Game Dev Pulls out of E3 over SOPA

Author	All Replies
Krisnatharok Caveat Emptor Premium join:2009-02-11 Earth Orbit kudos:3 Reviews: ·Comcast	Game Dev Pulls out of E3 over SOPA ... starts Gaming Foundation instead! »arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012···sade.ars The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate cousin the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are like thermonuclear devices deployed to kill an insect. They would give copyright holders and the US government unprecedented abilities to summarily block and cut off funding for websites accused of violating copyright. Major sites ranging from reddit to Wikipedia are voluntarily going dark today in protest of the proposed laws, as an illustration of the silencing effect they could have on Internet free speech. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for PC game developer Red 5 Studios. Not only has the studio blocked access to the beta of free-to-play open-world shooter Firefall for the day, but it also revealed last week that it is pulling out of the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) showcase, which is run by the SOPA-supporting Entertainment Software Association (ESA). Red 5 will also use the $50,000 it would have spent on a promotional E3 booth to start The League For Gamers, a grassroots group it calls "a gathering place for gamers, developers and industry supporters who want to stand against legislation that's detrimental to the games industry." The URL of the gaming foundation is »www.leagueforgamers.org Red 5 is the developer behind Firefall. Must say I have now bumped it to the top of my "must play" list for their opposition to SOPA among a bunch of companies more concerned about DRM and their bottom line. The Red 5 CEO is a law student grad and was team lead for WoW over at Blizzard for 7 years. -- If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-18 11:50:17 ·

I AM join:2010-04-11 Ephrata, PA kudos:3	Awesome really. Now if they will just give me my beta code for FIREFALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-18 11:54:16 ·
Jobbie Keep It Simple Premium join:2010-08-24 Mexico	Totally agree Kris. So much respect for this company. I will look for Firefall now since it was outside my gaming radar. -- "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-18 12:01:19 ·
Tehuno join:2005-01-18 Bartlesville, OK kudos:1	reply to Krisnatharok They will just end up blocking the leagueofgamers site... incoming great firewall of the USA.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-18 15:43:28 ·
Mcrobrewer Premium join:2001-03-04 Trenton, NJ	reply to Krisnatharok I need to look into the specific legislation.... but I do not support IP or copyright theft of any kind. -- Obama is a liar.... a cheat... a person of low moral character... the least common denominator...
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-18 19:02:47 ·
Krisnatharok Caveat Emptor Premium join:2009-02-11 Earth Orbit kudos:3 Reviews: ·Comcast	I don't think you have to be a pirate to be against legislation that destroys Constitutional rights. The pro-consumer gaming companies (like Red 5 and Valve) have continuously said that the industry should be investing in convenience for the consumer instead of restrictive DRM that only punishes the paying customer and rewards pirates. But no, the MPAA and RIAA have declared that foreign piracy is the #1 threat to America, and Free Speech and Due Process are acceptable casualties in the fight against the punk teen squatting your internet connection on with BitTorrent. -- If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-18 19:22:49 ·
Mcrobrewer Premium join:2001-03-04 Trenton, NJ	reply to Krisnatharok Does The Constitution through "Free Speech" allow me to support illegal activity?
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 07:16:47 ·
Adalicia PoM Nom Nom 'Mon join:2009-10-13 Columbus, NE kudos:12 Reviews: ·Time Warner Cable ·RoadRunner Cable	No but SOPA and PIPA also are too broad in their wording to properly protect the internet and your free speech. They would give the government, and thus corporate interests, unprecedented power when it comes to "filtering" the Internet in addition to forcing ISPs to "police" their consumers. Never mind the fact that you can't actually block shit on the internet like that, nor the DNS issues that would result or questionable extradition of evil "terrorists" from the United Kingdom. I know you hate those evil pirates, stealing all that money from those industries that refuse to adapt to modern times, drop antique distribution techniques, and evolve with the the rest of the world, and hell who wouldn't be mad knowing Brad Pitt didn't get the millions he deserves for doing Mr. & Mrs. Smith, he has all those adopted children to feed! What are SOPA and PIPA? SOPA (the "Stop Online Piracy Act") and PIPA (the "Protect Intellectual Property Act") are bills in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, respectively. These bills are presented as efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but in our opinion, they do so in a way that would disrupt free expression and harm the Internet. Detailed information about these bills can be found in the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act articles on Wikipedia (which remained available during the blackout). GovTrack lets you follow both bills through the legislative process: SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that advocates for the public interest in the digital realm, has summarized the flaws in these bills, and the threats to an open, secure, and free Internet. It is entirely possible to be against piracy and IP theft while still not being in support of two pieces of legislation that are too ambiguously written to really do anything other than easily be manipulated. Google said, for example, if this were the pass they would have to take YouTube down. Period. Because there would be too much liability, there would be no way they could ever "police" it to the levels this bill would ask. WHERE WOULD I GET MY CUTE KITTEN VIDEOS?! Also, I would download a car if I could. More on topic, I support Red 5 and I support their request that other game developers do the same. The ESA makes their largest amount of money from E3, they do not represent the gaming industry as a whole, the developers do, big and small, and we do. The idea is that if enough folks do this, if Kotoku and Game Informer and whoever the fuck else, and these companies don't cover, don't attend, don't support E3 the ESA may be a bit more open to changing their mind of supporting a horribly written piece of legislation. -- Lore Nerd. Role Player. Raid Leader. Healing Priest. Slightly Annoying. Also Likes Kittens.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 07:33:16 ·
Snakeoil Ignore Button. The coward's feature. Premium join:2000-08-05 Mentor, OH kudos:1 Reviews: ·RoadRunner Cable ·magicjack.com	reply to Krisnatharok Thanks for the link. And he is dead on about: quote: I mean, have you ever rented a movie? What do you see? What's your experience when you pop in a DVD or a Blu-Ray? You get a ton of ads up front. It takes you forever to get to the movie. You get advertising in the menus, now. The interface is horrible. I mean, compare that to someone who just downloads a movie from the internet where they have no ads, no BS in front of it, and they just watch the movie! That's what the movie industry should be doing. They should be offering better features and better service to their customers, to really make the case against why you don't want to pirate them. The above is so damn true. One reason why I "love" Netflix. It's legal and i get the movies without ads. A shame the industry is trying to crush Netflix. Same with games. I've stopped buying new games, instead I just rent them, or play the free to play games. I can't see plunking down 60 bucks for a game that has at the most 20 hours of play time. -- Is a person a failure for doing nothing? Or is he a failure for trying, and not succeeding at what he is attempting to do? What did you fail at today?.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 09:02:37 ·
Lothario join:2009-09-30 Ottawa, ON	reply to Krisnatharok »en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_despotism After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. I do not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. Of all the forms that democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 10:11:52 ·
Homunculus Pipsquack Premium join:2000-12-14 Dar al-Harb	reply to Krisnatharok said by Krisnatharok: I don't think you have to be a pirate to be against legislation that destroys Constitutional rights. The pro-consumer gaming companies (like Red 5 and Valve) have continuously said that the industry should be investing in convenience for the consumer instead of restrictive DRM that only punishes the paying customer and rewards pirates. But no, the MPAA and RIAA have declared that foreign piracy is the #1 threat to America, and Free Speech and Due Process are acceptable casualties in the fight against the punk teen squatting your internet connection on with BitTorrent. Our founding fathers (ie. foreign invaders) had internet? -- “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and waving a cross”
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 10:46:56 ·
Adalicia PoM Nom Nom 'Mon join:2009-10-13 Columbus, NE kudos:12 Reviews: ·Time Warner Cable ·RoadRunner Cable	reply to Krisnatharok Thought this was relevant, The PirateBay Press Release: INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Over a century ago Thomas Edison go the patent for a device which would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture. Because of Edison's patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North American East Coast. The movie studios therefore relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disney's biggest hits ever. So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: "stole") other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they're all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it's all based on being able to reuse other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules. The reason they're always complaining about "pirates" today is simple. We've done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between each other, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It's all based on the fact that we're competition. We've proven that their existence in their current form is no longer needed. We're just better than they are. And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for the freedom of speech, we see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations. The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we've stayed out of the USA. WE have Swedish roots and a Swedish friend said this: The word "SOPA" means "trash" in Swedish. The word PIPA means "a pipe" in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet into a one way pipe with them at the top shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you'll learn that no one wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government wants the American people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown. SOPA can't do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we'll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names, and did it work? Not really. To fix the "problem of piracy" one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they're creating "culture" but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that makes them think they're fat. In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build the Wonders of the World. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you can control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he's complaining that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world - because he's jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you'd get a honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News. Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can't access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that. THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012 -- Lore Nerd. Role Player. Raid Leader. Healing Priest. Slightly Annoying. Also Likes Kittens.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 10:50:25 ·
Jobbie Keep It Simple Premium join:2010-08-24 Mexico	said by Adalicia: Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release.The reason is that we can't access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We're sorry for that. Priceless.... -- "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 11:06:28 ·
Adalicia PoM Nom Nom 'Mon join:2009-10-13 Columbus, NE kudos:12	I thought that was a nice touch. TPB is nothing if not folks with a generally good sense of humor. -- Lore Nerd. Role Player. Raid Leader. Healing Priest. Slightly Annoying. Also Likes Kittens.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 11:25:54 ·
Savious join:2009-11-20 Belgrade, MT	Two words: Haji Mart. Pirated movies funding terrorism. For real. -- DSLR's #1 Diablo 3 Fan.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 12:16:36 ·
Savious join:2009-11-20 Belgrade, MT	reply to Adalicia Also, The Pirate Bay is not some sort of evil do gooder type cast character, ala Batman or Robin Hood. All the enable is a bunch of dipshits to priate movies and music and software. I stopped doing that when I became an adult and could buy my own products. Really? Does it bother me that I have to pay 16 bucks for my wife and I to go to a 2 hour movie? No. You know why, because I dont work at fucking McDonalds. Im not 19. Yes, these policies are probably too far reaching and could have a dramatic effect, but to call the Pirate Bay a bunch of saints is laughable. -- DSLR's #1 Diablo 3 Fan.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 12:21:41 ·
Savious join:2009-11-20 Belgrade, MT	More crap about the ME generation. Why should I have to pay money to watch a movie, I want to watch it! WAHHH -- DSLR's #1 Diablo 3 Fan.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 12:22:30 ·
Lothario join:2009-09-30 Ottawa, ON	reply to Savious said by Savious: Two words: Haji Mart. Pirated movies funding terrorism. For real. You have more to fear from Wall street than from some camel jockey in the middle east.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 12:52:53 ·
Savious join:2009-11-20 Belgrade, MT	Depends on where I am. 4-12 months ago, I would say I had more to fear from the camel jockeys shooting 120mm rockets at me, but thats just me. The thing is, they pirated the newest movies, things that werent even out in theaters yet, and sell it to us for $5 a pop. I bought Red Faction Armageddon and Duke Nukem Forever for $7, and a Gucci and Rolex knock off for $17. Where do you think this money goes to? It was funny because if we were going to get rocketed during the day, magically all the shop keepers disappeared. Weird right? -- DSLR's #1 Diablo 3 Fan.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 12:56:42 ·
Jobbie Keep It Simple Premium join:2010-08-24 Mexico	The Wall Street people that sent you there in the first place are scary.
	to forum · permalink · 2012-01-19 13:01:24 ·

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