Atomicboy Software’s Brit Clousing takes the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to task in a post on the company’s blog.
Entitled “Why I Don’t Like the EFF,” Clousing’s post centers on The EFF’s support for net neutrality, which he views as that of a “pro-freeloader / anti-creator stance.”
Clousing's take on the topic comes from the view of a content creator and while he indicates that he does support net neutrality, he states that he does not support it when it involves copyright infringement:
To use a page from the EFF’s playbook, perhaps we could say that the EFF is attempting to hijack the Net Neutrality legislation to make the world safer for piracy.
Most of Clousing comments are in direct response to an action letter set up by The EFF for net neutrality backers to send to the Federal Communication Commission.
Clouosing continued:
The net-neutrality bill would allow ISPs to throttle the unlawful distribution of copyrighted works? Gee, it’s a good thing the EFF has stuck out their neck to fight against this. Based on the phrasing, it almost seems as if the EFF thinks that piracy should be permitted as a part of “free speech”. Personally, I actually find it “deeply problematic” that the EFF thinks throttling copyright-infringement is a problem.
The EFF really needs to straighten out their act and stop going out of their way to side with freeloaders.
Comments
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
It's also important to note (if slightly off-topic) that nearly without fail, anyone who uses the radioactivity warning trefoil as a logo is a talentless hack.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
If you own a computer and that computer is hooked up to the Internet somehow and you support ISP throttling for any reason you should just forfeit all of your rights now since you clearly do not understand them.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
What this guy doesn't seem to understand is that the EFF's stance is not pro-piracy, it's anti-throttling, no matter how "good" the reason for throttling might be (not even going to enter that part of the debate).
As an analogy, it would be like if someone was trying to make a law that would allow the government to round up books that contained hate speech, and burn them. I would certainly oppose this idea, as would many others. It's not that we want to have books full of hate speech, but that we absolutely do not support book burning for any reason, or at least do not trust the government's judgement on what is hate speech.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
There's also the fact that people would begin to look for hatespeech where there is none. If a book is perfectly safe, someone may just find some hatespeech in it and burn it.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Im more than just a bit disturbed at the term "freeloaders". Just who does this guy think he is acting like the rest of us are commoners who only deserve scraps from the table. Most of us who pay for high speed internet pay a nice little sum for it on a monthly basis so I dont appriciate his attitude toward a system that the online gaming industry depends on. I sure do not like the view that bandwidth should be restricted.
Its bad enough that Comcast has been jumping though hoops the last 5 years trying to hand out less bandwidth for more money, making deals to insure monopolies and now implimenting a manditory bandwidth meter for users.
As for the copywrite thing, it went way over board some time ago and is way out of hand in some cases. I would have to suspect that our boy here has friends with an agenda.
Thanks for the link to the letter. Signed it.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Blaming piracy for your own obscrutiy, nice.
Bet his tune would change the second he started being forced to shell out big bucks for ANYONE to access his media, hell, if the Net Neutrality were done away with, EA could easily pay money to IPs to keep smalelr indie develoeprs like his from being noticed at all.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
"Personally, I actually find it “deeply problematic” that the EFF thinks throttling copyright-infringement is a problem."
Personally, I actually find it "deeply problematic" that Brit Clousing thinks the Net Neutrality issue is all about software piracy.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
You'd think he'd have figured out that Comcast's ham-handed attempts to block copyright infringement also block legitimate Bittorrent traffic.
Oh wait, that was on purpose and they did it because they decided Bittorrent eats up too much of their bandwidth.
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I'm not under the affluence of incohol as some thinkle peep I am. I'm not half as thunk as you might drink. I fool so feelish I don't know who is me, and the drunker I stand here, the longer I get.
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I'm not under the affluence of incohol as some thinkle peep I am. I'm not half as thunk as you might drink. I fool so feelish I don't know who is me, and the drunker I stand here, the longer I get.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
The problem with the tiered net is internet providers will force CP owners and distributors more to send their content out or be throttled back. The consumer will be forced to pay 5 tiems as much for the speeds they are getting now and worse yet the stuff you buy/subcribe to will cost more....
A tiered net only supports the internet providers and their partners and owners and no one else.
Until lobbying is a hanging offense I choose anarchy! CP/IP laws should not effect the daily life of common people! http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/
Copyright infringement is nothing more than civil disobedience to a bad set of laws. Let's renegotiate them.
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http://zippydsm.deviantart.com/
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
I personally think people will be willing to spend whatever they have to in order to get CP.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Oh no doubt a tiered net will be huge for the indutry but all the small legal operations and peole who can bearly afford the net now are SOL.
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I made a thread more copy right thoughts wif zippy
http://forums.theeca.com/showthread.php?t=7323
Until lobbying is a hanging offense I choose anarchy! CP/IP laws should not effect the daily life of common people! http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/
Copyright infringement is nothing more than civil disobedience to a bad set of laws. Let's renegotiate them.
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http://zippydsm.deviantart.com/
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Pathetic. The point isn't that they prevent ISPs from throttling piracy, but that they prevent ISPs from being in charge of what people can and can not see. Don't want people to download (legally, by the way) from a competitors site? Throttle them and force them to use our video site.
This isn't hypothetical, by the way. This is EXACTLY what my current ISP, Bell Sympatico does between their Digital Video service and rival Rogers service.
It is pathetic in every regard, and there absolutely should be a first-amendment like law to prevent this. Sickening that this guy would attribute anyone in favor of that to be 'for piracy'.
Edit: I forgot to add, I live in Canada. I'm not certain this stuff happens in the US as well, but I still think it's worth mentioning because our countries are generally very closely tied in this regard. Though, fortunately, we haven't adopted a DMCA type law.. yet. We enjoy being on your 'watchlist', by the way.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
I found this quote rather amusing:
>Besides, if the EFF believes that the goal of Net Neutrality is to let everything flow freely, then they >should take a real stand and tell us that child pornography is part of “free speech” and ISPs should >never be allowed to interfere with its transmission. At least then, they would be consistent.
Since if I recall correctly, the EFF IS against ISPs doing deep content inspection under the 'we are fighting kiddy porn!' banner.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
What an idiot.
If you're concerned about copyright infringement, there's really no need to worry: when someone distributes your works without your permission you can determine the source of the infringement and issue a takedown notice under the DMCA. It's that easy.
It's not an ISPs place to throttle transfers of infringing works, or -- as would actually happen in practice -- works the ISP can somehow assume are infringing (like anything transfered via P2P). ISPs don't want to become copyright arbitrators, but they would love to use copyright as an excuse to throttle P2P networks and such.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
I'm gonna have to chime in with the rest here -- this is an incredibly naive point of view regarding net neutrality. (Question -- if ISPs *can* throttle down 'illegal' downloads, and you then pay them more not to, are those downloads now legal? Wouldn't we be, in effect, giving them the power to decide these things or enact an incredible level of censorship?)
Gah. It's all the same wining from devs that don't get it. Digital Media is, miraculously, NOT LIKE physical media. It works differently, so we need to treat it differently. The fact that people are still trying to sell a non-physical thing as though it were a manufactured object is a continual source of confusion to me.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Part of the problem is that it used to focus on being a physical object, I think, you used to get tapes or discs with the code stored on it, obviously, you still can, but digital distribution means that is decreasing.
Seems to me that the industry wants the best of both worlds, they want protection of the game as though it were a physical object, with the added protection of the 'no refunds once you actually look at the disc' rule, whilst also demanding that their own rights over the customer be based on the digital media, not the physical item. When you harm them, it's a physical object, when they harm you, it's a digital 'license'. This sort of 'Buyer Beware' attitude is, I think, becoming more and more common in the Media industry, much the same mentality is applied to both games software and the Internet.
Fact of the matter is, if I pay for a 2mB connection, I expect a connection at that speed, otherwise I am wasting money, and industry, of all things, should be aware that a money-wasting aspect will be re-evaluated and replaced or closed, they place themselves in the precarious position of simply losing all their customers to any provider brave enough to not enforce the throttling system, and can avoid sub-providers who do. People liken it to a speed-limit, similar to roads, but the difference here is that, on a road, people are limited in speed by the density of traffic, and their own feelings as to what is 'safe', it is not people standing by the edge of the road, examining what is in the boot and altering your speed according to the contents.
It's seems like harming the many to punish the few is coming back into fashion.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
You're very right; though digital distribution isn't taking off as fast as many had predicted. Even then, we still face the idea of piracy (which is what this lame duck is trying to rally against, despite his foolish point of view) since data is easily copied and DRM is always circumventable (making it difficult to justify since it harms the consumer more than the thief).
As software becomes a bigger giant and problems are unveiled in the disparity between the phyiscal model of old and the digital model it's become, Software as an Industry is (unsurprisingly) protecting their own interests at the expense of the consumer. It's only with a clear reexamination of the nature of our media without the dogma of what it used to be can we possibly hope to clear up these legal messes.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
GoodRobotUs
Agreed I pay 60$ a month for a 1.5 dsl its the only option out here and I will use it as much as I can,since I hate TV and don't have alacart they promised 10 years ago all I have is what I can find online, I also pay for cable TV here because other people watch it thats 50$ a month I am putting into "the industry".
Ack rant mode, anyway....
The problem with the tiered net as I see it internet providers will force CP owners more to send their content or be throttled back this will trickle down twice as hard to the consumer because not only will the end product cost more but to get a good connection you'll have to pay 3 or 5 times more for.
A tiered net only supports the internet providers and their partners and owners and no one else.
Until lobbying is a hanging offense I choose anarchy! CP/IP laws should not effect the daily life of common people! http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/
Copyright infringement is nothing more than civil disobedience to a bad set of laws. Let's renegotiate them.
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http://zippydsm.deviantart.com/
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
The first step in treating it differently is changing copy right, if they would only focus more on sites that draw money via donations and direct sell doing that would marginalize sharing to a more proper number but they want to toss the baby out with the bath water......
Until lobbying is a hanging offense I choose anarchy! CP/IP laws should not effect the daily life of common people! http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/
Copyright infringement is nothing more than civil disobedience to a bad set of laws. Let's renegotiate them.
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http://zippydsm.deviantart.com/
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
What ever happened to GusTavToo? The comments fields on these pages stopped being populated by stakeholders a long time ago, more's the pity.
The new editor rocks, though.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Yes, I'm sure Comcast won't brand me a pirate for using BitTorrent to download the latest World of Warcraft patch. Because Comcast cares.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Ah shortsighted stupidity..... hey stupid...you do realize if you don't pay more to get your game/data on a higher tier it will be throttled with the "unlawful distribution".
Until lobbying is a hanging offense I choose anarchy! CP/IP laws should not effect the daily life of common people! http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/
Copyright infringement is nothing more than civil disobedience to a bad set of laws. Let's renegotiate them.
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http://zippydsm.deviantart.com/
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Atomicwho?
Because cutting the customer entirely out of the loop is so good for industry... It's not as if they'd even consider abusing the powers they recieve.
Like the Finance industry when left to regulate itself, I'm sure they'll be a model of good, open practice with sensible, non-biased policies...
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Customer? Forget the customer.. they get to cut the competition out of the loop.
It should be no surprise that Comcast started putting in caps right when Netflix was ramping up its streaming service (which competed with thier own).
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
LOL same nieve pro-corporate bullshit the republicunts buy into. Yes, let's give private companies control over every aspect of our day to day lives I'm certain that will turn out AWESOME.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
A) Who is this nobody? He's made one pretty shitty looking hex-based civ rip-off and has a blog.
B) He must be very very naive if he genuinely believes ISPs wouldn't abuse the power to throttle the unlawful distribution of copyrighted works to throttle as many people as possible in the interests of profit.
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I LIKE the fence. I get 2 groups to laugh at then.
Re: Game Developer Not Impressed with The EFF
Yeah sounds like he's just pissed that nobody has bought his game which is a shitty ripoff of every turn based strategy game I've played in the 90s.