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Tess, my five year-old desktop PC, has been throwing all kinds of conniptions over the past few months. Macheads, I see your fingers poised over the keyboard: If you are interested in purchasing Apple’s overpriced hardware and gifting it to me,  I will gladly accept. Otherwise, silence.

Classes and my lab rotation are now in progress, forcibly applying structure to my time.  In lieu of more interesting developments, I saw this post on Techdirt. A band (that I happen to enjoy) denied permission to use their songs in television commercials, so the company created “sound alike” songs to use instead. Far better than crying to copyright or imaginary property, their response is more like what I talked about a few weeks ago.

Ultimately, what somebody says in the comments is correct – people liking the music in the commercials are going to find their way to Sigur Ros – even more so now that they’ve said something.

Our trip back to Maryland is coming to an end with the wedding of two of our friends. While Rachel’s off doing bridesmaid things, I’m enjoying a beautiful part of Maryland I’ve never really known existed. They even have a few palm trees growing in the gardens, something I would have appreciated a lot more pre-move. Other than looking at the scenery and being Rachel’s arm candy, there hasn’t been too much for me to do yet – hence the computer.

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My love of Lego goes back nearly as far as I can remember – Lego sets were some of the first things I saved money to buy, and one of my brother’s early sentences was him asking me to “pay dupo” with him. I’ve spent years on staff at one of the biggest Lego community websites around. Unfortunately, the Lego company has spent a lot of time (most recently in the EU) attempting to trademark the actual stud-and-tube coupling brick – essentially making it into a patent so they could prevent other companies from making their own versions. Continue Reading »

After living in California for over a month, we’re traveling back to Maryland for our friends’ wedding. It almost feels like coming home, but then it doesn’t, because we’ve had a bit of time to become accustomed to our new place being home. While we’re back, we’re going to be in a madcap dash to see our family and as many of our friends as possible while hitting up our favorite East Coast locations like El Azteca, Five Guys, and Rita’s. Continue Reading »

Game modding communities thrive on the free exchange of knowledge that ranges from the developers adopting a mod-friendly attitude to the hobbyists who share their work and knowledge with comrades. The community thrives on clever innovation, on people picking up a project where others have left off, and on learning by imitation. Yet interestingly, the poisonous ideas of imaginary property find their way into this environment as well – often to its detriment. Continue Reading »

bookTuner is a Wordpress plugin for displaying books from a Goodreads.com shelf. After configuring, you can use tags to build a customized display of the book’s title, author, and jacket artwork, as well as a link to its page on Goodreads and a preview of your review. You can see some of these options in the sidebar at right; the combination of tags I used is in the settings screenshot. Continue Reading »

Several years ago Rachel picked up “Show Me How” on impulse, a book with hundreds of random things to learn how to do to make yourself more leet. I mean, when the situation arises where an alligator has to be wrestled or a baby delivered, who doesn’t want to be the one who steps up and says, “It’s okay, I’ve got this?” This treasure trove of instruction also demonstrated a few neat ways to lace shoes, which got me interested in other creative methods. Continue Reading »

Many of my budding artist friends appreciate their obscurity problem and want to share their work without the encumbrance of copyright. Yet they are worried about others using it for commercial purposes, the same fear that drives people like Cory Doctorow into the arms of Creative Commons licenses. This idea of somebody else, maybe a corporation making all kinds of money from uncredited use of their work seems to represent a worst-case scenario for artists – thus, if we can find ways for even these types of situations to work to their advantage, everything else is simple. Continue Reading »

Ignorant corporate executive Cory Ledesma thinks buying games used somehow cheats developers (read: his company, THQ), so he doesn’t have any problem with tying a game’s online multiplayer  mode to a one-time-use code. This is the kind of ridiculous decision one can expect from the knee-jerk fiscal entitlement mentality everybody making things seems to have these days.

Of course, this is a grave misunderstanding of the marketplace and the value of the secondary market, something often discussed on TechDirt (Penny-Arcade is somewhat more sympathetic). What people like Cory fail to understand is that making a purchase is an economic decision for the customer. There’s no “right” way to do it; just because selling new games throws some money to the game’s developers doesn’t mean you’re an unfeeling shell if you save money getting it secondhand. Certainly there is more involved in the decision than simply price, and wanting to support the game’s creators is a potential influencing factor; however, theatrics like this sure don’t do much to build love for THQ and their employees.

Here’s the kicker: online multiplayer is usually an incentive to buy a game instead of downloading the free version. By removing this benefit from the used games, Cory’s company has essentially made the two identical. Customers should ask themselves why they bother buying the used game at all when they could get the same benefits for free. Believe it or not there’s a competitive marketplace at work here, no matter how much folks like Cory whine about it.

People like this need to quit trying to blame others: It’s his company’s responsibility to encourage purchases of new retail versions. This should be elementary, but providing incentives for people to buy the game new needs to be about adding benefits, not taking them away. Lowering retail prices, including DLC, or deluxe editions all help give customers a reason to buy. Taking away core features and pretending it’s an extra is not.

Now that we have internet access and are pretty much unpacked, I’ve been slowly trying to catch up on the internet. I’ve collected RSS feeds in Google Reader to the point that I can’t get through them all on a regular day, so several weeks of backlog probably means I’m going to give up and miss out on some incredible world event or the latest IP-maximalist atrocity. Continue Reading »