Sega Gets It Right About SOPA: It's Time For A Hard Reset On Copyright Law & Congress

from the metaphorically-speaking dept

Fri, Jan 13th 2012 8:02am — Zachary Knight

With the news that the ESA supports SOPA, thus representing all its member companies on the matter, many gamers have taken to writing to ESA member companies asking for their input on the matter and especially asking them to oppose the legislation. As Kotaku reports, one such gamer has received word back from Sega after writing a very nicely worded letter outlining his concerns over SOPA.

Generally these issues are caused by bad installs or junk data that's stuck in the system memory. The first suggestion would be to perform a hard reset on the device. It's best to attempt this any time you experience performance problems with your device or have an app crash. If it doesn't work, its suggested that you uninstall the app, perform a hard reset, reinstall and then perform one more hard reset before launching the game.

If you're problems continue, please let us know.

While Sega does not come right out in opposition to SOPA, it does give some great advice for dealing with the problem. As we all know, there have certainly been some bad Congressmen and Senators installed into Congress. This has led to a lot of junk data build up in Washington. The best solution, according to Sega is to uninstall those Congressmen and Senators and start fresh. While a hard reset might not be the easiest way to deal with the problem, the threat of such a reset would certainly get the attention of those in Washington. We have already seen some of the fruits of Reddit's attempts at just such an uninstall and hard reset. So let's all follow Sega's advice and work on clearing out the bad installs and hard reset Congress.

In a follow up to this advice, Sega also put together a video:

Now, let's see if Sega comes out with an actual position on SOPA.

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Filed Under: hard reset, pipa, protect ip, sopa
Companies: sega

31 Comments

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Mesonoxian Eve (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 7:17am

Electrical Engineering 101: Start half way. If it's discovered the output is bad, the source is the issue. If it's discovered the output is good, the components beyond are the issue.

*puts multimeter between Article 1, Section 8 of US Constitution and SOPA/PIPA/DMCA

The output is bad.
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el_segfaulto (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 8:19am

Re:
Gotta love a nerdy, non-car metaphor. I will be pirating that from you for future arguments.
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Robert (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 8:36am

Re:
A fellow Sparky.

Let's not also forget the most important troubleshooting question "Are you sure it is plugged in?"

In this case, I don't believe our politicians (US Congress or my own Members of Parliament) are plugged in to reality.

It's like they think they are BJT's, responding to base current (ie: the word of the people) but in reality they are MOSFET's, negligible current enters the gate. Like a MOSFET, they respond to voltage, the potential difference between the gate and source (ie: monetary provided difference - salary Vs 'donations'). Well... we people are the VG (gate voltage), but naturally their source is tied to VDD, so of course you never get a breakover of VGSThreshhold (point where the MOSFET operates in accordance to VGS - the people's will). Which means our own voltage (money from taxes and voice from voting/letters/phone calls) is ignored in favour of VDD (typically much larger than VGS) which is money from corporations.

Hell, we even have industry behind us, like adding a battery in series trying to boost our VGS to exceed VGSThreshold, but to no avail.

Truly a sad time!

Hmm... in hindsight, this might have been funnier if I chose a TCP/IP packet routing table algorithm analogy instead. Sorry.
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:Lobo Santo (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 8:39am

Re: Re: VSS
Don't sweat the TCP/IP possibility, I enjoyed the uC analogy.
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Loki, 13 Jan 2012 @ 8:50am

Re: Re:
Don't be sorry. You're analogy was good, and all the funnier because it took me back 20some years and remember a few funny moments from when I was still in tech school.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:01am

Are you sure their satirical answer really means what you think it means? Maybe they meant the internet needs a hard reset. "Uninstall" all the methods of piracy through filters, spyware, delisting domains, and rootkit packages that prevent copying or even listing content from sources other than the official source. You know, reboot the internet back to the last IP-friendly restore point, 1994.
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TechnoMage (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:03am

You're thinking too much
This was probably nothing more than a customer support rep sending the wrong canned support reply to a message.

Though... They took the initiative and decided to roll with it, since the "perform a hard reset" was so obviously out of place they made the video to play off of it, and to make it funny.

The company that owns Sega is very rich(From pachinko machines in japan) so if any major game company would come out for a "hard reset" of copyright, they would be on the short list of candidates.

I hope Sega comes out officially against SOPA.
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crade (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:04am

Re:
You missed the reinstall part?
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jupiterkansas (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:05am

System restore my ass!
If we do that we'll lose all our settings and unsaved work. And it still won't fix those corrupt documents and that evil font that always causes a crash.

Plus we have to sit there forever waiting for it to start back up - that's the only reason I never shut the thing down in the first place.

No, I don't want to download all of iTunes every time they release a new product. And no, I don't want Safari with that. Get outta my face.

Oh man, automatic updates again! It's like every week!
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:06am

Non news much? It was a wrong response,mistake of some poor soul at support.
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crade (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:06am

Re:
Awesome, I still have my old dial-up modem
and I really miss that old text based MUD game I used to play! I won't be able to do work or be productive anymore, but work is lame anyway.. bring on 1994 internet!
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JT, 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:09am

Tsk Tsk Sega
*your
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:20am

Re:
But this bill isn't about the internet, Melvin Watt says so, it's about counterfeit drugs being sold to the military in fake Gucci purses!

Read the bill!
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crade (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:45am

Re: Re:
I dunno, I think he's onto something with this 1994 internet thing.. I think you would get more techies on your side with that plan than with this stupid plan of just adding more problems to our current internet and making it crappier. It would have to be exactly the same though as it was then though.. man those were the days. Things were progressing at a lightening pace at that time, that was the time that inspired dreams of becoming a programmer one day! The possibilities seemed endless. It didn't feel like we were being boxed and prevented from making cool stuff by idiotic laws at all back then.
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Chosen Reject (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 9:54am

Re: Re:
This is why I agree with Ron Paul about bringing our military home. It's no wonder other countries hate us when our soldiers are walking around with fake Gucci purses. Now, if they had authentic Gucci purses then we'd command some respect, but until then, the world simply mocks us. I say bring the soldiers home until we can get the real deal, or even, heaven help us, authentic Prada purses. Nothing says "respect my authoritay" like camouflage and an authentic Louis Vuitton purse.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jan 2012 @ 10:05am

Re: Re:
I still play MUDs. How are they old?
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DannyB (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 10:10am

I read that The Pirate Bay is going to remove ALL torrent files
That should satisfy the **AA holes of America.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jan 2012 @ 10:20am

Re: I read that The Pirate Bay is going to remove ALL torrent files
They will not be satisfied until all file sharing and user-made media sites are DNS blocked, web filtered, and deleted.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jan 2012 @ 10:27am

Our entire government needs a hard reset.
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StopSOPA (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 10:40am

Announcing Operation Blue
We just launched operation blue (OpBlue) to force SEGA to make a public statement on SOPA.
After our success yesterday with NVidia, we hope we can get some results. Any help you could give in spreading the word would be much appreciated.

http://operationsopa.blogspot.com/2012/01/announcing-operation-blue-opblue.html
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TtfnJohn (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 10:42am

Re:
Switch multimeter over to the ohms. Expected resistance between Article 1, Section 8 of the US Consitution expected to be as close to 0 as possible, say something like 0.00000000000001 ohms. Preferably less.

The resistance reading between Article 1. Section 8 of the US Constitution and SOPA/PIPA/DCMA deflects on the needle to infinity.

Output is bad because output never connects due to high resistance/impedance between source and target. The design of SOPA/PIPA/DCMA introduces far too much resistance fort the signal to get from them to the US Constitution. Output 0. Expcected output 1. Fail.
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Mike Masnick (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 10:49am

Re: You're thinking too much
Re: You're thinking too much

I think actually it may be you who's thinking too much. :)

This was probably nothing more than a customer support rep sending the wrong canned support reply to a message.

That's exactly what it was. And we turned it into what we thought was an obvious joke.

Perhaps not so obvious.
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Mike, 13 Jan 2012 @ 11:12am

Common Sense not found. Reboot, Retry, Fail?
Congress is a malicious rootkit. Their legislation is almost strictly viruses and malware.
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crade (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 11:13am

Re: Re: I read that The Pirate Bay is going to remove ALL torrent files
They won't be satisfied until they have control and people have no choice but to use them for publishing all content. DNS blocking, filtering and deleting won't cut it. Nothing will, they will never have total control and will always want more.
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crade (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 11:13am

Re: Re: Re:
The one I played is old and not around anymore.
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Violated (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 11:20am

AI
Sega Robot in action.

Sorry for insulting any Robots more intelligent than a dish cloth.
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AzureSky (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 2:10pm

Re: AI
SEGA!!!! :P
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Jeffrey Nonken (profile), 13 Jan 2012 @ 2:16pm

BWAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH!
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Travis, 13 Jan 2012 @ 2:50pm

Ugh
You KNOW someone's gonna go to extremes and equate "hard reset" to a Mad Max or Borderlands style world.
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Ninja (profile), 16 Jan 2012 @ 5:58am

Funny button?
Darn, I can't hit funny for that reply from Sega.. If it was really o purpose it just so funny and brilliant that they managed to make me take my hat off. And I don't even wear one!

Mike, I demand you put the Insightful and Funny button on your articles!
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