p2pnet.net News View:- Music companies are suing their customers with the apparent goal of ruining them financially. The movie studios will put you in jail. But Game companies have been turning over content to their users for almost a decade.

What gives?

Games are a billion dollar industry now, leap-frogging the pop music market and rivaling the motion picture industry in revenue they generate. But with all the profit to be had, the leading lights of the game industry have consistently empowered their users, instead of beating them with the legal stick.

Why did they chose this course, instead of the confrontational approach of the RIAA, the MIAA, and now most importantly, of the CRIA (The Canadian Recording Industry Association of America)?

First, Get Yourself An Army
Id software is behind the hugely successful Doom and Quake series games. It’s hard to overstate just how ground-breaking these games were, and how influential they were on everything that came afterwards.

Based on their previous experience with the First-Person Shooter (FPS) prototype Wolfenstein 3D, id software built the ability to make "wads" (customized, user-created game levels) into their first release of Doom. This innovation was continued and greatly enhanced through the Quake series (where user-created content are called "mods"), and is now an industry standard included in many games.

The opening up of content to modding resulted in fervent online communities who took the games as their starting point and extended them in an explosion of creativity. Many of the top mods have been released as commercial products by themselves, with others reaching a popularity equal to that of the original game (for example the online Counter-Strike mod for the blockbuster Half-Life title).

But the gaming industry didn’t see this activity as a threat to their existence,. Rather, it was a way to protect their position in a competitive market.

The creator of Doom has said that at the end of the 90s, most game designers came to have a Doom or Quake mod as the foremost item on their resumes. The point is clear. These communities of modders were training the game designers of the future. If they were working on your game, they were simultaneously adding to its value by creating content for it and when the time came to hire new designers for your studio, you had a fresh crop of coders dedicated to your titles from which to chose.

Sue ‘em All
Canadian heritage minister Liza Frulla recently said that she’ll be backing a new law, "addressing the peer-to-peer issue … It will give the tools to companies and authors to sue."

Such a law is made for the music and movie industry, not for the game industry, who, as we have shown above, courts its fans, instead of suing them. And Canada is home to top-tier game design houses such as Bioware, EA, and Ubisoft, whose creations sell far more widely around the world than Canadians movies or music.

And they’re clearly not clamouring for such a law.

What Frulla is proposing is that we sue the directors and guitar heros of the future. Do you think the next Rush will come into existence if the parents of the next Geddy Lee are forced to hand over their life savings when the CRIA discovers him downloading mp3s in their Scarborough basement? Or that the next Denys Arcand will make Oscar-winning films if he’s dragged into court for downloading a European release before it makes it to screens here?

For a country that believes preserving its cultural voice is a matter of life or death, this amounts to artistic suicide.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The Wilco Effect
The band Wilco famously released its critically lauded album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot online when their record company declined to release it commercially. This got it into hands of the fans, who then came out in force to support the band in the subsequent tour. This, in turn, lead to a record deal that was even better than the one they’d had with the label that rejected them.

Game design studios had been operating like this for at least a decade. And it took a tin-eared philistine at the record company to force Wilco to make a virtue of necessity. Still, the cat is out of the bag. What worked in the game industry can work for pop music.

The Wilco lessons says when the current "owners" of content turn some control overs its use (for example, putting it on the internet for free) the result is the blossoming of a community of users around. The content brings prosperity and fulfillment to everyone involved. Wilco’s happy, the fans are happy. Wilco’s new record company is very happy.

What Goes Around…
At the same time, however, we must realize the battle to keep digital content open, and the belief that opening it up will reap untold benefits, is much older, and much larger, than the p2p wars of 2005. In fact, it’s a struggle that’s been going on since the beginning of computer use itself.

One of the original hackers – before the term acquired its pejorative use – was Richard Stallman of MIT Labs. In the 1970s, at the MIT computer lab, Stallman worked in a community of like-minded people who freely shared the software they used. Like the game modders who came after them, but on a grander scale, the community at MIT were able to improve and extend the programs they used because they had open and unfettered access to their digital code. As a result, they wrote many of the ubiquitous, bedrock programs we now take for granted.

That all changed when the computer companies connected with MIT began to shut down access to the insides of the programs Stallman and others worked with. When this happened, Stallman saw the community of hackers who’d once freely shared and built on each other’s work, begin to fall apart.

Stallman set up the Free Software Foundation (1985) to try and prevent a this happening to other people. For the next decade, he advocated his beliefs forcefully and by the 1990s, they’d taken root in several important places outside the FSF.

One of these places was id software. Another was the community that had grown up around the embryonic Linux operating system, released in 1991.

Developed in an open, co-operative manner over the internet, Linux made astounding progress. Stallman himself said he was astonished by how far Linux had gone so fast. Presently, it rivals the behemoth from Redmond in quality, and threatens to eclipse it.

When the owners of id software looked at their bank accounts, they found they were millionaires — like the start-ups based around Linux that are now beginning to dot Silicon Valley. Opening up content, and the code inside, empowers a community of users who turn around and feed their energy and expertise, (and money) back into the band, the company, or the project that opened the doors in the first place.

Or, you could simply sue people or throw then in jail.

Why Sue Smart People?
Ours leaders in the West continually tell us we now live in a "knowledge economy." Yet, Canada, among other countries, is about to pass laws that will penalize people who tinker, modify, take apart and put back together the basic commodity of the knowledge economy – digital information – whether it’s the source code of a program someone like Stallman is hacking, an mp3 file a bedroom DJ is remixing, or a ripped DVD someone might like to play on their laptop while traveling.

Perhaps more importantly, these laws savagely attack any prominent point where two or more people might come together to share this information (such as a peer-to-peer network).

Like Stallman’s community at MIT, these new laws will destroy our new p2p communities by making it a crime to participate in them.

But these communities and the smart hackers and coders who inhabit them are both the backbone and brains of the "new economy" we live in.

Why shoot the golden goose?

It’s the same goose that made the owners of id software rich and allowed an album that had languished in the vault to reach the ears of listeners who so desperately wanted to hear it. We all know how important a good song is on days when we feel bad.

It’s surely an indicator of how high the stakes are in this fight that both Art and Science are at risk.

The two are perhaps the most fundamental expressions of human nature that we know. Don’t let them shut it all down.

Simon Poole – Simon Pole.ca

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Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net

<——The number one cause of computer problems is people——>

See:-
confrontational approach – BMG Canada v John Doe, p2pnet, April 18, 2005
peer-to-peer issue – Frulla backs Big Music, p2pnet, April 5, 2005

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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