Microsoft Says It's Cool With California's New Privacy Law

from the competing-on-privacy dept

We've made it abundantly clear that California's new privacy law is aggressively undercooked, and will require some very serious fine tuning if it's going to be workable for many California companies. At the same time, giant companies like Google, Comcast, and AT&T have spent a lot of time aggressively misrepresenting what the law actually does, running ads outright lying about the bill's impact, and downplaying the fact that states wouldn't be wading into the privacy waters if these companies hadn't lobbied to kill modest federal privacy requirements in the first place.

Whereas companies like Facebook have repeatedly and routinely tripped over themselves in almost dystiopian fashion to make their existing regulatory headaches worse, it has been interesting to watch Microsoft, steeled from its experiences in the late 90s, navigate the current minefield more deftly. That was on display again this week when Microsoft came out in seemingly total support of California's new privacy law, with a blog post by Chief Privacy Officer Julie Brill stating the company intends to apply its adherence to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) law nationwide:

"CCPA marks an important step toward providing people with more robust control over their data in the United States. It also shows that we can make progress to strengthen privacy protections in this country at the state level even when Congress can’t or won’t act.

We are strong supporters of California’s new law and the expansion of privacy protections in the United States that it represents. Our approach to privacy starts with the belief that privacy is a fundamental human right and includes our commitment to provide robust protection for every individual."

It may just be that I've covered telecom companies like AT&T for too long, but it's interesting to note that nowhere in the blog post does Microsoft even fling so much as an underhanded, veiled criticism of California's efforts. It's a notable contrast to other Internet Association members, many of which have been running advertisements falsely claiming the bill will result in people having to pay per click just to access websites that used to be free:

While Microsoft is still a member of the group running these ads, the blog post seems to indicate at least a few people at Microsoft understand that this is a battle you're not going to win by swimming upstream or doubling down on idiotic behavior (oh hey Facebook, didn't see you standing there).

Outside of the problematic COPPA, there's no meaningful US privacy laws for the internet era, and the endless series of hacks, breaches, incompetence (like leaving private data in openly exposed Amazon cloud buckets) make it clear modern US industry is too incompetent to self regulate and we need at least some basic rules of the road on privacy. Yes, government dysfunction and corruption means it's going to be ugly as hell as we figure out what that looks like, but that doesn't somehow magically eliminate the necessity for some meaningful penalties for incompetent privacy-violating corporate giants.

Microsoft's clear support for existing efforts is a far cry from the response by companies like Facebook and AT&T. Both companies claim they want a federal privacy law, but what they really want is their lawyers to write a loophole-filled federal law with only one real purpose: to pre-empt any tougher state or federal measures. They're well aware that any good bill will result in informed, empowered consumers who'll opt out of snoopvertising, costing them billions, and their response is to try and undermine those efforts at every opportunity.

And while it's certainly possible Microsoft feels the same way and is just engaged in a convincing head fake here, it's also possible Microsoft seriously intends to actually compete on privacy, realizes the die is already cast thanks to an incredibly pissed off public, and knows that swimming against the tide is going to prove counterproductive and harmful to their brand--and their customers--over the longer haul.

Filed Under: california, ccpa, privacy
Companies: microsoft

Retrospective: As Sony Clearly Wins This Generation's Console Wars, Let's Recall How It All Began

from the x-boned dept

In these modern times, it seems almost silly to say just how long ago 2013 feels. Six years is nearly an eternity in most respects these days, but when it comes to the video game industry, even an eternity feels like it falls short. I bring this up because 2013 is the year that both the Playstation 4 and Xbox One were released, kicking off the latest battle in a thirty year console war between Microsoft and Sony. Sony released a couple pieces of information over the past few weeks, both of which will be of interest to gamers. First, the Playstation 5 is on the way. Second, Sony released new lifetime shipping figures for the Playstation 4, noting that total shipments of the console are now over 102 million in total.

The PlayStation 5 might be on the horizon, but the PS4 continues its impressive run. As of September 30, Sony has shipped 102.8 million PlayStation 4 consoles, surpassing even the Nintendo Wii.

Sony announced the news in its most recent financial statements, revealing that 2.8 PlayStation 4s were moved in the last quarter. Twitter user ZhugeEX has been tracking the data, so you can see how the global console shipments stack up.

Well, it stacks up as the second best selling console of all time, actually. With what appears to be the crossing of the finish line in this generation's console wars, with the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch well behind Sony's numbers, it's a decent time to look at what happened. Interestingly, a peek down memory land here at Techdirt provides some of the context in these numbers.

We'll start with Nintendo. Many will point to the fact that Nintendo didn't release a console at the same time as Microsoft and Sony. The Wii came out in 2006 and shipped 101 million units, while the Switch came out in 2017 and has shipped 36 million units. The Wii was an obvious success, but its numbers are spread across 5-7 additional years compared with the PS4. The Switch, meanwhile, has been successful as well, but nothing at the level of Sony's current console. Much of this is explained by Nintendo's consoles being slightly more in a niche market compared with Sony's and Microsoft's. But part of the reason for that is the decidedly closed off, walled garden, anti-consumer approach Nintendo has taken with its consoles and intellectual property.

The Xbox One comparison is more meaningful, however. Here we have a competing console released at roughly the same time, while sharing a similar catalog of games (save exclusives), and sporting similar console capabilities. What explains Sony shipping roughly 60 million more PS4s than Microsoft shipped Xbox Ones?

The rollout of Microsoft's console, for starters. We did an entire series of posts on the Xbox rollout, even pre-release, and Microsoft's proposals and subsequent walk-backs for online requirements to play purchased games, plans to limit the ability to play used games on the console at all, and the strange requirement that the Kinect be bought with it, despite the paltry sum of games that bothered to use the Kinect at all. This paragraph sums up the chaos, all of which occurred in the course of less than a year:

It's been a relatively tough road for Microsoft's Xbox One, even as it's early in the console's life. You should recall that the console was initially designed to require some degree of online connectivity to work; a plan that was subsequently walked back after consumers revolted. It was the same for proposed limitations on used games, which caused similar outrage. The console was also supposed to not be fully operational without the bundled Kinect engaged, but that plan was also scrapped because customers hated the idea. Left in place were consumers questioning why they had to pay for the Kinect device at all, given the paltry sum of games that actually utilized it. Well, the trend continues, now that Microsoft has announced in an absolutely tone-deaf blog post that there will now be an Xbox One offering that comes sans Kinect. The post, laughably, is entitled "Delivering More Choices for Fans."

In the moment when a company was looking to hype its forthcoming console, this combination of "features" customers didn't want and the chaos that ensued with all the walk-backs had many, many customers that might have been interested in the Xbox instead shrugging and buying a Sony PS4 instead. It was the combination of tone-deaf plans and anti-consumer features that gave the public a sour taste even before the console release. And, with such a significant percentage of console sales occurring in the initial release window, that's a recipe for losing a console war.

It wasn't the only reason of course. Competitor that Microsoft might be, it's no secret that Sony is the dominant player. After all, 4 of the top 5 best selling consoles of all time are Sony products.

But there can be no doubt that Microsoft would have sold more units if not for its ill-fated, anti-consumer features, shoddy communication, and the fact that its chief competitor offered alternatives to both. With the PS5 on the way, you would assume Microsoft's next console will be announced shortly as well. Hopefully the company has learned its lesson.

Filed Under: console wars, consoles, playstation 4, video games, xbox
Companies: microsoft, nintendo, sony

Company Threatens To Sue NBC For Reporting On Its Facial Recognition Tech Being Used Against Palestinians

from the how-not-to-handle-journalists dept

Earlier this week, NBC News had quite a story about a facial recognition tech company in Israel, named AnyVision, that is being used by the Israeli military to conduct surveillance on Palestinians in the West Bank. Much of the article focuses on the fact that Microsoft invested in AnyVision, at a time when Microsoft claims it's been taking the moral high ground and unwilling to work on more nefarious uses of things like facial recognition technology. The story hits on a bunch of different points that we regularly cover at Techdirt, from misuses of facial recognition to large company hypocrisy. But we're writing about it for a different reason: the way that AnyVision's CEO reacted upon being contacted by NBC reporters:

When NBC News first approached AnyVision for an interview, CEO Eylon Etshtein denied any knowledge of "Google Ayosh," threatened to sue NBC News and said that AnyVision was the “most ethical company known to man.” He disputed that the West Bank was “occupied” and questioned the motivation of the NBC News inquiry, suggesting the reporter must have been funded by a Palestinian activist group.

As a general rule, when reporters come calling, asking for comment on a questionable thing your company may be engaged in, don't threaten to sue. Also, generally speaking, calling yourself the "most ethical company known to man" probably throws up some red flags too (as does the denial of a program that NBC had documentation about...). All that really does is tell a reporter that they're on to something.

The story itself, of course, raises all sorts of questions about how governments, law enforcement, and the military might use facial recognition -- a technology that still hasn't been proven to be particularly accurate. There's a reason why many places are banning the use of the technology by law enforcement. At the very least, any such use deserves public discussion and scrutiny -- not bogus threats of lawsuits.

Filed Under: eylon etshtein, facial recognition, israel, journalism, palestinians, surveillance, threats
Companies: anyvision, microsoft, nbc

Microsoft Asks For Actual Spying Evidence To Justify Blackballing Of Huawei

from the protectionism-is-the-new-black dept

We've repeatedly noted that while Huawei certainly engages in some clearly sketchy shit (like any good telecom company), the evidence supporting the global blacklist of the company has been lacking. The Trump administration still hasn't provided any evidence supporting the central justification for the global blackballing effort (that Huawei works for China to spy wholesale on Americans), and at least some of the effort is little more than protectionism driven by companies like Cisco, which don't want to compete with cheaper Chinese gear.

Again while Huawei does pose some legitimate security concerns, there's also little doubt that at a sizable chunk of this effort is just good old protectionism. Despite this, plenty of companies (like Google) have been happy to jump on the Huawei blackballing bandwagon. That hasn't been the case with Microsoft, which this week broke ranks and went so far as to call the Trump administration's attempt to blackball the company "un-American."

While clearly holding selfish motivations (Microsoft wants to be able to sell Huawei product), company President Brad Smith was quick (and correct) to point out that the Trump administration is incapable of providing actual evidence of Huawei's spying in the US:

"When Microsoft asked US lawmakers to explain the threat, they've been too vague for Smith's liking. Huawei is a major customer of his company: Its laptops come with Microsoft's Windows operating system. "Oftentimes, what we get in response is, 'Well, if you knew what we knew, you would agree with us'," Smith told Bloomberg. "And our answer is, 'Great, show us what you know so we can decide for ourselves. That's the way this country works.'"

The thing is, that's the response everybody gets when they pressure the Trump for actual evidence that Huawei spies on Americans. That includes the UK, which has also lamented a lack of solid spying evidence, while noting that most of Huawei's security issues (frequently the result of sloppy craftsmanship, not malice) can be addressed using common sense instead of harmful trade wars and blackballing.

The last time we went through this was in 2011, where similar protectionist sable rattling (again, well hyped by US networking gear competitors) led to an 18 month investigation into Huawei by the White House that discovered... nothing at all. And while it's certainly possible that Huawei has helped the Chinese government spy on Americans, actual public evidence is kind of important if you're going to engage in sweeping global blackballing policies impacting a massive chain of companies and ecosystems. If the shoe were on the other foot, there'd be no limit of US indiignation at the lack of supporting evidence.

The other problem of course is that the US isn't really in much of a position to lecture anybody on spying. Snowden docs revealed that the NSA (aka the United States) had broken into Huawei as early as 2007 in a bid to steal source code and covertly implant backdoors into Huawei products. Similarly you'll recall how the NSA was also busted intercepting Cisco hardware in transit, taking that gear to a special facility, then outfitting it with backdoors. That's before you even get to AT&T's role in international and domestic US surveillance, something routinely applauded as patriotic.

Pursuing the blackballing of Huawei without showing any evidence of actual spying sends two messages. One, that unethical behavior is only okay when the United States does it. And two, giant countries don't need to provide evidence when flinging accusations about if they just bury the data under ambiguous accusations of national security violations. Neither China nor Huawei are saints, but there are far better ways to go about shoring up US telecom security (like spending some of these calories on fixing the internet of broken things), assuming fixing telecom security is even the actual goal.

Filed Under: blackballing, china, evidence, trade wars
Companies: huawei, microsoft

That Time Taylor Swift Threatened To Sue Microsoft Over Its Racist Chatbot

from the tay-tay dept

I don't know much about Taylor Swift, but I do know two things. First, she apparently has built a career out of making music about men with whom she's had breakups, real or fictitious. Second, it sure seems like she spends nearly as much time gobbling up every type of intellectual property right she can and then using those rights to threaten everyone else. She trademarks all the things. She tosses defamation and copyright claims around to silence critics. She sues her own fans just for making Etsy fan products. Some of these attacks are on more solid legal ground than others, but there appears to be a shotgun approach to it all.

Which is why perhaps it only comes as a mild surprise that Swift once threatened to sue Microsoft. Over what, you ask? Why, over Microsoft's racist chatbot, of course!

In the spring of 2016, Microsoft announced plans to bring a chatbot it had developed for the Chinese market to the US. The chatbot, XiaoIce, was designed to have conversations on social media with teenagers and young adults. Users developed a genuine affinity for it, and would spend a quarter of an hour a day unloading their hopes and fears to a friendly, yet non-judgmental ear.

The US version of the chatbot was to be called Tay. And that, according to Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, is where Swift’s legal representatives got involved. “I was on vacation when I made the mistake of looking at my phone during dinner,” Smith writes in his forthcoming book, Tools and Weapons. “An email had just arrived from a Beverly Hills lawyer who introduced himself by telling me: ‘We represent Taylor Swift, on whose behalf this is directed to you.’

“He went on to state that ‘the name Tay, as I’m sure you must know, is closely associated with our client.’ No, I actually didn’t know, but the email nonetheless grabbed my attention. The lawyer went on to argue that the use of the name Tay created a false and misleading association between the popular singer and our chatbot, and that it violated federal and state laws,” Smith adds.

Note here that Swift sic'd her lawyers on Microsoft before Tay evolved into its most infamous form. See, Tay was designed to learn from its interactions with humanity to make it appear and react more human-like. This went exactly as should have been predicted, with Tay morphing into a solidly racist hate-machine that spat vitriol at nearly all who interacted with it.

But before that occurred, Swift had trademarked her nickname, "Tay." And then sent Microsoft a cease and desist notice claiming that the public would confuse its chatbot AI as having some association with Taylor Swift. That's not how any of this works. Taylor Swift, to my knowledge, is not herself an AI chatbot nor has she created one herself. Nothing in trademark law allows a pop singer to control language for a technology company.

It's only by virtue of Microsoft's good sense that we didn't get to see an epic legal battle between the two.

Tay had been built to learn from the conversations it had, improving its speech by listening to what people said to it. Unfortunately, that meant that when what Smith describes as “a small group of American pranksters” began bombarding it with racist statements, Tay soon began repeating the exact same ideas at other interlocutors. “Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now,” it tweeted. “WE’RE GOING TO BUILD A WALL, AND MEXICO IS GOING TO PAY FOR IT,” it added.

Within 18 hours, Microsoft disconnected the bot from the Tay Twitter account and withdrew it from the market. The event, Smith writes, provided a lesson “not just about cross-cultural norms but about the need for stronger AI safeguards”.

Any chance we could make some room for safeguards against this insane ownership culture we have?

Filed Under: ai, brad smith, chatbot, publicity rights, tay, taylor switf
Companies: microsoft

Microsoft Nabs Russian Hackers Exploiting Flimsy IOT Security

from the the-check-will-someday-come-due dept

Week after week we've documented how internet of things devices are being built with both privacy and security as a distant afterthought, resulting in everything from your television to your refrigerator creating both new attack vectors and wonderful new surveillance opportunities for hackers and state actors. And CIA leaks have indeed confirmed that "smart" TVs and other devices with embedded microphones make for wonderful surveillance tools.

So it's not too surprising to see Microsoft's Security Response Center proclaim this week that it has caught Russian hacking group “Strontium" (aka Fancy Bear and APT28) using poorly secured printers, VoIP phones, and video decoders to gain access to sensitive networks. As is usually the case, Microsoft found that once these devices' security was bypassed (often an easy feat given there's sometimes little to no security measures in place), they were able to use them as a beach head to gain broader access to the networks they were connected to:

"After gaining access to each of the IoT devices, the actor ran tcpdump to sniff network traffic on local subnets. They were also seen enumerating administrative groups to attempt further exploitation. As the actor moved from one device to another, they would drop a simple shell script to establish persistence on the network which allowed extended access to continue hunting. Analysis of network traffic showed the devices were also communicating with an external command and control (C2) server."

In at least two instances, the hacks were only made possible thanks to hardware shipping with default username and password logins, something that has frequently plagued residential routers as well. Just as unsurprising as the hack was Microsoft's warning that this is a problem that's only going to get worse, regardless of the government or organization pulling the strings:

"While much of the industry focuses on the threats of hardware implants, we can see in this example that adversaries are happy to exploit simpler configuration and security issues to achieve their objectives,” the report noted. “These simple attacks taking advantage of weak device management are likely to expand as more IoT devices are deployed in corporate environments."

As security researchers like Bruce Schneier have long noted, there's some severe market failure driving this dysfunction. Companies don't want to spend money on security and privacy standards as they connect everything under the sun to the internet, and by the time vulnerabilities are discovered, they're off to selling the next big thing. Because the devices often don't provide insight into what they're doing, consumers routinely have no idea what the device is even doing on the network. And by the time vulnerabilities are addressed, consumers are off to buy the next big thing (with equally terrible security holes).

Year after year after year, we're connecting millions upon millions of devices to home and business networks with paper-mache grade security. And while there's some fleeting efforts to address the problem (like incorporating flaws into product reviews), it's still not something folks are taking seriously enough. And while such proclamations are often dismissed as hyperbole, it's something folks like Schneier predict isn't likely to change until these vulnerabilities result in some notable human casualties.

Filed Under: hacking, iot, russia, security
Companies: microsoft

Don't Let This Get Lost In The Shuffle: The Data Transfer Project Is Expanding, And Could Help Create Real Competition Online

from the this-is-important dept

While lots of people are angling to break up the big internet companies in the belief that will lead to more competition, we've long argued that such a plan is unlikely to work. Instead, if you truly want more competition you need to end the ability of these companies to lock up your data. Instead, we need to allow third parties access so that the data is not stuck in silos, but where users themselves both have control and alternative options that they can easily move to.

That's why we were quite interested a year ago when Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter officially announced the Data Transfer Project (which initially began as a Google project, but expanded to those other providers a year ago). The idea was that the companies would make it ridiculously easy to let users automatically transfer their own data (via their own control) to a different platform. While some of the platforms had previously allowed users to "download" all their data, this project was designed to be much more: to make switching from one platform to another much, much easier -- effectively ending the siloing of data and (worse) the lock-in effects that help create barriers to competition. As we noted last year:

But the really important thing that this may lead to is not so much about transferring your data between one of the giant platforms, but hopefully in opening up new businesses which would allow you to retain much greater control over your data, while limiting how much the platforms themselves keep. This is something we've talked about in the past concerning the true power of data portability. Rather than having it tied up in silos connected to the services you use, wouldn't it be much better if I could keep a "data bank" of my data in a place that is secure -- and where if and when I want to I can allow various services to access that data in order to provide the services I want?

In other words, for many years I've complained about how we've lost the promise of cloud computing in just building up giant silos of data connected to the various online services. If we can separate out the data layer from the service layer, then we can get tremendous benefits, including (1) more end-user control over their own data (2) more competitive services and (3) less power to dominate everything by the biggest platforms. Indeed, we could even start to move towards a world of protocols instead of platforms.

So it's good news to see the latest announcement about the project is that it's expanding once again. While the headlines are that Apple has joined the program (to round out the biggest internet companies) it's also notable that two other very interesting, but much smaller, players are joining as well: the federated Mastodon project and Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, which is an attempt to build the kind of "protocols, not platforms" approach that we keep advocating for.

There are still many open questions about how well all of this will work -- but if you believe in true competition among internet services this is the project to pay attention to it, as it has the highest likelihood of actually creating such competition. Plans to "break up" big tech just creates a few more data silos and effectively locks in some pre-selected (slightly smaller) giants, thanks to network effects. What the Data Transfer Project does is flip the equation. It makes it so that more competition can thrive without taking away the network effects that make the internet so powerful. It's the most interesting, and most compelling approach to generating actual competition among internet services.

I still hope that the project goes even further in knocking down silos and opening up for competition, but it's already quite encouraging. Of course, it got almost no attention at all because anti-trust is sexy, whereas companies opening themselves up to competition through technological means is apparently boring.

Filed Under: competition, data portability, data transfer project, lock-in, mastodon, solid
Companies: apple, facebook, google, microsoft, solid

What Happens When The US Government Tries To Take On The Open Source Community?

from the maybe-we-are-about-to-find-out dept

Last year, Microsoft bought the popular code repository GitHub. As Techdirt wrote at the time, many people were concerned by this takeover of a key open source resource by a corporate giant that has frequently proved unfriendly to free software. In the event, nothing worrying has happened -- until this:

GitHub this week told Anatoliy Kashkin, a 21-year-old Russian citizen who lives in Crimea, that it had "restricted" his GitHub account "due to US trade controls".

As the ZDNet article explains, a user in Iran encountered the same problems. Naturally, many people saw this as precisely the kind of danger they were worried about when Microsoft bought GitHub. The division's CEO, Nat Friedman, used Twitter to explain what exactly was happening, and why:

To comply with US sanctions, we unfortunately had to implement new restrictions on private repos and paid accounts in Iran, Syria, and Crimea.

Public repos remain available to developers everywhere -- open source repos are NOT affected.

He went on to note:

The restrictions are based on place of residence and location, not on nationality or heritage. If someone was flagged in error, they can fill out a form to get the restrictions lifted on their account within hours.

Users with restricted private repos can also choose to make them public. Our understanding of the law does not give us the option to give anyone advance notice of restrictions.

We're not doing this because we want to; we're doing it because we have to. GitHub will continue to advocate vigorously with governments around the world for policies that protect software developers and the global open source community.

The most important aspect of this latest move by GitHub is that open source projects are unaffected, and that even those who are hit by the bans can get around them by moving from private to public repositories. Friedman rightly points out that as a company based in the US, GitHub doesn't have much scope for ignoring US laws.

However, this incident does raise some important questions. For example, what happens if the US government decides that it wants to prevent programmers in certain countries from accessing open source repositories on GitHub as well? That would go against a fundamental aspect of free software, which is that it can be used by anyone, for anything -- including for bad stuff.

This question has already come up before, when President Trump issued the executive order "Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain", a thinly-disguised attack on the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei. As a result of the order, Google blocked Huawei's access to updates of Android. Some Chinese users were worried they were about to lose access to GitHub, which is just as crucial for software development in China as elsewhere. GitHub said that wasn't the case, but it's not hard to imagine the Trump administration putting pressure on GitHub's owner, Microsoft, to toe the line at some point in the future.

More generally, the worry has to be that the US government will attempt to dictate to all global free software projects who may and may not use their code. That's something that the well-known open source and open hardware hacker Bunnie Huang has written about at length, in a blog post entitled "Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War". It's well-worth reading and pondering, because the relatively minor recent problems with GitHub could turn out to be a prelude to a far more serious clash of cultures.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: crimea, doj, open source software, sanctions, trade wars, us sanctions
Companies: github, microsoft

You Don't Own What You've Bought: Microsoft's Books 'Will Stop Working'

from the the-end-of-ownership dept

The latest in our forever ongoing series, recognizing in the digital age how you often no longer own what you've bought, thanks to DRM and copyright: this week, people with Microsoft ebooks will discover they're dead.

Microsoft made the announcement in April that it would shutter the Microsoft Store’s books section for good. The company had made its foray into ebooks in 2017, as part of a Windows 10 Creators Update that sought to round out the software available to its Surface line. Relegated to Microsoft’s Edge browser, the digital bookstore never took off. As of April 2, it halted all ebook sales. And starting as soon as this week, it’s going to remove all purchased books from the libraries of those who bought them.

Other companies have pulled a similar trick in smaller doses. Amazon, overcome by a fit of irony in 2009, memorably vanished copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from Kindles. The year before that, Walmart shut down its own ill-fated MP3 store, at first suggesting customers burn their purchases onto CDs to salvage them before offering a download solution. But this is not a tactical strike. There is no backup plan. This is The Langoliers. And because of digital rights management—the mechanism by which platforms retain control over the digital goods they sell—you have no recourse. Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or markups. But that provides only the coldest comfort.

This tweet kind of sums up the insanity here:

As Cory Doctorow points out in discussing all of this, he has been predicting this kind of nonsense for years now -- including in a 2004 speech delivered at Microsoft.

This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books.

When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn't get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid.

People sometimes treat me like my decision not to sell my books through Amazon's Audible is irrational (Audible will not let writers or publisher opt to sell their books without DRM), but if you think Amazon is immune to this kind of shenanigans, you are sadly mistaken. My books matter a lot to me. I just paid $8,000 to have a container full of books shipped from a storage locker in the UK to our home in LA so I can be closer to them. The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine: if the publishing industry deliberately set out to destroy any sense of intrinsic, civilization-supporting value in literary works, they could not have done a better job.

For everyone who likes to (laughably) claim that supporting copyright is about supporting property rights, this (and all those other) stories show the exact opposite is often true. Copyright is often used to destroy property rights and to destroy ownership.

Filed Under: copyright, drm, ebooks, ownership, property rights, you don't own what you bought
Companies: microsoft

Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo Say Trump Tariffs Will Make Game Consoles Hugely More Expensive

from the Big-Old-Derp dept

If you hadn't noticed by now, Trump's efforts to use tariffs to somehow magically improve the country's standing in the world aren't based on much in the way of sound logic or economic theory. And companies who've been forced to reconfigure and relocate their entire supply chains (to countries like Taiwan) to avoid massive penalties are likely to just pass those costs on to American consumers, something said consumers haven't really fully grokked yet. Countless CEOs think the entire gambit is immeasurably stupid, but have been hesitant to be too pointed in their criticism for fear of upsetting administration regulators.

As the actual bill comes due however, consumers are likely to wake up from their slumber. Maybe.

Case in point: Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo this week fired off a letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, warning the Trump administration's plan to bump Chinese tariffs from 10 to 25 percent will have a profoundly-negative impact on the game industry. With 96 percent of game consoles made in China last year, the act of reconfiguring their entire supply chains will have a massive impact on the sector's bottom line and the numerous connecting companies that tendril out from the big three gaming giants.

The letter itself is abundantly clear that it's not these companies that are going to eat these costs, but the American consumer. In fact, the full letter (pdf) leans heavily on data suggesting that the 25 percent hike on game consoles will result in US consumers paying $840 million more on the game hardware than they might have anyway:

"A price increase of 25% will likely put a new video game console out of reach for many American families who we expect to be in the market for a console this holiday season. For those purchases that do go forward despite tariffs, consumers would pay $840 million more than they otherwise would have, according to a recent study prepared for the Consumer Technology Association by the independent economic group, Trade Partnership. That study also noted that “[e]ven after accounting for new tariff revenue, the result is a net $350 million loss for the U.S. economy for each year the tariffs remain in effect, with the burden carried by U.S. consumers."

Hey, neat.

Presumably, Trump believes that these threats will ingeniously force China's hands in trade negotiations, though it's not really clear that's actually happening. What's happening instead is a slow accumulation of collateral damage, as countless US companies (like Apple) face new penalties that will slowly chip away at the US economy before it forces China's hand. It will be curious to see what happens when American consumers realize they're the ones footing the bill as we wait for the final outcome of a unilateral US trade gambit that was never likely to actually work.

Filed Under: china, donald trump, gaming consoles, playstation, tariffs, trade war, us, ustr, xbox
Companies: microsoft, nintendo, sony