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Tecmo, which has published Ninja Gaiden, the Dead or Alive series, are suing fans for making custom skins for the characters ingame. I wish I was slanting this article in some way or other to excuse how absurd this lawsuit is, but I am not. There is no illegal gamecopying involved. You have to purchase and own the Tecmo titles to make this work. What is involved are a bunch of blokes who reversed engineered the title and figured out how to make extra content for the game.

I equate this with someone purchasing a book, and then being sued because he/she highlighted portions of the text (thus modifying the looks of its contents). To its defense, Tecmo is using the DMCA act whereby breathing is illegal, and to sway the courts is making use of the nefarious term “hacker”, as per the following statement: “Hacking of this kind will not be tolerated and we intend to take all necessary measures to protect our intellectual property.”

“Most of the skins posted on the Message Board by defendants show Tecmo Characters with appearances that are different from the original Tecmo designs,” the complaint further notes; “Several… are designed to make Tecmo Characters appear naked.”

To add insult to injury, Tecmo’s Pfeiffer says the company is seeking $1,000 to $100,000 in damages for every custom skin swapped over the website. So continuing with the highlighted book analogy, that’s like demanding $1,000 to $100,000 in compensation for every time I highlighted the book, EVEN THOUGH NOT DOING SO WOULDN’T AFFECT THE PLAINTIFF AT ALL. What does Tecmo gain by suing these folks? There are no lost sales due to the actions of the defendants (no piracy involved), why if anything, the sales go up! (The prospect of having attractive naked girls in a video game is enough to make any male want to purchase it.)

Another analogy: someone figures out how to integrate a GPS system in his car. But because he modified the car he owns, Ford sues him. Even though he bought the car, and modified it himself. He is demanded to pay incredible fees on the basis of how many modifications he made.

The full article can be read here.

Microsoft seeks to patent “Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form.” I’m not even going to tell you the grandiosse repercussions of such actions… actually I am.

So Microsoft seeks to patent latitude/longitude coordinates. If this were to pass, the repercussions would be enormous: weather information websites, basic geography websites, GIS datum information, online navigation maps, GPS datasets would all be liable for lawsuits. Honestly, this is a prime example of why I’m against software patents in its current form: because the system is being abused to the point of insanity. If this passes, it will be illegal to have any content on the Internet that pertains to geography and locations.

But this extends beyond the reaches of the Internet. I am a Physical Geography student. I put alot of my work online so that I can access and work on it regardless of where I am physically situated. With such laws in place, it means that I am legally liable to be sued because my homework contains Lat/Long data in its filename. This homework that so happens to be online. Utterly ridiculous.

Death is no obstacle to feeling the long arm of the Recording Industry Ass. of America.

Lawyers representing several record companies have filed suit against an 83-year old woman who died in December, claiming that she made more than 700 songs available on the internet.

“I believe that if music companies are going to set examples they need to do it to appropriate people and not dead people,” Robin Chianumba told AP. “I am pretty sure she is not going to leave Greenwood Memorial Park to attend the hearing.”

Gertrude Walton, who lived in Beckley, West Virginia hated computers, too, her daughter adds. An RIAA spokesperson said that it would try and dismiss the case.

However the RIAA’s embarrassment doesn’t end there. Chianumba said that she had sent a copy of her mother’s death certificate to record company lawyers in response to an initial warning letter, over a week before the suit was filed. In 2003 the RIAA sued a twelve year old girl for copyright infringement. She’d harbored an MP3 file of her favorite TV show on her hard drive. Her working class parents in a housing project in New York were forced to pay two thousand dollars in a settlement.

You can’t be too young to face the consequences of being social, it seems. Only the unborn, it seems, have yet to receive an infringement suit.

But here’s another interpretation of this distasteful litigation. Wouldn’t the RIAA members be better off if a traditional compensation scheme, such as the one used by radio, was extended to digital music?

Yes, of course they would. And so would we.

Source: The Register

I really don’t know if this is a circumstance of someone else using the computer of the deceased individual in question, or another false-positive. However, if it does ultimately become a false-positive (the result of which we shall never unfortunately know), then it does bring into question the legitimacy of the RIAA and their sue-everything-that-moves campaign.

Full Story

This despite the fact that the RIAA sets ridiculously high royalties on legal music obtained from Internet services. If only the RIAA had fully-embraced the income potential of the Internet rather than suing off anyone who uses it, that %31 figure might of been even higher.