Digital Diatribe

Looks like google has taken it down already, here’s a screenshot. Street View is awesome.

Originally seen on Japan Probe

Article found here.
Go read it, I’ll wait.
Done? Ok.

“Heindl said she had no objections to people seeding it to BitTorrent download sites, many of which the music industry is trying with limited success - to shut down because they contain vast stores of pirated music.”

Firstly, you can’t seed something to a BitTorrent download site, because a BitTorrent download site is a site where you go to download the BitTorrent client. But then if you knew anything about BitTorrent you wouldn’t have then gone on to so firmly insert your foot into your mouth by saying that BitTorrent download sites “contain vast stores of pirated music.”. Bram Cohen would be proud.

For someone writing for the tech section of a national newspaper, and who claims to be a tech writer in general, I would have expected better. I’m not sure if you are indirectly quoting Heindl here or quite what you’re doing, but it makes you look horribly  ill informed, and if you were quoting her, it’s not obvious, which makes you look like a sloppy writer.

A Torrent site or search engine contains torrent files, which, when downloaded and opened in a client that supports the  BitTorrent protocol, provide metadata relating to the suggested file name, the file size, and the tracker server. Through the tracker the user is then able to download the files from the people who are seeding them. The torrent site simply provides a small text file, and in some cases only a link to the file.
It doesn’t “contain vast stores of pirated music” because that defeats the entire point of a peer to peer protocol.
But then, as a tech journalist, you should already know all of this.

In response to the actual artists:
Would you like some cheese with your whine?
You get to do what you love for a living. And some of you make more money in a year than I’ll make in a decade and you’ll have fun doing it. Contrast that to the rest of us, who have to sit behind desks looking busy from 9-5 in the land of the working dead.

I don’t buy CDs anyway, I listen to the radio, and non commercial radio at that, so by your logic I’m a thief because I’m not paying you anything to hear your music.
I’ll quite happily to pay money to the tune of up to $130 to go to your concert, assuming I manage to hit refresh on the ticketek website within the first 10 seconds of tickets going on sale and make it through to the order confirmation page before all the online scalpers. Oh, that was also assuming you don’t suck, sorry The Veronicas, Jimmy Barnes, Phrase, Human Nature, Mahalia Barnes, Damien Leith, Anthony Callea, Weapon X, Ken Hell and the Dawn Collective.

What I won’t do is pay over inflated prices for CDs which are so poorly mastered due to dynamic range compression that I’d be better off running the needle of a gramophone over them in order to get some semblance of music out of them.
If you released something that was worth listening to then perhaps I’d change my stance on this.

To conclude, if you’re all in it for the money then you’re a bunch of sell outs anyway.
If you can’t afford to pay the rent, then don’t rent out a 5 bedroom mansion while you’re off overseas and “unavailable for comment”.
Go back to snorting coke and not eating anything.

Yours sincerely,
A well informed user of technology and alleged music pirate.

This is getting beyond a joke. Every time I try to go out and purchase a game, it’s either out of stock EVERYWHERE or I get invited to drop my trousers and bend over the counter where the assistant manager would then proceed to anally rape me.
Why do retailers persist in these price gouging tactics? How on earth is it good for business to drop the price of Bioshock on the xbox 360 to $40 for one week, only to raise back to $120 the next? And to have MarioKart Wii on sale for $77 for 3 days, and then jack the price up to $99. Who the fuck wants to buy it for $99? Surely they’ll just wait until the price comes back down again right?
Only it doesn’t. After these crazy sale promotions, the price goes back up to RRP and stays there. It’s like they are punishing you for not coming into the store the minute the thing goes on sale. They expect you to keep an eye out on the catalogues and then rush in to buy as soon as the price drops.
I don’t know about you, but I seriously can’t be fucked.

Where is all this hate coming from, you might ask?
I went to try and purchase a copy of MarioKart Wii last night at a local shopping centre. SOLD OUT. Everywhere. And then I get a lecture from the staff at GAME on how I should have pre ordered.The same lecture I got from EB about how I should have pre ordered GTAIV Special edition for the 360.
I’m sorry, but maybe instead of forcing everyone to pre order, you can do your fucking job and gauge how popular a title is and then order in enough fucking stock for it.
It’s not as if you don’t have agreements with the suppliers where you can send back unsold stock, so what’s the big fucking deal? Do you just like punishing people for not pre ordering?
How is it that in a suburb surrounded by University housing and uni students and high income single people, which make up a pretty high proportion of the gaming demographic, the local retailers all fail to get enough stock in?
Either they hate us, or there is a mandate coming from someone that says that all these games have to sell out, thus forcing people to pre order, thus making the job of store managers all that easier so that they can all eventually be fired and replaced by robot anal raping drones.

Well, my response to this is quite simple. FUCK YOU!
I’ll go and install a mod chip on my Wii and 360 and then you won’t get another god damned cent out of me. How do you like them apples?
I’m sure I’m not the only one put off by these ridiculous pricing and stock policies. Most of my friends have already chipped their consoles and have an R4 in their DS units, and if they haven’t, they are seriously considering it after the massive fuck abouts with MarioKart and GTAIV.
What incentive is there to buy it legally? Walk into a store only to find out the special pricing promotion is now over and you’ll have to pay $120 to get the game you were after? Get a lecture on how you should have pre ordered it? Thanks, but no thanks.
For those games that I actually do want to own a physical copy of, such as GTAIV Special Edition, I’ve found it’s cheaper to order them from the UK. At least they have it in stock and the game hasn’t been dicked around with by the OFLC.
But you know what’s even faster than that?
Downloading the iso.

Piracy has so many advantages that you wonder why publishers don’t try to adopt some of these ideas.
You can get a game that’s been released in any region, so no more having to import rare titles from Japan just to play them.
You get it the day it’s released, not the day that they decide to have some stupid midnight launch in your country. Often, you can get it before it’s released.
You get it quick. You don’t have to drive to a store only to find out the copy they said they were holding for you got sold.
With movies, you get the stupid region coding stripped out for you and the nice little notices telling you you’re a pirate are deftly removed.

And speaking of region coding, Microsoft has a lot to answer for. I can’t understand how it is that Sony comes out the good guy in all this, as they usually fuck up everything they touch, but in this case PS3 owners are the clear winners here as they are the only people in the country who get to play RockBand (the issues I have with that would take up a whole new rant).

So when it becomes cheaper to chip your Wii than it does to buy MarioKart (assuming you can find a copy), what do you think most pissed off gamers are going to go out and do?