National Writers Union Drops Huffington Post Boycott After Discovering That No One Cared

from the duh dept

Back in March, we thought it was pretty silly that the Newspaper Guild and the National Writers Union were calling for a boycott of the Huffington Post, because some of the writers who had agreed to post on the site for free no longer liked the deal. As we said at the time, if you think that writing for free undermines your profession, you have a pretty simple solution: don't do it. But don't agree to write for free and then bitch about how it's unfair. In the end, we suspected that the same reasons why people had written for the Huffington Post in the first place (in order to share their thoughts to a wider audience) would continue to win out.

It appears that is absolutely the case. The National Writers Union has now admitted that it's dropped the boycott, because, well, no one cared. What's amusing is that rather than quietly dropping it, they actually put out a press release saying they were "withdrawing the boycott" which almost no one paid attention to in the first place.

Filed Under: free, journalism
Companies: aol, huffington post, national writers union, newspaper guild

Adult Swim, Cartoon Network Piss Off Fans By Removing Free iPad Streams; Now Only For Cable Subscribers

from the that's-not-helping dept

It's amazing how frequently legacy entertainment industry companies look to screw up a good thing. Cartoon Network and its alter ego Adult Swim launched iOS apps in the last year that received a ton of praise for offering full streams of shows in their free apps. This made them useful apps for plenty of fans of cartoons (and, really, who isn't a fan of cartoons?). But, it appears things have changed. A practicing intellectual property lawyer, who prefers to remain anonymous (he apparently doesn't want the world to know of his cartoon obsession), alerted us to the news that the two apps have now removed the free streams. The deal is you can now only get free streams if you subscribe to a partner cable/satellite provider. In fact, they're even pitching it as if they're doing something new -- totally ignoring that the free streams used to be available for everyone, and now are limited to just people who have cable/satellite subscriptions.

Yes, this is weak attempt by everyone to try to hold back the flood of people cutting the cord -- but it's the absolute wrong way to go about it. Rather than providing more value, they're trying to take away value from others, and in the process pissing off a lot of people. It's not going to make cord cutters any more interested in re-subscribing to cable or satellite TV, but may make the Cartoon Network and Adult Swim lose some of its most valuable audience -- the young, employed, well-educated folks that advertisers crave... who have been leading the charge in cutting the cord. Here's what the attorney wrote to me:

I do not have cable. and, just to make it clear, I am a late 20-something, practicing intellectual property attorney, and I cut my cable not because the economy is bad, but because it is an outrageously overpriced, single direction service that forces me to choke down a ton of content I do not care about, in addition to forcing me to watch ads.

I was happy to watch my favorite cartoons, for free, but with ads, ostensibly, the profits of which go directly to the stations with less dilution than if they had been broadcast, but now I will probably go back to doing what I did before my iPad: not watch stuff, wait for it to come out on DVD and Netflix/Qwikster it, or, potentially, even 'infringe' it.

The way to compete in this market is to add value, not take it away. That just pisses people off.

Filed Under: adult swim, cable, cartoon network, free, ipad

TV Companies Plan To Make Hulu Suck Even More Making It More Difficult To Sell Hulu

from the well,-duh dept

We've talked about how the entertainment industry is really good at killing the golden goose every chance it gets. Any time some new online service actually gets people to move away from infringement, the industry freaks out and complains that they're not making enough money from the service and then tries to kill it. For example, the TV folks have made it clear that they'd like to kill Hulu even though they own it. They're so worried about "cannibalizing" the old revenue streams, that they're killing off the new ones as well. We predicted this would happen a few years ago, and it's amusing to see it happening in real time.

Because of the conflicts between what Hulu management (who do seem pretty clued in) and their ownership wanted to do with the company, Hulu was recently put up for sale. But, now it's coming out that the bids Hulu is receiving are much lower than the owners want -- and it's because they've made it clear they plan to cut off all free content from Hulu:

But the bidders all figured out pretty quickly that the TV companies who own Hulu now want to phase out free ad-supported content completely. So as soon as the current set of Hulu contracts expire in a couple of years, it would be back to the negotiating table.

Because of that, no one was willing to bid over $2 billion -- and the TV guys (of course) think it's worth a lot more than that, even as they're trying to kill it. Well, one exception: apparently Google was willing to pay closer to $4 billion... but it would only do that under certain conditions (which likely involve getting the TV guys to renew/guarantee future deals). So congrats, backwards looking TV guys, not only are you killing Hulu, you're killing the goodwill you build up via the company so you can't even cash out on that.

Filed Under: free, online, open, tv
Companies: google, hulu

Success Of Mixtapes Finally Making Major Labels Realize That 'Free' Can Be Useful Marketing

from the not-so-awful dept

We were amazed a few years ago when the RIAA, with the help of law enforcement, started going after DJs who made mixtapes, even though those same mixtapes were considered a huge part of the promotional infrastructure of certain parts of the music world (mainly hip hop, but certainly elsewhere as well). Of course, after shutting down and arresting a bunch of mixtape DJs, a bunch of artists just started making and releasing their own damn mixtapes, and doing so for free online. And even though we still see some stories of the RIAA going after "officially released" mixtapes, it seems that even the labels are starting to recognize that free mixtapes help promote artists and aren't worth freaking out about:

"The game favors people that can produce quality music and then turn right around and produce more quality music-which is not a given," Atlantic Records VP of A&R Zvi Edelman says. His signee, Wiz Khalifa, leveraged free, original mixtapes like 2010's "Kush & OJ" and 2011's "Cabin Fever" into the building of a dedicated fan base that helped, along with an intensive touring strategy, make his Atlantic/Rostrum Records debut, "Rolling Papers," one of the few hip-hop debuts to sell more than 500,000 copies (it's now at 570,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan) in 2011.

A batch of newcomers -- such as J. Cole, Big Sean, Dom Kennedy, Mac Miller and Smoke DZA -- has adapted to the consumer demand for free, original rap music. The philosophy is often described this way: As a reward for artists remaining loyal to them (by giving away original music), fans return the favor by buying concert tickets, merchandise and "real" albums from record labels. The result is a give-and-take relationship that keeps rappers in control of their brand and marketing, and iTunes playlists full of free albums disguised as "mixtapes." The payoff is an active fan base, which labels and management hope stimulates retail purchases.

This might be about as close as you can come to big record labels officially admitting that free music actually has value that is monetized elsewhere. But, still, apparently, we need special new laws to shut down the very same marketing that they now want to use to build a stronger fan base.

Filed Under: free, marketing, mixtapes, music

Lady Gaga's Manager Would Like To Give Her Next Album Away For Free... If He Could

from the not-up-to-him dept

It's been clear for a while that Lady Gaga understood the power of free music, using it in a variety of promotions, saying she didn't care if people downloaded her music, because it only got more people to go see her live and emphatically saying she thinks albums cost way too much. She thought that $0.99 was a better price for an entire album, rather than per song.

Now, as Robw was the first of a few of you to point out, her manager has said that, if it were up to him, he'd give her next album away totally free -- with the focus on getting it as much exposure as possible, knowing full well that he'd make that up through greater fan support elsewhere.

"If it was up to me, I'd give away the next album and put it on every handset that I can put it on, to get that scale," he said. "You can't be scared to fail. Sometimes we're going to get big results, and sometimes you learn a lesson, make an adjustment and move on."

Of course, some will immediately point out that since it's not up to him, such comments are meaningless. He can say that and "pander" to fans, even if he doesn't really believe it. But, of course, there's no reason to believe he doesn't mean it. And in an era when so many top musicians are being pressured to toe the industry line about how evil "free" is, it's certainly nice to see one of the biggest (if not the biggest) pop stars in the world, and her management, recognizing publicly that the business model these days isn't in selling music directly.

Filed Under: album, free, lady gaga

University Of Copenhagen Giving Away Patents For Free... If You Have A Credible Plan

from the tech-transfer dept

We've talked in the past about the whole concept of tech transfer offices at universities. This was an idea that became popular a couple decades back, that universities, with all their researchers, could create a profit center by licensing or selling the patents that come from university research. The reality is that this has been a dismal failure. Most universities (like many patent holders who aren't actually building products in the marketplace) totally and completely overvalue their patents, making it completely uneconomical for anyone to license the patents. In the end, this has made the vast majority of tech transfer offices cost centers rather than profit centers. They hired lots of people, which is expensive, and they haven't seen much of a return on it.

Even worse, this focus on locking up knowledge and research from universities has been disastrous on actual advancement and the spreading of knowledge, which many of these universities claim is a key goal. Professors are told not to share results or data or plans with professors at other universities, for fear of "losing out" on a patent. The whole academic culture of sharing and building on each others' knowledge is held back tremendously. It's a huge shame.

Thankfully, a few universities are realizing this and are starting to push back. Last year, we noted that the University of Glasgow was freeing up most of its "intellectual property," for anyone who could use it. And, now, hrusha alerts us to the news that the University of Copenhagen (known as KU) is offering free licenses to anyone who can present a "credible" plan for bringing a product to market within 3 years.

It's not a totally open and free system, but it's certainly better than most. The encouragement on commercialization will hopefully help get the practical implications of the research out into the marketplace quickly. I'm not so sure how they determine what is and what is not a "credible plan," so hopefully they err on the side of granting such licenses whenever possible. Hopefully more and more universities will begin to realize that locking up research and expecting to get paid for it is a dead end road that goes against the core principles of most institutes of higher learning.

Filed Under: copenhagen, free, ideas, patents

Shouldn't Free Mean The Same Thing Whether Followed By 'Culture' Or 'Software'?

from the principles dept

Adapted from a talk and slide show I presented at the Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin on July 1, 2011. --NP
Crossposted from ninapaley.com

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program's users have the four essential freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

-- The Free Software Definition

These are the Four Freedoms of Free Software. They are foundational principles, and they are exactly right. They have served and continue to serve the Free Software Movement very well. They place the user's freedom ahead of all other concerns. Free Software is a principled movement, but Free Culture is not – at least not so far. Why?

1. The No Derivatives (-ND) Restriction

If you tinker with software, you can improve it. You can also break it or make it worse, but the Freedom to Tinker is one of the foundational 4 Freedoms of Free Software. Your software may also be used for purposes you don't like, used by “bad people,” or even used against you; the Four Freedoms wisely counsel us to GET OVER IT.
Unfortunately, The Free Software Foundation does not extend “Freedom to Tinker” to Culture:



Cultural works released by the Free Software Foundation come with “No Derivatives” restrictions. They rationalize it here:

Works that express someone's opinion—memoirs, editorials, and so on—serve a fundamentally different purpose than works for practical use like software and documentation. Because of this, we expect them to provide recipients with a different set of permissions (notice how users are now called "recipients," and their Freedoms are now called "permissions" --NP): just the permission to copy and distribute the work verbatim. (link)

The problem with this is that it is dead wrong. You do not know what purposes your works might serve others. You do not know how works might be found “practical” by others. To claim to understand the limits of “utility” of cultural works betrays an irrational bias toward software and against all other creative work. It is anti-Art, valuing software above the rest of culture. It says coders alone are entitled to Freedom, but everyone else can suck it. Use of -ND restrictions is an unjustifiable infringement on the freedom of others.

For example, here I have violated the Free Software Foundation's No-Derivatives license:

The Four Freedoms of Free Culture:

1. The freedom to run, view, hear, read, play, perform, or otherwise attend to the Work;
2. The freedom to study, analyze, and dissect copies of the Work, and adapt it to your needs;
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor;
4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.
(link)

Without permission, I've created a derivative work: the Four Freedoms of Free Culture. Although I violated FSF's No-Derivatives license, they violated Freedoms # 2 and 4, so we're even.

1. The Non-Commercial (-NC) Restriction

The Freedom to Distribute Free Software is essential to its success. It has given rise to many for-profit businesses that benefit the larger community.

Red Hat, Canonical – would the world be better if such companies were forbidden? Would Free Software benefit from a ban on those businesses?

Yet the Cultural ecosystem is stunted by the prevalence of Non-Commercial restrictions. These maintain commercial monopolies around works, and – especially for vocational artists like me – are functionally as restrictive as unmodified copyright. Yet they are widely mislabeled “Free Culture,” or even “Copyleft.”

This is a still from the mostly excellent and popular documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. This film is many peoples' introduction to the term “Free Culture” and “Copyleft.” But as you can see, the Non-Commercial restriction is lumped in with actual Free license terms.

See that dollar sign with the slash in it? That means Non-Commercial restrictions, which are most definitely NOT Copyleft. (I've posted about Creative Commons' branding confusion before, but it's only gotten worse since then.) This film is itself licensed under unFree Non-Commercial restrictions. As an artist and filmmaker, I have found confusion is rampant among my creative colleagues. Some filmmakers are beginning to think the term “Free Culture” is cool, but they still want to restrict others' freedom and impose commercial monopolies on their works. The book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig its itself not Free culure, but it is widely looked up to. It sets an unfortunate and confusing example with its Non-Commercial license. It illustrates the absence of guiding principles in the Free Culture movement.

I have spoken to many artists who insist there's “no real difference” between Non-Commercial licenses and Free alternatives. Yet these differences are well known and unacceptable in Free Software, for good reason.
Calling  Non-Commercial restrictions “Free Culture” neuters what could be an effective movement, if it only had principles.

So what do I want?

I want a PRINCIPLED Free Culture Movement.

I want Free Software people to take Culture seriously. I want a Free Culture movement guided by principles of Freedom, just as the Free Software movement is guided by principles of Freedom. I want a name I can use that means something – the phrase “Free Culture” is increasingly meaningless, as it is often applied to unFree practices, and is also the name of a famous book that is itself encumbered with Non-Commercial restrictions.

I want a Free Culture ecosystem that allows artists to make money. I want anyone to be able to accept money for their work of remixing and building on Culture – just as a trucker can accept money for driving on a road. I want money to be among the many incentives to participate in building culture. Without the freedoms to Tinker and Redistribute without restriction, there is little incentive to build on  and improve cultural works. There is little reward to help your neighbor, when you are guaranteed to lose money doing so. “Free Culture” with non-Commercial restrictions will remain a hobby for those with a surplus of time and labor, and those who only accept money from monopolists.

I want commerce without monopolies. I want people to understand the difference.

I want a Free Culture ecosystem that includes equivalents of  businesses like Red Hat and Canonical. I want cultural businesses that give back to their communities, that work with their customers instead of against them. Only if we refuse to place Non-Commercial and No-Derivatives restrictions on our works will a robust Free Culture ecosystem be able to emerge.

I want the Free Software community – those who currently best understand the Four Freedoms – to champion the rest of Culture, not just Software. I want Freedom for All.

Filed Under: free, free culture, free software, freedom

The Misconceptions Of 'Free' Abound; Why Do Brains Stop At The Zero?

from the free-is-not-a-business-model dept

Jim Harper points us to a blog post by a guy named Richard Muscat, supposedly debunking the problems of "free" as it comes to business models. Frankly his post is pretty weak. It rehashes a bunch of arguments that have been debunked plenty of times before, but since we keep seeing these arguments made, I figured I'd use Muscat's piece to explore why it is that those who don't understand the concept of free are condemned to make such bad arguments against it.

The key problem, it seems, is that people who dislike the concept of free have this weird issue where they stop thinking once the big zero enters the equation. In the past, I've pointed out that it seems like some brains have a divide by zero error problem, where, once they see free as a part of the business model, they stop paying attention to the rest of the business model and just focus on the free part. But here's the thing, no one is claiming that "free" is the business model. People who discuss the value of free have always been talking about how you use it as a part of the business model. So arguing that "free" is not a business model is a strawman. No one is claiming that free, by itself, is a business model because that makes no sense. But Muscat takes things even further, by claiming that it's so bad that it's "harmful":

My contention is that “Free” as described and used in many contemporary web-based businesses is a non-business model that is not only broken, but actively harmful to entrepreneurship. Free rarely works, and all the times that it doesn’t, it undermines entrepreneurial creativity, destroys market value, delivers an inferior user experience and pumps hot air into financial bubbles.

Don't hold back.

Free does not push you to create something evocative that users and customers are willing to commit to in the long term.

Free absconds on the entrepreneur-customer commitment: by asking for nothing you also promise nothing. Both parties can walk away because there is no relationship. On the other hand by asking for money (or some other form of commitment), however large or small an amount, you create a self-imposed drive to produce creative and valuable products because not doing so would mean letting somebody down.

Because no one has committed to Google long-term. And before that no one committed to radio. Or broadcast TV. Huh? Having a product that is "free to the consumer" does not mean people won't commit to it at all. In fact, if you put together a smart business model, it could be the exact opposite. All of the examples here involve cases where companies use free to bring in people and then sell that attention to advertisers. In those cases, they very much have the incentive to create something that makes people commit, or they don't have the attention to sell. It's only if you stop at the zero and don't follow through that you could possibly claim that business models that use free don't get customers to commit.

As the title suggests, the book argues that software pricing shouldn’t be decided randomly. There are three big reasons for not doing this: first, you might be missing out on revenue; second, your product price says something about the quality and intended audience of your product; third, your price also sets an expectation of how much effort has gone into production and how much value a customer should expect.

Not sure what that has to do with anything. I don't think anyone is suggesting that people randomly choose free as a price either. In fact, we've been quite careful to explain that the whole point of understanding the economics of free is so that you can understand when it's appropriate to use free and when it's not. That many startups don't understand when it's appropriate to use free is not a condemnation of free as a price. It's a condemnation of people not understanding the larger economics and how to put together a good business model.

Choosing Free as your product price runs the risk of attracting entirely the wrong audience for your product or service.

Sure. But that's only an issue if you fail to plan out the rest of your business model. The implicit assumption that Muscat makes here, which is incorrect, is that the whole point of free is to attract an audience which might buy.

Although you may get tens of thousands of users, it is probable that those users are unlikely to ever consider paying you because by definition you have attracted people who are looking for free stuff. Reversing this decision later can be extremely painful: you will piss off your existing user base, potentially generating very negative publicity and you might need to start from scratch in terms of looking for the right audience.

Right, but that's not a criticism of "free," that's a criticism of a bad business model built around the idea that free is just a trick to get people to upgrade. If that's your business model, then he's right that it could be a bad business model (though some companies, such as Evernote, have found that it works for them). But that's not a problem with "free." That's a problem with the rest of the business model.

At some point or another you will realise that you do need to create a revenue stream. If you end up in the situation I just described above, i.e. encumbered with an audience of people unwilling to pay for what you’re providing, you will be faced with a dilemma: start over and risk the bad press or try to squeeze some pennies out of a reluctant user base.

Again we see the divide by zero issue, in which he implicitly assumes that free is implemented in place of a complete business model. That's not the fault of "free." That's the fault of a bad business model.

The latter is a slippery slidey slope that leads towards intrusive in-app advertising, pop-ups, link-baiting, shady affiliate marketing, email spam and a total lack of focus on user experience.

Indeed. Those would be bad decisions built on a bad business model. I'm not sure what that has to do with "free" however.

The idea that things can be free is behind a lot of financial bubbles. In the late nineties we thought that we could get distribution and infrastructure for free and we got the dot com bubble. A couple of years ago we thought we could get loans and bank credit for free and we got the property bubble. In both cases we left something very important out of the equation: delivery costs in the former and ability to repay mortgages in the latter.

That's an interesting and totally incorrect bit of historical revisionism. First, the dot-com bubble was a result of investors (and many dot-coms, themselves) having no real understanding of web-based business models. Early dot-com successes (some real, some imaginary) created a rush of investors eager to throw money at any company offering something on the web -- without ever looking at whether they even had a business model. And I've never seen a loan or credit -- or internet infrastructure, for that matter -- that was "free." Were there some companies that went to extremes during both bubbles? Yes. But there was no direct connection to "free."

If you’re putting together a business plan or a slide deck that claims there will be an initial period of “short-term loss” while you establish a user base which you will then monetise, just remember that that is exactly what most of the pre-2000 dot com business plans were like.

And, um, it was also the basic business plan of all sorts of successful businesses going back through history. It was clearly the plan of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter, for example. So what? If you have a smart business model behind it, it can work. If you don't, it will fail. Claiming that it is inherently flawed is wrong. Also, it's the very basis of pretty much the entire venture capital industry. The whole reason why startups need venture capital is to fund that initial period in which there are short-term losses. It's called investing in growth. Intel had to build fabs. Apple had to build computers. Those involved "short-term losses" to build the product. That's how these things generally work.

Almost never. Somebody always pays. If healthcare is free, your taxes pay for it. If the flight is free, the extras aren’t. If the search is free, the advertiser is paying.

Um. That's the whole point of using free as a part of a business model. Of course someone pays. That's what we're describing here. It seems totally ridiculous to go on for paragraph after paragraph discussing how free is awful because no one pays... and then, at the very end, to throw in a "but someone pays!" Why didn't he consider those points earlier in the article?

The only time when Free can really work for you is if you set your sights on having a specific outcome: acquisition.

Yeah, just like Google. And Facebook. And Twitter. Good grief.

Look, if you understand the economics behind digital goods, you can quickly learn that there are places where free makes sense. It makes sense when, if you don't go free, your competitors will and you'll lose all of your business. But no one has ever suggested that free, by itself, is a business model and if your debunking of "free" is based on that, it just means you've stopped your analysis too soon. Free is an important part of many, many, many business models these days and that's been true for many years as well. Free isn't bad. It can be used badly, but to condemn it, based on that alone, suggests someone hasn't thought things through.

Filed Under: business models, economics, free

Sony CEO: We Were Hacked By Freetards Who Just Want Everything Free

from the freedomtards,-perhaps dept

Ah, delusion in the CEO suite. Sony CEO Howard Stringer has been struggling to deal with the fact that pretty much everyone* in the tech world now hates his company. He famously called the month or so of downtime for the PlayStation Network, due to Sony's own failure to properly secure its servers, "a hiccup." He's also continued Sony's standard practice of going to war against makers, hackers and innovators, by trying to close off everything and then suing anyone who dares to try to do more with the products they thought they'd bought.

Stringer, at a recent Sony shareholder meeting, had to deal with critics concerning the PSN downtime, and his response was not to take any of the blame, or to admit that Sony might have been at fault, but rather to say that hackers pick on the company because it likes to "protect" its intellectual property:

"We believe that we first became the subject of attack because we tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), our content, in this case videogames," Stringer told shareholders at Tuesday's meeting in response to a question about the background to the incident.

Of course, that's an interesting version of revisionist history. There are all sorts of theories as to why Sony got hacked, with Occam and his trusty Razor suggesting the simplest answer: because Sony had crazy weak security that would allow malicious hackers to make off with useful information with which they could profit. But even if we grant Stringer's unsupported assertion was true, what set many people off (though, not necessarily these hackers) was the fact that Sony sued George Hotz for doing nothing more than helping to re-enable a feature that Sony had marketed as part of the PS3... and then had retroactively disabled. That's not "protecting Sony's IP." That's breaking a product and false advertising... and then suing people for trying to help make your products more valuable.

But Stringer apparently wasn't done there. You see, the real problem is just those damn freetards:

“These are our corporate assets,” Stringer told the meeting, “..and there are those that don’t want us to protect them, they want everything to be free.”

Seriously, Howard? This has absolutely nothing to do with people wanting stuff for free. People are pissed because you're suing people who are trying to improve your products -- the ones they actually paid for (yes, with real money). If anything, they want "free" as in speech, not free as in beer. They're looking for the freedom to tinker and to expand and to build.

And you're giving them the opposite.

And let's can the crap in which you pretend that Sony has to "protect" its intellectual property in this manner. It doesn't. You can treat customers right, even without being overprotective. Why, just look at Samsung, one of your biggest competitors. When it came out with a new device, rather than freaking out about people jailbreaking it, it sent free devices to some of the top modders, and asked them to mod and hack them faster...

That's called treating your community right, not treating them as criminals. It's not because people want everything to be free. People are quite often happy to pay for something of scarce value to them. Where they get upset is when you make that product less valuable by locking it down in anti-consumer ways.

So, no, you weren't hacked by freetards. You were hacked because you had dreadful security, and everyone's pissed not because they want stuff for free, but because you treat them like crap.

* Yes, slight exaggeration. But no more than calling over a month downtime on a popular gaming platform a "hiccup."

Filed Under: free, hack, hiccup, howard stringer, intellectual property, psn
Companies: sony