I have to agree with the author in that this lawsuit really makes no sense.
1. They claim "The video serves no worthwhile purpose and shows a tremendous lack of common human decency towards the family of the victim," yet they had to have known that the amount of publicity and attention they would get from a lawsuit would drive even more people to find the video now that it's out in the wild (aka internets), not to mention the family of the victim would now be even more involved in this and won't even get the opportunity to put the whole event behind them to move on with their lives.
2. "defendants have either refused or failed to remove the video from their Web sites." Youtube immediately complied with the DMCA notice they received and is still being held accountable despite the fact that another site, LiveLeak.com had approximately 10x more viewers, but they were "voluntarily removed them from the lawsuit after they removed the video". Liveleak had 213,295 views and YouTube had 24,346 views, but the NJTA decides to drop LiveLeak from the suit and continue suing YouTube despite the fact that they both complied with their requests. Apparently YouTube is being singled out because the NJTA doesn't want to accept the fact that the video had already spread and for some reason they think YouTube has control over every video on the internet.
3. Bringing attention to this situation is undoubtedly going to raise the questions about how this tape got out in the first place. The parent post raises a valid issue about why there aren't more questions being asked about the apparent lack of internal security and the article fails to raise the issue about why the main issue isn't related to how the video got out in the first place and who is actually responsible for the copyright infringement (perhaps creating a situation where the users are to be held accountable in a court of law rather than the distributor (YouTube/LiveLeak/etc).
Really those are my major concerns with the premise of this lawsuit, but I have to wonder why they would want to create such a large issue out of a case like this, when it would certainly make more sense to try and keep the entire situation as low-key as possible. This is undoubtedly going to bring more attention to this situation and it can only have a negative effect on the victims they are supposedly trying to protect. Also the fact that they are continuing to sue YouTube regardless of their full co-operation (all the while dropping the case against LiveLeak despite the fact they had 10x more people view the video on their site) makes me think they must have some strange reason for wanting to sue. Why would the NJTA want to sue somebody with the resource of YouTube/Google... I don't know... perhaps there is pressure from someone within the company, maybe they are upset that YouTube really wasn't able to prevent future copies being uploaded, or maybe they just want better roads.
Regardless, this case seems to have very little merit exercising some pretty bogus copyright rights and suing despite the legal cooperation of the aforementioned parties.
I would think blocking the ability of trial accounts to initiate tells is what had the largest impact (so far). Most of the spam came in the form of mass whispers from companies like peons4hire that would contain a couple of lines about the gold/price/website and it was sent to everybody in the entire zone.
The person who originally sent the whisper would generally have a trial account, create a character with a random name (often including accents and ascii symbols), log in, send the mass number of tells, and the log out and delete the character, so they might only be logged on for no more than 30 seconds.
The trial accounts are free so they could be used to sent mass whispers w/o any fear of getting banned. By blocking the ability to trial account users to send tells, that alone cuts of the primary method of spamming people, because now they would be forced to open subscriptions which would include a significant investment considering the account is destined to be banned quickly.
Don't forget, there is a market for selling gold in a virtual economy. Gold spammers might be breaking Blizzard's TOS, but they are making money from it with absolutely no consequences. Blizzard certainly took steps to protect their users given you could expect an average of 2-3 gold spam tells in an hour, but I'm sure they will find another way to get their message across (after all, it's a business that rely's only on marketing and price).
This lawsuit really has nothing to do with seeking monetary gains from peons4hire. It's about deterrence and making peons4hire and all other gold selling companies aware that there are consequences for their actions. If they win their case, then it basically makes selling gold within WoW more expensive than continuing to break Blizzard's ToS and it will have a huge impact on that entire market.
Bottom line, as long as gold sellers can continue to profit, these companies will exist.
I don't understand why Cringley still has the ability to make front-page slashdot news given the numerous times he has been wrong about things. The underlying argument for his article is weak at best and he is basically criticizing Google for hiring the best minds.
the Google Geeks are constantly talking with each other, team building, bonding, and goofing off. And for 20 percent of that goofing-off time I'll guarantee you that many of these people are discussing their pet projects, 99.75 percent of which have been REJECTED by the company.
Hmmm... so because the Google employees decide to spend their free time talking about work as well as new and innovative projects, the company is destined to fail. That makes a ton of sense. Given Cringley's reputation for fact-checking, I'm going to assume him saying 99.75% of ideas are rejected is either completely out of context or just blatantly false.
The search feature of Google will always be the bread and butter and there is no way they will let employees go and start up a competitor given all the trade secrets and insider knowledge that they are privvy too. And somehow I think Cringley, for whatever reason, is making the assumption that the idea to pursue ideas/projects proposed by employees are based on the whims of Google execs. They're not retards. They sift through thousands of ideas coming from some of the most talented people in the world and make decisions about which to pursue and which aren't worth it. For the few good ideas that get rejected initially, there is nothing stopping the employees from working on the projects in their free time w/o company resources and proposing a more developed, more thought-out project afterwards.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't foresee a mass exodus of people because of ideas getting rejected. Cringley makes it sound like having an idea shot down is going to turn "hundreds -- and soon thousands" of Google employees into disgruntled geniuses out to seek revenge by creating something that will somehow destroy Google (which could only happen by managing to make their search/ad revenue obsolete).
Either way, please, let's all lament about Google's downfall because they have hired the best people on the planet and they enjoy discussing pet projects in their free time. And then let's also blame them for keeping the ideas they think are best and rejecting the ones that don't have potential. With such a flawed business model I can only assume that the end days are upon us.
Given that Starcraft is probably best known for its incredible multiplayer gameplay, I would hope they are devoting the largest amount of resources into creating a viable online system. The reason I personally expect Starcraft 2 to be a huge hit is that Blizzard has experience in some of the more primary gaming aspects that result in very addictive, creative games.
With all their experience with World of Warcraft, I think they probably have a pretty good idea how to turn normal people into addicted 24-hour-a-day gamers. Given how much time they've likely dedicated to online gameplay development, I can only expect that they will somehow find a way to make Starcraft 2 appealing in an extremely saturated RTS environment.
Which also brings to mind the fact the fact that Warcraft III + expansion both had very well made single-player campaigns. I must've gone through that entire campaign atleast 3 times just because it was actually worth playing again, unlike many single-player games that you might play once and never return to. With any luck, they still have some of those storyline developers on staff somewhere to come bring that genius to creating a great single-player campaign as well.
I guess I'm mostly hoping for Blizzard to leverage their skills in creating an incredible single-player campaign with the quality of Warcraft 3, with the amazing online appeal found in the original Starcraft and WoW (even in a much more competitive RTS marketplace) which will hopefully live up to the reputation that Starcraft and the Warcraft series have come to enjoy.
I'm pretty sure that's why they started this competition. I mean, first they just happen to hold a contest to see who can make the best NASA Glove http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/0 5/1249229, and weeks later they come up with a contest to see who can make the strongest, fastest, most efficient robot of them all. They've clearly been watching too many episodes of the Bionic Man.
This is looking like some crazy NASA soup with some Bumfights and a Six Million(?) Dollar Man mixed in, and of course a dash of government institutions realizing the power of the people and private enterprise added for good measure.
Anyways, I'm off to go print me some NASA business cards for my newfound occupation as an independent NASA contractor.
Don't forget that at the moment, there is just a Harvard law professor (albeit a reputable one) that is simply advocating resistance against the RIAA, and not the university as a whole.
Given the sheer volume of RIAA notices sent out to universities throughout the country, Harvard has yet to receive any notices for copyright infringement. Until Harvard actually receives some notices (which seems increasingly unlikely given Harvard's reputation and also that the RIAA is generally looking for students that are likely to settle out of court for $3-5k (generally a pretty paltry sum when you consider it in a context of how much they are already paying for a college education).
It's great that a reputable Harvard professor is supporting change and urging other universities to resist RIAA notices, but Harvard students still remain untouched. Until the RIAA goes after Harvard and the university decides to actively defend the students, we can't really know if Harvard would actually support the students and fight the RIAA.
if users were presented with a large screed of text requesting approval for something, research had shown that "they will click OK to anything." and go figure... a nice link integrated into the paragraph above saying:
Click here to read more about a new flaw uncovered in Internet Explorer 7 that opens users up to phishing attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
1. They claim "The video serves no worthwhile purpose and shows a tremendous lack of common human decency towards the family of the victim," yet they had to have known that the amount of publicity and attention they would get from a lawsuit would drive even more people to find the video now that it's out in the wild (aka internets), not to mention the family of the victim would now be even more involved in this and won't even get the opportunity to put the whole event behind them to move on with their lives.
2. "defendants have either refused or failed to remove the video from their Web sites." Youtube immediately complied with the DMCA notice they received and is still being held accountable despite the fact that another site, LiveLeak.com had approximately 10x more viewers, but they were "voluntarily removed them from the lawsuit after they removed the video". Liveleak had 213,295 views and YouTube had 24,346 views, but the NJTA decides to drop LiveLeak from the suit and continue suing YouTube despite the fact that they both complied with their requests. Apparently YouTube is being singled out because the NJTA doesn't want to accept the fact that the video had already spread and for some reason they think YouTube has control over every video on the internet.
3. Bringing attention to this situation is undoubtedly going to raise the questions about how this tape got out in the first place. The parent post raises a valid issue about why there aren't more questions being asked about the apparent lack of internal security and the article fails to raise the issue about why the main issue isn't related to how the video got out in the first place and who is actually responsible for the copyright infringement (perhaps creating a situation where the users are to be held accountable in a court of law rather than the distributor (YouTube/LiveLeak/etc).
Really those are my major concerns with the premise of this lawsuit, but I have to wonder why they would want to create such a large issue out of a case like this, when it would certainly make more sense to try and keep the entire situation as low-key as possible. This is undoubtedly going to bring more attention to this situation and it can only have a negative effect on the victims they are supposedly trying to protect. Also the fact that they are continuing to sue YouTube regardless of their full co-operation (all the while dropping the case against LiveLeak despite the fact they had 10x more people view the video on their site) makes me think they must have some strange reason for wanting to sue. Why would the NJTA want to sue somebody with the resource of YouTube/Google... I don't know... perhaps there is pressure from someone within the company, maybe they are upset that YouTube really wasn't able to prevent future copies being uploaded, or maybe they just want better roads.
Regardless, this case seems to have very little merit exercising some pretty bogus copyright rights and suing despite the legal cooperation of the aforementioned parties.
The person who originally sent the whisper would generally have a trial account, create a character with a random name (often including accents and ascii symbols), log in, send the mass number of tells, and the log out and delete the character, so they might only be logged on for no more than 30 seconds.
The trial accounts are free so they could be used to sent mass whispers w/o any fear of getting banned. By blocking the ability to trial account users to send tells, that alone cuts of the primary method of spamming people, because now they would be forced to open subscriptions which would include a significant investment considering the account is destined to be banned quickly.
Don't forget, there is a market for selling gold in a virtual economy. Gold spammers might be breaking Blizzard's TOS, but they are making money from it with absolutely no consequences. Blizzard certainly took steps to protect their users given you could expect an average of 2-3 gold spam tells in an hour, but I'm sure they will find another way to get their message across (after all, it's a business that rely's only on marketing and price).
This lawsuit really has nothing to do with seeking monetary gains from peons4hire. It's about deterrence and making peons4hire and all other gold selling companies aware that there are consequences for their actions. If they win their case, then it basically makes selling gold within WoW more expensive than continuing to break Blizzard's ToS and it will have a huge impact on that entire market.
Bottom line, as long as gold sellers can continue to profit, these companies will exist.
Hmmm... so because the Google employees decide to spend their free time talking about work as well as new and innovative projects, the company is destined to fail. That makes a ton of sense. Given Cringley's reputation for fact-checking, I'm going to assume him saying 99.75% of ideas are rejected is either completely out of context or just blatantly false.
The search feature of Google will always be the bread and butter and there is no way they will let employees go and start up a competitor given all the trade secrets and insider knowledge that they are privvy too. And somehow I think Cringley, for whatever reason, is making the assumption that the idea to pursue ideas/projects proposed by employees are based on the whims of Google execs. They're not retards. They sift through thousands of ideas coming from some of the most talented people in the world and make decisions about which to pursue and which aren't worth it. For the few good ideas that get rejected initially, there is nothing stopping the employees from working on the projects in their free time w/o company resources and proposing a more developed, more thought-out project afterwards.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't foresee a mass exodus of people because of ideas getting rejected. Cringley makes it sound like having an idea shot down is going to turn "hundreds -- and soon thousands" of Google employees into disgruntled geniuses out to seek revenge by creating something that will somehow destroy Google (which could only happen by managing to make their search/ad revenue obsolete).
Either way, please, let's all lament about Google's downfall because they have hired the best people on the planet and they enjoy discussing pet projects in their free time. And then let's also blame them for keeping the ideas they think are best and rejecting the ones that don't have potential. With such a flawed business model I can only assume that the end days are upon us.
and now I've learned to use the preview button before posting....
Given that Starcraft is probably best known for its incredible multiplayer gameplay, I would hope they are devoting the largest amount of resources into creating a viable online system. The reason I personally expect Starcraft 2 to be a huge hit is that Blizzard has experience in some of the more primary gaming aspects that result in very addictive, creative games. With all their experience with World of Warcraft, I think they probably have a pretty good idea how to turn normal people into addicted 24-hour-a-day gamers. Given how much time they've likely dedicated to online gameplay development, I can only expect that they will somehow find a way to make Starcraft 2 appealing in an extremely saturated RTS environment. Which also brings to mind the fact the fact that Warcraft III + expansion both had very well made single-player campaigns. I must've gone through that entire campaign atleast 3 times just because it was actually worth playing again, unlike many single-player games that you might play once and never return to. With any luck, they still have some of those storyline developers on staff somewhere to come bring that genius to creating a great single-player campaign as well. I guess I'm mostly hoping for Blizzard to leverage their skills in creating an incredible single-player campaign with the quality of Warcraft 3, with the amazing online appeal found in the original Starcraft and WoW (even in a much more competitive RTS marketplace) which will hopefully live up to the reputation that Starcraft and the Warcraft series have come to enjoy.
This is looking like some crazy NASA soup with some Bumfights and a Six Million(?) Dollar Man mixed in, and of course a dash of government institutions realizing the power of the people and private enterprise added for good measure.
Anyways, I'm off to go print me some NASA business cards for my newfound occupation as an independent NASA contractor.
Given the sheer volume of RIAA notices sent out to universities throughout the country, Harvard has yet to receive any notices for copyright infringement. Until Harvard actually receives some notices (which seems increasingly unlikely given Harvard's reputation and also that the RIAA is generally looking for students that are likely to settle out of court for $3-5k (generally a pretty paltry sum when you consider it in a context of how much they are already paying for a college education).
It's great that a reputable Harvard professor is supporting change and urging other universities to resist RIAA notices, but Harvard students still remain untouched. Until the RIAA goes after Harvard and the university decides to actively defend the students, we can't really know if Harvard would actually support the students and fight the RIAA.
Click here to read more about a new flaw uncovered in Internet Explorer 7 that opens users up to phishing attacks.