Should small scale piracy lead to lawsuits?

This is a very controversial point – and one that is hard to make in a few lines, so bear with me.

We have a generation of parents now who just missed the technological boat, so to speak. They grew up just before computers (and the Internet) became popular and many can only use it for the bare minimum. Now, computers are everywhere: every kid needs it for school and most kids know way more about then than their parents ever will. And therein lies the problem: Kids are kids and you may be as good a parent as you want, but you know your 14 year old son will end up looking at porn just like you know he’ll find a way to download music and games even when you tell him not to.

Now, the dilemma is caused by combining the two: kids will do things that are illegal AND theyusually know more about computers than their parents. Even the parents that are smart enough to put a parent lock in place, would be surprised how quick their kid can circumvent it. So this poses a problem: as a parent, you’re responsible for what your kid does, yet the current reality makes it incredibly easy for your kid to do stuff online that could cost you millions as a parent!

And that’s where I object. This is simply not right – the current legal system basically forces parents to know more about computers than their kids (which is virtually impossible for most parents, ask them). A few years back, a mother was fined an enormous amount for downloading a pinball game – except her son had done this, not her. She could barely use a computer let alone prevent her son from downloading content illegally. What was she supposed to do? Take his computer away? I’m sure she did after it was too late – but it’s hardly a realistic thing to do. Kids need computers for school – a lot of school content is online so you can’t even unplug the Internet.

Some people say “just watch over what your kids are doing” and I call them naive fools. When I was 13, I was allowed 2 hours of computer every day (back in 1993) and my father had added a password so I couldn’t cheat. It took me less than a week to figure out the password and sneak on while I was home alone. You can try as hard as you want, but when kids get the chance, they’ll do it. That’s what teenagers are – they do stupid stuff. The thing is, in the past most of the stupid stuff involved petty crime – which the police would usually ignore unless it got too out of hand (like vandalism) – but considering the large scale of downloading music, games, movies, etc. AND considering how hard it is for a parent to prevent your kids from doing it, it strikes me that the current laws are far too harsh.

Of course, you may say it’s a non-problem because only a tiny tiny percentage of people who pirate get caught which is partially true. It’s not like a load of people have to pay these outrageous fines, but that’s just it – because so few people get caught, most people shrug it off and it essentially becomes a game of chance. It’s like lining up 10.000 people and shooting one at random!

If they increased the rate of prosecution and got the fines to be a lot lower to a more realistic level, I’d be more fine with it all but of course, fines wouldn’t go to the greedy corporations so, gee, I wonder why this never happened …

Razer’s Project Fiona – missing the mark?

There has been a lot of speculation over Razer‘s new secret “Project Fiona“. Words like “innovative” and “mind-blowing” were being whispered through the Internet and some even made fake mock ups that even further fuelled the wild imaginations. Razer has finally come clean and has unveiled their device and … well … it’s like the bastard love child of the Wii and a tablet.

My first impression was “who on earth would take that somewhere with them?”. The Wiimote already got plenty of laughs but at least it’s used in a home environment where you play it with family or friends. This tablet is supposed to be portable meaning its main advantage is the ability to take it with you but would you honestly enjoy being seen with something that looks like that? I get flashes of baby toys where they add bars like that on the side so the kid can easily grasp onto it.

My second thought was “who are they even catering for?”. There’s no integrated mouse, no keyboard (on-screen most likely) and the two control sticks at the side will just about handle the same amount of buttons as a regular gamepad so I doubt PC gamers are the target audience leaving console and casual gamers. Casual gamers you can scrap too (despite them taking up the majority of tablet users) because there’s no way they’d fork over that much money for what is predominantly a gaming device (hence “casual” gamers). So console gamers are left – except this tablet will be running Windows games (I assume) and last time I checked, many console gamers were allergic to anything that was more involving than shoving the disc inside the console.

On top of that, the demo stations so far have been using OnLive to play games on – a logical choice in a way, but it does raise questions about how powerful the tablet will be when dealing with modern games. When a full blown PC is needed to run a game like Skyrim, how would a  tablet of that size be able to keep up? OnLive does seem the sensible solution but me and many others aren’t huge fans of the platform which seems dangerously control-hungry (not to mention expensive in the long run).

Still, there are a lot of unanswered questions so a lot of the potential flaws come from what we do know but who knows – it’s still just a prototype for now so we may be surprised yet. I wouldn’t hold my breath though … so far, this is one of the silliest things I’ve seen in quite some time.