Spanish government adopts anti-internet piracy law

The Spanish government has adopted new legislation aimed at cracking down on websites illegally sharing digital content. Called the Sinde Law, after the former Spanish culture minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde, rightholders can report websites hosting infringing content to a newly created government commission. The commission will examine the complaint and determine if further legal action against an infringing site or the ISPs providing infrastructure to it is necessary. If the commission decides in the affirmative, the case will be referred to a judge who would rule on whether or not to shut down the website within 10 days.

The law has been vigorously opposed in Spain, with bloggers, journalists and tech professionals staging a series of protests, including writing an anti-Sinde manifesto. The president of the Spanish Film Academy even resigned over the issue. Overseas, open internet activists have voiced concerns about the breadth and implications of the law.

Personally, I’m for open rights. The internet might be the closest thing we have to utopia. Quite simply, it is a free market of ideas. Once the government starts playing a coercive role, it will have a chilling effect on the online community. Ultimately, it is the internet users that lose out. Besides, one of the sites where I get my fix of classic basketball games is in Spanish; so that’s at least one thing I’ll lose out on.

Source: BBC News

Francis Paolo Tiopianco, Entry #3

Piracy for the Love of Fandom

Image Source: http://www.anigamers.com

A fansub (short for fan-subtitled) is a version of a foreign film or foreign television program which has been translated by fans and subtitled into a language other than that of the original. This is usually common with animes and asian dramas.  Most of these shows in order to get "dubbed" or "subbed" in another language, needs to be licensed in another country. This happens when the series has already finished airing in the home country. Also, when it takes a while for these shows to be officially released in DVDs. Fansubs, however, does it semi-real-time. When an episode is aired, give or take in less than a week, a fan sub will be out, thereby giving non-east asian speakers almost the same pace as their home country counterparts.

Scanlation on the other hand, is pretty much the same thing, although it involves comics, particularly manga. It involves scanning the pages and translating, hence the word. Again, fans do this because it takes ages for manga to be released and more often than not only those popular titles make their way into the English market.

While most of the fansubbers (the people who do the translation and the actual subs) and scanlators (for manga) do it for free and do not gain any profit whatsoever (except maybe the eternal gratitude of the fans), it cannot be denied that under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, such an act is illegal, to wit:

Authors of literary and artistic works protected by this Convention shall enjoy the exclusive right of making and of authorizing the translation of their works throughout the term of protection of their rights in the original works. (Article 8,  Right of Translation)

In the recent years, Japanese Copyright Holders have been aggressive in their fight against piracy, taking down streaming sites as well as actually arresting persons related to such offenses. What has been controversial about this is that minors are involved -since most of the people who do these works are below 20. In fact, just last year a 14-year old boy was arrested for leaking manga in Youtube. This reminds me of  Lawrence Lessig's lecture on Remix and how we need to change the current copyright rules in place. This only reiterates his claim that children are now being viewed as criminals.

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Entry no. 15
Soleil Flores

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Of Open Source, Flashcarts and Homebrews

I bought my Nintendo DS to play the then-new Version of Pokemon (Diamond and Pearl). And for a while, knowing that one original game card of the NDS costs quite a lot, I thought those would be the only games I'd be able to play... until I learned about flashcarts.

A flashcart is a device similar to an original game card, but instead having a built in memory, it runs with an external microSD card, wherein you can put in, as originally intended, unofficial, user- and community-created, usually-free NDS softwares (homebrews): from media players (Moonshell), to comic book readers (ComicBook DS) and to organizers-slash-web browsers (DSOrganize).

However, while flashcarts were originally intended to the development of a self-sustaining homebrew industry, they are now more commonly used to play commercial games via downloaded ROMs, free of charge. These ROMs have been the source of Nintendo's (and other gaming companies') intensified battle against piracy, even going as far as placing Anti-Piracy (AP) features in their titles.

After learning about open source last Friday, I can't help but relate this practice with my flashcart experience. Indeed, the flashcart industry, may be considered as an underground society of (illegal?) open source enthusiasts.

What was termed as Linus' Law provides that, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

The bug-solving prowess of the flashcart community has helped detect and solve numerous bugs not only in homebrew apps, but also in commercial titles. The community, however, has also learned how to bring down several AP measures of these games, thus successfully making these AP-infested ROMs playable in flashcarts. Flashcart programmers have also developed tools in editing and recreating these ROMs. Cheat code programmers have also joined in on the fun of testing and developing a whole new gaming experience. A lot of community-created translation (localization) projects of Japan-only games have also fluorished over time.

As I've said, the gaming companies are starting to notice the threat that flashcarts pose unto their market, but I am doubtful as to the practicability of Intellectual Property Rights discourse in this phenomenon, given that a huge part of this community involves the internet. But knowing the capitalists that they are, they will not take this matter lightly.

TV vs. Net

I just realized how disconnected I am to our TV already.

I remember the times when I had to finish my assignments at school so that I could just stay at home, relax and watch my favorite anime series at that time (BT' X, Ghost Fighter, Hunter X Hunter, etc.) I'd get mad at my cousins when they try to change the channel whenever my eyes are glued unto the screen. I know the exact times when my favorite shows are shown and I always act as if I have a vested right to watch these shows, as a reward for my being a "good" student.


But now, I rarely watch the TV. Aside from the snippets I see from the teleseryes my mom's fond of, I only watch the TV whenever I feel like I need to watch the news to remain "in the know".

And now that I thought about it, me getting over the tube-box may have been caused by my now-full-blown internet addiction:

1. My daily morning news from Inquirer.net and Yahoo! News;


2. My weekly dose of anime and manga from various torrent and streaming sites (I don't need to be at home at a specific time just to watch a TV show anymore);


3. My daily mail;


4. My daily fix of Facebook and its games;


5. My occassional Wikipedia trips.

Even my mom, who has been religiously following her seryes 'til almost midnight has discovered the existence of Youtube, ever so thankful that she won't need to stay up late just to watch Villainess A slap the face of Protagonist B.

Indeed, the Internet has changed the way people entertain themselves and it probably will continue to make TV less and less relevant in the future (thus resulting in a lot stronger presence of the TV networks on the Net)

If video did kill the radio star, then the net will, someday, kill the TV star.

The BSA Manhunt

I was riding the MRT the other day when I noticed the Business Software Alliance poster offering a bounty as high as P1 Million pesos for anyone who would be brave/stupid enough to narc on one’s employer for using pirated software on company network systems. What an ingenuous approach, I thought. Any regular schmo could not care less whether his office has genuine software installed in his/her computer as long as it’s running fine. But for 1 million pesos, why the hell not, right? The juicy prospect of earning money with the added bonus of sticking it to your dictatorial boss and your uber-stingy company does make one sit up and take notice, most especially any one of those disgruntled employees who ride the MRT every day.

It made me wonder though, if the BSA is willing to fork out a considerable amount of money just to encourage people to rat out their employers, does it mean that they actually think that they stand to gain a significant amount as a net effect of this plan of theirs? The answer would seem to be in the affirmative. From their perspective, the substantial loss of income would be enough justification to conduct this type of campaign to deter companies from using those dastardly pirated software. The reward money is chump change considering the king’s ransom they would demand from companies for the installation of genuine ones.

It’s not the BSA’s problem if some of these companies cannot afford to have their entire system outfitted with the genuine stuff. So what if most companies are in a vulnerable financial position at this point in time? When small businesses like internet cafes have their equipment confiscated and left to rot in a storage facility somewhere effectively paralyzing the business and causing its eventual demise thereafter – not the BSA’s fault. And if companies get fined a bankruptcy inducing amount for their infraction, well BSA should not be blamed either.

After all, the companies reported did violate the law. It serves them right to be fined and punished. These are not some lowly person’s rights being trampled upon here. We’re talking about the rights of the software companies – the big guns. It’s not as if there are more important rights being violated that need more immediate and effective attention from our government. It’s not like we’re a 3rd world country with more pressing issues than upholding the precious property rights of copyright and patent owners.

If I have to offer my two cents though, I believe that if BSA’s actions are truly dedicated to inhibiting piracy, then it should instead promote the use of FOSS in the Philippines. In countries like ours (economy cellar dwellers), FOSS represents an ethical approach to software use that supports IP laws. Greater FOSS adoption means the piracy index of the Philippines will go down. In sum, go FOSS!