Nintendo, Sony, and EA all hate your internet freedoms
Matt Hawkins For those who haven’t heard the acronym SOPA yet, it stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act, a new bill that’s intended to hinder copywright infringement, though it mostly risks to rob all of our rights as citizens on the net.
For down and dirty rundown of that the bill would do exactly, if it gets passed, simply refer to American Censorship Day’s infographic, though it doesn’t answer the basic question, and that’s: what exactly is the criteria that will be used to determine if copyright infringement has occurred?
And the answer is simple: no one really knows. Hence the power (and danger) of the bill. It’s so vague that pretty much any IP holder can scream that such and such is perpetuating online piracy. And as the infographic makes clear, LOTS of things could get axed, like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit… this site as well.
So who’s behind this? Well, as Joystiq points out, a number of folks, including some video game people. Like Nintendo, who perhaps more than anyone has been the biggest victim of piracy, admittedly. Who knows how many dollars in game sales have been cost via R4 flash carts for the DS over the years.
Then again, there may have been game sales and other forms of benefits as a result of such devices. Time to come clean: I have such a device. Several in fact. I mostly use it to run emulators, to play old NES games, primarily during a particularly dreary subway ride. Along with various homebrew games, and… yup, pirated commercial software. From Japan.
Before blinding putting large sums of money down on a title, due to the high price of importing, I like to test drive and see what I’m getting, since Gamefly and the like are not viable options I’m afraid. And guess what? If I like something, I’ll get the original. And to show everyone that I’m not full of it…
It’s not much because, hey, stuff from abroad is pricey. And I wouldn’t have even one if I hadn’t gotten the chance to see beforehand if I would like what I’d be getting. So my point is, piracy is not the worst thing in the world, though back to the topic at hand: it’s just being used as an excuse to strong arm and mishandle our rights.
Along with Nintendo’s whose draconian online infrastructure is further evidence of their attitude towards the internet, is Sony. Who, btw, just cut the number the devices that a game you purchased via PSN can be shared between devices. In a move that will encourage piracy, more than anything else.
EA is also part of team, and their crowd-pleasing attitudes towards its customer base, like how stuff you say on their silly message board will prevent you from actually playing their games is further evidence of a company that is seriously devoid of reason or logic, and therefore perceives EVERYTHING as a threat. Yay.
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