Tag Archive for 'digital rights manufacturing'

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The Indie Paradox: Paying Rent Without Depending On Corporations

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 8:29 PM on May 21, 2009 in Commentary. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/OR

If you're not indie...Piracy happens for two reasons: people don’t have a lot of money, and 90% of everything is crap (or DRM’d, but that makes it crap). Therefore, by getting everything free, you won’t lose any of your hard-earned cash on that 90%. Unfortunately, because no money is going to the creators of the other 10%, they won’t continue making things for everyone to download free.

Large corporations have come up with a solution: go into the manufacturing business. They are now Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, creating new rights for themselves using a revolutionary new process known as “fellating lawmakers”. Their revenue stream comes from licensing these digital rights at high prices, and suing people who don’t pay. But it’s too expensive for indie artists and creators, and it doesn’t win you any friends.

Because of this situation, indie game developers are doing horrible things like experimenting with in-game advertising. I’m not saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of annoying ads bombarding us. I’m saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of depending on the advertising industry for revenue.

Think about it: TV series with devoted fanbases are cancelled because they don’t make enough ad revenue. Millions of websites depending on Google AdSense would go broke if their accounts were inexplicably terminated (I’ve read about this happening before but can’t find a link detailing it. Maybe I’m typing the wrong words into Goo…gle…wait a minute). And remember when GameSpot fired Jeff Gertsmann when their advertisers didn’t like his reviews? For people who call themselves indie, it’s not very indie-pendent.

The best way to be indie in any medium, be it game development, filmmaking, music, writing…hell, even running a business in general, the only party you should be depending on is individual people. Some may know them as “customers”, or “users” who “generate content” on your “social media application”, but let’s avoid such corporate-speak, as it makes baby Jesus cry and is killing America. But there’s still the problem of how exactly to make money on individual people anymore. In a world where art is hard work and people don’t seem to want to pay for it, one man will stand up to explain his opinion. That man is me. Reread the previous two sentences in a movie trailer guy voice, then click the jump-cut-continue-reading thingy:
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    MPAA To Teachers: Don’t Rip DVDs, Camcord Them!

    Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 12:04 AM on May 8, 2009 in Commentary. 0 Comments Tags: , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/B0

    Current hearings in Congress about exemptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are focusing on the following: should it be legal for teachers to circumvent copy-protection on DVDs so that they can show video clips to their classes?

    No, says the Motion Picture Association of America. Besides, why would you want to do this? There’s a perfectly reasonable alternative: point a video camera at the screen!

    MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set from timothy vollmer on Vimeo.

    Two things:

    1. Not every teacher has a high-quality monitor and camcorder, so it would cost educational institutions an enormous amount of money before this ridiculously convoluted workaround could produce usable results.
    2. The jokes write themselves.

      YouTube Blocks Content ID Matches Worldwide Except In Everywhere

      Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 4:11 PM on May 1, 2009 in Commentary. 4 Comments Tags: , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/LD

      I got a very odd notice from YouTube. Apparently their robots finally detected my fair use of a copyrighted Universal Music Group song in one of my ridiculous convention videos. However, this was not cause to automatically take down the video, nor to automatically mute the audio. Instead…

      As a result, your video is blocked everywhere except in these locations:
      American Samoa, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Cuba, Fiji, France, Germany, Guam, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kiribati, Mexico, Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Spain, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, United Kingdom, United States, United States Virgin Islands, Vanuatu

      So, wait, where is it blocked, then? Most of the countries I’m not seeing on there don’t have their own versions of YouTube. Um…China? Is it blocked in China? Oh, no, that’s all of YouTube, sorry.

      I’m very confused. Oh well. I’d imagine that it’s still accessible everywhere regardless, now that I submitted the fair use dispute. This is the third time I’ve had to do that, and it’s kind of annoying. Why can’t I just submit the fair use claim when I upload the video? I know it’s got copyrighted music, I state that in the description, so let’s just cut to the chase, shall we?

        Kindle Text-To-Speech Now Up To Visually Un-Impaired CEOs, Not People Who Need It

        Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 2:42 AM on March 2, 2009 in Commentary. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/HXH

        A few weeks ago, whoever the fuck the Authors Guild is proved they’re just another association filled with complete idiots unable to comprehend adapting their business model to current realities. Unfortunately, their threats to shift their industry’s revenue stream to the lawsuit market have caused Amazon to cripple the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech abilities. Now, instead of allowing the Kindle 2 to read anything aloud to visually impaired users, children, or anyone else who might need or want such a thing, this option will be up to the book publishers.

        Let’s think realistically about this for a second. Amazon hasn’t removed the feature entirely, so as long as a publisher allows it, their book can certainly be read aloud in a robotic, monotone voice. Still with me on this realism thing? Okay, now tell me how many publishers are likely to do this? To be fair, we don’t know. But looking at precedents set by the digitization of music and movies, I’m guessing the number of publishers allowing that will be less than or equal to the number of independent, smaller publishers selling Kindle books through Amazon.

        I really hope, though, that I’m wrong. I hope, to the bottom of my heart, that the publishing industry has about as much respect for the Authors Guild as, well, any author I’ve ever met. I would be so happy if publishers prove me wrong and universally offer the text-to-speech option, because they know that negative reinforcement doesn’t make a customer want to buy another “license” from you. But I am not at all optimistic.

        I should note that my argument about the visually impaired doesn’t seem to jive with the Guild; they state in their “rights alert” thingy that “Kindle 2 isn’t designed for such use” by people with bad vision or blindness. I could question who the hell the Authors Guild is to question how useful something is for visually impaired people, but I think the National Federation for the Blind can do that better than me.

        But oh well. Looks like there’s nothing we can do but fire up our BitTorrent clients in protest.

          Finally, YouTube Will Let You Download Videos Without A Stupid Grabber Tool

          Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 4:53 AM on January 19, 2009 in Commentary. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/UeZ

          I love how Google decides to publicly test new features without issuing a press release. I guess they figured that the blogosphere notices anyway so why bother with the fanfare? But here’s something rather nice: they’re using Already President as far as I’m concerned Barack Obama’s channel to test out their new ability to download YouTube videos from the site.

          But Zacqary! There have been lots of tools that let you download YouTube videos for years!

          That’s a valid point, Helvetica Bold 10.5 Dark Orchid, but all of those have required you not only to download an extra program or Firefox extension, but they grab the crappy, compressed Flash Video version that you’d see anyway on YouTube. Now, not only do you click a little link below the video, but you also get to download it in H.264 format! That’s the same encoding that they use on Blu-Ray. BLU-RAY! (Though, granted, the YouTube download has a lower resolution and bitrate than a Blu-Ray, but seriously, it’s an improvement)

          I grabbed one of the Obama videos to compare, and yes, it’s quite nice:

          H.264 is better than standard YouTube FLV

          H.264 is better than standard YouTube FLV

          If you view that full size, you can see that the downloaded video has better contrast and is a lot less fuzzy. Keep in mind, though, that it downloads at 480×270; I resized it to 640×360 so it would be the same size as the video on YouTube. But the YouTube video is probably scaled up too.

          Sadly, it isn’t the same quality as YouTube HD:

          The download is still lower res than it could be.

          The download is still lower res than HD, unfortunately.

          Again, I scaled the download up. At this level of scaling you start to see where the downloaded copy loses detail. Though the contrast still looks better…maybe that’s Firefox’s fault?

          Now, this is still only available for Obama’s channel, but in the coming weeks, Google claims that everyone will have the option to enable their videos to be downloaded. Personally, for the sake of the common Internet user, I’m hoping that it’s an opt-out system. That way the only reason someone would have to stop being lazy and edit their videos is if they want to be an asshole or a corporation.

          Speaking of which, when do I get to replace my old videos with HD versions? They’re all ready to upload as soon as you let me, Google.

          [Source: Ars Technica]