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Sega Pushes ISONews, and They Push Back
ttol writes "Take a look at our announcement at iSONews.com. Sega of America is trying to censor our freedom of speech by claiming our news service infringes on their copyrights on their Dreamcast system. We've got Ms. Jennifer Stisa Granick representing us (she spoke at DefCon). Sega has been sending out these notices for to other sites as well. It's time that someone can stand up for our constitutionary rights, and not let Big Business bully us around." ISO News doesn't distribute ISOs, so Sega is being very uncool. I think they're just pissed that only like 9 people bought dreamcasts *grin*.
Here is an at least semi-accurate analogy.
Bob is a homosexual man living in san fransisco, for a living he makes and sells homemade jams and fruit perserves. He is also very successful, selling tons of jams and also becoming very famious.
One day on one of his many trips to buy bob's jams a young jamacian man named Stan thinks to himself "if only i dident have to dish out 50 bucks for each jam, what if i bought the jams and reverse engeered them so i could make them for my self and give bobs secret recipes to my friends for free, after all bob is just a money hungry bastard anyway charging 50 bucks for each jam, what an asshole". And so Stan buys a few of his favorite jams from bob, takes them home and gets to work at figuring out what went into these jams.
After weeks of hard work Stan breaks bob's secret recipe for strawberry jam and after a few more days discovers that almost all his jams include the same basic ingrediants. He quickly sends the
recipe along with this information to a few of his closest friends, so they too will no longer need to pay bob's outragious prices.
Months pass and while Bob is still doing very well he notices that some of his key customers are no longer showing up to buy his jam. He ponders this and reasons that either someone has cracked his secret recipe or someone is making an even better jam, but Lance wasent supposed to come out with his new jams for at least six months.
So Bob gets busy searching the internet and finds www.latestbobsjams.com with all the latest info on which of his jam's recipes have been discovered but does not include the actual recipes. Bob is infuriated and runs downtown to talk to his lawyer who says that Bob most likely wouldent win a court case against joe, (the admin of www.latestbobsjams.com) but a scare tactic would most likely work.
So off goes the email to Joe. And a few days later www.latestbobsjams.com goes down. Bob is delighted and ignorantly thinks that now no one will give out his secret recipes out of fear. But he is sadly mistaken because only a week later he finds out about www.jamplanet.com which not only lists the latest progress in the discovery of Bob's recipes it also lists the latest of his two good friends Steve and Larry as well. Along with at least twenty other people he dosent know.
Bob tries sending out a threatening email to www.jamplanet.com assuming that it will work because it worked with www.latestbobsjams.com. Fred (the admin of www.jamplanet.com) briefly takes only Bob's listings off the site only to consult his lawyer. With his lawyers ok Fred puts back up the Bob section on his site. This was Bob's greatest fear, the scare tactic dident work
and now everyone would know when each of his jams was reverse engeered.
Bob runs to his lawyer and begs him to do something. Bob's lawyer informs him that in court they would most likely lose but that a lawsuit could either scare them off or consume all of there money.
And thats where we sit today.
Ok, Maybe i went a little overboard.
Question: is it really a case of "free speech"?
Yes, it is a case of free speech. As far as I can tell, ISONews does not distribute any illegal games themserlves. They simply report on what's out there. This is not and should not be a crime. If someone comes up to me on the street and asks if I know where he might find some crack and I tell him that the crackhouse down the street might be a good place to start should I be arrested as a drug dealer?
Warez fascinates me I guess, because people that wouldn't steal anything material - ie wouldn't walk into a shop and steal one of these games, feel totally justified in downloading them.
Agreed.
don't want to start a fight, I'd just really like to see some other opinions on this. Is it ethical?
It may not be ethical but "ethical" and "legal" are two very different things.
Once we start handing over our speech rights to lawyers where would it stop. I don't pirate software, but I do frequents the boards. The VCD board is one of the few places I can even ask encoding related questions and expect to get an answer. The boards are heavly moderated, and requests, trading, whatever is not allowed.
ISONews may be pussing the limits of good taste, but in not way are they doing anything illegal. Like they said, you must show what parts are infringing. Frankley after reading the letters, it appears more like harrasment than anything else.
You must ask yourself, before damming ISOnews, what if it were YOUR site. You were doing noting you thought was illegal, and they threaten you with vauge refrences to what you are doing wrong. They tell you that litigation will be long and agrivatitig. They force you to retain leagl advice and respond to letters that do not conform to the laws they are refrencing. You know the lawsuit is baseless, but how do you fight a company like sega? What would you do?
Everytime they bully a site down without just cause, and everyone that caves is sending the wrong message. They are saing that it's ok for coperations to strong arm the little guy for their own benifit, and the first amendment means noting. I'm starting to question wether or not any of out bill of right are really still enforcable, as now there are so many laws in place to restrict them, and I'm not just talking about free speach.
(2) We can change the product license/EULA at anytime and that is always legally binding on you, with or without your consent. Even if you're a minor.
(3) Software piracy is "theft" and a loss for our company everywhere except in our annual financial report (where the SEC requires public US traded companies to disclose all profits, expenditures, LOSSES, etc.)
(4) Negative reviews of our products are illegal, as this may result in financial losses. Also, the reviewer is financially responsible for any such losses he/she causes.
(5) Since we always own our product, we can use it to covertly spy on you, collect personal data, and secretly send it back to corporate HQ. Blocking this action in any way is also illegal.
(6) US law is world law, thanks to UN treaties which preempt the US constitution (See Article VI, ection 2), and other nations' constitutions. Non-compliant nations will be carpet bombed into submission (Yugoslovia, Iraq, etc.)
(7) Exemptions for archival backups, reverse engineering, security analysis, transfer of license, reliabiliy testing, etc., no longer applies to our products (see the DMCA).
(8) Even when we're wrong. We win the lawsuits. You are a mere peon. We have an army of lawyers and a mega-dollar legal budget and years to decades of time on our hands to sue and delay and filibuster you into litigation hell. Can you afford to "win"? You'll go bankrupt, your wife and kids leave you, and die a bum on the streets, of starvation, long before that happens. God bless the US legal system. And when we do win (rightfully or wrongfilly [in your opinion]), the win builds up case law in our favor to make us stronger against the next punk.
(9) Copyrights never expire. They never will ever again. Just get over your dreams of eventual intellectual property theft. We'll be working on patents, next.
(10) We reserve the right to make deletions, additions, or changes to this Bill of Rights at any time and any such alterations are retroactively effective from infinity B.C. to infinity C.E.
I don't know why the Dreamcast always gets such a bum wrap... They've been on the market for over a year now, while the PS2 isn't even in the US market yet, but even a year ago people were saying they didn't want to spend 200 bucks for the best system out at the time because the PS2 would beat it when it came out.
Besides, Sega tries stuff in the states that there's no way Sony would even think of doing... Seaman, for instance, is an awesome "game" that does some truly innovative stuff that sega took a chance with and released in the states.
Anyway, I'm not a huge console gamer, but if any next-gen console survives, I hope it's Sega's.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
The premiere 'news' site for the piracy scene finally gets a letter from Sega.
It's %100 true that ISONEWS does not distribute images of games, but the difference here is that ISONEWS reports news of groups releases of games.
They send out their own 'press releases' if you will that state they have released the latest game.
The question is: what is legal, or illegal about these 'press releases' (otherwise known as NFO files).
If these NFO files can be found as not breaking any laws: then sega has no case, otherwise, isonews has a bit of a problem.
I don't recall remembering anyone that has successfully been litigated upon for having mere NFO files.
Ah, therein lies the rub.
:)
To quote Voltaire, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
The funny thing with Free Speech, you ethier have it or you don't. The minute you start saying, "Well this speech is OK, but that speech over there, that has to go", you open Pandora's box.
Personally there's a lot of stuff on TV or radio that I would rather not see. It all comes down to, what is one man's offensive trash, is another man's free speech, and simply because I believe that a certian site shouldn't exist (for whatever moral, legal, religous, or phil grounds) I have to respect their right to say it. Full stop. This is one of those things you can't do half way, lest you get book bannings, and all other sorts of bad karma stuff.
Like it or lump it, it's free speech
Minupla
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Remove the rocks from my head to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Think about it... How do lawyers feed their kids?
.com chasing
20th Century: Ambulance chasing
21st Century:
It's just the latest easy-peasy way of lining their pockets. I bet they charge $100 per letter/e-mail!
SEGA stock is down 75% from its peak early this year. They're losing money. And they don't have an entry in the next generation race: Sony has the PS2, Nintendo has the GameCube, and Microsoft has the X-Box. Sega? Well, Sega has a new GameBoy-like unit. Maybe they're moving to the handheld market.
So SEGA is sinking. One article on SEGA wrote "This company is dead", but it's too soon to tell.
A lot of comments about Sega strongarming an innocent news site.
:) ]
Would it be illegal to post a news site with the topic of... oh, how about Cmdr Taco's house: www.tacohome.com. There could be different sections, like:
Blueprints
Resident Traffic News *updated frequently*
Resident Traffic Patterns : daily
Security Analysis : 9/27
Invasion Scenarios : 9/29 (2 new)
Likely Valuables / Locations
Links
Of course, the links would be to stores that sell stuff that would be useful in a home invasion. Or online gun stores. Maybe simple HOWTOs on how to disable phone lines and other communication.
It's just freedom of speech, baby. I'm not doing anything wrong. You can't prosecute me.
Oh, but wait, that's different. Is there some area where I can be legally right, but morally wrong? How?
Because this situation isn't what the framers of the consititution had in mind. Big troop movement was horses, and guns had firing rates of one round per minute. Information traveled at horse-speed. Information travel was so slow and so deliberate that it took weeks for wars to end. No concept of fast information transfer... no idea that information transfer would become the center of the economy. I'm not saying they were unintelligent or wrong, they built the best system in the world, for it's time.
Stories like this are why I secretly pray for some kind of magical legal armageddon, so that we can start over and write relevant laws. Because our legal system is the best, it's the best in the world, but the laws under it are like a software architechture that's been hacked to work for over 200 years. The design is good, but you can hardly see through the spaghetti of maintenance.
So why talk about how ISOnews is legally right? Sure it is, and Sega is doing the legally wrong thing to go after the website. But why not talk about how what ISOnews is doing is morally wrong?
I mean, this isn't Cuecat and their dopey business strategy, and using lawyers to make money. This is theft, and someone "innocently" being the center of that community.
I know that arguing morals is a slippery slope, but man, I love my Dreamcast and it just pisses me off to see people stealing what is pretty much an awesome toy made by brilliant people.
[Sorry I singled out Taco, but he doesn't obviously know dreamcast sales from Slashdot's back end.
You mean a website like Ebay? Where a mix of legitimate and stolen goods is for sale? Hmmm. Not all ISOs are illegal. There really are people making ISOs that are demos, new games, etc. They are not all cracks.
CmdrTaco you are quickly become very annoying. Have you even USED a Dreamcast? People like to play good games and the Dreamcast has been dishing them out for a long time and at a good price.
When you tack your lame comments on stories you show yourself to be a very petty person.
Why wait 18 months to get bascially the same thing - and pay more for it.
This reminds me of my former roommate that didn't want to buy a CD player because "something better was coming". This was in 1997.
Question: is it really a case of "free speech"? I mean it's all good and well to talk about people's rights etc, but honestly everyone knows this sort of thing is purely directed to game piracy. I'm really curious about this - how many people think that the piracy of games under the banner of "backups" is actually "right"?
Yes sure ISONews is just that - a news site, and I'm not going to argue semantics on whether or not sega is being heavy handed, other than proposing this: if you coded games for a living, to sell, and yes increase the value of your business, would you like people to post them where people could download them?
Warez fascinates me I guess, because people that wouldn't steal anything material - ie wouldn't walk into a shop and steal one of these games, feel totally justified in downloading them.
I don't want to start a fight, I'd just really like to see some other opinions on this. Is it ethical?
It looks like they are trying to stop people who are posting information on how to pirate DC games. Don't think they will be able to stop it but I can't blaim them for trying, pirating sucks!
,"only 9 people bought dreamcasts." Yes the DC isn't close to outselling the ps1 yet but older consoles always outsell the new ones for a couple of years. Last time I looked at the sales figures the DC was doing just fine for such a new console.
,etc.) and there are some awesome games on the way (Shenmue.) So what if the DC doesn't "win" it is a great console that is well worth the $150 price tag. I think the DC will do better against the other next generation consoles than people think. If it doesn't hopefully the industry has grown so much they can make money with only a small part of the market. Sega's marketing can leave something to be desired but NO ONE makes better games than Sega!!!
Why do people make jokes like
The fact of the matter is that the DC is inexpensive for a next generation console, it has TONS of great games (Seamen, Sega GT, NFL 2k, SC, Crazy Taxi, Get bass, house of the dead 2, Resident evil CV, power stone 1 and 2, sonic
Ok. So. Another friend of yours both bought a lock from toolshedlockshop.com and read the instructions on toolshedtheft.com. Only problem is, he doesn't know about the electrician's tape thing. So, he goes to break in to your next-door neighbor's toolshed, but doesn't tape up her pet poodle (obviously), so he gets bitten by the poodle as he's trying to climb the fence to get out of her yard. So the next day this friend comes to you with half a canteloupe and asks you where to get rabies shots. Considering that you've been wanting to sleep with your next door neighbor whose canteloupe he stole for months, but you hate her poodle, but also now know that you can make a killing in the electricians' tape market, do you tell your friend you still have five CD's and an old sweatshirt that he left at your house four months ago?
Bruce
Bruce
You are the real Bruce Perens.