Category Archives: Culture

These posts will deal with Copyright and other cultural topics

Nintendo doesn’t get fair use

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In the YouTube community there’s a bit of a kerfuffle over the fact that Nintendo has been doing two things. First, they’ve been taking down Let’s Play videos because of copy right infringement. The second is they’ve been putting ads on those videos they aren’t taking down. I don’t believe that either of these should be allowed. As always, I’m not a lawyer – keep that in mind.

Let’s Play videos are essentially play through of a particular game. Nintendo is claiming that they own the copyright to video because they created the content that is in the game, including the text, music, artwork, and characters. This is of course completely true. However, they don’t own everything in the video. The person doing the let’s play makes choices so, while the overall story arc is in fact the same, the manner in which the game is completed is unique and can happen in very different order. Which means if Nintendo owns the copyright of the way you play it, then it owns every possible way the game could ever be played. I could see that there’s some logic to that argument, however, it’s impossible to predict how the game will play out any given time and it also means that Nintendo also owns every time the player fails to beat the game and gives up.

If this was the only thing in the video, I’d say Nintendo has a decent argument, but even then it’s something of a remix, because things are being changed, events happen randomly that aren’t under Nintendo’s control, they set the parameters for something to happen, but they couldn’t predict a priori when something was going to happen or what items would be dropped at any given time – which makes the game different each time.

Furthermore, many of these videos have voice overs by the players. In many cases the players are talking about things completely unrelated to the actual game which Nintendo cannot claim as their own copyright. In many cases it is actually the YouTuber that is driving viewership to the video and not the game alone. Of course if you don’t like Pokemon you’re not going to sit and watch a 45 minute play through of Pokemon even if you find the person hilarious (or you might). It’s the personalities that make these videos valuable as much as the Nintendo game material.

I also think that Nintendo needs to put this in perspective of other mediums that people do a similar type activity. Think of someone analyzing a film, a book, or TV Show – in all of these cases there are direct quotes, clips of the video or whatever with pausing and zooming and highlighting and whatever. In addition there is custom material that the specific critic ads to the video which makes it something new. This constitutes Fair Use. These reviews make the film more valuable because it draws viewers to the movie, the is the same for video games.

Nintendo doesn’t understand this and it’s likely to be contested, eventually Nintendo will lose this and will have lost a lot of good will from the gaming community. This will end poorly for Nintendo.

Trust and Networks

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At work today, my team and I went through training on something called the “Speed of Trust” which essentially argues that the more trust an organization has the less costs there are associated with doing business. Not only are things cheaper, but they happen faster. I was actually pleasantly surprised, I’m typically pretty skeptical of things like this as a rule because I feel that they compress extremely complicated ideas down to a single scale to be measured on. However, with the facilitator’s contribution of how the different types of powers interact with trust it became a lot more meaningful, even if there were so many platitudes provided by the author of the book during the videos that were shown.

I think that there’s one area that was definitely missing from this topic that was only moderately touched on – Networks. There are plenty of network theories that discuss the obvious cost savings and accumulation of social capital in better ways than was covered in this discussion.

Social Capital is a way of measuring how much influence you have in a network. Unfortunately, the only networks that were recognized in this method are the formal networks that are created simply by being an organization. There was no discussion of how people can create informal networks that can have more influence on the organization than the actual formal network structures. For instance, if I want to change the direction of some project and I’m struggling within the project itself, I may try to use my formal structure of going up through my manager over to one of the managers of the people on the team. However, this is typically considered poor form, another option would be to discuss the topic with someone else that is influential and spend some social capital and have the problem resolved informally. These networks can influence the structure of organizations because people that are managers may not be the thought leaders in the organizations. When striving for change in an organization it is crucial to expend social capital on the most influential people – titlewise or otherwise.

Furthermore, these networks can enable anyone to generate more powerful ideas. As you discuss issues or ideas with many different people in the organization and include their suggestions or comments around the idea/issue it’s possible to create significantly better ideas. Then whenever you’ve come to the point where you’d like to enact your idea, you’ve already built a coalition of support through your conversations and will have more successful ideas.

The Speed of Trust course was pretty useful to help determine how to address trust issues in an organization. It’s important to identify where and how things are going wrong. However, I think it’s important to keep in mind network theory to maximize the benefit of trust.

Amazing artistic abilities unleashed through remixing

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Most people have seen Macklemore’s Thrift Shop video and if not, they’ve heard the song. Roughly speaking the song is about a guy who decides to do all his shopping at thrift shops because he finds it’s better pricing for clothes that look as good or better than the clothes that are popular today and cost $50 for a T-Shirt.

The song was then covered by a band that specializes in big band styles music, which by itself is a pretty cool song. This was then remixed by some French DJs mixed with two different movies and turned into this awesome video, which I found on reddit once it got pretty popular on /r/videos.

 Through this evolution of Thrift Shop, it’s pretty obvious something new is being made each time. In the “Granpa’s Style” version the electropop sounds are replaced with a standup bass, a keyboard, and a jazz drummer plus a fantastic female vocalist. The video is simply a recording of them performing the song. In the final version of the video, it’s so far disconnected from the original video that if you heard it alone, you could be excused for not realizing it was based upon Macklemore’s Thrift Shop.

Not only is it bringing a new and interesting life to Macklemore’s music, it’s reviving two forgotten films that show off some pretty amazing dancing mixed with modern day video remixing that just adds a lot to the song. I think that the song along would be a lot less without the video.

Remixing are a good thing. We all remix things even if we really aren’t aware of it. When you talk about a song or movie in a quote along while watching someone streaming a video game or sports game, you’ve remixed that experience. You’ve created something new. The context of the game you’re watching triggered a memory that you associate with that movie, tv show, or song. Internet memes are all remixes and these highlight the need for more things to be entered into the public domain. No one wants the owners of “Grumpy Cat” to go around suing anyone that makes a meme using their cat. They’ve registered a trademark for Grumpy Cat, so it really could happen.

Looming battle: Content providers vs. service providers

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In my last post about the PS4, I discussed how the PS4 is a long term play and that over time the product will move away from playing directly on the PS4 towards utilizing servers to stream the game to the user. This was an argument to counter many PC gamer’s disdain for the specs for the system. Sure, the specs aren’t great, but they are a huge advancement over the PS3, which is still able to play, rather well, new games.

Most of the feedback I got on the article basically went “well that’s great and all, but the infrastructure isn’t there for this in the US.” This is extremely valid feedback. AOL still records $500 Million in revenue from dial up connections. The US rates among the worst in developed world for internet speeds and penetration. Of course there’s the argument that our country is so much larger, well, the EU as a whole tops us, it’s not uniform across the EU, but that still makes it a valid comparison. The other thing to remember, the console won’t just come out in the US. Many of these features will work better in Korea and Japan than in the US. Typically Sony has released different features by region and will likely experiment with the sharing features in Japan before rolling it out to the US, where Sony knows it will have infrastructure difficulties.

This discussion raises additional concerns though, infrastructure isn’t just about the lines in the ground, but also the structure of the service providers that allow access. In the case of the US, not only does quality and speed of the connection vary wildly but we also have more restrictions on the amount of data we can download than other countries. For a typical family you end up buying the internet 2 or 3 times at the minimum (smart phone access per family member and then the main house connection). Each of these connections likely has a different maximum for downloading or uploading with fees for going over this.

This creates a lot of difficulties as we don’t always know how much bits a specific file will use as we access it. In many cases, it likely drives consistent under utilization of the service do to excessive fees and user dissatisfaction for those hitting the cap. Americans are starting to cut the cord in record numbers, my wife and I don’t have TV, just cable internet; I have a lot of options without Cable. This is going to start increasing the rate of frustration users have with caps. I typically watch live streaming video in 720p while my wife surfs the net and watches a show on Hulu.

I have absolutely no idea how much bandwidth is being consumed on a typical night. There is no easy way for me to measure this or plan for getting close to a cap. Furthermore, both my wife and I use our phones to access the internet, listen to music, watch videos, and play games on our phones. Again, all of these use bandwidth and likely push us against our cellular plan. Sure there’s meters for these, but they are notoriously inaccurate.

This issue with be further exacerbated by the proliferation of cloud services like Drop Box, video sharing on YouTube, streaming new services all the time, and the eventual goal of offloading computing power to the cloud. The measurement of these services will be extremely difficult and planning for how much data these services will require will be absurdly difficult at best for the average user. It is likely that these services will push users over the usage caps on a monthly bases.

I think that we need to start looking for another solution. I think that Google Fiber is a start, it would make sense for Netflix, Amazon, Dishnetwork, Microsoft, Intel, and other content providers to join a consortium that will introduce a new service provider to attack the incumbents. I have heard that Dish is currently working on creating their own system with Google or some other company, I think that this could potentially shake up the industry and allow users more options. There are going to be a wealth of new services that require more and more bandwidth and higher speeds. If these content providers want users to be able to access and enjoy their services they need to challenge the status quo to enable their customers.

Some thoughts on gun issues

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I posted the following as a comment to my brother’s comment about gun control. He’s a boarder patrol agent. Basically he commented about how allowing guns (in the right hands) can save lives. He also argued that if you take guns away from most people only criminals will have them. As most of you know I love to shoot guns. I’ve shot all sorts of guns from pistols to an AR15. I think it’s fun and a good way to enjoy some time with your friends. That being said, here’s my comment to him.

“Alright, I’ve been hearing a lot about how gun control won’t fix the problem. You know I like shooting guns and do believe that we should be able to own guns. Now, I think that there needs to be some level of gun control/additional checking before gun purchases are made but I’m not exactly sure what that is. Secondly, simply saying criminals won’t follow the law isn’t a suitable answer either because there’s no completion of the thought. If criminals won’t follow the law, why are they criminals in the first place? What do we need to do to eliminate their supposed need for the gun to commit said dubious act?

I believe that to truly eliminate (or greatly reduce gun violence) we need to address the root cause, gun control alone won’t work. We have to address the reasons for the criminality. Those include, poverty, inequality, drug addiction, sale of drugs, unemployment, being a convicted felon and so on. All of these causes have significant interaction effects. You can’t separate sale of drugs from drug addiction and drug usage is higher in impoverished areas. So, this indicates to me that we need to address the root cause issue behind poverty and drugs. The extralegal crimes related to drugs include things like murder over turf wars and the sort of activities you’re involved with as a boarder patrol agent, smuggling, etc… We as a society have direct control over what is a legal and illegal drug. We have control over this – it’s a matter of do what we consider the right thing to do about drugs.

The other obvious area we need to address is mental health, which has a different root cause than the others. Many people can’t afford the mental health they need because we as a society don’t value mental health very well and many insurance companies think it’s a waste of time.

In my mind I think that if we want to address the true root cause behind gun violence we need to address poverty, drugs, and mental health. Unless you or anyone else for that matter, is willing to seriously consider fixing many of these issues, then gun control is one of the few options we have to address it. It’s a failed option from the start because it’s a band aid. In my opinion all gun advocates need to pull together and push for reform on those social issues I outlined to keep guns ownership legal as you think it should be. Otherwise we are doomed to repeat this sort of cycle.”

Yes, this is something of a rant, but I think we need to really consider what we value as a culture and how we decide to address an issue like gun control. The events at Sandy Hook and other locations in the past 2 years around the world are horrible.