Blackmoor Vituperative

In this lovely item from The Register, we see that the cancer called intellectual property is claiming more victims:

In the first case of its kind, a California video game maker is suing an entire community of software tinkerers for reverse engineering and modifying Xbox games that they legally purchased….
The lawsuit claims the ninjahacker.net users decompiled the code to several Tecmo titles, including Ninja Gaiden, Dead or Alive 3, and Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, and figured out how to create their own “skins” that change the appearance of game characters. They swapped modding techniques and hundreds of custom skins over the website message board.
The defendants are not accused of pirating the games, and the modifications and methods at issue appear no different than those employed by hobbyists on other video games — from Halo to the Sims 2 — for years. But according to the lawsuit, Tecmo suffers in the practice anyway…. (The Register, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/10/tecmo_sues_xbox_game_hackers/)

So, from Tecmo’s point of view, even though you paid for the game, you can only play it in the manner the publisher intended. This should come as no surprise. The robber barons at MPAA and RIAA — the real pirates — have been making this argument in the courts for years: successfully, in most cases. It won’t change anything, of course — the genie is out of the bottle, and getting further away from the robber barons’ grasp all the time. With books like Steal This File Sharing Book on the shelves, and the ceaseless motivation of ingenious human beings, it’s only a mater of time. As the author of Steal This File Sharing Book says:

The bottom line is that the corporations, who currently hold all the power and make most of the money, are going to have to change, and that’s something they aren’t willing to do…. Unfortunately for them, their fate is already sealed and out of their hands in the same way that buggy whip manufacturers, slide rule makers, and whale-oil lamp companies found themselves wiped out by technological change.

The question isn’t whether file sharing technology will put today’s corporate powerhouses out of business. The question is when, and that future is closer than they think. (Wallace Wang, Steal This File Sharing Book, 2004)

Another question is how much damage the robber barons can do to the rest of us in the meantime. The answer to that is, “As much as they can get away with.”