Game Devs Trolling Pirates Goes All The Way Back To At Least The Playstation Days With Spyro 2

from the misplaced-effort dept

When it comes to how game developers react and interact with those that pirate their games, there are obviously plenty of ways to go about it. There's the ineffective legal route, which puts developers in a bad PR light. There's the DRM route, which is a hellish waste of time. And, on the other end of the spectrum, there are devs that choose to embrace the internet and attempt to monetize piracy through human connections and innovative business models.

Somewhere in the middle is the less-traveled path of simply fucking with infringers. Whether its embedding antipiracy messages into the gameplay itself, or simply overlaying the entire game with the drone of a vuvuzela, there are a couple of recent examples where developers figured out how to detect cracked versions of their games and using that to torture pirates. While I would argue there are better ways developers could be spending this time and human capital, such as innovating, it's also true that it's hard not to smile when the pirates get messed with.

But this goes back much further than the last few years. The always excellent Tech Rules YouTube channel put out the following video on how Spyro 2 on the Playstation 1 tortured those using pirated copies of the game.

The slow burn of this prank on pirates is what makes it both so effective and so infuriating if you believe, as I do, that all of this is mostly time wasted. The joke being played here, with the effects of using a pirated version of the game getting incrementally and progressively more profound, is indeed funny. You can just picture the person playing a cracked version of the game very, very slowly realize he or she is being screwed with.

But it also appears to have taken quite an effort to pull off. And for what? We have no idea how many would-be pirates were converted into paying customers of Spyro 2 by any of this, but I cannot imagine anyone thinks that unknown number is significant. The game was reviewed well, and sold well in several regions, but not at numbers that would seem to justify the time commitment spent to convert whatever the fraction of pirates turned into customers was.

So, again, funny? Yes, absolutely. Mean or harmful? Nah. A useful use of the game developers' time? I can't see an argument for that, so why bother with any of this?

Filed Under: piracy, spyro 2, trolling, video games

Tired: Insane Patent Verdicts; Wired: Insane Trade Secret Verdicts

from the stop-expanding-intellectual-property-law dept

There are so many issues related to what's referred to (misleadingly, of course) as "intellectual property" that it's difficult to cover them all. For a while I'd been meaning to write about the attempt to "raise up" trade secret law to the federal level and what kinds of problems that might cause. Professor Eric Goldman, not surprisingly, was covering this all along, noting that the Defend Trade Secrets Act from 2016 was the "biggest IP development in years" (even if Congress, in a little twist, made sure it was not officially an "intellectual property" law -- which means that Section 230 immunity still applies).

Of course, it usually takes a few years for the real effects of new laws to be felt. In a fascinating, if troubling article, economist Ike Brannon, notes that we may be on the verge of a new raft of patent trolling-esque legal fights over loosely defined "trade secrets," that have the potential to be much, much worse than patent trolling. At least with patent trolls, there's an actual patent with actual definitions (even if they're a mess) that can be looked at to see if there's infringement. The world of trade secrets is a lot more murky.

Brannon points to a crazy recent case, involving a title insurance company Title Source (now Amrock) who sued a data analytics firm called HouseCanary over a claim that HouseCanary breached a contract the two companies had to deliver "an advanced, automated home valuation model." HouseCanary countersued, claiming that Title Source used its proprietary trade secrets to develop its own home valuation model. As Brannon points out, most people thought little of these counterclaims... but a funny thing happened when it got to court:

At the time, HouseCanary’s claim appeared to be merely a tactical move with little basis in reality, but to the surprise of many a jury found in its favor in the countersuit and awarded it nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars. A judge recently upheld the jury’s award.

Several people questioned the jury’s rationale, and shortly after the verdict several former HouseCanary employees came forward to attest that what their company delivered to Amrock was of marginal value and contained no proprietary intellectual property or trade secrets that could have been stolen.

For instance, data on home sales and prices are publicly available and software that aggregates and collects it has been widely available for two decades; Redfin and Zillow each employ such software. What’s more, the alleged Amrock product at issue was never commercially sold or marketed.

The case is now being appealed, but as Brannon notes, thanks to the DTSA, suddenly there's a wide open field of questionable trade secret claims that can be brought in federal court:

Unfortunately, it has become clear that the legislation did little to clear up these disputes. The scope of the damage awards in the the last few years and the recent spike in cases involving trade company secrets means that more companies should brace themselves for lawsuits.

It was not the intent of Congress to broaden the scope for such lawsuits when it enacted a more uniform approach to the trade secrets law. However, that does indeed appear to be occurring, and the HouseCanary verdict may very well serve as the (house)canary in the coal mine, serving to inform the market of the peril in the law.

This, of course, should not surprise anyone who's spent literally any amount of time studying how other areas of so-called intellectual property have developed over the years. We've seen copyright trolling, patent trolling, and trademark trolling. There are even some examples that might be considered publicity rights trolling. So, of course, there's going to be an increase in trade secret trolling, especially when you're discussing an area of law that includes much more vague and amorphous "property" (note: not actual property) than copyrights or patents. And, of course, this is exactly what Professor Goldman predicted years ago, and supporters of the law brushed off.

Filed Under: dtsa, patent trolling, trade secret trolling, trade secrets, trolling
Companies: amrock, housecanary, title source

Coordinated Trolling Efforts Are Serving Up Small-Scale Election Interference Across The Country

from the I'm-so-old-I-remember-this-being-nothing-more-than-knocking-down-yard-signs dept

A brave new world of voter suppression is upon us. It isn't shadowy government guys with guns patrolling polling centers in search of "voter fraud" unicorns. It isn't the surrealistic landscapes created by gerrymandering. It isn't even the messages being sent from the top man in the land: that people who aren't Caucasian are probably bussed-in illegals voting straight Democrat.

This new voter suppression flows through the internet, originating in closed chat sessions and manifesting as disinformation campaigns meant to steer certain voters away from the polls.

In a private “strategy chat” with more than 40 far-right trolls, one user who tried to create a new Twitter account to spread disinformation ahead of Tuesday’s midterms elections described how he had hit an immediate roadblock: Twitter banned him for deliberately giving out the wrong election date.

“Were they really banning people for saying [vote on] November 7? Lol, whoops,” the user, whose name was a racist joke about Native Americans, wrote. “Maybe that’s what got me shadowbanned.”

As the report points out, some of Twitter's anti-election interference efforts appear to be working. Tweets containing the wrong voting date were blocked before they were seen by other users. But there's only so much algorithms can catch. Faced with this blocking, the trolls viewed in this chat room adjusted their tactics.

Several were successful in creating unique identities that appeared to be middle-aged women who posted anti-Trump rhetoric as part of a long-term effort to build up followings that could later be used to seed disinformation to hundreds or thousands of followers.

If this seems counterproductive in terms of eliminating votes for non-Republican candidates, it actually isn't. As NBC's Ben Collins notes, this more clever effort has managed to elude moderators. Posting under hashtags like #nomenmidterm and #letwomendecide, these accounts are being used to deter male liberals from casting votes.

The interference is coming from inside the house. Homegrown efforts are joining foreign state-sponsored interference to make every election from 2016's to the rest of forever seem tainted. This is piled on top of ongoing problems with electronic voting devices, which are notoriously insecure and far from user friendly. The democratic process appears to be no more secure than a connected tea kettle.

But this cascade of bad news shouldn't deter anyone from voting. For the most part, the system works! (And by "system," I mean the actual act of voting, not necessarily the system run by those receiving votes…) Even if the individual act of voting can often feel pointless or useless, it's still better than the predetermined "elections" held by despotic governments where the outcome is made-up and the points don't matter.

This also shows efforts to quell online disinformation are working to a limited extent. Combining humans and algorithms makes more sense than relying solely on one method, but both have their limitations. Human biases can strip the neutrality out of moderation efforts and algorithms tend to do one thing pretty well, but suck at anything else that requires comprehension of context, nuance, or sarcasm.

This is the new normal for elections. Get used to it. But don't get discouraged.

Filed Under: content moderation, election, election day, social media, trolling

Valve Clears Up Nothing With Its Latest Explanation Of What Games It Will Ban As 'Troll Games'

from the for-whom-the-bell-trolls dept

You will recall that several months back, Valve released a statement outlining what it considered to be sweeping changes to its game curation duties. While the company made a great deal of forthcoming tools on the Steam store for filtering game searches, pretty much everyone focused on the platform's claim that it would no longer keep any game off its platform unless it was "illegal or a troll game." That, of course, still left all kinds of ambiguity as to what is and is not allowed on the platform and it provided a wide avenue through which Steam could still drive its oversight truck. This led to our having a podcast discussion in which I pointed out repeatedly that this was every bit as opaque a policy as the one that proceeded it, which was followed by the real-world example of developers across the spectrum pointing out that they in fact had no idea what the policy actually meant. In other words, the whole thing has generally been an unproductive mess.

A mess which Valve tried to clean up this past week in an extensive blog post on its site which attempted to define what it meant by "troll games." As the folks at Ars point out, this attempt at clarity is anything but. Much of what Valve lays out as "troll games" makes sense: scam games that work Steam's inventory system, or try to manipulate developer Steam keys, or games that are simply broken due to a lack of seriousness on the part of the developer. But then it also said the definition included what most people thought of in the original announcement: games that "just try to incite and sow discord."

Valve's Doug Lombardi said at the time that Active Shooter was removed from Steam because it was "designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict through its existence." That designation came despite the fact that the developer said the game was "a dynamic SWAT simulator in which dynamic roles are offered to players" and that he would "likely remove the shooter's role in the game by the release" after popular backlash to the idea.

As the developer noted at the time, too, "there are games like Hatred, Postal, Carmageddon and etc., which are even [worse] compared to Active Shooter and literally focuses on mass shootings/killings of people."

It's as good an example as any for pointing out what has always been true about art forms: one person's inflammatory content is another person's artistic genius. More worrisome, Valve's own words on its policy put the company squarely in the business of mind-reading, with its post suggesting that troll developers are those that aren't actually interested in making or selling a game. It relies on Valve's own analysis of a developer's "good faith" in putting forth the game.

While good-faith developer efforts can obviously lead to "crude or lower quality games" on Steam, Valve says that "it really does seem like bad games are made by bad people." And it's those bad games from bad people that Valve doesn't want on Steam.

Absent a mind-reading device, determining a developer's motives isn't an easy task. Defining what separates a good faith effort to sell a game from a "troll" involves a "deep assessment" of the developer, Valve says, including a look at "what they've done in the past, their behavior on Steam as a developer, as a customer, their banking information, developers they associate with, and more."

We could spend a great deal of time discussing how qualified Valve is in making these determinations, or what value such curation provides for a platform like Steam. Or we could talk instead about whether this treatment sets video games back a notch or two as an art form, with corporate oversight playing the role of evaluating each artist's intent.

But the real lesson here is that, whatever you think of Valve's definitions above, it is clear as day that these explanations are not in line with the overall message in Valve's original notice of the change in policy. The company explicitly said at that time that it didn't believe it should be in the business of deciding what types of games with what types of content users should see on the platform. The whole point of this was for wide inclusion, whereas it seems really hard to see any daylight from this updated explanation and Steam's historical curation policy. Valve still gets to decide what goes on the platform.

So many words and so much time for so little effect, in other words.

Filed Under: content moderation, steam, trolling, video games
Companies: valve

Post Valve's 'Hands Off' Games Curation Announcement, Everything Is A Mess

from the shrugging-emoji dept

Back in June we discussed Valve's somewhat odd announcement that it was getting out of the games curation business, and opening its platform to what it said would be far more games. The restrictions on what type of content would now be allowed on the gaming platform was said to mostly be limited only to games that are "trolling" or "illegal." As with all things Valve, this apparent announcement aimed at transparency and making sure developers knew what expectations Valve had for games on Steam mostly achieved the exact opposite, with everyone wondering immediately what qualified as "trolling." Nobody could really agree on where exactly Valve would be drawing the lines on the types of content it would allow. That said, most people, including most of the participants of the podcast we conducted on the topic, essentially agreed that this would chiefly allow more games with sexual content onto the platform.

And, yet, it seems that even that hasn't been true thus far. Kotaku has a post up discussing the many, many sexuality related games that had been disallowed from Steam, but which were gearing up to be included based on the new policy. It seems the policy hasn't opened up the platform to many of them after all.

James Cox was finally feeling optimistic about his game’s chances on Steam. Last year, his horror-inspired exploration of what it’s like to look at porn for the first time, You Must Be 18 or Older to Enter, got booted from Valve’s walled garden, but then, earlier this year, Valve said it was getting rid of all the walls. His game was neither illegal nor a troll job, so it should have fit into Valve’s “allow everything” policy. Months and a rollercoaster of policy changes later, however, and Cox has no idea where his game stands. Its release is on hold indefinitely.

Cox is far from alone in his confusion. In the wake of a fiasco in which Valve apparently erroneously targeted a bunch of previously approved sexy games for removal from Steam, the company said last month that it was holding back games with suggestive content from release while it planned a new suite of filtering tools for the Steam store. These tools, which still are not available, will allow users to decide what kinds of games they see on the store.

In our podcast, I pointed out that this would be a problem. Valve essentially rolled its new policy out before it could be put into place, basically doing things exactly backward. If Valve had developed its filtering tools first and then rolled out the policy, allowing these newly allowed games onto the platform, much of the current confusion wouldn't exist. Instead, it told game makers the good news of the policy prior to them being able to make any use of it. What the hell was the point of that?

And even the policy doesn't seem to be cohesive within Valve itself.

Except that, according to Cox, Valve is still insisting that developers censor games that contain what the company perceives to be objectionable material. He said he spoke with Valve shortly after the company announced its anything-goes policy.

“I asked Valve if I needed to resubmit the game for it to be reinstated or if it would automatically be unbanned once the content control tools were released,” he told Kotaku in an email. “They told me that they still consider the game to be porn and that they can’t sell or distribute porn or content that is illegal.”

Which is leading us right back to a discussion as to what constitutes porn. Which, if you'll recall, is where this all started in the first place, as one person's porn is another's art. Cox's title, for instance, is a horror-type game based on the character's first life experiences with pornography, which is represented in text-based images. Valve told him he had to remove the porn parts of his game, to which he asked if just removing the ASCII art would be enough. It's been over a month and he hasn't had a response.

Meanwhile, other porn-y games are currently on the store. Some visual novel style games, however, are not. In other words, this has become a nightmare for developers, their having no idea what is allowed or not on Steam.

“I as a developer have no idea what the rules even are anymore, how to follow them, and what happens on Steam just seems to change day by day,” said Peter Rasmussen, of visual novel developer Lupiesoft, in an email. “If Valve gave us clear guidelines to follow, then we would, as we much prefer the security to what we have now. My biggest fear is that Valve washes its hands of the entire [visual novel] genre because of a few who are abusing it to pump out cheap achievement games.”

Again, adult-themed visual novels were supposed to be the shoe-in for inclusion after the policy was announced.

Honestly, whatever you think of Steam's new policy, it's clear at this point that it screwed up the rollout. This has become enough of a clusterfuck at this point that I'm not sure how it gets cleaned up, unless Steam decides to impliment the policy now and rollout the filtering features later. And it will be much later, as Valve recently admitted that the filtering tools are still months away.

Filed Under: content moderation, curation, games, porn, steam, trolling, video games, violence
Companies: valve

Microsoft And Nintendo Team Up To Troll Playstation In Ads For Not Giving Gamers What They Want

from the trolling-as-advertising dept

Buckle up, because this seemingly mildly interesting story has a ton of intersections on topics we typically talk about here at Techdirt. As a preface, you should recall that we firmly believe that content is advertising and advertising is content. By this we mean that every bit of content a producer makes serves to advertise that producer's wider content library and that advertisements, in order to be engaging, must be useful and/or entertaining every bit as much as more traditional content typically is. We've also talked a great deal about how content producers in the digital spaces must connect with their fanbases, treat them well, and provide them what they want, or risk backlash. Add to that, finally, that we think restrictive protectionism in the name of wider profits often achieves the opposite of that goal.

Which brings us to Microsoft and Nintendo somewhat suprisingly teaming up to push out a bunch of ads centered on the ability for users of either to crossplay games across both systems.

For those of you who cannot see the video embed, it's an ad put out by both Nintendo and Microsoft pointing out that gamers on both systems can crossplay with one another on some games, including the example shown in Minecraft. Frankly, it's quite jarring to see these combo-ads (there are more) put out by two rivals in the console space. If you weren't well-tuned to the video game industry, you'd probably be left wondering what the hell was going on here.

The answer is that these ads are rather entertaining trolling attacks targeting Sony's Playstation 4, which has been the subject of some recent backlash coming out of E3 over the platform's lockdown on its system's games. While there is pretty much no such thing as a Playstation user that does not want crossplay enabled, and there are many who want it very much, Sony has gone the protectionist route. This is an attempt to convince friends of friends to buy Playstations so that they can play together, I suppose, but it's stupid and awful.

Some of the world's biggest games, from Fortnite to Minecraft to Rocket League, all support some variety of crossplay, allowing people with PCs, Xbox Ones, mobiles and Nintendo consoles to play on the same servers. Yet Sony continues to refuse to allow PlayStation consoles to get in on the fun when it comes to playing with Microsoft or Nintendo consoles.

In the wake of E3 and the disappointment of Fortnite's account locking, then, two of the companies that do allow crossplay have teamed up to take a swing at the PlayStation 4 with this commercial for Minecraft, a game that's also available on PS4.

A couple of reactions. First, Sony made this shit-sandwich for itself by not giving its customers what they want for no other reason than protectionism, so it's not without fun to see them have to eat it up. Second, the combo-ads put out by Microsoft and Nintendo are both useful and, if you enjoy watching huge companies troll one another, fairly entertaining. And the companies have kept this up as a coordinated effort, rather than just limiting it to a one-off video ad.

And the Xbox Twitter account responded, of course, happily saying they're ready to build something together. While this might have flown right past many gamers, enough will realize that both companies are going out of their way to rub Sony's nose in crap to make this all a bit fun. Whether Sony will respond to the ribbing by finally unlocking its garden remains to be seen.

In the meantime, though, this is a great example of advertising as content.

Filed Under: advertising as content, content as advertising, crossplay, games, openness, ps4, sharing, trolling, xbox
Companies: microsofty, nintendo, sony

Court Tosses Out Silly Trollish Publicity Stunt Defamation Lawsuit

from the but-no-anti-slapp-win dept

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a ridiculous defamation lawsuit filed by a plaintiff who has a history of fairly trollish, attention seeking behavior. I chose not to name the person in the post as I argued that the lawsuit itself was something of a publicity stunt, and I'll continue to do that here, even though it will become clear in the quoted parts of the ruling below. I have no interest in participating in the publicity stunt part of the lawsuit -- but do feel compelled to write about it because of the First Amendment issues that are a key component in the case. Amusingly, the plaintiff had a history of loudly proclaiming her support for free speech and the First Amendment, even going so far as to once state: "I care more about free speech... than almost any other issue."

And yet, she sued a reporter over a tweet. Here's the way I described it last year:

The background is pretty straightforward. The person in question, who is known as a strong Trump supporter (though, in the past also got attention as a strong Bernie supporter, and once said this: "I got called a literal Nazi so many times, I eventually went, Fuck it, I’ll just go all in.") was at the White House and had a picture taken of herself and someone else, standing behind a podium, with both doing the "OK" sign with their hands. There was a stupid little thing a few months back where some 4chan trolls tried to pretend that the OK sign was a symbol for "White Power". The idea was to get the press to report on this kind of thing and then laugh at how silly the press could be. Well, mission accomplished. A reporter for Fusion tweeted about the photo of these two people doing the "OK" sign were "White Power" hand signals being done in the White House.

As we noted last year, among the many, many issues that doomed the plaintiff's case was the fact that she admitted in a tweet that the whole thing was an attempt to troll journalists:

For a defamation case against a public figure to have any chance, a plaintiff needs to show first that the statement was a false statement of fact, but also that it was done with "actual malice." Actual malice has a specific legal meaning that is not just "the person wanted to do something mean." It specifically means that the person making the statement did so knowing it was false or, alternatively, with reckless disregard for whether it was false. Having the plaintiff flat out admit that it was all part of an attempt to trick people kind of undermines the entirety of the "actual malice" part of the lawsuit.

And the court noticed. In a ruling yesterday, the DC district court tossed out the case. And the key reason? A failure to show "actual malice." Oh, it also recognizes she's a troll. In the very first sentence of the opinion.

Plaintiff Cassandra Fairbanks trolled the web through Twitter, releasing a photo of herself and a fellow journalist in the White House press room making a gesture widely recognized as the “okay” hand symbol but also speculated at the time to be a “white power” symbol. Defendant Emma Roller, also a journalist, retweeted the photo with the caption, “just two people doing a white power hand gesture in the White House.” Ms. Fairbanks sued Ms. Roller for defamation. The First Amendment requires that Ms. Fairbanks’ claim be considered “against the background of a profound national commitment” to the freedom of speech and especially of political speech, which is “essential to the security of the Republic.” See New York Times v. Sullivan... This “fundamental principle of our constitutional system” obligates Ms. Fairbanks, as a public figure, to support her defamation claim by alleging facts that support a finding of actual malice on the part of Ms. Roller.... Because Ms. Fairbanks has failed to allege such facts, Ms. Roller’s Motion to Dismiss under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure will be granted.

Oh yeah, note how the court, from the opening, is talking about the First Amendment. I should remind you what the plaintiff said about the lawsuit at one point:

Anyway, back to the case. As we expected, the court noted the Plaintiff's own admission to trolling. It mentions the tweet we showed about "trolling" above and in the discussion part notes that's part of the reason there's no actual malice:

Especially given the public debate about the “okay” hand gesture at the time of Ms. Roller’s tweet, Ms. Fairbanks’ allegations do not provide clear and convincing evidence of actual malice. Indeed, the inescapable conclusion one reaches upon viewing the photo and tweets at issue (including Ms. Fairbanks’ tweets) is that Ms. Fairbanks intended her photo and hand gesture to provoke, or troll, people like Ms. Roller—whether because the gesture was actually offensive or because they would think that it was offensive—not that Ms. Fairbanks was the victim of a malicious attack based on innocent actions. So Ms. Fairbanks has failed to state a claim and her case should be dismissed.

Unfortunately, we were also correct in the second part of our initial post -- that because the case was filed in federal court in Washington DC, it would mean that Washington DC's (pretty strong) anti-SLAPP law would be inapplicable. A horrible ruling from a few years back, which goes against rulings in most other federal courts, found that DC's anti-SLAPP law couldn't be used in federal court. The defendant in this case sought to use it anyway, but the court rejected it:

The District of Columbia’s anti-SLAPP statute does not apply in federal court, so Ms. Roller’s Motion to Dismiss and request for attorney’s fees under the anti-SLAPP statute will be denied.

The Defendant had tried to argue that the infamous Michael Mann ruling had overturned that earlier ruling concerning DC SLAPPs in federal courts, but the court disagreed.

Once again, this is another example of why we so badly need a federal anti-SLAPP law.

Oh, and I should note that the plaintiff's lawyer in this case just happens to be the same guy, Robert Barnes, who we wrote about yesterday for his failed arguments that Twitter somehow violated Chuck Johnson's rights in kicking Johnson off its platforms. So while he seems to making a name for himself, it mostly appears to be in filing failed lawsuits that are dumped on First Amendment grounds on behalf of infamous Trump supporting internet trolls. I'm not sure that's a reputation worth having.

Filed Under: anti-slapp, cassandra fairbanks, dc, defamation, emma roller, first amendment, free speech, robert barnes, trolling, trolls

Photographer Tutorial Company Reacts To Pirates By Screwing With Them Hilariously

from the free-laughs dept

When it comes to content producers reacting to the pirating of their works, we've seen just about every reaction possible. From costly lawsuits and copyright trolling, to attempts to engage with this untapped market, up to and including creatively messing with those that would commit copyright infringement. The last of those options doesn't do a great deal to generate sales revenue, but it can often be seen by the public as both a funny way to jerk around pirates and as a method for educating them on the needs of creators.

But Fstoppers, a site that produces high-end tutorials for photographers and sells them for hundreds of dollars each, may have taken the creativity to the next level to mess with those downloading illegitimate copies of their latest work. They decided to release a version of Photographing the World 3 on several torrent sites a few days before it went to retail, but the version they released was much different than the actual product. It was close enough to the real thing that many people were left wondering just what the hell was going on, but ridiculous enough that it's downright funny.

Where Fstoppers normally go to beautiful and exotic international locations, for their fake they decided to go to an Olive Garden in Charleston, South Carolina. Yet despite the clear change of location, they wanted people to believe the tutorial was legitimate.

“We wanted to ride this constant line of ‘Is this for real? Could this possibly be real? Is Elia [Locardi] joking right now? I don’t think he’s joking, he’s being totally serious’,” says Lee Morris, one of the co-owners of Fstoppers.

People really have to watch the tutorial to see what a fantastic job Fstoppers did in achieving that goal. For anyone unfamiliar with their work, the tutorial is initially hard to spot as a fake and even for veterans the level of ambiguity is really impressive.

Beyond the location choices, there are some dead giveaways hidden in subtle ways within the "tutorial." As an example, here is a scene from the tutorial in which Locardi is demonstrating how to for a 'mask' over one of the photos from Olive Garden.

If that looks like he's drawn a dick and balls over the photo on his computer screen, that's because that is exactly what he's done. The whole thing is a Onion-esque love letter to pirates, screwing with them for downloading the tutorial before the retail version was even available. By uploading this 25GB file to torrent sites, and going so far as to generate positive but fake reviews of the torrent, Fstoppers managed not only to generate hundreds of downloads of the fake tutorial, but its fake actually outpaced torrents of the real product. The whole thing was like a strange, funny honeypot. The fake apparently even resulted in complaints from pirates to Fstoppers about the quality of the fake product.

Also of interest is the feedback Fstoppers got following their special release. Emails flooded in from pirates, some of whom were confused while others were upset at the ‘quality’ of the tutorial.

“The whole time we were thinking: ‘This isn’t even on the market yet! You guys are totally stealing this and emailing us and complaining about it,” says Fstoppers co-owner Patrick Hall.

You have to admit, the whole thing is both creative and funny. Still, the obvious question that arises is whether all the time and effort that went into putting this together couldn't have been better spent figuring out a business model and method in which more of these pirates were flipped into paying customers rather than simply screwing with them.

Filed Under: developers, fstoppers, photographers, piracy, trolling
Companies: fstoppers

Even If The Russian Troll Factory Abused Our Openness Against Us, That Doesn't Mean We Should Close Up

from the giving-them-what-they-wanted dept

Last week, we wrote about the Mueller indictment of 13 Russians and three Russian organizations for fraud in trying to sow discord among Americans and potentially influence the election by trolling them on social media. If you haven't read the indictment yet, I recommend doing so -- or at least reading Garrett Graff's impressive attempt at basically turning the indictment into one hell of a narrative story. The key point I raised in that article was that the efforts the Russians undertook to appear to be American shows how difficult-to-impossible it would be to demand that the various internet platforms magically block such trolling attempts in the future.

But, there's a larger issue here that seems worth exploring as well. Among the various attacks aimed at social media companies (mainly Facebook) it feels that many are using this as yet another excuse to demand more regulation of these platforms or to poke more holes in Section 230 of the CDA.

We've already spent many posts explaining why undermining CDA 230 will do a lot more harm than good, but it seems worth especially highlighting how undermining it here in response to Russian attacks would only help the Russians accomplish what it is they've set out to do. CDA 230 is a key aspect of enabling free speech online. It's what allows platforms to host our speech without having to carefully review it before it's allowed, or take it down at the first sign of complaint (allowing a heckler's veto). This is tremendously important in making the internet a platform for everyone, as opposed to just the elite and connected. And, yes, with that comes serious challenges, because some people will inevitably seek to abuse that openness to try to turn us against each other (as appears to have happened here).

But it would be quite an "own goal" to turn around and dismantle the tools that enable free speech in response to foreign attacks.

As Julian Sanchez points out at the NY Times, the Russian government is annoyed by the US criticizing them for online censorship -- so pushing social media companies to censor more in the US would help the Russians point out what hypocrites the Americans are and continue to suppress opposing political points of view:

No less than our “meddling” in their internal elections, Russia has long resented United States criticism of the country’s repressive approach to online speech. Their use of online platforms to tamper with our presidential race reads not only as an attack, but as an implicit argument: “The freedoms you trumpet so loudly, your unwillingness to regulate political speech on the internet, your tolerance for anonymity — all these are weaknesses, which we’ll prove by exploiting them.”

Urgent as it is for the United States to take measures to prevent similar meddling in the next election, we should be careful that our response doesn’t constitute a tacit agreement.

I'm not one to believe the idea that Russians are such implicitly brilliant tacticians that they'd deliberately play the US into taking the exact response they want, but we should be quite careful about undermining our own freedoms and our own services just because some people were able to exploit them. Not only does it harm our own society in the long run, it also gives a fairly explicit basis for lots of repressive regimes (including, but in no way limited to, Russia) to use that as something to point to as they push much greater suppression of free speech.

Filed Under: censorship, free speech, intermediary liability, openness, platforms, russia, trolling
Companies: facebook, twitter

Atari Gets The Settlement It Was Surely Fishing For Over An Homage To 'Breakout' In KitKat Commercial

from the gaming-the-system dept

As readers of this site will know, once-venerated gaming giant Atari long ago reduced itself to an intellectual property troll mostly seeking to siphon money away from companies that actually produce things. The fall of one of gamings historical players is both disappointing and sad, given just how much love and nostalgia there is for its classic games. It was just that nostalgia that likely led Nestle to craft an advertisement in Europe encouraging buyers of candy to "breakout" KitKats and included imagery of the candy replacing a simulation of a game of Breakout. For this, Atari sued over both trademark and copyright infringement, stating for the latter claim that the video reproduction of a mock-game that kind of looks like Breakout constituted copyright infringement.

As we discussed in that original post, both claims are patently absurd. Nestle and Atari are not competitors and anyone with a working frontal lobe will understand that the ad was a mere homage to a classic game made decades ago. If the products aren't competing, and if there is no real potential for public confusion, there is not trademark infringement. As for the copyright claim, the expression in the homage was markedly different from Atari's original game, and there's that little fact that Nestle didn't actually make a game to begin with. They mocked up a video. Nothing in there is copyright infringement.

It was enough that I'm certain some of our readers wondered why Atari would do something like this to begin with. The answer is the recent news that a settlement has been reached in the lawsuit, and it was almost certainly that settlement that Atari was fishing for all along.

Vintage gaming company Atari has settled a lawsuit accusing Swiss foods giant Nestle of using one of its classic video games to sell Kit Kat bars to nostalgic gamers without permission. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers approved Atari’s request to voluntarily dismiss the case with prejudice.

Both parties reached a settlement during a conference in Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim’s courtroom on Dec. 12, 2017, according to court records. The terms of the agreement are confidential.

So, while we don't know the terms of the settlement, it's incredibly common for megaliths like Nestle to throw settlement money at pests like Atari to make them go away. The settlements are often not anything like the potential rewards for the plaintiff if the case had gone to trial, but that's entirely besides the point. The point is to get the settlement. It's essentially free money, after all, reliably gained by filing lawsuits trolling successful companies with spurious legal claims that at best skirt the line of what intellectual property laws actually say.

It's for that reason that trolls like Atari seek treble and punitive damages in these suits, merely as a way to alter the risk calculation for the legal teams of their victims. A company like Nestle, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, has easy math to do when it comes to deciding how to make this all go away. The problem with this is, of course, that not every company has billions of dollars of revenue coming in. It's the smaller companies that are truly victimized by IP trolls that fill their war chests with these kinds of easy settlements.

Filed Under: candy, kitkat, trademark, trolling, video games
Companies: atari, nestle