Sony Demands IP Addresses of YouTube PS3 Hack Viewers [ZeroPaid]

[Krisan Thyme]

On that note, Imagine if the console was your product. You'd be PISSED and there ain't no denying that.

They have a right to be upset, yes. They have no right to be invading everyones privacy and handing out frivolous lawsuits left and right, however. Sony has gone completely off the deep end on this, and it's made them come out looking like lunatics, and nothing short of that. They're trying to sue homebrew developers here, most of which didn't even have anything to do with the console being compromised.. these are just innocent coders\hobbyists that are being targeted just because they decided to write their code for the PS3, which itself is already compromised and there's not a damn thing at this point that can close it again.

None of this is about damage control, none of this is even an effort to combat piracy either.. Those are both impossible battles, and in all honesty they've already lost both of those as it is. What this is about, is them destroying the lives of anyone and everyone on the homebrew scene they think they can get their hands on by drowning them in legal fees however they possibly can.. This is plain and simply, them trying to send a clear and concise message: "Don't fuck with our console."

Quite frankly, they're acting like complete assholes about all of this. They're alienating a lot of people in the homebrew scene and throwing a lawyer at everything they can find. They've been sending out DCMA notices for gods sake to git repositories, none of which had any copyrighted material or code within them.. They're simply using scare tactics to major coding hubs to get them to pulldown projects without any actual authority or legal right to do so.


On a side note.. It seems Hon. Susan Illston has denied Sony's request for expedited discovery. As a result, this means Sony's little subpoena frenzy is null and void (for now), and that if they want the information they asked for they have to go to a hearing first to prove their case for warranting such information - the hearing of which is scheduled for March 11th.

[garrendesares]

i find it funny, you buy something from a company, its yours. and you do have to take it appart to clean the dust out of it because they do get dusty and those fans dont help! cant tell you how many times we had to take appart our ps1 and ps2. and if i am caught with a pandora battery in a psp with games i will just say "i legaly bought it so i can do what i want, its not like i am selllng or making profit off of it". besides, some of us download games off sites like this but at least most of us have a decentcy to at least delete everything before we sell it.

[Mistral]

I only emulate what I have owned. Sega genesis games, Super Nintendo, NES, Nintendo 64, PSX, Dreamcast. I don't need 7 consoles hooked up to my one TV. That's just stupid. The fact of the matter is if people respected what they had more we wouldn't have to put up with crap like this. Its not some kind of mystical secret.

On that note, Imagine if the console was your product. You'd be PISSED and there ain't no denying that.

You do seem to generalize a lot. I'd love to see some evidence for your claim that "all" modders eventually pirate games. You know, the topic of piracy goes to more than just consoles. For instance, Janis Ian had a lot to say about the theft of her music...

The premise of all this ballyhoo is that the industry (and its artists) are being harmed by free downloading.

Nonsense. Let's take it from my personal experience. My site gets an average of 75,000 hits a year. Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975. When the original Napster was running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people who'd downloaded "Society's Child" or "At Seventeen" for free, then decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they'd found the site), 15 bought CDs. Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year. But... that translates into $2,700, which is a lot of money in my book. And that doesn't include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows.[1]

Or perhaps books? Books are pretty expensive. Eric Flint had plenty of words on the topic of thieves stealing his books...

Sure, sure — if presented with a real "Devil's bargain," most people will at least be tempted. Eternal life. . . a million dollars found lying in the woods. . .

Heh. Many fine stories have been written on the subject!But how many people, in the real world, are going to be tempted to steal a few bucks?

Some, yes — precious few of whom, I suspect, read much of anything. But the truth is that most people are no more tempted to steal a few dollars than they are to spend their lunch hour panhandling for money on the streets. Partly because they don't need to, but mostly because it's beneath their dignity and self-respect.

The only time that mass scale petty thievery becomes a problem is when the perception spreads, among broad layers of the population, that a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices. But so long as the "gap" between the price of a legal product and a stolen one remains both small and, in the eyes of most people, a legitimate cost rather than gouging, 99% of them will prefer the legal product.[2]

Let's now look in closer detail at the progress of another title in the Library, a novel I co-authored with David Drake: An Oblique Approach, the first volume in the Belisarius series. I think these figures demonstrate the impact of the Library more clearly than any other.

An Oblique Approach went into the Library a few days after Mother of Demons-i.e., it's been available for free for a year and a half now. That novel first came out in paperback in March of 1998. (There was no hardcover edition.) Here are the royalty figures on that novel, beginning with the first period for which figures are available and ending with the last. The first column gives you the royalty period; the second, net sales of the book as of that period; the third, the current sell-through; the fourth and last column, the new sales which took place during that reporting period:

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Within a year after a novel comes out, the sales usually drop right through the floor. Thereafter, sales steadily dwindle away. And, sure enough: in the third and fourth periods, An Oblique Approach sold considerably less than a thousand copies each period-835 and 795 respectively, showing the expected slow and steady drop.

It's what happens next that is significant. Because, all other things considered, those "sales this period" figures should have kept steadily dropping. Slowly, perhaps, but what most certainly shouldn't have happened is a sudden rise in sales-and a rise which increases in the next period.[3]

Or textbooks? Those are far expensive than games, and most people don't even buy them for enjoyment. Certainly, if textbooks could be downloaded free, even legally, that would drastically cut the number of people willing to pay hundreds of dollars for tomes they only use a handful of times, right? The National Academy Press certainly thought differently.

Our site is very busy -- from January through mid-August of this year, more than 3.2 million people had viewed more than 28 million Web pages, including 15 million book pages. While those are great numbers in terms of wide dissemination, the more remarkable thing is that, over the same period, we have sold more than 40,000 books through the same site -- something approximating 25 percent of our overall book sales, and already surpassing the number we sold during all of last year. Moreover, our other sales -- via bookstores, an 800 number, fax, and mail -- have apparently not been cannibalized, staying pretty much in line with industry sales.[4]

Hmmm, still, these are all rather static things. Books, you read. Music, you listen to. You don't get the full media experience, not like games...and not like movies. Right? Oh, but how Japan has screamed that fansubbers are ruining anime sales in Japan. After all, these fansubbers are putting up high-quality episodes and raws as they're aired, things that the Japanese market can also access and download at will, to say nothing of what it does to official releases in the same countries these fansubbers are from, in the same langauges these fansubbers speak. Isn't this crippling the anime industry? Hasn't it already killed Geneon USA?

Though much empirical research has been conducted on the music industry, research on the movie industry has been very limited. This paper examines the effects of the movie sharing site Youtube and file sharing program Winny on DVD sales and rentals of Japanese TV animation programs. Estimated equations of 105 anime episodes show that (1) Youtube viewing does not negatively affect DVD rentals, and it appears to help raise DVD sales; and (2) although Winny file sharing negatively affects DVD rentals, it does not affect DVD sales. Youtube’s effect of boosting DVD sales can be seen after the TV’s broadcasting of the series has concluded, which suggests that not just a few people learned about the program via a Youtube viewing. [5]

But...all of these, in the end, are physical media. Things you can hold, things you can carry and listen to, put into a player and watch on the big-screen. Video games are fundamentally data, right? They must be different. You can download a song, show, or movie, but the quality is questionable, perhaps, with fidelity less than the original - we'll leave aside lossless formats like FLAC and TTA, or direct 1:1 DVD rips for this. But a game, oh, no, is already data on the computer or console. It doesn't need to be converted or transferred, just burned to a CD, or not even that if you have an ISO virtual drive or the right mods for your console. This must affect them differently, right? Well...

The results suggest that although six of every seven software users utilized pirated copies, these pirates were responsible for generating more than 80% of new software buyers, thereby significantly influencing the legal distribution of the software.[6]

But, that was in 1995. The Internet itself was in its infancy, the present population base not yet present; the Summer that Never Ended had only just begun. Well, there is the issue that games rarely publicly release such sales data, and that many companies tend to use unusual methods of counting piracy. Just as RIETI notes in their own abstract for their findings, as in the movie industry, there are very few hard, conclusively derived numbers in the gaming industry. A piracy rate of 90% for World of Goo is surprising, but neglects dynamic IPs and tells nothing about actual sales rates among those pirate users. An astonishing £1.45 billion lost in video games sales in Britain, or $450 million from the iTunes Apps store draws the eye, but where does that number come from? Well, the latter is definitely questionable...

The biggest red flag is that 24/7 Wall St. assumes that paid iPhone applications have a piracy rate of 75 percent. How did they come to this conclusion? Using some past piracy usage examples from apps from Fishlabs and other developers, they came to the conclusion that for every app purchased, three more were downloaded from cracked sources.

Now, this might be true for games like iCombat and others from Fishlabs — but this certainly isn’t going to be the case across the board. It might be more fair to say that the piracy rate for games in the App Store is 75 percent, but even then you would need a much larger sample size and various tracking methods if you wanted to be accurate.

Additionally, 24/7 Wall St. is estimating that 17 percent of the 3 billion apps downloaded from the App Store were paid apps — or 510 million. They then multiply that by three (using the previous ratio) and assume that 1.53 billion apps have been pirated. Then, the report multiples that figure by $3 (the average price of a paid app) and gets $4.59 billion. Assuming that 10 percent of app pirates would have actually purchased the app in question, that’s how you get $459 million in lost revenue.[7]

As for the official studies by the BSA, it looks impressive in newsprint, but the actual report itself raises all kinds of questions, not the least of which include how 5000 people in 24 countries were readily extrapolated to 110 countries (check their actual methodology near the back on page 17, not their reports section, and note that they don't actually list which 24 countries they collected data from so we can see if it's really a representative sampling "from all geographies, levels of IT
sophistication, and geographic and cultural influences," or how similar countries were identified for extrapolation, or what proportion of that response rate came from each nation). Obviously, if you normalize with respect to high-piracy nations, you will get high piracy numbers. This kind of extended extrapolation for statistical "analysis" tends to negatively impair our ability to accurately determine the effects of piracy on game sales. But, on the flip side, when a date for piracy rates taking off can be conclusively determined and is found to occur well after a baseline for non-pirated sales rates can be established...

Amitay looked at two 17-day stretches, December 4 to 20 and December 30 to January 15, putting together a sales and piracy graph plotting the data. Over the first period, sales and piracy run flat, with sales appearing to marginally outpace piracy. But just before Christmas there was a "huge pirating push against Punch 'Em!" reflected in a piracy rate in the second time period almost 39 times higher than the first. But something else happened, too. Amitay's sales during that same stretch of time more than doubled.

He said he's still against piracy for the simple reason that it's stealing but added that at the end of the day, business is business. "Throughout Punch 'Em!'s paid lifetime, I couldn't raise its sales count in the long term," he explained on his blog. "So if thousands of users end up pirating my app, but hundreds buy it as a result of hearing about it from their pirate buddies, why should I cry?"
...
And how does he know the holiday season isn't actually responsible for the bump? Sales tend to jump immediately following Christmas but the effect only lasts for a few days and app rankings don't change because everyone takes advantage of the same push. In his case, however, the situation is different. "My sales increase extended well past Christmas, and is still stable," he said. "My sales increase during Christmas was well beyond the standard 2x [caused by the holidays]. My app increased in rank over the period of time that my app was pirated."[8]

Now, obviously, a single referent point can only be carried so far; perhaps his game was an exception? Perhaps it is because it is only a dollar game. But, for such a wide range of media and formats to show such startling differences from the common perception, and in the absence of hard, qualitatively demonstrative data, it is...suspicious, shall we say. Or perhaps, enlightening.

[Asura]

a given product is priced artificially high due to monopolistic practices and/or draconian legislation designed to protect those practices

Way to describe the situation in my country. A retail PS3 game costs an average of R$150,00 in my country. That's about 70 bleeding dollars...for one game... and I make 3 thousand bucks per month and hell no, I'm not gonna pay 150 in a game. Selfish? Perhaps, but I'm not the only one. Brazil is becoming the paradise for piracy, and not just games. There are people who make a living out of selling pirate movies, music cds etc. So long as the taxes are so high in such products, few will even be able to afford retail games. It's not something I'm proud of, but it's what I have.

On geohot, tough, seems he's not in such a deep...yet?

A San Francisco federal judge declined to order New Jersey-based hacker Geohot to turn over the technology he used to root the PlayStation 3, saying she doubted Geohot was subject to her court's authority.

The move by US District Judge Susan Illston on Friday was a blow to Sony, which argued that the 21-year-old hacker, whose real name is George Hotz, should be forced to surrender his computer gear and the code he used to circumvent digital rights management features in the gaming console. Illston rejected arguments that Hotz's use of Twitter, PayPal, and YouTube, all located in the Northern District of California, were sufficient contacts with the region to establish personal jurisdiction.

“If having a PayPal account were enough, then there would be personal jurisdiction in this court over everybody, and that just can't be right,” Illston told James G. Gilliland Jr., an attorney representing Sony. “That would mean the entire universe is subject to my jurisdiction, and that's a really hard concept for me to accept.”

Source:http://www.geohot.com/