SOPA and independant game projects.

[SpliFF]

Just remember that being unpopular, expensive, impractical, invasive, destructive, short-sighted, ill-advised, unwinnable and unilateral didn't prevent the U.S. from initiating both the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror". I'm sure the "War on Piracy" will be equally successful.

[AF]

The difference if we put as much effort into hurting the pockets of the middle men lobbying washington as we did in fighting DRM and the politicians they bankrolled, we wouldn't have this problem. Sure we'd have a brief few moments were DRM reigned supreme, followed by a big shift to a DRMless industry as the old giants crashed and burned, bringing their fear mongering DRM technologies with them.

[smoth]

Just remember that being unpopular, expensive, impractical, invasive, destructive, short-sighted, ill-advised, unwinnable and unilateral didn't prevent the U.S. from initiating both the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Terror". I'm sure the "War on Piracy" will be equally successful.

This has little to do with spring, where as sopa does. I get it, you seem to see america as the only bad guy. Good, move of and stop being such a twat. You HAD to use something that has to do with developing things as a chance to soapbox about your buttmad over the iraq war..

[smoth]

The difference if we put as much effort into hurting the pockets of the middle men lobbying washington as we did in fighting DRM and the politicians they bankrolled, we wouldn't have this problem. Sure we'd have a brief few moments were DRM reigned supreme, followed by a big shift to a DRMless industry as the old giants crashed and burned, bringing their fear mongering DRM technologies with them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14322957

like the UK is already doing?

just saying, the us and china isn't the only one..

[dizekat]

Hmm doesn't look like it can possibly work, also looks like theres a great deal of BS as well. With atari lodging a complaint - atari most definitely can shut the balanced annihilation according to the copyright law as it is now, and that's how copyright law is intended to work, sorry guys but that's just the way things are, if you use other people's copyrighted stuff w/o formal permission they are free to do with you whatever they want.

In practice what I expect from SOPA is rather small impact mostly having to do with reversal of some hole in DMCA and closing down those megaupload and similar sites whose entire business model is to sell paid high speed access to pirated stuff, pay the pirates for uploading popular files, and pretend that they are a general purpose file service, which they are not at all, and 'complying' with DMCA notices by removing their copies, only to put up other copies right away. Those sites are hosted by semi-illegal ISPs; regular ISP would shut them down on a notice.

If some small idiot lodges a complaint against my site, it won't be shut down (everyone's going to be under this sort of attack); if some big company, say ubisoft, decides that my game is competing with their 'child of eden', and lodges a pointless complaint, they're going to lose a lot more than they gain (plus that would be mostly an attack on Valve). The same as it is now, really - if you use a normal ISP, they WILL close your site on complaint by any big player - you have to use some shady semi illegal one to do above-mentioned 'file hosting', and to share with them the money.

[Forboding Angel]

Dize, you really need to read up on SOPA again.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 — drafted with a fair share of input from content holders — struck a careful division of labor after years of negotiation. SOPA dismantles DMCA overnight, cutting off websites from payment and ad services without even a judge’s review, solely on the basis of a rights holder’s allegations — choking off income until they wither on the vine and die off.

[KaiserJ]

dize even out of jurisdiction, they will shut down your payments... site may still be up for some people, but if paypal and mastercard stop processing your payments, you're pretty much out of luck

[hoijui]

@smoth
spliff said US (gov) does bad stuff.
you, completely out of the blue, act as if he claimed that others do not.
(then you bring up two examples for your point.)
-> you make yourself look quite stupid

[Das Bruce]

dize even out of jurisdiction, they will shut down your payments... site may still be up for some people, but if paypal and mastercard stop processing your payments, you're pretty much out of luck

What if the entire operation is hosted outside the US? (Payment facilities, web host, dns)

[smoth]

@smoth
spliff political soapboxing about the IRAQ WAR.
you, once again pointing out that spliff has an issue primarily with the us government and raise issue with it
I mock you awkwardly

[Forboding Angel]

dize even out of jurisdiction, they will shut down your payments... site may still be up for some people, but if paypal and mastercard stop processing your payments, you're pretty much out of luck

What if the entire operation is hosted outside the US? (Payment facilities, web host, dns)

Paypal, and mastercard would still cut you off, etc etc etc.

[Noruas]

Its only a matter of time until the U.S. internet is completely cut off from the rest of the worlds web, its called the great firewall of the United States. Its the only way to keep people ignorant and controlled. A completely different network!

[dizekat]

Dize, you really need to read up on SOPA again.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 — drafted with a fair share of input from content holders — struck a careful division of labor after years of negotiation. SOPA dismantles DMCA overnight, cutting off websites from payment and ad services without even a judge’s review, solely on the basis of a rights holder’s allegations — choking off income until they wither on the vine and die off.

From what i've read your quote is complete BS and/or misinterpretation.
What the SOPA will do is to allow basically the same process to apply to the ad network operators and payment services, as the one that currently applies to ISPs (of the web host kind not of user kind) in regards to the pirated content.
Regarding "without judge's review", that's some massive twisting of the issue. The ISP or payment processor can shut you down "without a judge's review" any time they want, but they don't, and they won't under SOPA unless you're quite clearly a violator and they're in the risk of getting sued. They receive a complaint, they contact you asking you to explain, you explain (something that passes for explanation at least as much as the copyright holder's message passes for proof) and they are off the hook.
Furthermore, if you suffer any damage due to a false claim of infringement you can sue the person who made the false claim.

The current situation really is ridiculous. Piracy is not about information wanting to be free and people sharing stuff, at all, it's now about 'someone will make a $1 by screwing you out of $100'. Cut off the money flow to the 'file hosting services', and the piracy will not be so disproportionally effective.

[dizekat]

hmm wait some bits seem ridiculous. Foreigners (allegedly) have to litigate everything in US, which is just fucked up if true. However, unless I'm reading the law itself, I am not trusting what is written about it, because most of what is written is obviously bullshit. I remember the similar bullshit that was written for DMCA, which in reality turned out to be very protective of piracy and extremely permissive.

[smoth]

http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/issue ... sites.html

Here you go dize.

[dizekat]

Good. Now you quote the bad bits and why you think they are bad, instead of quoting opinion pieces that never quote the bill itself (a giant red flag). Why you? 'cause you're US citizen with voting rights, and I am not (sorry if i'm mistaken and you're canadian).

edit: So far i dont see outrageous stuff. Claims of violation that are under penalty of perjury, the recovery of all the losses including attorney fees if you are not found to be infringing, the counter-notification that would just stop this whole thing from even getting anywhere most of the time, needing to win in court to actually have anything happen, doesn't sound too bad. At all. I can see why google's up in arms about it, 'cause if you search for my game free download, what's the top link? Some highly SEO'd site that pretends to be a piracy site, and which has in fact been trying to sell demo version of my game in such a way that would mislead customers it is a full version. Second is me. Third is filestube, which is a piracy profiteer. And which, most interestingly, is NOT commonly used for downloading of any genuinely free anything, and has enough notoriety that the Google should of manually removed it, if Google was not so much into helping people find a download.

[Degenerated5]

'cause if you search for my game free download, what's the top link? Some highly SEO'd site that pretends to be a piracy site, and which has in fact been trying to sell demo version of my game in such a way that would mislead customers it is a full version. Second is me. Third is filestube, which is a piracy profiteer. And which, most interestingly, is NOT commonly used for downloading of any genuinely free anything, and has enough notoriety that the Google should of manually removed it, if Google was not so much into helping people find a download.

Just as biased as the comments you dislike.

Bet you're just waiting for the moment it passes so you can send out copyright notices. Your little gem being copied, your precious driving you to act in accordance with the corporate demagogy. Chaining your immaterial bits using words devoid of worth. Illusory sense of entitlement to ownership of your ideas, sense of pride and misplaced importance.

As if thoughts should be limited by such primitive emotions.

[Das Bruce]

Welcome back Yan. Play nice now.

[PicassoCT]

Hell, yeah, its all been there. And there we go again, the coporate chefcocks chopin the piracy heads for law-sui, and suddenly it grows to new one, million of little feet tripple and vote for law-circumvention, and the companys follow, and the bill stands hollow and crippled on the hill of similar bills, because the people vote, and they voted for games and bread beeing free. For those who want to live from them, fuck thee.

[dizekat]

'cause if you search for my game free download, what's the top link? Some highly SEO'd site that pretends to be a piracy site, and which has in fact been trying to sell demo version of my game in such a way that would mislead customers it is a full version. Second is me. Third is filestube, which is a piracy profiteer. And which, most interestingly, is NOT commonly used for downloading of any genuinely free anything, and has enough notoriety that the Google should of manually removed it, if Google was not so much into helping people find a download.

Just as biased as the comments you dislike.

Bet you're just waiting for the moment it passes so you can send out copyright notices. Your little gem being copied, your precious driving you to act in accordance with the corporate demagogy. Chaining your immaterial bits using words devoid of worth. Illusory sense of entitlement to ownership of your ideas, sense of pride and misplaced importance.

As if thoughts should be limited by such primitive emotions.

I've contributed a fair bit of free code to springlobby and spring. I also donated 3000$ (coming from my game's sales) to GLFW, free software I rely on, for buying new computer several times 'cause the maintainer is poor. I also send the patches i make to developers of relevant libraries. Did you ever contribute anything to free software? No? Then shut up.

There's kids starving in Africa. There's also born-rich greedy kids in developed countries who don't want to pay one kind of immaterial bits (money in bank account) for other kind of immaterial bits (software) so that they can get more 'material' toys, made by kids their age in Chinese factories - working 14 hours a day inhaling toxic fumes and whatnot.

Regarding Spring and other free software, if this ever makes any dent in piracy whatsoever (which I kind of doubt), that will be a huge bonus to genuinely free projects.

Das Bruce: I'm the guy who been contributing to SL (mostly) and to Spring (some) and then released some game (spring unrelated) on Steam successfully. Not Yan. Who the hell are you though?