I think the quality of a given answer depends on the quality and honesty of the question.
'Should news-outlets expose would-be anonymous commenters if their identities are newsworthy' isn't a good or honest question - it lacks any recognition of social benefits or harms, focusing instead on the benefit to the news-outlet, excluding all other considerations.
A better formulation would be four questions - not as headline-friendly, perhaps, but more honest and far more likely to obtain good answers: • 'where does society benefit from anonymous comments'; • 'where is society harmed by anonymous comments' and; • 'where is the brightest path between the last two answers that allows us to maximise the benefits, while minimising the harm'.
The first question is most clearly answered by me. I am pseudonymous and, obviously, fantastic - anyone who suggests otherwise is clearly a damned fool. I comment honestly, free from much fear of significant repercussion or personal harm, despite crude attempts by censorious governments to chill all our speech.
The answer to the second question is best exemplified by the dismayingly-endless legions of astroturfers, trolls, spy-agency employees and other fraudsters. Such people are attempting to spam the world into seriously considering what are basically lies, intended to do nothing more than distort public perception and discussion and - more often than not - to drown out all rational discourse in favour of partisan political extremism.
Those are easy-enough answers, but finding the ethical path can be more involved.
As a general matter, I think that if a person - whether they be a Somebody or a Nobody - appears to be expressing an honest view, then society presumably benefits from their contribution - however demented it might be - and they deserve their anonymity.
If they're using sockpuppets all over the shop, if they're trying to endlessly mislead and deceive, then they deserve no protection at all. I don't believe I benefit from being deceived. I assume society doesn't, either. I have no problem with websites that chill the speech of deliberate liars and deceivers.
The bright line necessarily turns on a given poster's honesty and intentions, which can often be difficult to gauge, even when you know exactly who they are.
The most obvious trolls are obvious - and Huppenthal in the article is clearly one such troll, undeserving of much protection. His anonymity is gone, but in my opinion, little of value was lost, notwithstanding the chilling effects on BlogForArizona's comment-section.
While it might have been wiser to expose his most commonly-used online identity, rather than the man himself, that's on the mercy and wisdom of the moderator - and in this case, I'm not inclined to second-guess it overmuch.
So long as I can see that those responsible look towards society's good, rather than their own short-term benefit, I find no difficulty in continuing to trust sites like Techdirt to make correct and wise choices in such matters.
Apart from anything else, if they ever make the wrong choice, they can be very sure we'll all let them know exactly how bad a choice it was. :)
Note to PIPCU: just so you know, we're not being wilfully obtuse about what Mr Leppard meant. The sentence "Whether it’s Bitnet, The Tor – which is 90% of the Internet – peer-to-peer sharing, or the streaming capability worldwide" literally makes no sense.
I read this on TF the other day and I still can't figure out what "Bitnet" and "The Tor" are meant to be, or what the 90% figure is meant to refer to. I'm guessing the bittorrent protocol is supposed to be in there somewhere, but beyond that, the sentence is basically just vaguely-technical-sounding gibberish.
If you're going to weigh in on issues like this, it's probably a good idea if your spokespeople know what they're talking about before they start. Especially when said spokesperson is in charge of your entire department, supposedly.
---
TF's article mentions something important which isn't covered here - Mr Leppard said "organized crime is motivated purely by money and the way to start dealing with this is to target the money flows and how people make money out of this crime".
The important part of that sentence is the phrase "organised crime", which is very telling. The phrase really only gets used by FACT - it was most visible during one of their earlier anti-piracy ad campaigns on VHS (they love to claim that profits from pirate videos funds organised crime, human trafficking, drugs and terrorism).
It's appearance here strongly suggests that the MPAA - via FACT - are really in charge: Mr Leppard and PIPCU are not very much more than sockpuppets who have yet to learn their lines properly.
The reality that organised crime has rarely had any involvement in the distribution of pirate media via disc - and none whatsoever via the internet - is obviously beside the point for an anti-piracy sockpuppet, especially when the hand up it's backside goes out of it's way to conflate manufacturing fake medicines with watching episodes of The Flumps without permission.
I'm not convinced that assertions of malicious intent are entirely well-founded in the case of some governments. I live in the UK and our parliament has a strong tendency to keep the more technical branches of government very much at arms length - and this seems to me to include groups like GCHQ.
If it doesn't result in a happy photo-op, or a slew of postive, vote-winning headlines, I can't see the average cabinet minister giving two sharp tugs on a dead dogs cock about what our spies get up to.
From a previous Techdirt article, I recall that the one person most directly responsible for oversight of the department seemed to be a witless fop with no clue about much of anything at all.
Based on the way things work in Parliament generally, and on the limited responses our government has given thus far, I get the distinct impression that almost nobody in government - with the possible exceptions of a select few that the intelligence community might be happy to be more open with - has the slightest idea what's going on unless GCHQ goes out of it's way to tell them.
It's certainly not better - rather worse, if anything - but the endemic, bone-dead stupidity and ignorance in parliament is a different kind of problem from willful abuse - and we are likely to need a different approach, if we wish to find and reach an effective solution.
As others have said, I think the best way forward is not to buy from companies that pull stunts like this. Other companies certainly do the same thing, but with this coming so soon after the previous issue, LG, in particular, appears to be deliberately pissing on its customers' moral and legal rights.
This is the UK, not Korea or the US. This kind of behaviour just isn't good enough. I strongly doubt if it's even legal.
I've a surprisingly cheap LG 3D monitor that - up until now - I've been quite happy with and happy to promote to others. I won't be recommending their products any more and I'm going to replace the monitor with something not from LG.
Trust is the basis of every relationship. I don't trust LG any more. I don't want them in my house.
You seem very inclined to give these people the benefit of the doubt and I find myself wondering: exactly what evidence will you need that they are corrupt in the worst way?
These are experienced politicians, professional lobbyists for their industries - how is there any plausible likelihood that they're oblivious to the impropriety of such incestuous relationships? How can there be any chance at all that they don't know how it looks from the outside?
If they were ever to be tried in court for corruption, they might be able to claim some measure of plausible deniability, but that's not the same as having credibility from the outset. These men have none.
Powell, Baker and Wheeler are textbook cases of utterly shameless, corrupt officials - and short of making public, signed confessions - or wearing sandwich-boards with "whore for sale" written on them - there's not much more they could do to prove it.
To be fully honest, not everything DF does is a success - it has some real failures behind it, both critically and commercially speaking.
But not once - not even once - have I felt the terrible buyer's remorse I've had from realising that the latest big-dick EA game or the last Arkham sequel or Diablo God-Damned Fucking Miserable Pay to Win Piece of Shit III is a steaming great load of crap.
Even when a DF game doesn't work for me and I don't "feel the love", the ideas are almost always fresh and interesting, I know they've tried their best, they'll learn and do better - unlike the soup-factories of gaming, my support here means a good company will improve and gaming as a whole can only benefit.
There are very few companies in the world I give my financial loyalty to, very few worthy of genuine praise. Double Fine has been and remains good - I'm happy to reward that with my money, every time. :)
I was going to say a lot here, but the more I read of Mr Smart - especially his own comments - the more I realise he's not actually worth that much effort.
tl;dr: he's a drama queen, deliberately manufacturing his own controversy for his own lulz and profit.
I won't be buying any of his games. He won't miss me. God knows, I won't miss him, either.
Thank you for an interesting article, Mr Geigner. The original Telegraph article is slightly confusing on the point, but as Rabbit80 pointed out, the new game's title is Elite:Dangerous, not Frontier: First Encounters, which was the previous installment.
I've been looking forward to this for decades. I contributed quite heavily (relative to my income) not just to the Kickstarter but also to it's satellite projects (licensed spin-off books and audio-books from third-parties, with proceeds going to the main project's total). I'm not sure how much I spent, but it's by far and away the most money I've ever thrown at a game, including when I've had to buy a new console to play it.
I applaud Braben's engagement with the new marketplace of funding - if he sticks with it and doesn't slide back into old habits of tying his projects to the whims of mainstream publishers, then I'll be more than happy to back his future work above and beyond the call of retail prices.
I also appreciate his recognition of piracy as not being of the ridiculous, monstrous character that anti-piracy campaigners would have us all believe.
I strongly disagree with the article on one point: the implication that big budget games and movies can only be funded through Big Investment.
Elite:Dangerous is a relatively obscure project and knowledge of David Braben and Elite is largely limited to a smaller number of Britons who have followed our country's games industry for years. Most of its backers are undoubtedly players of the earlier versions.
According to Kickstarter, E:D (terrible abbreviation!) made just over 1.57 million pounds (about 2.5 million dollars) from just over 25,600 backers.
By way of contrast, current charts have the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online now pulling pre-orders at 28,000 people a week in the US alone - and the chart-publishers are calling it "a slow week".
As time passes and the infrastructure and marketing get better - and more and more people get used to funding projects ahead of development, via sites like Kickstarter - the reputations and popularity of both crowdfunding sites and crowdfunding-focused developers will undoubtedly continue to grow - and the revenue will grow with them.
Translate TES: Online's 28K preorders a week into crowdfunding and you can see what kind of money can be generated.
Translate GTA V's seven million total worldwide preorders into crowdfunding and you can see a budget of 420 million dollars - completely outgunning the budget of every film and game ever produced.
Whether piracy exists or not, content creators of all hues will start to seriously kick the various conventional investors to the kerb, in favour of leaner, smarter and more cost-effective specialists in marketing and distribution.
No more EA. No more MPAA companies.
I think it's inevitable, it's unstoppable and it's something I look forward to. :)
On the post: Local Blog Outs Local Politician's Crazy But Anonymous Comments. So...Is That Okay?
Quality
'Should news-outlets expose would-be anonymous commenters if their identities are newsworthy' isn't a good or honest question - it lacks any recognition of social benefits or harms, focusing instead on the benefit to the news-outlet, excluding all other considerations.
A better formulation would be four questions - not as headline-friendly, perhaps, but more honest and far more likely to obtain good answers:
• 'where does society benefit from anonymous comments';
• 'where is society harmed by anonymous comments' and;
• 'where is the brightest path between the last two answers that allows us to maximise the benefits, while minimising the harm'.
The first question is most clearly answered by me. I am pseudonymous and, obviously, fantastic - anyone who suggests otherwise is clearly a damned fool. I comment honestly, free from much fear of significant repercussion or personal harm, despite crude attempts by censorious governments to chill all our speech.
The answer to the second question is best exemplified by the dismayingly-endless legions of astroturfers, trolls, spy-agency employees and other fraudsters. Such people are attempting to spam the world into seriously considering what are basically lies, intended to do nothing more than distort public perception and discussion and - more often than not - to drown out all rational discourse in favour of partisan political extremism.
Those are easy-enough answers, but finding the ethical path can be more involved.
As a general matter, I think that if a person - whether they be a Somebody or a Nobody - appears to be expressing an honest view, then society presumably benefits from their contribution - however demented it might be - and they deserve their anonymity.
If they're using sockpuppets all over the shop, if they're trying to endlessly mislead and deceive, then they deserve no protection at all. I don't believe I benefit from being deceived. I assume society doesn't, either. I have no problem with websites that chill the speech of deliberate liars and deceivers.
The bright line necessarily turns on a given poster's honesty and intentions, which can often be difficult to gauge, even when you know exactly who they are.
The most obvious trolls are obvious - and Huppenthal in the article is clearly one such troll, undeserving of much protection. His anonymity is gone, but in my opinion, little of value was lost, notwithstanding the chilling effects on BlogForArizona's comment-section.
While it might have been wiser to expose his most commonly-used online identity, rather than the man himself, that's on the mercy and wisdom of the moderator - and in this case, I'm not inclined to second-guess it overmuch.
So long as I can see that those responsible look towards society's good, rather than their own short-term benefit, I find no difficulty in continuing to trust sites like Techdirt to make correct and wise choices in such matters.
Apart from anything else, if they ever make the wrong choice, they can be very sure we'll all let them know exactly how bad a choice it was. :)
On the post: City Of London Police Claim That 'The Tor' Is 90% Of The Internet, And Is A Risk To Society
Eh?!
I read this on TF the other day and I still can't figure out what "Bitnet" and "The Tor" are meant to be, or what the 90% figure is meant to refer to. I'm guessing the bittorrent protocol is supposed to be in there somewhere, but beyond that, the sentence is basically just vaguely-technical-sounding gibberish.
If you're going to weigh in on issues like this, it's probably a good idea if your spokespeople know what they're talking about before they start. Especially when said spokesperson is in charge of your entire department, supposedly.
---
TF's article mentions something important which isn't covered here - Mr Leppard said "organized crime is motivated purely by money and the way to start dealing with this is to target the money flows and how people make money out of this crime".
The important part of that sentence is the phrase "organised crime", which is very telling. The phrase really only gets used by FACT - it was most visible during one of their earlier anti-piracy ad campaigns on VHS (they love to claim that profits from pirate videos funds organised crime, human trafficking, drugs and terrorism).
It's appearance here strongly suggests that the MPAA - via FACT - are really in charge: Mr Leppard and PIPCU are not very much more than sockpuppets who have yet to learn their lines properly.
The reality that organised crime has rarely had any involvement in the distribution of pirate media via disc - and none whatsoever via the internet - is obviously beside the point for an anti-piracy sockpuppet, especially when the hand up it's backside goes out of it's way to conflate manufacturing fake medicines with watching episodes of The Flumps without permission.
On the post: How Have Governments Around The World Responded To Snowden's Revelations?
Actually...
If it doesn't result in a happy photo-op, or a slew of postive, vote-winning headlines, I can't see the average cabinet minister giving two sharp tugs on a dead dogs cock about what our spies get up to.
From a previous Techdirt article, I recall that the one person most directly responsible for oversight of the department seemed to be a witless fop with no clue about much of anything at all.
Based on the way things work in Parliament generally, and on the limited responses our government has given thus far, I get the distinct impression that almost nobody in government - with the possible exceptions of a select few that the intelligence community might be happy to be more open with - has the slightest idea what's going on unless GCHQ goes out of it's way to tell them.
It's certainly not better - rather worse, if anything - but the endemic, bone-dead stupidity and ignorance in parliament is a different kind of problem from willful abuse - and we are likely to need a different approach, if we wish to find and reach an effective solution.
On the post: LG Will Take The 'Smart' Out Of Your Smart TV If You Don't Agree To Share Your Viewing And Search Data With Third Parties
The only real solution
This is the UK, not Korea or the US.
This kind of behaviour just isn't good enough.
I strongly doubt if it's even legal.
I've a surprisingly cheap LG 3D monitor that - up until now - I've been quite happy with and happy to promote to others. I won't be recommending their products any more and I'm going to replace the monitor with something not from LG.
Trust is the basis of every relationship.
I don't trust LG any more.
I don't want them in my house.
On the post: Telecom Musical Chairs: Regulators And Lobbyists Swap Roles, Everyone Wins! (Except The Public)
Evidence
You seem very inclined to give these people the benefit of the doubt and I find myself wondering: exactly what evidence will you need that they are corrupt in the worst way?
These are experienced politicians, professional lobbyists for their industries - how is there any plausible likelihood that they're oblivious to the impropriety of such incestuous relationships? How can there be any chance at all that they don't know how it looks from the outside?
If they were ever to be tried in court for corruption, they might be able to claim some measure of plausible deniability, but that's not the same as having credibility from the outset. These men have none.
Powell, Baker and Wheeler are textbook cases of utterly shameless, corrupt officials - and short of making public, signed confessions - or wearing sandwich-boards with "whore for sale" written on them - there's not much more they could do to prove it.
On the post: Double Fine Unchains Game IP, Fans Work To Make The Game For Them
To be fully honest, not everything DF does is a success - it has some real failures behind it, both critically and commercially speaking.
But not once - not even once - have I felt the terrible buyer's remorse I've had from realising that the latest big-dick EA game or the last Arkham sequel or Diablo God-Damned Fucking Miserable Pay to Win Piece of Shit III is a steaming great load of crap.
Even when a DF game doesn't work for me and I don't "feel the love", the ideas are almost always fresh and interesting, I know they've tried their best, they'll learn and do better - unlike the soup-factories of gaming, my support here means a good company will improve and gaming as a whole can only benefit.
There are very few companies in the world I give my financial loyalty to, very few worthy of genuine praise. Double Fine has been and remains good - I'm happy to reward that with my money, every time. :)
On the post: Game Dev Derek Smart (Again) Responds To A Negative Review By Making Vague Legal Threats And Banning Commenters
Error 418: sanity not found
tl;dr: he's a drama queen, deliberately manufacturing his own controversy for his own lulz and profit.
I won't be buying any of his games.
He won't miss me.
God knows, I won't miss him, either.
On the post: David Braben, Once Angry At Used Games, Now A New Business Model Embracer
Elite:Dangerous
Link to finished Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous
I've been looking forward to this for decades. I contributed quite heavily (relative to my income) not just to the Kickstarter but also to it's satellite projects (licensed spin-off books and audio-books from third-parties, with proceeds going to the main project's total). I'm not sure how much I spent, but it's by far and away the most money I've ever thrown at a game, including when I've had to buy a new console to play it.
I applaud Braben's engagement with the new marketplace of funding - if he sticks with it and doesn't slide back into old habits of tying his projects to the whims of mainstream publishers, then I'll be more than happy to back his future work above and beyond the call of retail prices.
I also appreciate his recognition of piracy as not being of the ridiculous, monstrous character that anti-piracy campaigners would have us all believe.
I strongly disagree with the article on one point: the implication that big budget games and movies can only be funded through Big Investment.
Elite:Dangerous is a relatively obscure project and knowledge of David Braben and Elite is largely limited to a smaller number of Britons who have followed our country's games industry for years. Most of its backers are undoubtedly players of the earlier versions.
According to Kickstarter, E:D (terrible abbreviation!) made just over 1.57 million pounds (about 2.5 million dollars) from just over 25,600 backers.
By way of contrast, current charts have the upcoming Elder Scrolls Online now pulling pre-orders at 28,000 people a week in the US alone - and the chart-publishers are calling it "a slow week".
[ http://www.vgchartz.com/article/251500/usa-preorders-chart-25-january-2014-another-slow-week/ ]
As time passes and the infrastructure and marketing get better - and more and more people get used to funding projects ahead of development, via sites like Kickstarter - the reputations and popularity of both crowdfunding sites and crowdfunding-focused developers will undoubtedly continue to grow - and the revenue will grow with them.
Translate TES: Online's 28K preorders a week into crowdfunding and you can see what kind of money can be generated.
Translate GTA V's seven million total worldwide preorders into crowdfunding and you can see a budget of 420 million dollars - completely outgunning the budget of every film and game ever produced.
Whether piracy exists or not, content creators of all hues will start to seriously kick the various conventional investors to the kerb, in favour of leaner, smarter and more cost-effective specialists in marketing and distribution.
No more EA. No more MPAA companies.
I think it's inevitable, it's unstoppable and it's something I look forward to. :)
On the post: Hollywood Needs The Internet More Than The Internet Needs Hollywood... So Why Is The W3C Pretending Otherwise?
Ummm...
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