Just bought one Humble Indie Bundle 2 for my self. And two as gifts for later. I already have Cortext Command but I always wanted to buy/play Osmos and Braid but never was getting my self to but them. Thus Humble Indie Bundle was a hard offer to resist Revenge of the Titans seems good addition too

Open game development

Things that Wolfire do interest me a lot. I was thinking for a while(few years) about how AAA games industry and often indies prefer to stay at a distance from their clients. For AAA industry it often feels as if you are facing a faceless giant that does not see, care or bother with you. For that reason I slowly start to pay them with same disrespect. They may make good games but it feels like some large soulless machine spiting out stuff for consumption… Something that makes me feel bad about the purchase.

For few years I was thinking about various ways and business models that would make game development closer to the people where customers know what’s behind the scene, can influence, interact and engage with development and developers while supporting them in various ways be it testing, ideas sharing and crowd funding.

And Wolfire with their Overgrowth are trying to do just that. Good to see such developments. Humble indie bundle initiatives Wolfire made are interesting in same sense though probably not exactly what I want. But still good.

Interesting features of HIB

Here are things I find to be brilliant about Humble indie bundle:

• Allowing people to choose their own price is a jewel here but it is hard to foresee all the cases where developers loose or earn money with such an offer, but it definitely is a buzz generating part of this
• EFF and Child’s play charity are part of this, but even more important that project allows users to choose what proportions of payment go to what. This I think brings more meaning in to the purchase by making users to make a choice. Now it is not meter of pure consumption. As with amount of price here user makes a choice about who he is and what he wants in various dimensions. I think it engages user more with action of purchase making him more aware of what goes where.
• Stats of average price given by OS platform. It is interesting in many ways. For example you can see that Linux users pay twice as much then Windows users and Max is in a middle. And you can see proportion of platforms. That actually shows that Windows market is bigger in numbers but almost equal in money to Linux here Interesting observation considering AAA companies prefer to say “There is no money to be had on Linux market”, yeah right… If you do not try then yeah there is not money to be had. Another interesting thing about this is that it provides a base point and forces user to answer a question of who he is. Are you cheap? Are you generous? Are you average and just like majority of people?
• Then there is top 10 contributors top. This one partially works like a previous adding moral and competitive motivation for users to pay more but this time I see what I hoped to see with first HIB. Advertisers. At the moment 3 out of 10 top payers are advertising something paying the project together something like 2k$. Not not that much I guess but I think there is promise in that idea.
• Also majority of games are selling for a while. Hype already ended for them. As I mentioned I was thinking but not bringing myself to buy some of those and basically my money was money they would not get otherwise.
• They picked a right time to do this in combo with gift option. As I mentioned I bought few copies as gifts as well.
• There is number of less significant things, no DRM, probably a world wide release, digital download being available for a while etc

There are of course some things that bother me a little:

• Bundle version bothers me a little, last time I had 50%+ of games, that was alienating me to not participate or motivate to lower a price as I payed one already for some of them. And low price because of that may lower average price stats and in this way influence others choice as well. I guess you could tackle this with trying to sell new games like that or adding ability to say which games you want and which you do not even though you still get all of them.
• This offer is 7 days long… This bothers me because as usual with such stuff people would manipulate it. Buy like 100 and resell later for bigger price when it will not be sold anymore. Of course such exploit is little bit effected by “pay what you want” and “no DRM” parts of this but still it holds.

Conclusion

HIB and Wolfire explore things that I am very interested in and my respect to them for this. All that is very interesting on many levels and could be a start of many interesting game development business models I wish will succeed. Bringing all models together is what is right and what HIB tries to do may be not in very refined way so far. Motivation, morals, engagement of buyer. Social media. Charity. Advertisement place for big contributors/sponsors. All it together in as easy to buy form as possible. Right way to go don’t you think?

I wrote before that I find some of the aims behind copyrights noble but that I just don’t see their today state noble and bringing more harm then good.

Well during last weeks many things have happened on internet vs copyrights front.

Recent developments

Pirate bay appeal in court

Messy and questionable case… Unproven revenues and expanses of site, unclear involvement of defendants, questionable and arguable intent to infringe copyrights. And yet jail and fines measured in millions of dollars. That’s how it looks to me, confusing and not solid…Is this a precedent and example of how justice in court should be? It looks to me more like rushed and lobbied decisions even if it is not.

COICA act and domain name seizure

EFF wrote about this act and its implications, its a latest idea of media industry. They do not want to go after all of the pirates as it makes big fraction of their clients too and criminalizing such large amount of people is pointless, so instead they look for easy, cheap and effective technical solutions to make digital sharing go away. So they try to sue site owners that are not directly responsible like blogs that link to tricky stuff or platforms like Digg where users create and link to content. They pressure open platforms like Youtube forcing them to police their own users spending their own resources and in addition paying the industry… They try to force ISPs to police their own users. And now when all of it fails to bring internet on its knees they try a new thing. To push laws that would allow without court to seizure domain names of sites that may not even be in USA jurisdiction.  This has far going consequences in technical level. As with any other attempt of censorship on internet new technologies or alternatives will spawn. There are already many talks about alternatives to DNS like unified root project , its one thing when they close servers, sue technology creators and so on but now they attack one of the core elements of the internet… It surely will make internet a lot less reliable and could even motivate countries to do their own DNS systems so that we will have internet with borders… Horrible possibility.

All in all they attack internet core now which has large implication for freedom of speech, innovation and unified world. You can read in more details in this post for example or follow EFF posts like this one. This is a really really horrible development.

And now just the other day I learned that USA already is seizing domain names of torrent indexers and other sites media industry sees as “infringing”. Without court order, without notice, without famous digital millennium copyright act notices… Or so it seems at the moment.

ACTA accepted by EU

This week I learned that controversial ACTA developed in secrecy from public was accepted by EU, luckily not as mandatory things that does not force EU countries to adopt “thee strikes” regimes or similar things. So it is hard to understand what implications ACTA will have for EU with such foggy stance. I guess it is a lot better then it could have been.

Screenwriter against 20th century Fox

And most outrageous of last days news that shocked me and forced to write this post and add new category to my blog. A screenwriter from USA that was collecting on one site scripts from various films to share with other screenwriters to read, learn and use as cultural base for their work is sued by 20th century Fox for 15 million in damages?!?!? One of those “scare the crap out of everyone for using internet” type of cases again… She did not even leaked, made or stole those scripts, just collected them and is sued for 15 millions… In what kind of world are we living in now…

It seriously looks like some fear inducing tactics and racket by media companies against internet these days…

Thoughts that such news provoke in me

Honestly I have no idea what media industries are thinking doing all that. I know that by their definitions we all are pirates these days and what they show us? That we all are potential targets for prison sentences and fines with ridiculous amount of zeros in them… So we all are criminals now? We all should be living like criminals waiting to defend in court, run, bankrupt or fight for your freedom? Rampant piracy is here for 10 years or so. As a master of computer sciences I do not see technical resolution to it, or in other words means to enforce copyrights in digital age without sacrificing freedoms and/or internet.

I especially am sad and sometimes even angry on copyrights collateral damage on innovation. As I wrote in my older post media industry right now tries to force others to shoulder copyright protection. It attack service providers like youtube forcing them to make expansive copyright work detection systems and attacks ISPs to police their own users and also attacks governments lobbying for disastrous laws…

Want one more example of how it damages innovation? There is art site I participate in and love called DeviantArt. They have fractal, photography digital and traditional art, games and animations and movies sections. What they do not have is music section. Actually people manage to upload music in to various sections like Flash apps/games/animations or in to video section but it is prohibited and someteimes when administration feels like it they purge those without checking. Why? You can find short answer here “Will deviantART ever allow uploading of music files? Not at this time as there is a wealth of legal and structural issues to consider”. So yeah. Internet sites, start ups and others should provide frameworks to police copyright content if they want to make a content related service. And it is especially worse for video and audio content. That’s the price we are paying sadly

This all starts to remind me of alcohol prohibition laws and we know how they ended up. Prohibiting something many want and anyone can do in his basement out of cheap widely available elements is just pointless and is a welcome for corruption and underground movements. They do not remove the problem, they force it underground… And that’s what will happen if they will be approaching it from laws and enforcement side only.

Well I always was a more or less silent or more correctly passive supporter of Creative Commons and pirate parties ideals and aims. But with cases like that of a screenwriter or other cases mostly in USA with outrageous sums of money and other ridiculous penalties on a selective basis where hundreds of thousands if not millions of people do the same and one of them is sued like that… Such cases stop to remind me of alcohol prohibition story from our history. They start to remind me of various fear and oppression stories from out history. And they all end bad for oppressors be it rebellions in Rome, American Civil War or French Revolution. Probably it is far reaching comparison but media industries are becoming oppressive, pushy, racketing and making many if not enemies then at least no sympathizers be it Google, ISPs and new generations of netizens. And we can see first glimpses of growing movement against that oppressions and attacks on internet that started from pirate parties years back. But those parties are small and with narrow aims that appeal probably only to younger generation and thus do not have enough voice to change things and protect internet for now. Which leaves masses unsatisfied and willing to do something, to help, to participate, to make your voice heard. In recent months this took on a new form. A civil disobedience in digital age.

Anonymous and Operation Payback

You can read about it here and here and here is their page. In short it started in September 2010 as reaction and counterattack against DDOS attacks on torrent sites. Since then they were attacking various anti-piracy related sites almost constantly. After appeal verdict on Pirate Bay case they attacked IFPI and it was down for 27 hours. Now they attack Warner Bros, MGM, Universal, and Sony as ones behind IFPI. There are no words on screenwriter case yet but I guess 20th century fox should get ready for being DDOSed by people they oppress.

My view on Operation Payback is constantly changing. For few first time it seemed like ordinary civil discordance aimed to voice and show that people do not agree… Just in new and kind of interesting for me way.  It looked like fighting fire with fire and as disorganized little man was coming together to show corporations that they do not agree. But it goes on since September. Too long I was thinking. They were even attacking some targets I was not finding to be good targets. It was starting to seem more like vandalism then civil disobedience and they were asked by pirate parties to stop. There were rumors that Anonymous agreed. But after all those recent events we see that they aether did not agree or changed their mind. And I changed mine too today, I again agree with what they are doing. I even feel slight motivation to join in… Is this what copyright industries want? Rebellion? I would have liked to go the pirate parties way but it is long, pirate parties seem weak and battles over those issues are lost in courts and law making… It just does not seem to work so what are we left with then just trying to show with civil disobedience that we do not agree and that we are willing to fight in a way netizens ought to fight.

Reading this blog I guess you know that internet, tools built upon it, various related phenomena and its effect at social and economical aspects of our life. One of things I am getting more interested in in recent years are various rights conflicts around internet and various marketing and business models related to it.

I was planing originally to write such articles as part of web category and I did, I also was not planing to write much about it before but recently things are becoming more and more outrageous so I decided to separate such posts to different category. So here we are, will try to write about interesting business models in internet that do not rely on copyrights, various conflicts around internet and copyrights, outrageous cases of media corporations attacking a little guy or lobbying dangerous laws.

Today it is not a pleasant or even dangerous thing to write about but because of various recent news I find it hard and even irresponsible to be silent.

Short version

With age of internet open content platforms become possible which put incredible power in to the hands of simple people and make very incredible things possible. But also it took power out of copyright holders hands. Now they are pushing to get it back and as they can’t seriously fight the masses the try to push weight on shoulders of content  platform and channels owners.

But if service existed that could identify if content has some copyrights on it, and if that service would be openly available it would become possible for platform and channel owners to provide cheap and innovative services.  For example of possibility of such service check out how YouTube does it. Now question is who should pay for it? My answer is that those should be copyright owners in form of % tax of their earnings to support such service. It is in their interests anyways.

For longer version and TED video about YouTube system read further…

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