According to this report, Microsoft has banned close to or right at one million people from using its online service because the subscribers modified their Xbox 360 to be able to play pirated games. For a monthly fee, people who own an Xbox 360 can play online with other Xbox 360 owners on Xbox Live. Warez groups release pirated versions of videos games and make them available for normal people download. Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo lock their respective consoles down in hardware and software to try to prevent people from playing pirated versions. However, people have found ways around the protective measures by modifying the physical game consoles. It isn’t apparent whether the banned users will be able to return sometime or if they are banned forever.

I have no sympathy for the people who modified their hardware and who Microsoft have banned. As much as I dislike digital rights management, I can see that it is completely necessary for companies to try to protect their products because many people apparently don’t know the difference between right and wrong. I don’t see why people who won’t pay for a game like any decent law abiding person should be able to play online; at least the legitimate people have some value to their game that the pirates can’t enjoy.

The defendants argued that they had produced original sounds which were “entirely different” from the copyrighted songs because they were not the actual sounds contained in the copyrighted recordings and because the defendants added visual images to the recordings. The judge shot down their argument, stating that they produced no evidence to support their claims, contrary to the plaintiffs who were able to provide proof that the defendants were using the plaintiffs’ copyrighted material illegally.

The web site in question offered Beatles songs that had not been available for digital download or streaming before and undercut the typical dollar price by 75 cents. The judge noted that the plaintiffs had the exclusive right to do what they wanted with the songs, even if it were not good business. The argument of unavailability to justify downloading copyrighted songs is one that I read often in articles about music copyrights.

One of the most fascinating aspects about music piracy is that, at least on many of the sites I read, people complain about the quality of music that the major record companies produce and release each year, yet people in significant numbers download all that music in large numbers, which leads me to conclude that arguments about quality are disingenuous attempts to justify ripping off content owners.  Personally, if I don’t like a type of music or a band, I choose not to listen to it at all, not download it illegally; it’s not rocket science.

When I was growing up, I played several sports as many children do, and the game I loved more than any other was baseball. When I say that, I mean it; I lived baseball from about age 6 to age 14. I watched the Reds on television, went to games at Riverfront Stadium, collected baseball cards, and the whole shebang. Even now, my baseball cards are in albums in my closet. If I close my eyes, I can see myself diving in the outfield to make a catch, exchanging a smirk with my friend while he walked to the batter’s box to face my pitching, or sliding into home plate safely for the only home run I ever hit. The scent of the summer air, the nervous excitement before a game, and the satisfying jolt that ran up through my arms when I hit the ball on the sweet spot of the bat are all fond memories of my youth, inexplicably delightful to those who never played the game.

My enchantment with baseball ended with two particular events, but only one of them is relevant here: the 1994 player’s strike which caused the World Series to be canceled. Among other things, baseball owners wanted a salary cap to try to even the disparity among the teams, and the players’ union refused to accept any sort of salary cap. You can read more about the affair here and here. After the ’94 strike, I awoke to the reality that professional baseball, in many ways, was simply not the same baseball I had played. Professional baseball was a business.

Major League Baseball has grown in popularity and revenue. For example, an article in Forbes noted that 2007 marked the fourth consecutive season that Major League Baseball broke its yearly attendance record. In 2007, team revenues grossed $5.5 billion. Players are making more and more money as well. According to an article on MLB.com, the average salary for a professional baseball player is now over $3 million, which is up from $512,804, the salary that CBS Sports reports that players made in 1989. Baseball stars make outrageous sums of money. Alex Rodriguez, an admitted steroid user, made $33 million in 2009, for example.

The unbelievable salaries, the steroids scandals, and the constant changing of uniforms and hats (merchandising) are all facets of professional baseball that stain an otherwise enjoyable experience. Yet, somewhere behind the marketing stunts, the monstrous egos, and the juiced megastars lies the game I used to play. Numerous films and books have tried to capture the spirit of baseball and the fondness it leaves in its fans. Sometimes, when I watch a game, the excitement of the moment captures even a jaded fan like me, and I forget what I dislike about the business of professional baseball; namely, that it is a business.

The Internet provides an immense resource for businesses, entrepreneurs, and customers alike, and it does not discriminate. The Web does not favor the honest businessperson more than the dishonest one, or vice versa. Businesses can engage in all sorts of legitimate or shady practices, and unless people take the effort to inform themselves about technology and the way “businesses” try to victimize them, they may fall for a scam.

Recently, someone (or possibly a script) left a comment on one of my posts, leading me to conclude that it was a spam comment which was posted solely to hawk the company’s products. The comment itself was two sentences long and included a link to another site. That this blog received a spam comment is somewhat surprising, given that it only has a few posts and so forth, but I’d like to take the opportunity to remind everyone to keep up their guard when dealing with other people on the Internet.

When I first saw the comment, I figured it was probably a spam comment, but I decided to check it out, just to make sure. Their web site contained no address, phone number, e-mail address, or any other kind of contact information for the company or any agent of the company, so I checked the e-mail address that the woman entered in order to post the comment to see if a student had left the message. Since it was not a student, I checked out the profile that the person had on Yahoo. The profile listed a different name, a male’s name even, allegedly someone from New York.

Since the person claimed to be from New York in the profile, I searched the New York Secretary of State’s “Business Entities Database”, and it did not find any records of the company whose name was on the spam link that they posted in the comment. Needless to say, I was not surprised when the search on the secretary of state’s web site returned no results.

I put in the I.P. address of the person into this site’s query box to find out from where the comment originated, and, lo and behold, the e-mail did not originate from the United States at all. No, the I.P. address is assigned to an internet service provider who is apparently on the third floor of the the Ebene Cyber Tower in Ebene, Mauritius. In case anyone doesn’t know what or where Mauritius is (Don’t feel bad; I didn’t either), it is an island located off the southeastern border of the African continent. Many of us may know that Africa is the home of the “419” scams.  Incidentally, the Wikipedia page for the Ebene Cyber Tower links to scams that come from the building, but I cannot link to some of them because of the nature of the scam.

In summation, using a normally female name , a person, whose Yahoo profile lists “her” as being a male from New York and whose I.P. address clearly originates from Mauritius, posted a comment, advertising a product for some company, whose web site listed no contact information. A Google search of the name of the product revealed similar or exact duplicated comments on other blogs.

The whole point here it to draw attention to the fact that unethical people roam the Internet, looking for victims, because the Internet provides almost complete anonymity.  I would not buy a product or even use a free product from any untrusted source, such as an amateur-looking web site that did not have a legitimate, verifiable address. It is easy to create a web site today and claim to be a business.  Businesses need to earn trust by establishing their legitimacy and reliability, and I don’t trust random, anonymous people and businesses on the ‘net. Unfortunately, many people do trust complete strangers and buy from spammers, which is the real reason that spam is such a problem. It is profitable.

I have to admit that I don’t particularly see the attraction of e-books overall.  Portability is not particularly a factor with regard to paper books, except for multi-volume sets or extremely thick books like medical reference books.  Also, looking at the screens of computers, cell phones, or other similar electronic devices is simply inferior for reading for long periods of time when compared to reading a physical book.  Advances in e-reader technologies will narrow the gap, but I can’t see myself reading primarily digital books any time soon in the future.

The other obvious problem is that digital books will come with all kinds of digital “rights management, which I have discussed in other posts.  Activation, one-time only downloads of purchased books, and other annoyances will be part of the experience, no doubt.

Years ago, I bought sheet music online, and somehow or another, I lost the songs.  When I went back to the web site and signed in to re-download the songs, the web site informed me that I had already downloaded them (or accessed them, I don’t remember the exact wording) and thus could not download the content for which I had paid.  That’s one big reason why I hate DRM so much; it punishes honest people.  I was lucky that it was only sheet music and not some actual important item.

Businesses exist for one reason primarily: to make a profit.  Keep that in mind.  Artificial limitations on digital products, such as limits on how many times you can “activate” a product, download an item, access a product or service, or any other restrictive measure are all ways that businesses will try to make you pay for the same things over and over again.  No thanks, not for me.

The only thing more depressing than the content and obnoxiousness of most advertising today is having the knowledge that somewhere, probably in a big city, people are actually responsible for creating that particular piece of propaganda, probably while congratulating each other on how clever they all are. Instead of providing useful information about a given product, modern advertisements are, in large part, lies that seek to coerce, through psychologically manipulative means, people to buy low-quality products (with planned obsolescence, of course) that they don’t need. Perhaps the worst part is that it is pretty much unavoidable.

It didn’t take too long before advertisers realized they could spread their poisonous messages all over the Internet, just like they had earlier corrupted radio, public television, cable television, satellite radio, newspapers, video games, movies, sports telecasts, sporting events, and magazines, to name a few. Web advertising has morphed from blinking text to banners to pop-ups to Flash movies. For obvious reasons, I will not link to any examples of the abominations of which I have just written.

Much to the dismay of scheming advertisers, people can filter out internet advertising if they find the right tools and read instructions on how to use them. Firefox is a browser that allows for people to write “extensions” that provide extra functionality not available in Firefox. Some of these extensions even block advertisements, and people have written filter lists that contain rules for certain ad-blocking extensions to use in order to block as many ads as possible in a way that is transparent to the user. Another approach to ad-blocking works by mapping certain web addresses to a person’s local computer in a particular file so that when a web site requests a connection to that web site, the computer will try to connect to that site on the person’s computer rather than the actual web site, thus preventing the advertisement from even being downloaded.

Although I could write a really long rant on advertising and may do so at some point, I don’t object to the idea of advertising but only if advertising means simply to provide information about a product to potential customers. Without advertising at all, I’d imagine it would be difficult for many businesses to succeed at all because no one would ever hear about the products, and this means that people would not be able to find products that they really do need. I cannot stand the in-your-face, constant barrage of transparently condescending advertising that feeds on the emotions rather than that gives useful information about a product or service, and thankfully I can avoid most of it while I’m browsing the Internet.

The technological advances achieved in the past fifty years have led us from the numerous limitations of the typewriter to the seemingly boundless capabilities of the modern computer. Along the way, the computer has shrunk from warehouse-size to notebook-size. Computer software has evolved quickly as well, expanding in the types of programs as well as in the number of options available in each respective program. The average person can perform a wide range of tasks, such as writing papers in a word processing program and touching up family pictures in a graphics editing program. In short, computers have revolutionized the way people work and play.

Home users are not the only beneficiaries though; businesses have had an intricate part in perpetuating the breakthroughs in the hardware and software areas. Microsoft and Google, for example, are household names, having become dominant in their particular market. Different companies now offer niche software for particular industries. Businesses have innovated in creating new software, but they have also enjoyed the benefits as well. Imagine how much fun working on and passing around documents in an office was for workers thirty years ago, and that is just one example.

That being said, the digital age has its own issues. The ease with which people can share digital information in addition to a carefree disregard of copyright law has led to a booming software piracy subculture. Groups of people spread out all over the world publicize working serial numbers for software, create programs that circumvent protective measures intended to thwart piracy of a program, and offer full version downloads of whatever products they can obtain. It is remarkably easy to illegally download virtually any program. Some studies put the losses due to piracy at $53 billion.

The problems that piracy causes affect businesses and individual users. Obviously, if people do not pay for software that they use, businesses do not make money, which can lead to layoffs or other problems. As a result, businesses pass on the cost of piracy to customers in the prices and look for ways to make their program as difficult as possible to illegally use.

Commercial software typically must be “activated” online in order for the purchaser to use the program. The most (in)famous is probably Windows Product Activation, which is Microsoft’s activation scheme for all of its Windows operating systems starting with Windows XP. The user must input a 25-character serial number during the installation and then “activate” their copy of Windows, most easily by connecting to a Microsoft server which receives information about the installation. Companies implement these schemes in order to try to prevent people from violating the software’s license.

I think activation schemes are rather lame because, instead of preventing or significantly hindering piracy, they merely inconvenience and irritate paying customers. The same study that I linked to earlier lists the United States in the group of countries as having the lowest rate of software piracy. All the people pirating software in central and eastern Europe don’t have to activate the same programs because “warez” groups disable activation entirely or provide a work-around for it. Why should a paying customer be treated as if he or she were a criminal? Activation and other anti-piracy schemes essentially ask the honest consumer to provide validation that he or she is not a criminal.

In my view, the reality of software piracy means that businesses need to adapt to changing times and provide a better experience for the customer. Although I am skeptical of the claim by some people that most people will pay for software given a reasonable price, I do think that the high costs and the pointless, confusing attempt to split the market with multiple editions of the same program, such as the various flavors of Microsoft Office or Windows, tempts normally honest people to pirate software. The restrictive end user license agreements are probably a factor as well, but that’s a whole other topic.

I fully respect the right of companies to protect their hard work and products. People ought to respect copyright law and pay for proprietary software or go without it if don’t want to pay the retail price. However, I object to intrusive schemes that unreasonably seek to limit or control how I use software.

The music industry has taken a number of approaches to try to stop music piracy, which it claims has had substantial impact on the profits of the music companies and indirectly on the artists themselves.  First, trade groups, namely the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have filed numerous lawsuits against file sharers, some of which have resulted in unbelievable damages.  Second, the music companies themselves have done just about everything to hang on to their twentieth century business model of exercising almost complete control over the distribution and price of music, and it is this stubbornness that I would like to examine.

Let me first preface the discussion with this:  I do not condone downloading copyrighted material illegally.  However, the music industry, until recently, has pretty much been completely clueless about how the digital age works and how it changes their business abilities.  Any person with a CD, computer, appropriate software, and an Internet connection can rip the CD into unprotected mp3s and upload it to anywhere in the world.  This means that someone else can not only get the music for free but also be able to listen to the songs at any time on any device compatible with the mp3 standard.  How did the media conglomerates respond?

The music companies decided that they would put one toe into the pool, so to speak, by offering music online, but the stores have had numerous problems.  First, in order to try to prevent people from distributing the songs to others, the companies introduced digital rights management (DRM) into all the songs.  Perhaps the best example of DRM can be seen with the music subscription services, such as the ones the new Napster and Rhapsody offers.  Basically, a consumer pays a flat fee each month to have access to a large library of songs, featuring popular artists from major record labels.  Typically, consumers can also download these songs to their computers or portable music players, but they can only listen to them for as long as their subscription lasts because the files are protected by a license and will expire if the subscription lapses, though the customer can renew the license and listen to the files once he or she extends the subscription to the music store.  Also, the customer cannot cannot convert the file to another file format.

From the perspective of a music executive, the subscription model laden with DRM is great because it provides a constant revenue stream and limits the choice and abilities of people to do anything with the music, but it is, at best, a wash for the consumer.  I don’t see anything particularly attractive about paying for music that a company can take away from me at a point down the road.  In reality, music subscriptions services merely give a consumer a license to listen to it for a predetermined amount of time; the person does not own the music.

Because of the proliferation of music sharing online, music companies are slowly coming to understand that people resent their greed.  DRM-free stores are becoming more commonplace, such as Amazon’s mp3 store.  iTunes went DRM-free earlier this year, though I feel sorry for anyone who purchased a lot of music from iTunes, considering that, if you want the non-restricted songs, you have to re-buy them for thirty cents per song or thirty percent per album.

The music industry is slowly adapting and offering choices that are more palatable to consumers, and it will be interesting to see if these offerings have any demonstrable effects on music piracy and profits.  The pro-piracy apologizers that seem to inject their rationalizations at every tech site and the industry itself will be watching to see what happens.

If you are interested in free and legal music, check out sites like Jamendo, which has a range of different styles of music.  You can listen to the albums streaming and download them if you like them.  All the music is published under Creative Commons licenses.  I have no affiliation with the site, other than I have enjoyed the music and downloaded albums from the site.

I believe in the right to free speech contained in the First Amendment, but I also believe that the First Amendment right to free speech does not include the right to be heard.  Accordingly, the comments section of my blog will not be a free-for-all for all the angry people on the Internet, looking to simply cause problems.  I will try to be fair in my moderation, meaning that I will not delete comments just because I disagree with a person’s view.  That being said, I will not tolerate comments that in any way promote or sympathize with racism, sexism, threatening language toward anyone, sexual innuendo, homophobia, or any other such behavior.  Basically, treat others with respect and disagree with others with grace.