Nightly Open Thread
Does anyone else find it mildly troubling that Sony was able to find a judge willing to grant their request for information that could be used to identify anyone — yes, even you — who has evern looked at noted Playstation hacker George Hotz’s website, Twitter timeline and YouTube channel?
Because personally, I think it’s an excremental ruling by a clown in a robe.
On the other hand, this couple and their use of Skype is pretty darn cool. Not that I’d recommend it for everyone, but under the circumstances it certainly worked.
Also, Charlie Sheen keeps on bi-winning…right into unemployment. So I suppose that’s it for Two and a Half Men. (That’s okay, though; The Big Bang Theory is better.)
Tonight’s post brought to you by hipsters:
Wordpress is too mainstream. I should use Tumblr.
I actually like Two and A Half Men, so meh. Perhaps they’ll get a new actor/character to replace Charlie Sheen.
He IS a very talented actor though, so I guess it is rather sad when you see these people ruining their own lifes. Oh well…
Big Bang Theory IS better though yeah 😛
On the one hand, boo that judge. Boo!
On the other hand, I hope Geohotz goes to prison forever.
As far as George Hotz is concerned…welcome to the 21st century, my friend. I believe that if you intentionally use a company’s technology against them to destroy future profits, you are fully liable–and so is everyone else who does the same thing.
Example–you invent the teleporter…a device that revolutionizes travel. You start a business which charges people for travel from 1 site to another. Some kid hacks your teleporter, and then overnight, noone is paying to use it–they all travel for free–after you’ve invested MILLIONS of your dollars (and the billions of investor dollars) to bring your product to market. Your investors would be pissed, the government would be pissed (taxes), and YOU would be pissed because everybody loses over some kid who wanted to cheat you out of your profits.
I applaud the judge for this ruling.
Some will use the RIAA argument, and state that the system is broken–that technology changes the way people should share information, but that (in my opinion) iss incorrect–the system isn’t broken, it’s the people who cheat the system (and share their illegal activity with the world) who are broken.
I don’t like anyone infringing on a person’s rights–until that person infringes the rights of others, namely Sony (it is probably stated in the doc that using this constitutes and agreement that you won’t hack the thing).
The piracy argument is compelling only to a point, and the transporter example is not apt. While it is true that jailbreaking any device — an iPhone, PS3, whatever — can enable users of those devices to then pirate software for them, the jailbreak itself does not grant free access to the hardware being jailbroken; everyone who jailbreaks his PS3 still have to go out and buy one first. Sony isn’t losing money on the hardware side. They might be on the software side, but I haven’t seen those figures, and that issue doesn’t seem to be what their lawsuits are about.
That’s why the teleporter example fails; it’s not as if Hotz is giving people the ability to suddenly obtain Playstations for free.
(Granted, jailbreaking does violate the EULA for most systems that can be so broken. This raises the thorny issue of just how far an EULA is allowed to go in controlling how a user can use hardware he has legitimately purchased. As an example: What if the Dell EULA stipulated that you couldn’t swap out RAM chips in your Latitude?)
Jailbreaking is, primarily, about extending the functionality of the system. Granted, on PS3, people use it for cheating and piracy (iPhone jailbreaking is also used, by some, for piracy, though much of the jailbreak community frowns on this), but can Hotz be held liable for that? Can Dell be held liable if I use a Dell laptop to hack into a government server somewhere? Most jailbreakers still buy PS3 games; the just use the abilities their cracked system gives them to in effect image the games they buy onto the unit’s hard drive, allowing the game to be played off the drive rather than the optical disc. (This speeds game performance, especially for those users who have also swapped out the default drive for an SSD.)
The better route for Sony — and the more profitable, PR-boosting route, for that matter — would be to emulate Apple’s model of dealing with jailbreaking. Apple doesn’t really go after jailbreak publishers or users; they do try and push more and more secure versions of iOS, but they also try and diminish the desire to jailbreak by adapting for use in iOS those features available to jailbroken phones that they can implement securely.
Folders in iOS are a great example of this; the first three versions of the iPhone OS didn’t have them, but there were a couple of jailbreak apps that could emulate folder functionality. With iOS4, Apple introduced folders, which (in my opinion) pretty much put to shame any of the homebrew solutions which were previously available. (Multitasking is another example, although some would argue that Backgrounder, the jailbreak solution, is still better than what iOS offers. I disagree, but it doesn’t make for as clear-cut an example as the folders do.)
In the end, my concern is what Sony plans to do with this information, and I have a hard time believing that they’ll use it properly.
In Geohot’s defense: his hacks did NOT allow for the use of any kind of pirated content. While Sony wants to paint him as this big evil pirate, he’s more the kind of hacker who hack things just for the sake of hacking AND to open the roads for homebrew development which could lead to very interesting thing (one exemple that would speak to us all: what about a native Exult Port for the PS3? That would great and wouldn’t be possible without such thing).
Now of course the way Geohot’s opened the PS3’s gate allowed for other people to offer ISO loaders, cheats and things like that… should we really put all blame of Geohot’s for this though? It’s the difference between what a hack can do, and what one choose to do with it and while there are many pirates, there is also a strong homebrew scene who just want to be able to offer homebrews and are not in this for pirating.
(It’s kinda like the Modchips of olds: sure with a PS1/PS2 Modchip you could pirate all kings of game… yeah well personally I was glad to have modchips in my PS consoles, because they allowed me to get legally imported games that I wouldn’t have played otherwise)
There is a lot of fuss over the PS3 hack… but it offers lots of interesting prospect beyond the obvious “1et’s pirate games D00Ds” unlike say the X360 firmware hack whose only point WAS to allow users to pirate games. And yet there was not such a fuss over the X360 hack.
I honestly think Sony is overreacting – any console will end being hacked at one point of another, it’s a fact of life really. They should just be very happy that the PS3 managed to stay hacked free for so long while the competittion got hacked after a few weeks of their releases
I see your points, WTF, but I still disagree. Mainly my teleporter example is still valid. What you forgot about is basic videogame marketing–Companies usually sell their hardware systems at a tremendous loss, and make most of their profits off of the licensing of the software for use on their system. This is why my example didn’t sell teleporters–it charged for the use. “But I was only trying to experiment” isn’t a logical excuse–“I was only trying to see how fast my car could go” won’t get me out of the ticket either. People should accept responsibility for their actions. By opening the box these folks accepted the EULA–and if they broke the law (by hacking it), the only decision left to be made is what the punnishment is. Relating it to lost revenue is a plausible prosecution.
Type “PS3 +free games” in Google. The answer comes back About 4,460,000 results–cut out 50 percent of these for ads, videos and other junk, and you’re left with an estimated 2 million wares sites, all giving away Sony’s profits. -If your small business suddenly starts losing 25 percent to thieves, would you be able to make ends meet?
Will PS3 pirating break Sony? Probably not. Could it prevent them from competing in the market to develop the next console? You *BET* it could. Then we all lose. And do you know who would be screaming the loudest at Sony for not making any new games for the system? The a-hole hackers.
I see your points in turn, but let me raise you something: the Ultima 9 v1.19f patch. We wouldn’t be able to play Ultima 9 on modern hardware without it; should I (as the main provider of this patch) or the original developer be liable if some third party uses the patch to play the game illegally? Because remember, the patch does two things: it makes the game play nice with DirectX, and it removes the SafeDisc protection from the game. All you need to play Ultima 9 now is a pirated ISO of the game and that patch…so should I or the patch-maker (whoever he was) be held liable if people opt to use it in that way?
I was wrong in my initial critique of the teleporter example, but I should point out that you still make one key error in it anyhow. Hotz didn’t actually create the means to pirate games on the PS3; he didn’t create the means to use the teleporter for free. What he did create was a way for third parties to take the base functionality of the PS3 (teleporter) and add thereto. Using Hotz’s jailbreak, this person over here can get a particular homebrew game — Exult, even! — to run on his PS3, and this guy over there can install Linux on it so it can double as a home entertainment server. The analog in the teleporter example would be that the jailbreak…allowed this guy over here to create a means to use the teleporter to screen out explosives in packages sent via teleportation, or allowed that guy over there to use the teleporter to give painless, instant full-body waxes to interested clients by simply filtering out certain kinds of hair follicles during transport.
And yeah, some other clown over in some other place figured out a way to get free games onto his PS3 (free rides on the teleporter).
I’m all for going after pirates; don’t think that I’m not. But that’s not what Hotz is, and that’s not what he did. And I for one would argue that he can’t be held liable for what others have used the jailbreak to do, unless Sony can demonstrate clear intent on Hotz’s part to aid and abet the pirates.
It’s also worth noting that an EULA is not the same as a federal (or state) law. Indeed, a US court recently ruled that iPhone jailbreaking was perfectly legal, and the ruling is almost certainly portable to the PS3 context.
“Will PS3 pirating break Sony? Probably not. Could it prevent them from competing in the market to develop the next console? You *BET* it could.”
No it couldn’t. The PS3 pirating is insignificiant at this point, is for now mostly limited to very geeky circles and comes way too late to make any real impact on the PS3’s sales. Pirating is way more rampant on Wii and 360… and this does not prevent games and consoles to sell well.
Eck just look at the PS1, the PS2 and the PSP… they were pirated to death. Did this prevent these to be a success and Sony to create new home console or the upcoming NGP? Of course not.
This does not mean pirating must not be fought, but it has to be fought properly. Here it feels like fighting a mosquito with a nuclear bomb.
And they way to diminish piracy et not to hit any would be pirates with a sledgehammer – but rather give them a reason to BUY(*) the games instead of going the “easy way”.
And of course, publishers are NOT going the right way to fight against piracy. When you see all the DRM crappyness coming around (even if I think it’s more abotu screwing any customers that would dare buying an used version of the game, instead of fighting piracy)… this is the kind of thing that DRIVE customers away and only hurt legitimate customers while pirate can play cracked version without any issue.
(*) At least for those who could, since in the end a lot of piracy comes from teens with no money to buy games. Which is not an excuse… but show that the financial impact is nowhere as much as the big honchos of videogames, movies and what else wants us to believe. Because not every perso who pirate one thing would have bought it otherwise.
So of course piracy has to be fought, it just feels to me they are going the wrong way about it and in the case of Sony VS Geohot, against the wrong target.
Wait–Geohot wasn’t involved at all in jailbreaking the system to be able to copy software or cheat at online gaming?
I stand corrected. I thought that’s what this entire thing was about. My whole 2 cents on the subject is that I *HATE* the illegal downloaders–the ‘abandonware’ sites that try to justify their illegal actions with lame excuses of “they’re not using it any more, so why can’t we just have it?”. Because it’s wrong, that’s why.
Yeah Geohot started the jailbreaking thing, but his own work did not allow the use of illegally downloaded games – he’s never been an advocate of piracy. Now of course, his hacks allowed other people to create these stuff… but just because one’s work can lead to illegal stuff doesn’t mean one should be held responsible (or then let’s put all those companies that put all those comapnies selling us Burners, DIVX readers and physical medias in Jail too :P)
We’re also gonna disagree on one thing, I’m gonna go and defend abandonwares here. Technically that’s illegal, sure. I’d argue it’s not *morally* wrong though.
If it wasn’t for abandonwares and emulation site archiving all these old games that aren’t supported anymore by their own IP holders (or that sometime don’t even HAVE a IP holder anymore) there are a LOT of games that would simply have ceased to exist anymore and completly fallen into oblivion.
I don’t see how any of this can be described as wrong. Hell we have a very good exemple for Ultima games: the Worlds of Ultima games haven’t been republiched EVER in TWENTY years. I’m sorry but as illegal as it is, and as much as I’d rather have a legitimate re-release, I am glad there are abandonwares sites that allows these games to be found and played. If it were up to be, we should have some law making games and programs which are now longer supported fall into public domain after say… five or ten years. For me the people holding those abandonwares sites (at least those was do it PROPERLY of course… which unfortunatel is not always the case); should be commended as great videogames archivist and not labelled as “evil pirates”
Now hopefully, publishers are starting to see the appeal of their old videogames catalogue actually with things like Good Old Games, XBLA, or WiiWare getting bigger and bigger and obviously any games available in such way has no more room on abandonwares site, and perhaps a time will come such site will no longer be required. But we’re not quite there yet.
I’m not an advocate of illegal games downloading… but I think game antiquities are a different matter, and it’s always been a rather gray area even amongts developpers and publisher – there ARE actually some who released some of there games into public domains because they agree to the abandonware philosophy, even if they are the minority.
Oh yeah, and on that last point I think the success of GoG, WiiWare and even in different genre things like VOD and Itunes kinda proves one thing: the vast majority of people will prefer a good, fast, reliable and easy to use legal solution to the hassles of piracy.
So publishers obviously needs to continue in this way.
Wow, two times in three days I have to be the asshole.
<asshole>
Please don’t advocate for abandonware again…not here, at any rate. EA — including Mythic — do pop in from time to time, and I like to stay in their good books. You’d like me to, too. Ultima 4 is fair game to mention as a free download; the others are off limits. There is no legal concept of “abandonware”; there are only those games which have been specifically released for free by their developers and/or those who hold rights to the IP, and those games which have not been released by same. Whether a game has been republished or not is irrelevant; whether a game is old or not is irrelevant. It is both legally and morally wrong to obtain for free those games which have not been released for free by the original developers or rights-holders…period.
And I want no talk of it here.
</asshole>
On the other hand, I’m not going to delete any comments, and if people want to debate the abandonware fiction, I’m actually fine with that. Just don’t link to or advocate for the use of abandonware or any sites that serve the stuff up, okay? Keep it “high level”.
And I do totally agree with the comment about sites like GOG, or WiiWare, or even the success of iTunes: people do tend to prefer having a legitimate means to obtain the things they might otherwise resort to piracy to download. It does reduce hassle, in addition to ensuring a minimum standard of quality and (especially in this day and age) affording a measure of assurance that the obtained product will be free from malware.
It’s not that I want to “advocate” abandonware and I’m sorry if this came out this way. I certainly don’t intend to post any link or whatever (I don’t even think I’ve visited one of those sites in years) and I’m not trying to get people to GO and download stuff where they can…
BUT it does irks me to see abandonwares considered as the same level as say… sites offering the latest AAA games to download and let me explain why:
While this might be the same to the letter of the law, I have to disagree about this being the same thing morally speaking and it’s one of those stuff which I think would need more distinct laws. I mean there ARE subtelties in the legal system; so why not about videogames ?
There’s a difference between offering products on the web with the sole purpose of having the publisher lose potential sales and money from their game – and offering products which are no longer supported sold or available anymore through any legitimate means. Are both illegal? Certainly. Are both *unethical* though? I think that’s definitly arguable. I mean no offense to anyone, but claiming this is exactly the same sounds like a very black & white kind of view to me, while this is something that has more shades of grey here.
I mean you’d have a hard time finding any game developpers advocating piracy and for good reasons – but there ARE game developpers advocating (or at least not entirely dismissing) the abandonwares concept though. It doesn’t matter of course, since developpers rarely hold the IPs of the games they worked on (altough it has led on rare occasions to have some games released to the public domain), but it does show it is not quite the same thing in many people’s eyes, even within the videogame industry.
Now of course a legalisation of the “abandonware concept” seems unlikely to happen in the foreseable future, but the best way to “fight” it is for publishers to push these “retro offerings” further and further. It wouldn’t cost that much for them to make it happens, and could provide them with additional revenues and even reveal some interest in some old IP, who knows?
The more retro games we’d have on GoG, WiiWare, XBLA or other equivalent… the less reason there will be for people to download these games illegally and the less reasons these site will have to exist. This will always the better way to fight against all form of piracy: offer something legal, easy to use and better.
And I’m still hoping the things we heard a few month back about Barnett trying to get the old Origin games available legally through some form of download will come true because that’d be mighty neat!