networks are crappy by design. They are made on the cheap, because they are just superfluous expense. They will go down all the time – it’s a fact of life. That’s how this whole racket is set up. Think about this next time you buy a game with online activation.

For the record, Steam might be an exception here because it is a distribution platform. As such, Valve has vested interest to invest into it. What I’m talking about above are dedicated DRM solutions like that of AC2.