UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

YouTube’s popularity is continuing to grow.  Searches on YouTube now account for over 25% of all searches done on Google.  That means that if YouTube searches were counted separately from Google, YouTube would be the second most popular search engine on the internet ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft.

Despite the popularity of YouTube, media companies continually send take-down requests to get their videos removed from YouTube.  Most famously, Viacom sued YouTube for $1 Billion for making Viacom media available on YouTube.

When the Viacom-produced movie Tropic Thunder was released, the stars of the movie produced a mock viral video and posted it to YouTube in order to generate publicity for the movie:

The stars in the video state that they are producing the video to post on the internet for publicity, which generated positive buzz in advertising circles for its originality.  Despite this, Viacom sent a take-down request to YouTube, claiming that they were illegally using Viacom property and forced them to remove the video from the site.

Despite popular belief, it it is not the case that media companies not being paid for their content.  Today, Warner Music Group announced that it was pulling all of it’s music videos off of YouTube despite a previous deal that paid them whenever their music videos were watched.  It is even speculated that Google was losing money on the deal while Warner was being paid millions.

While YouTube search is more popular than Yahoo search and a potentially lucrative profit stream, content providers are still removing their material from YouTube.  No company would request to be removed from search engines like Yahoo since it is so vital to their online presence.  In fact, the opposite is true.  An entire new industry of search engine expertise has developed to help these companies rank higher in searches.  Yet when even better opportunities for free publicity exist, they let their fear of industry change take precedence over making money.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, the Recording Industry Association of America is abandoning lawsuits against file sharers who trade music online:

“The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.”

Wall Street Journal - Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits

We’ve previously covered some of the the reasons why suing your customer base may not be the best long-term business strategy.  But given that the music industry has a history of pursing any strategy to prevent piracy no matter how self destructive or pathetically futile, it comes as no surprise that they are launching a new anti-piracy strategy.  The RIAA is forming partnerships with internet service providers who will scan their customer’s traffic for illegal file sharing and then warn them, slow down their transfer speeds, or cut them off altogether:

“If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.”

Wall Street Journal - Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits

One alarming problem with this approach is that the RIAA has a horrible track record for identifying pirated material being transferred online.  As far back as 2003, the RIAA almost succeeded in having Penn State University’s astronomy and astrophysics department disconnected from the internet.  After a RIAA network scan found a folder called “usher” on an astronomy department server and assumed it contained pirated music by the musician Usher, they sent a cease and decist letter to the university.  The university threatened to cut off access to the department until they proved that the material had nothing to do with the musician Usher.

The RIAA has had to apologize for many other similar incidents over the years, including harrasing the Amigascne.org Amiga Computer fan site:

The RIAA’s form letter sent to Speakeasy last Thursday alleged the Amigascne.org site illegally “offers approximately 0 sound files for download. Many of these files contain recordings owned by our member companies, including songs by such artists as Creed.”

ZDNet - RIAA apologises for more mistaken warnings

Given the track record, it is alarming that the RIAA will be given power to cut off the internet access of individual users.  And given the RIAA’s history of continuing to litigate in piracy cases where there is no valid evidence, it is unlikely that they will be forgiving to users who are innocently caught in the dragnet.  Meanwhile, the large scale pirates will continue to use advanced tools that encrypted file transfers and are unlikely to be caught.

If you disagree with this move, let your ISP know how you feel.  If your ISP supports this program, switch to another provider who values user privacy.  Without full cooperation from the ISPs, the RIAA would have no ability to implement this program.

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Copy protection for computer games is as old as computer games themselves.  Software companies have long believed that if they don’t come up with ways to stop games from being copied, consumers would wildly copy games between themselves for free and the software company would lose sales and not make any money.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, game companies came up with increasingly outrageous copy protection schemes.  VintageComputing.com has a great run-down of some of these methods:

Many games — X-Com: UFO Defense included — would ask the player to type in a code that appeared on a given page. Other games took it a step further and would ask for a specific word from a given line in a given paragraph on a given page: “Type in the fourth word of the first line of the last paragraph on page 254 to continue.”

While the copy protection methods have changed, the idea remains the same.  Instead of looking up words in a manual, computer games these days will require online activation or use specially-modified cds that must be inserted in order to play.

While piracy is rampant in the computer gaming world, the very idea of copy protection is completely broken.  At first, it might seem like a reasonable idea to force game players to prove that they bought the software, but it is actually counter-productive due to the nature of software.

Think about it: Once a single person figures out how to bypass copy protection, every other pirate in the world can get a copy from the first person who copied it.  At that point, the software pirates have a modified version of the game that doesn’t include the hassles of copy protection.  In fact, the only people who have to deal with annoying copy protection are the very people who actually paid for the game.  With today’s high speed internet connections and bittorrent download sites, is actually easier in many cases to pirate a game than it is to go to the store to buy it.

But while there hasn’t been a single* moderately popular computer game ever released that wasn’t successfully pirated despite copy protection, game publishers still think that they can stop pirates.  Spore, one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year, is the latest victim.

The publishers of Spore went to great lengths to prevent the game from being copied - possibly greater lengths than any game before it.  The publishers instituted a system where the game had to be activated online every 10 days in order to be played.  That means that even if you don’t play on the internet, you still had to log in once every 10 days to keep playing.  In addition, the game counted the number of times it was installed.  After the third install, the player was forced to call the publisher and prove that they didn’t pirate it in order to install it again.  Even worse, the copy protection would occasionally malfuction and cause problems for players who didn’t violate any of the numerous rules.
This resulted in widespread outrage from gamers.  Amazon was flooded with poor reviews decring the copy protection (the game current has 1.5 out of 5 stars), forums were swamped with protests from players, and gaming blogs were full of stories from dissatisfied players.

So clearly copy protection managed to destory the reputation of the game.  But did it at least keep people from copying the game illegally?

In the first two weeks after release, Spore had already been pirated over 500,000 times, more than any other game ever tracked.  And it gets worse!  According to TorrentFreak, here are the most pirated games of 2008:

1. Spore - 1.7M downloads
2. The Sims 2 - 1.15M downloads
3. Assassin’s Creed - 1M downloads
4. Crysis - 0.94M downloads
5. Command and Conquer 3 - 0.86M downloads

So if you are keeping track at home:

1. Spore’s copy protection outraged players, which resulted in wide-spread consumer outrage and one of the worst Amazon review scores ever recorded for a major game
2. Spore was still pirated more than any other game ever
3. The only users who were harmed by the copy protection were players who purchased the game legally.

So clearly the publishers of Spore and the rest of the industry will learn from their experience and not make the same mistake again, right?  Don’t count on it.  In fact, they should have learned over 20 years ago, when Game Guru was released:

It shipped on a 3.5″ floppy, but the program was restricted to only three installs. In order to install it, the write-protect tab on the floppy had to be disabled, and the software would supposedly write a marker to a file on the disk every time it was installed. Once that count reached three, poof! No more installs for you. Hmmm…I wonder why that technique never became popular.

So it shuts down after three installs just like Spore.

Here’s a little more history/trivia:  Game Guru was published in 1996 by 3DO Software.  3DO Software was a spin-out of EA Software started by the founder of EA Software, Trip Hawkins.  After 3DO Software went out of business, many of it’s assets were bought by UbiSoft.  Since 2004, UbiSoft was been partially owned by EA Software.  EA Software of course publishes Spore.  Small world, huh?

* No, really.  Not even one.  Try to find a counter-example.

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