09.20.09
Posted in politics, technology, web at 2:39 pm by Rob Fahey
Creative Commons licensed image from nrkbeta on flickr
In recent weeks, there has been some fairly solid grassroots inertia gathering behind a campaign against new legislation being proposed by Lord Mandelson, the business secretary. The gist of the legislation is straightforward – it proposes that individuals accused of illegal downloading should, after a certain number of accusations, be disconnected from the Internet.
There are several grounds on which this proposal is mad, bad and downright dangerous. First and foremost, while the details have not been fully nailed down yet, the implication of what has been revealed so far is that users will not be disconnected after being tried for a criminal offence which is proven beyond reasonable doubt – rather, you’ll just need to be accused a certain number of times before it’s decided that you’re definitely guilty and your connection is severed.
This is a brand new step in the abuse of the British legal system by copyright holders. Some of you may recall a series of cases in the past few years where copyright holders employed legal firms with low moral boundaries to send out letters to large numbers of people whom they accused of downloading movies, videogames and so on. (I reported on one of those mass-mailings, which was initiated by game publishers including Atari and Codemasters, for The Times – the story made the front page.)
Those letters were simple legal blackmail. They told the recipients that they had to pay a few hundred pounds, and warned that if they tried to contest this, the legal costs would be much more expensive – so just pay up, and we’ll leave you alone. The reason for this blackmail approach is straightforward – the “evidence” which they had of copyright infringement would probably never have stood up in court. It certainly wouldn’t have stood up in a criminal court, where you have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that your accusation is true – and on a good day, it would have fallen flat in a civil court too. (In Britain, civil courts have a less stringent standard of “proof” – you only have to prove that “on the balance of probabilities” something is true, rather than “beyond reasonable doubt”.)
The copyright holders know this. They know that it’s technologically nigh-on impossible to pin an act of downloading to an individual. Simply standing up and saying “I’ve got a Wi-Fi network” means that anyone within 100 yards of your house could have been responsible – even someone who sat on a bench in the park outside with a laptop – and that’s even before the question of things like spoofed IPs and the likes are considered. Unless you basically catch the person red-handed – raiding their home to find the infringing file sat on their hard drive and their bittorrent client merrily seeding it to the world – you basically can’t prove an act of downloading.
The solution the media industries have found is as straightforward as it is morally bankrupt – if you can’t work with the legal system, bypass it. Instead of having to fight things in the courts, and work with awkward concepts like “evidence” and “proof” and “justice”, they have lobbied the government to give them a system whereby they alone will be allowed to act as judge, jury and executioner. No courts, no police – just a few accusations from the likes of Sony, Disney or Activision and job done – off with his modem!
It’s not hard, of course, to see how a system where punishment is based on accusation rather than proof could be open to abuse. Indeed, it’s not so much a system open to abuse, as an abusive system.
Then there’s the question of the punishment itself – the cutting off of Internet access. There’s a generational issue at play here, I fear. Many people in their fifties, sixties or older – Lord Mandelson is 55, by the way – probably don’t see disconnection as much more than a slap on the wrist. These are people who probably don’t often check their own email or read webpages, who don’t manage their bank accounts or mobile phones or tax affairs online, for whom news stories about online shopping or Wikipedia or iPods seem impossibly exotic and futuristic. The Internet is a luxury, its removal no different to taking away a games console or a child’s toy.
That’s not what the Internet is to my generation – by which I mean anyone under 40, realistically speaking. I’m in the first generation to have grown up with the Internet as a constant presence (I’m a little ahead of the vanguard, since an early obsession with computers meant I was using Fidonet at a tender age), but people ten years older than me have used it for all of their working lives.
To many of us, the Internet is a service almost as vital as water, gas or electricity. It’s not only our primary social tool, it’s our first point of contact with the corporate and government services on which we rely. It’s essential for our work lives, for our lives as citizens – for our finances, our taxes, our democratic rights. It’s our touchstone for research, information and news.
This isn’t restricted to a handful of Internet obsessives. Countless people in the United Kingdom – whole swathes of the population – rely on the Internet for some aspect of their employment, even those whose job doesn’t involve computers in any way. They interact with their banks, their electricity, gas and water companies, their local councils, the Inland Revenue and the wider Government almost exclusively online. Their votes in elections are informed by online information, making it a crucial tool for democracy – and their social interactions with friends and acquaintances are often also carried out online.
Cutting that off is the removal of an essential service – the crippling of an individual’s ability to function as a normal member of modern society. This isn’t taking a toy from a naughty child (or at least, a child accused of being naughty by a biased third-party) – it’s a step back to the medieval concept of taking someone’s hand for being accused of stealing. It’ll cripple them, but at least they won’t do it again, eh?
Lord Mandelson doesn’t understand that, and nor do those who have worked with him on this proposal. (The media companies who urged him into this decision do know this, but why let the basic injustice of the punishment get in the way of protecting profits from their failing, outdated business models?) The proposed punishment in no way fits the crime – bear in mind that if you shoplifted a DVD from HMV, you’d get little more than a caution and a telling-off, despite the actual material losses involved in that crime. Download the same film from the Internet, an act which causes no direct material loss to anyone involved, and you could be cut off from the social, government, civic and financial services provided by the Internet. It’s an insane imbalance.
If you’re reading this, the chances are that you understand. You’re an Internet user. You know how vital it is – how damaging it would be to everything from your career to your social life if it was to be turned off on you. And unfortunately, you’re one of the few people who will ever know the extent of these laws, because the mainstream press – largely owned by the same companies which own the media groups lobbying for these laws – is mostly keeping quiet on this.
As such, you have a responsibility to act. That could be as much as writing to your local MP (they get remarkably little mail – and only a very tiny amount of that is lucid, well-argued and intelligent, so every decent letter gets considered fairly seriously, meaning that you can make a difference), or as little as getting involved in the campaign being waged by the fantastic Open Rights Group, or signing the petition organised by 38 Degrees, which is working with the ORG on the campaign.
Whether Labour is on its way out the door or not, this legislation needs to be killed dead in the water – because it’s much harder to repeal old laws than it is to bring in new ones. Be it just another in the litany of bad bills which Labour have run through parliament, or the sting in the tail from a dying government, this would be a basic attack on liberty, freedom of expression and the rights of consumers and citizens. We can’t let it happen.
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06.20.07
Posted in web at 12:59 pm by Rob Fahey
Housemate and fellow blogger Nic, despite his fine efforts in the field of providing genuinely useful stuff on his blog, appears to be annoyed at the fact that his top Google results – by a vast margin – are from people searching for “naked old men“. Under the circumstances, I feel that it’s beholden on me to help out by linking to his blog using that phrase, just in case Google needs that extra nudge up the search rankings. 
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06.13.07
Posted in games, web at 4:59 pm by Rob Fahey
Earlier this week, SCEA (that’s the US branch of Sony Computer Entertainment) launched a new blogging site which will see Sony staff posting information about what they’re doing, using their real names and job titles.
This is probably the most positive thing I’ve seen Sony doing from a PR perspective in ages. The company right now has a massive, massive image problem, and it only has itself to blame. From the very top of the organisation through to the PR lackeys on the front lines, it has displayed an attitude for years which is nothing short of impenetrable, arrogant and aloof.
That works (or at least, doesn’t hurt quite so badly) when you’re on top of the game. When you’re millions of units behind the competition and need to actively compete for hearts, minds and wallets, it’s a losing strategy.
Blogging is emerging as one of the best ways for companies to open themselves up to the public and remove that kind of arrogant, inhuman face from their organisation. More and more big companies (with Microsoft on the vanguard, it’s worth noting – even if I’ll never quite forgive the company’s wonderful blogging efforts for the sin of imposing the odiously self-important and ignorant Robert Scoble on the world) are turning to transparency as a way to engage with consumers and build a fanbase.
Sony hasn’t been quick to come around to this idea, and I get the impression that it’s probably viewed with outright suspicion in some parts of the company. However, it’s exactly what the firm needs – especially in view of the fact that Microsoft has been so successful with efforts like Major Nelson and the GamerscoreBlog, and in light of the significant rise in importance of games blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq in recent years. Admittedly, on the latter subject, I’m wont to grumble about the death of journalism, declining standards of English and the damaging credulousness of bloggers as compared to proper journalists – but none of that changes the fact that those sites have significant readership. Companies need to adapt to that environment.
Actually, this isn’t Sony’s first courtship with blogging; late last year, the firm’s European arm launched a blog site called ThreeSpeech, which was actually quite an interesting experiment in blogging. SCEE was paying for the whole thing, but they left production to an external company, and didn’t (as far as I could gather) apply any editorial control to what was posted.
I worked on the site for a little while, and they never edited a single word I wrote, or prevented me from asking any questions I wanted to ask. I’ve actually been criticised a few times for working on ThreeSpeech, the implication being that I was essentially being paid to be a Sony shill; it certainly never felt that way to me (not least because I was actually only meant to be paid for one of the articles, and I totally forgot to invoice for it – doh). In fact, in the small number of articles I wrote for them, there was as much bad stuff as good about PS3 revealed; for example, an excerpt from an interview with Phil Harrison where he admitted that the company had over-stretched itself by including Blu-Ray, and an article where I interviewed Insomniac Games boss Ted Price and he revealed that Resistance: Fall of Man wouldn’t use the PS3’s built-in buddy lists. Neither of which is exactly what you’d call Good News; both of which broke exclusively on a Sony-funded site.
So, to my mind, ThreeSpeech was actually quite brave. Badly designed, and a bit scattershot in terms of the content it posted – but brave. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing Sony needed to do before it fell out with gamers; doing it afterwards just attracted ire from people who saw it as an attempt to “deceive” people with cloaked PR spin, which is a bit harsh given that the site was honest from the outset about being Sony-backed.
Hence why SCEA’s initiative makes more sense, given the climate. It might be interesting to see if SCEE could now morph ThreeSpeech into some kind of platform where prominent journalists and bloggers talk about the PS3 and its software fairly openly, which I think was the core idea; it could be complementary to the PlayStation Blog in that form. More importantly, though, let’s see some of the UK staff blogging too. Openness and transparency won’t work straight away, but they’re exactly the magic pill Sony needs to rescue them from their own tarnished public image. (Well, that and making Jack Tretton shut up, but let’s aim for the attainable goals first…)
Technorati Tags: journalism, PlayStation, PS3, PlayStation 3, Sony, videogames
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04.09.07
Posted in web at 9:22 am by Rob Fahey
Regular readers of Eurogamer will probably have noticed the launch of a bunch of new social networking features on the site last week. I’ve been tracking the development of this with interest – evangelising the whole concept and doing some of the groundwork in terms of design and roadmaps was pretty much the last major thing I was involved with at EG before going freelance.
What has actually been launched now only resembles the stuff I worked on in rough outlines, and all the credit for the fact that it’s shaping up really nicely belongs to the supremely talented guys working on it at EG – but all the same, there’s a bit of a proud-dad grin on my face at the overwhelmingly positive reaction it’s had from the site readers thus far. It’s early days yet, and I know there are bags more features in the pipeline, and some of what’s there now won’t make complete sense until it’s augmented with the additional features that are coming down the line – but it’s a great start, and I think people are going to find stuff like game lists and private groups pretty compelling. I know I already do, in fact.
Social networks in general are an area which fascinate me. I’ve gone from being incredibly cynical about the whole LiveJournal/MySpace/etc phenomenon to being quite addicted to it – my Internet use is heavily defined by LiveJournal, Last.fm, flickr, Facebook and now, hopefully, Eurogamers. I think what’s really interesting, and an emerging trend which is going to be very important for success in future, is interoperability. Very few people, as far as I can tell, use one social networking site only; especially with sites like Last.fm (music), YouTube (video) and flickr (pictures), it’s likely that you have an account on each because they cover very different types of content. As such, the ability to link those accounts together is becoming increasingly vital. Even something as simple as being able to hook in feeds from flickr and Last.fm on this blog is quite an exciting use of the technology, and Facebook’s ability to pick up LiveJournal posts and add them automatically to its feeds is a clever bit of functionality.
The logical trend here would be for one “uber-network” to emerge which simply amalgamates the key features of the others; a site where you put in login details for all the sites you use, and it builds a master contact list and a bunch of content and interaction panels, essentially giving you one launchpad for everything you do on the internet. I’m not convinced that that will happen, however, because the other sites would resist it strongly. Such a site would be a “predator” website, sucking content and ad-dollars out of other social networks and giving nothing back.
What’s more interesting, and likely, is that successful social networking sites will learn how to interface with other sites in a meaningful and cross-beneficial way. A site like Facebook could link directly to your flickr galleries and last.fm music, Eurogamers could automatically import blog entries from LJ or WordPress, Bloglines could add feeds for all your friends’ blogs based on existing feeds on other sites. Cross-functionality like this will be crucial for new, upstart networks; by saying to people, “hey, I work seamlessly with your existing sites”, you’re removing the barrier to entry and solving one of the biggest problems with new sign-ups, namely the need to input loads of duplicate data.
Right now, lots of social network sites are islands which are great in their own right, but barely acknowledge the existence of everything else out there in the ocean of the Internet. I firmly believe that success over the next five years will fall largely to the ability of those islands to build strong transport links with each other. People are too diverse for homogenisation of social network sites to occur in any meaningful way – letting people stick with the networks they like, while still giving them the ability to build cross-network connections, is definitely the future of this technology.
(In other news, I estimate that I’ve now spent four full hours staring at my word processor and trying to find something interesting to say about the new Buzz game. On the weekend of Jesus’ famous now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t trick, is a little divine inspiration too much to ask?)
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02.15.07
Posted in web, writing at 12:53 am by Rob Fahey
Well, I do. The evidence is pretty much undeniable.
Actually, I’ve been fucking around with WordPress for some time now, but never actually got around to putting it “live” so to speak. Still, everyone else has one of these things, and the opportunity to vent opinions that nobody will pay me to publish is certainly appealing. Much of whatever I scrawl here will probably end up duplicated across my LiveJournal and maybe even, god forbid, my MySpace – but it’s my little chunk of the blogging revolution, god damn it, and that’s what counts. So there.
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