Tag Archive for 'free culture'

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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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    Artists Get The Internets Angry At Wikipedia For No Reason

    Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 1:28 PM on April 24, 2009 in Commentary. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/I5b

    Wikipedia Art: Everybody Look At Me!
    Being the Creative Commonsing, Fairly Using, “17 USC § 107″-number memorizing hippie I am, I was instantly riled up when I saw in my feed reader an Ars Technica article about how the Wikimedia Foundation is trying to pursue legal action against Wikipedia Art for “trademark infringement.”

    Wikipedia Art was an attempt at a conceptual “performance art” piece in the form of a Wikipedia article, acting as commentary on Wikipedia itself and…stuff. It was deleted from Wikipedia, not because it wasn’t art, but because it’s not an encyclopedia article. Perfectly reasonable. But then, allegedly, Wikipedia threatened a lawsuit and demanded the artists hand over the Wikipediaart.org domain name. This got the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is essentially an entire organization of crazy Fair Use-hippies like me, very upset. I mean, come on, Wikipedia? The paragon of free knowledge and culture going all RIAA on people?

    That’s what I thought. So I decided to do what nobody else had apparently attempted: get a comment from Wikimedia. On Twitter.

    • @XerxesQados: @jimmy_wales Are you okay with the threatened lawsuit against http://wikipediaart.org? Seems very anti-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Use #
    • @jimmy_wales: @XerxesQados There is no threatened lawsuit. #
    • @jimmy_wales: @XerxesQados : Wikimedia says: http://ow.ly/3PhY . I’m disappointed in the EFF – clearly misrepresenting the situation. #

    Well. Okay then. What Wales linked to was an official response from Mike Godwin, general legal counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation and predictor of Hitler.

    “Wikipedia editors brought the issue of the domain name to our attention, we corresponded with the Wikipedia Arts folks, raising domain name and trademark issues, and the result was a prominent disclaimer. No litigation was threatened or commenced.”

    In other words, Wikimedia asked for the domain name, not for the project to be shut down. They did this with VisualWikipedia.com as well, which is essentially a prettier wrapper over Wikipedia, and they now operate as VisWiki. Personally, I think it’s a bit of a stretch that people would get confused about whether any site with “wikipedia” in the domain was a Wikimedia project, but still, it’s nowhere near “threatening artists for fair use.”

    EFF, I love you, but calm down. Don’t let yourself get riled up just because some avant-garde artists want attention. I agree, the trademark enforcement doesn’t seem necessary, and it probably could be fought in court, but pick your battles. And YOU, Internet. Yes, YOU. Do more research before ranting on your blogs.

    Holy crap, I think I just did journalism.

      Arr, Google Me Timbers

      Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 1:58 AM on April 23, 2009 in Commentary. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/0CO

      The Pirate Google Logo
      In the recent Pirate Bay Trial, which the defendants “lost”, the argument was frequently made that The Pirate Bay does nothing more than Google: they post links to stuff, some of which happens to infringe upon copyright, but they don’t have a lot of control over what links are in their database. The Pirate Bay just happened to be completely disinterested in removing any links to anything that wasn’t a virus. It’s techically not illegal, which is why their conviction is such an outrage, and why Google does pretty much the same thing. To drive that point home in protest of this silliness, The Pirate Google has appeared.

      It’s nothing more than a Google Custom Search which adds “filetype:torrent” to the end of each query, which is doable on regular Google searches as well. Even if The Pirate Google is taken down by someone or other, that functionality will still be available in Google. Of course, given Google’s track record of being a pussy when it comes to defending themselves against Big IP Whoring (because “Big Entertainment” is kind of a stretch), it’s possible that this won’t last. Or it could catalyze Google’s growth of a spine.
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        Ever Edited Wikipedia? Help It Get Free-er.

        Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 11:19 PM on April 19, 2009 in Commentary. 0 Comments Tags: , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/SU3

        Our friends at Creative Commons have informed the Internets that there’s a very important vote being called at Wikipedia. It’s about licensing Wikipedia under Creative Commons.

        This is very important, even if you’re not up on the whole free culture commons creativity stuff, and I will explain why. Currently, Wikipedia is licensed under something called the GFDL, which stands for “GNU Free Documentation License”, where GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”, and GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”, and GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Ridiculous nomenclature notwithstanding, this license is intended for “free” documents, which can be distributed and reproduced freely. However, it has quite a few quirks which allow it to work very well for software manuals, and not very well for Wikipedia.

        “When I started Wikipedia, Creative Commons did not exist,” says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, and the GFDL was the only thing around back then which seemed like it worked. But it doesn’t. Wikipedian David Gerard notes that, “Even cutting and pasting text between two Wikipedia articles is technically a violation unless the full author list for that piece of text is attached. This is not workable on a wiki.” The Wikimedia Foundation hasn’t been enforcing some of these troublesome rules, but the fact that it’s part of the license is, legally, not great.

        So, in other words, Wikipedia needs to switch to a better license, and they’ve found it in CC-BY-SA. Wikimedia, the Free Software Foundation (maintainers of the GFDL), and Creative Commons have all worked together to make it legally possible, under the latest GFDL, for wikis (such as Wikipedia) to switch to CC-BY-SA. Yes, even the GFDL’s creators want Wikipedia to drop it. All that’s left is you.

        Yes, you.

        Wikipedia is ridiculously democratic, considering it’s by EVERYONE, so the license change isn’t going through unless the majority agrees that it should happen. Which you should. Otherwise you hate America. And kittens.

        Now, the title of this post is a bit misleading, because technically this vote is only open to people who have made 25 edits or more to Wikipedia before March 15th of this year. However, every time you fixed a typo or something counts, so if you’ve ever clicked “edit this page” on Wikipedia and actually pressed the “submit” button when you’re done, just log into Wikipedia and go to the voting page to see if you’re eligible. If you are, please vote yes.

        Go vote here in case you didn’t catch the link on the last paragraph. Also, here’s another link to the vote page.

          Pirate Bay Founders Found Guilty. Of Something. They’re Pretty Sure.

          Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 2:55 PM on April 17, 2009 in Commentary. 0 Comments Tags: , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/sqS

          This article was written by Thilus and originally posted on his LiveJournal. It is being reposted here, almost verbatim (with some minor grammatical changes), at his open request. While these are not my words and I don’t share some of his anecdotal experiences, I couldn’t have said any of this better myself.

          So we finally have an official verdict in the first round of prosecution against The Pirate Bay, or rather the four brave souls willing to play the part of human shields over it.

          All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.

          “Assisting in making copyright content available.” What the hell? I was doing that myself when I was fourteen, from the cheap computer in my family’s dining room over a free modem connection. Congratulations, authorities: you’ve succeeded, after all this pomp and circumstance, in royally screwing up the lives of four industrious people with the same charge you would have used to convict me at fourteen for sharing scanned comic books over AOL.

          Me, or anyone else, really. It’s the vague and pervasive wording on this that really bothers me. Find me someone in modern society who isn’t guilty of “assisting in making copyrighted material available.” Go on, I challenge you. Yes, your IPhone counts as entrapment. So does your TiVo, your PC, your XBox, and probably a fax machine.

          Over a million dollars in fines each and one year in jail. I doubt the money will even be a problem in a case like this… it’ll come form somewhere, these guys aren’t stupid and they’ve had a long time to prepare. And jail time is supposed to accomplish what, exactly? Do I even need to go into how utterly backwards and counterproductive that is? No matter what kind of prison circumstances these guys end up in (I really have no idea, either), it’s supposed to what, give them a year in which to build even more hate for the system and plan what they’re going to do when they get out? Or give them a year to turn into paranoid, survivalist animals? No matter how I look at it, this counts as complete bullshit.

          If nothing else, these guys are obviously damned good at what they do, and not likely to appreciate being dicked so hard by The Man. Why not throw them a bone instead and put them to some sort of positive community service. Heal the breach a little, don’t make it worse, you fucking idiots. Cops everywhere are all the same, root out the evil and all that’s left will be sunshine and rainbows. Bullshit. Black and white thinking only means that eventually something purple will appear and run your colorblind ass over because you couldn’t see it.
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