New youtube channel opened up for Censoring Life...

I have opened up a final companion youtube channel to this blog. Due to a censorship attempt on youtube and idiots seeing one of my videos and spamming me with insults in a response by a moron, I had to move my channel twice. Here is a link to the final channel. There I will post videos every afternoon. The videos will cover moral panics on video game violence, and similar topics. I will do videos regularly, and hopefully will get more views due to it being linked here.


Here are a few videos on the UCC Shooting video game moral panic:


                                                      UCC Shooting Blamed on Samuel Hyde by a Twitter Mob

                                                     UCC Shooting leads to anti-gaming propaganda on twitter.

                                                       Bobby Jindal Bashes Violent games after UCC Shooting

 
UCC Shooting Moral Panic Coverup?

Here are some other videos covering other topics:


                                      Quack Crime Writer fakes evidence to attack games:

EMA Vs brown Hijacked by Censorship Group using Hoaxes

Doom Moral Panic in 1999

Sandy Hook Moral Panic part 1

"Moms Against Gaming" Parody group attacks games

                                                                            

                                                         The Doom 4 Moral Panic Exposed

                                                                           


If you want to see more videos, head to my channel and watch them. There are a lot of playlists showing off videos that fit certain topics. I do more than just video game censorship and moral panic issues, although those 2 topics are mostly what I do. I also talk about Internet security, copyright maximalism, heavy metal related moral panics and other misc topics as well..

More Censoring life youtube videos uploaded...

Ok People. Here are some more videos for my youtube channel censoring life. I showed off some videos from there in my previous post, but here are some more videos....


A video talking about supposed Media Violence "Experts" on TV and why the should not be
trusted.

A video talking about conspiracy theories bashing heavy metal music:



A video talking about the supposed "Gamer Scoresheet" found in Adam Lanza's room and why it's a hoax.


A video talking about the mass effect facebook page being spammed after Sandy Hook


A video talking about how to stay safe online from Malware.

I will upload more videos later.... Maybe a few days from now.. Check out the videos and other ones I have posted on the channel. I plan to put up other videos of other topics as well, so stay tuned for them...

MPAA is planning to institute ISP level "Pirate" Site Blocking

I was reading techdirt recently, when I ran into this article. It is a scary read, so make sure you read it. It basically describes how the MPAA is trying to convince the International Trade Committee to force ISP's to block "pirate" sites at the border of the Internet.  It's disturbing, because to the MPAA/RIAA/etc, "pirate" sites don't just mean sites that there is actual pirating going on on, but sites that they want  to shut down because they don't like them.

Copyright holders have been trying to shut down non pirate sites under the guise of "copyright infringement" for years. A list of copyright infringing sites I read online had gaming sites on it, for instance, including a site that hosts modding sites for quake (telefragged.com) and a site that hosts mods/patches/etc (filefront.com).  This list was published by a group in the industry, saying that these sites are all "pirate" sites and not to advertise on them. The group was controlling advertisements and apparently modding = copyright infringement to them! For years copyright infringement claims have appeared on youtube. People like EMG, UMG and other record labels have tried to take down videos they DONT own the copyright too. Copyright infringement fraud is at a high on that site.

The following sites could be seen as sites they would want to shut down:

soundcloud.com (indie music hosts get targeted by the RIAA often, my bands music is here)
grooveshark.com (indie music hosts get targeted by the RIAA often, my bands music is here)
last.fm (indie music hosts get targeted by the RIAA often, my bands music is here)
youtube.com (infringing content is high on yt, admittedly, plus lets plays equal copyright infringement now)
reverbnation.com (indie music hosts get targeted by the RIAA)
xmetal-empirex.com (indie music hosts get targeted by the RIAA)
any and all blogging hosts (due to the infringing content posted on these)
that includes blogger.com. wordpress.com. livejournal.com, and many others
doomworld.com (hosts modding sites, modding = copyright infringing to them)
dukerepository.com (hosts modding sites, modding = copyright infringing to them)
skyrim nexus (hosts modding sites, modding = copyright infringing to them)
fallout nexus (hosts modding sites, modding = copyright infringing to them)
filefront.com (hosts modding sites, modding = copyright infringing to them)
fileplanet.com (hosts modding sites, modding = copyright infringing to them)
and many more

These people want to shut down anything they ACCUSE of being copyright infringement. They want the ISP's to monitor everything, and shut down things that could be copyright infringing. It's disgusting. Something has to be done about this. I suggest all gamers, modders, independent music producers all contact their representatives, to try to stop this. According to techdirt it will probably not happen till late 2015, so we have time... But it's important that we do something to stop this nonsense...

Do something about the TPP, fellow youtubers ..... Mail your senators now.....

Well Folks. The TPP (trans pacific partnership) is still being worked on. This draconian "treaty" to force copyright infringement laws, very draconian ones, ones that make SOPA look nice, has to be stopped. It's up to you to stop this. Because under this Treaty, YouTube and all of the Internet gets shut down. Including Gaming sites. This treaty would do the following:



"I've decided to write about what I've been writing about on that

blog for the last few days, the secret treaty called the "Trans-Pacific Partnership", which will
 basically force US to adopt copyright laws so broad and corrupt that it will make SOPA look
nice.  Under the law, the ISP's are required to A) filter all communications looking for possible
or alleged infringement, and then they are forced to hand it over to the government. The
government would then look through it looking for possible infringement. The problem with
this is that the government can then say that this site needs to be taken down to google and
other similar sites, force ISPS to filter it out, and worse. No actual proof is required that the
transmission or site is actually infringing on something, just one infringing link, or the
assurance that the site contains lots of infringing links. Also temporary copy infringement, is 
not exempt to this. Every time someone watches a video on YouTube, 1000's of temporary 
copies are created by the streaming process. The ISP would be forced to use deep packet 
inspection to find these and if one of these temporary copies is a YouTube packet that is part 
of a youtube video stream that has one "alleged" infringement on it, the person watching the 
video could get arrested, and sued, because the ISP is forced to tell the "alleged" copyright 
holder. The most recent RIAA case defendant had to pay $22,500 dollars per songs for 
illegally  downloading only 30 songs, each only 99 cents each... Imagine that multiplied by 
1000 for listening  to a video on YouTube where video game footage is overlayed with 
copyrighted music, because of the  1000's of temporary copies produced on the persons
HDD, all caught by the ISP. That's $22,500,000  dollars for watching a video!


Under this, there is an almost certain chance YouTube will be shut down. Youtube is filled with
infringing videos uploading copyrighted music. At least a few million.  But the other video types
uploaded to youtube, such as video game lets plays, walkthroughs, etc, could all be sources of
"alleged" infringement, due to the fact that many videos showing off games are put under fair
use, which TPP seems to be made to eliminate.  But even worse,  since the government simply
has to say a site is filled with infringing links, a lot of sites will be targeted under this. Expect all
the big file sharing hosts like 4shared, mediafire, etc to be shut down first. They have tons of
copyrighted material on them, and many people keep assuming they profit off pirated files
because they allow people to buy premium accounts for more upload space, even though the
pirated files are all tiny files, all tiny portions of an archive, split into 200 parts with 200 accounts
registered to upload a file. There is no way sites like this are profiting off of files uploaded to
their free account due to the fact that ads on these sites are part of every download, no
matter how legal."

It's important to talk to your senators NOW. Let them hear your voice. Tell them you can't
stand what this treaty is doing and that that your against it, and they should not vote for it.
It will shut down 90% of the known internet. This is really important, you can do something
about this... It is due for ratification soon, by the end of the year.... Get to work, youtubers!

Note, to get around the filtering they plan, you can use the EFF's plugin, HTTPS everywhere,
to force your browser (FireFox Only) to use the Encrypted HTTPS format. This should (in theory)
prevent the ISP's from illegally reading your traffic (deep packet filtering) under the TPP to find
alleged copyright material some 2 bit fake copyright holder claims you are distributing when your
not. These things can be bypassed. In case this gets passed make sure to do this!

Faux News is at it again! (More Anti-Gaming Trash!!)

It seems this country has to keep spewing nonsense over and over again about a non-existent link between video games and real life violence...  They wait till everyone is not thinking about it and use crap like this to attempt to start another video games moral panic. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.... But it's fucking stupid and it must stop...

A murder in Australia,  has been associated with violent games.. The police have supposedly searched the killers twitter posts to find out he played call of duty...  Like call of duty may have impacted the killers decision to shoot 3 people for the sheer fun factor of it...  Well.. When you go to the shoutbox on gamepolitics.com (where I found the article), you get an article linked in it which links to another article by an Australian News site mentioning gangs... Gangs aren't even mentioned in the fox article linked in the shoutbox. It seems Faux news has no problem with leaving out information that proves games had nothing to do with the killings when they want to pin games as the SOLE REASON... For moral panic reasons!!!!

To make things worse, there is a video in the article which part of the Faux news "medical team" rambles on about his completely bogus theory that every big mass killer since 1999 is addicted to violent games... That's mentioned in the first article I linked... This idea is preposterous, there is no proof to back it up, whatsoever. Sure Klebold and Harris among others played violent games. But the proof for V-TECH, and others is a media Fabrication coming from newspapers like this. Lanza's call of duty articles all cited one article by an english tabloid which failed to even prove he played call of duty and used that as proof that he did!  The one person linking V-TECH to Counterstrike said an article which used HIS evidence was the proof. He basically cited himself saying that there was a link when there wasn't.  In fact there is NO evidence to suggest the following people besides Harris and Klebold and Lanza were addicted to violent games...


(Eric Harris, Dylan Khebold, Seung Hui Cho, Jared Loughner, Anders Brevik, James Holmes, the eight-year-old who accidently shot his grandmother recently and the three teens who murdered an Australian tourist too)

Anders brejik was a TERRORIST who mentioned video games make great training tools. There has been no evidence to suggest he was addicted, same for James Holmes, or the rest of the list as well. None but Harris and Klebold have ANY link to video game addiction, it's bullshit.Anders played World of Warcraft, far from your average Violent Game.  James Holmes played Guitar Hero. Is that their latest "Violent" game to attack now? Really... This is stupid....

To make things worse, the medical "Expert" claims that the medical industry has found "proof" that there is a link between real life violence and video games, and has gone out to say that link exists, even though NO study has found a causation link between violent video game exposure and real life violence. The ones that attempt to find a link between violent games and aggression are extremely flawed and biased... My YouTube censoring life radio show goes into the studies a lot more... This "trusted source" then went on claiming that violent games were drugs and we need warning labels put on them, like that's gonna do anything...


This pisses me off. The last thing we need is a "trusted source" (who isn't) starting a moral panic on video game violence after it has cooled off!!! This kind of stuff is what was rampant on news stations after columbine and  the moral panic skyrocketed after that... It's frankly, disgusting....

I am doing a weekly youtube radio show every week, on topics of video game controversy...

For today and the next 2 days, I am alone in my house, which is not something that usually happens. So I decided to write some new music, and do a lot of videos in a format of a youtube video radio show, talking about debunking nonsense about violent games, talking about any and all video game legislation, media spread nonsense, and any similar topics. It will air on youtube every weekend, on Sunday or the Next Monday (after being recorded the previous night).  I will occasionally go into off topic topics here and there, but for the most part, it will be video game controversy related...

Enjoy

Youtube videos on Debunking Violent games BS being started by me.

Since I opened this blog to debunk BS claims made about violent games by certain groups who apparently all wanted extreme anti-violent games legislation passed (such as bans, 100% taxes on companies, taking down all sites related to violent games, etc), I've seen quite a bit of Youtube video's by other gamers talking about the so-called (or non-existant) link between violent games and school shootings, etc. Many of the video's were really well done, some weren't but none that I have seen have gone to lengths to debunk claims that are made against violent games that are utter BS, or fabricated. I am attempting to change this trend on Youtube to educate Gamers and Gaming Groups to the danger of fabricated claims being used against violent games that are possibly being done in an attempt to introduce draconian violent games legislation like Mr Poster boy Presidential Candidate is apparently supporting.  Here is a link to my first video of an extended series of video's all disproving various claims that are utter bunk, that are all being used to attack violent games.

Is the Government spying on people who watch youtube?

So, I was watching youtube, after hearing several horror stories about youtube bandwith being throttled by certain ISP's in America, from forums and such. So I decided to search on youtube to find out if someone had posted a video about it. Well I did. This video, was done by the author of the video I found which proved that certain ISPS are throttling youtube, through a hidden file that only can be accessed in windows explorer if you turn the "show all system files" feature in folder options on, not the "show hidden files" feature, mind you. This folder called "Content.IE5" is super hidden, and found on any machine that the main user uses IE as a default browser. It contains among other things, cache files from any site you visited, html files from sites you visit, but what really scared me, is that it also contains screenshots and in some cases, copied .flv files of certain youtube videos, taken of certain, but not all youtube videos you watch.

The person who did the above video, mentioned how he found this folder on his PC during a defragging and found the hidden folder with copied .flv files  of conspiracy theorist type video's only, but not other videos he had watched.  So he surmised IE has a secret system that was being used to spy on people by the government to find anti government types. I don't know if that's true, but if IE is in fact taking screenshots of certain youtube video's and not others, then it is a bad thing for everyone who still uses that really badly designed browser. So I decided to see for myself what would happen If I purposely browsed in IE on youtube for a 2 day test.

Since I didn't want to get hit with a nasty virus, I knew I would have to sandbox IE, like I do to any browser. I use Sandboxie on all my browsers due to nasty virus attacks I have gotten 2 times in the last 4 years on my PC, both unclean able by Antivirus products and both completely devastating my PC.  It's the only way to really prevent a virus attack these days. Antivirus software really sucks and doesn't prevent stuff at all due to many people on youtube reviewing them (look up mrizos on youtube), and finding out how much virus attacks they do not block. So I sandboxed my browser. But the other reason I sandboxed it was that sandboxie forces IE to put this folder in a plainly visible part of the sandbox I can freely copy to any part of my PC later. So after I was finished with youtube, I could simply just copy the folder "Content.IE5" to another folder and view that in Windows Explorer like the video I saw on youtube did.

So I started yesterday browsing youtube and other sites in a sandboxed IE session to see what youtube would be screenshoted to my Content.IE5 folder. What I found would shock me. I browsed a whole bunch of video's, from video game walkthroughs, to politcal type videos, which fit into 2 topics, anti-censorship, and anti-violent games BS. The anti-censorship videos mainly dealt with the TPP treaty I wrote about in my previous article. The anti-violent game BS  stuff were just video's posted by gamers, in a VBLOG format talking about how the whole link between violent games and violent crimes is utter BS. There is a lot of that on youtube, apparently. So I finished watching the videos and went back to my browser of choice, Chrome last night and posted some more blogs here. But before I went to bed I examined the content.ie5 folder I had copied out of my sandbox. What it showed is that screenshots of the video game playthroughs and the Anti-TPP videos were taken, at certain intervals. Simply excusing this as cache images of the video thumbnails doesn't add up, because multiple video's of one particular anti-TPP video made by a Japanese business man were found, and I knew right away that they were not thumbnails, more like regular screenshots taken by whatever program was taking them.

Strangely, absolutely none of the anti-video game violence videos were screenshotted at all, but the pictures from a descent 2 walkthrough were. It didn't make sense to me. But then I remembered what the video I watched earlier that got me into this said, it was mostly anti-government stuff that got screenshotted. So then it hit me. Something on my PC was somehow taking screenshots of certain video's that could be seen as a threat to the government or any legislation the public could oppose greatly, such as TPP, at least that's what I was thinking when I viewed these images that were in the subfolders of Content.IE5.

Now to prove that these screenshots have a ton taken of Anti-TPP video's being played, do a search on youtube for any video about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and you will get many video's that these screenshots came from. It seems like tons of video's that attacked the TPP got multiple screenshots taken of them but other video's I watched before attacking violent games censorship and ones saying violent games do not make people violent did not.

But the truth gets even scarier when you see what it screenshotted today. I decided to continue my IE test after clearing the sandbox so that the images above would not be copied to the new folder, then logged into youtube in IE sandboxed, and decided to completely watch a different type of video, rant videos made by gamers, ranting about violent games being linked to real crimes, like Columbine, the V-tech shooter, the Norway shooter, and the Aurora Shooter, all by the media. I watched a good 10 different video's, some really badly done, some really well done. Yet only one video uploaders video's were screenshotted, the one who was the most cynical and humorous by far, someone who happened to be Australian. This guys video seen here is what was captured, and other videos I watched by him were also captured. But the only thing is that only his videos were screenshotted, not the other 10 or so  I watched before. The thing is that the screenshot capturing done by whatever was doing it was logging his video's and no one elses. Now in australia there has been the biggest BS about violent games out of any country. Games over there if not good enough for the censors, they got banned, at least until the new law legalizing R18+ ratings went through. There has been a lot of morons in their government Bullshitting about how violent games cause crime, blah, blah, blah, including a certain former Parliment member who like a certain internet troll seen on gamepolitics, made it no secret that he thought gamers are shitheads, druggies, etc. So the bias against violent games, their companies, and the people who play them is really strong over there in the government, at least certain right wing groups, christian lobby, blah, blah, blah.  Another video screenshotted in the following videos shows another video game violence BS debunking done by a guy with long hair and a hat, which is also quite vulgar at times but makes the damn point it was meant to, which is all that counts. Somehow the screenshotter, which is unnkown to me what program it actually is, is screenshotting these video's as well. So it's screenshotting video game playthroughs of certain games but not others, but is screenshotting tons of Anti-TPP video's, and certain videos attacking attacks made against violent games by youtube content providers, but not all of them. Go figure. Here are the screenshots that were taken today to show I am not making this up:

As you can see, certain screenshots are quite mundane and can be debunked as cached images, but the sheer amount of anti-gaming BS and anti-censorship video's are quite high in these...  Now I cannot rule out the posibility my PC is Infected, allthough multiple Antivirus scans show nothing on the PC. However, this is quite scary to people who don't want their privacy violated. Who knows what is being done with these screenshots. Another video made by the person who discovered this on youtube, suggested that youtube bandwidth throttling and snooping on email accounts from free email services like yahoo mail and gmail was being done through other files in this folder. Since I would never trust the swiss cheeze that is IE to log in to my email account, I didn't even test that, even in a sandbox. It's quite scary how certain programs may be used to watch people who certain members of the government may think are a threat. You simply are not secure anymore online. I highly suggest that people sandbox their browsers, switch from IE, due to it's virus problems at the very least, install chrome instead and make sure that they visit sites like yahoo mail, or any other site that requires a log in and password with HTTPS enabled. You can download a free plugin called HTTPS enforcer to do that, and firefox users can use another plugin called HTTPS everywhere to automate this. It will help people stay anonymous online because HTTPS enables encrypted connections to every site that can use it if it uses it at all, and if TPP does pass this is at least a temporary solution to prevent "Deep packet Inspection" from being abused to sniff your data by ISPS who would give it to the government, incase data like that gets abused to arrest people for fraudulent reasons.

The Trans-Pacific partnership is BAD for the internet

I've been writing about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for a few days on my other anti-censorship blog, Debunking utter Nonsense. Basically TPP is a huge and secret treaty among "pacific" countries that would (among other scarier things) force them all to incorporate extreme, unfair and downright stupid copyright laws, not limited to forcing internet intermediaries (google, etc) to filter and block any content accused of "alleged" copyright infringement (aka no proof needed), as well as ISP's having to shut down access to the people accused and forcing the ISP's to tell the copyright holders about any of these people accused of "alleged" copyright infringement.

The other things it would allow corporations to do, that is quite scary, is sue an entire company if  their laws don't favor that corporation, raise the price of medicine, lower food standards, and many more scarier things. But this article has to do with it's possible effect on the internet as a whole, as a huge IP section which was leaked, shows how far the mega corporations in the music industry want to mess up our net freedom for profit.

To make things worse, as I mentioned in the previous article, temporary copies found on people's computers would be enough to make someone liable for copyright infringement, if found by "deep packet inspection", a technique ISPS would be forced to use to find these temporary copies, which are downloaded in the thousands everytime someone watches 1 youtube video, listens to 1 streamed song off of sites like  soundcloud, reverbnation, purevolume, etc, all specializing in hosting indie music artists music.  The content doesn't even HAVE to be infringing any copyright for the holder to take action, remember how many fraudulent content ID claims youtube allows, because youtube does not require proof the copyright holder actually holds the copyright! If TPP and the necessary Copyright laws pass this will only increase, by the thousands! Now let me tell you how easy it would be for temporary copies of an infringing work to get onto someones hard drive without them actually downloading them.....

Hypothetical situation A:

Some bar is blasting pop music.  The bar's radio station of choice has the right to play the music. Some guy happens to be walking outside filming himself going to the bar, for some other reason. The music ends up on his video. He uploads it to youtube.  The video is immediately marketed on google like all youtube video's are, by making it go into the search results.  Someone finds the video. He watches it on his PC. Without his knowledge, around 1000+ temporary copies are created PER viewer, that don't go away till the viewers clear their cache. And even if they do clear the cache, the damage has been done. Deep packet inspection would have found them the instant they are downloaded, because deep packet inspection involves looking at everything someone downloads with extreme scrutiny while the packets are moving from the youtube site to the person viewing it.  The ISPS would be legally forced to copy these packets and send them to  the government authority in charge of figuring out which ones could be infringing, which would look at them closely to find out if a "temporary" copy is inside any of them and if it's infringing, according to them.  IF The infringing song is found in the packets, the person is then liable for copyright infringement, even though he didn't actually steal anything!

Hypothetical Situation B:

Repeat the above scenario with the following changes.  The video' audio is cut out and replaced with a song the person happens to like. Now the person uploading IS guilty of copyright infringement. But that's not the point. The song is popular and makes the video even more popular. 90% of the viewers don't know of the song, but every single one of these viewers has 1000+ of these "temporary" copies on their hard drive. And because of the deep packet inspection, each and every one of these viewers, even ones who accidentally viewed the video when youtube automatically played it in part of a playlist due to an error or on purpose, are all guilty of 1000+ counts of copyright infringement under TPP!

The real problem, as highlighted by a blog post I did on Debunking Utter Nonsense, is that several key immunities offered by current US copyright law are thrown out the window, by the TPP. The TPP says that all copyright infringement, even accidental, and non-profit infringement, is considered criminal infringement. The US copyright law requires that a minimum profit of $1000 be made before the law says it is criminal infringement.  Under copyright law, the copyright moguls have to specify each individual infringing link on a site to take it down. Not so in TPP. TPP basically allows them to say "this site is filled with infringing links" (WITHOUT proof) and it's ok to take it down then. Just one baseless accusation. That's it. NO proof required! The TPP also makes it completely legal for the government to destroy anything used in the creation of the infringement, without proof, and without compensation, and any other thing that was created by the infringement work, so if that youtube video I gave the example for was used to create another video, that second video, and whatever was used to make it, can be legally destroyed also! The copyright law specifically states that only devices used commonly in criminal infringement like molds can be destroyed.  The TPP would also get rid of the exemption of copyright for non-profit educational uses completely, not require any action by the copyright holder before the government can do anything, and also allow copyright holders to penalize any and all transmissions of their copyrighted material on a PC, even legal ones, such as internet radio, legal mp3 file downloading sites like Amazon MP3/Itunes, and worse.

Now to examine the damages the people would be facing looking at the latest RIAA case:

The defendant of the latest RIAA case was forced to pay $22,500 dollars PER song downloaded when he only downloaded 30 songs illegally that were only worth $0.99 per song originally. Imagine this number multiplied by 1000 or more, It gets SCARY, Scary like in $22,500,500 per defendant for merely VIEWING a video! In a court case where the entire viewership are co-defendants of eachother (assuming the video gets 100,000 views), that adds up to $2,250,000,000,000 in damages!

If you think the lawsuit bringer would not stoop too that level, you are wrong... RIAA already made the defendant of the case pay $675,000 for 30 songs! If the persons involved show the video starts showing off the video to people on his PC, that number increases even more, lets say he shows the video to 10 friends, that number becomes $225,000,000 for that defendant!!!!

The bar, the uploader, AND youtube would probably  all be liable under TPP for ALLOWING infringement as well. The bar allowed someone to copy a song off the radio, don't think for a second the lawsuit bringer won't prosecute them.  The original poster even if he didn't put the song in the video on purpose, would STILL be held liable for allowing copies to be distributed in HIS video, even if the song was "accidentally" played in the video. Now to get to youtube.

Youtube has the reputation as the worst place on the internet, besides warez, where copyrighted material is available, and many people mistakenly believe that youtube profits off of piracy... Why? Their content ID system, which was set up to alert copyright holders to unauthorized infringers uploading their copyrighted works, allows the holders to upload samples of their copyrighted works (without proof), and gives them the option to either take down video's matching it, or to put ads in the video's. When people see ads in video's and they see infringement in the video's they think youtube are trying to profit off of this, but they aren't. The Copyright holders are, because it's THEIR choice not youtube...

Even if you think youtube's copyrighted works only amount to tv show clips and music pirated as video's you are in for a shock to what things could generate "alleged" copyright claims on youtube and what does. The following types of videos are considered infringing by someone, not necessarily the movie and music industry:

Video game commentary, Video game reviews, Video game walkthroughs, Lets plays, video's of mods for video games especially ones that include content from other games, their are tons of that,  videos of video games that have background music that just happens to be copyrighted by someone, video's showing live performances of bands or videos of bands, even if those videos are uploaded by the bands own label, behind the scenes videos of bands in the studio that play the tracks after being recorded, even though they are uploaded by the BANDS own label, advertisements for any site that hosts indie music, indie music directly uploaded to youtube by the artists themselves, indie music uploaded by an artist separately from their own indie hosting site (think reverbnation) not knowing that reverbnation/etc,  happened to copyright it,  clips from TV shows, even ones uploaded with the copyright holders permission, TV shows uploaded with permission, any video where the permission has been secured to upload it,  and any video someone claims fraudulent copyright on, without actually owning the copyright!

The sheer amount of video's where alleged infringement could occur is about 99.9% of youtube video's then. Even if some of these were not even infringing in the first place, the temporary copies found on the Hard drive of all the viewers would Guarantee that the copyright moguls and their clients would get even more money than they even deserve for this. Due to all the temporary copies being produced of copyrighted material that happens to be uploaded by people who own the rights, the amount of frivolous lawsuits resulting from this will skyrocket to the millions per years by people apparently downloading 1000 copies per video, without actually trying to do that. Simply viewing a video will get people thrown in jail and sued.  This will result in More money being given to the Copyright holders in court for something the defendant didn't even do!  This will be used to shut down youtube because of this. Imagine a megaupload trial X100 with youtube for all of this plus Temporary copies, IP address info given to the copyright holders for anyone who Dared to watch any of these videos in question. Anyone who even visited youtube and got into it would be at risk for having to pay 1000X what that defendant did due to the temporary copies!!!!

What's next after youtube??? If even ONE game related video from that list gets an alleged infringement tag, the copyright holders would get noticed. Now comes greedy gaming companies, suing major modding sites  AND lets players, people linking to those lets plays, for allowing the copyrighted infringing material to be "distributed", because of the temporary copies found on people's HDD after viewing the lets plays. You would then get them suing youtube.  I watch dozens of lets plays, because I love seeing other people playing games. It helps me get into new ones, and helps me to see good strategies in games I have already played. People like me would be targeted also. This whole thing would not end there however.  Any modding site that hosts any kind of mod for any video game that includes content from another game would then be targeted. Here's the thing. there isn't a modding site that doesn't  do this. Every single game has at least ONE mod that does this... Even modified models/graphics/sprites/textures or ones that are based or inspired would get every single Modding site in trouble. And since 99% of the modding sites are hosted by BIG gaming sites dedicated to the game they mod, those parent sites would be next.... You have 99% of the internet sites dedicated to any video game being taken down due to this!!! The following sites could be gone, Doomworld, Duke4ever, Planetquake, PlanetDeusEx, Planethalflife, TESNEXUS, ANY and All game related file hosting sites (gamefront, atomic gamer, etc),  and all other big gaming sites that happen to host mods, nevermind MODDB and other modding sites dedicated to hosting the latest mods, ALL would be targeted under this... But that is just  the microscopic tip of the iceberg.....

Streamed video in youtube is only 1% of the total streamed content online... the rest include internet radio sites, like Pandora, Snakenet internet radio and others, and ANY site that has streamed music on it. After defeating youtube and modding sites, Amazon probably will  be the the music industry's next target, for it's Amazon Mp3 download service and Amazon cloud drive, which recently got heat from the music industry for allowing people to host their own bought music on the cloud....  Amazon MP3 Allows people to buy music legally online and the price is much lower (9.99 for album vs 20+ per Phsyical CD), due to the lack of packaging and medium.  However the music industry probably won't like this because they think they don't make enough money from REAL cd's from amazon so... Next comes the Big Amzon.com take down where they demand Amazon get taken down because they are distributing "pirated" mp3 files.  Even though Amazon is not. Just because the service is "legal" does not mean the industry won't file a big lawsuit. Under TPP the chance is MUCH greater this will happen, due to the fact the ISPS have to block any site that has any allegation of infringing content on it. One Mogul saying "Amazon Mp3 is all pirated stuff" is enough to get Amazon.com shut down too. It's the only good source of music to many people, not just me, because of the fact of  the perfect selection of music and the cheap price. But that scenario only the tip of the iceberg....

There are literally Dozens of indie music hosting sites, all with streaming capabilities. A big one is soundcloud, another big one is reverbnation. I had my own metal music hosted on both for a while. Then you add in myspace music and facebook too because plugins for the later and the first allow streaming music. anyone daring to listen to any music from any of these sites is liable for copyright infringement under the TPP, due to the temporary copies being made, thousands from one song being played!!!

Next come the number 1 enemy of Piracy morons everywhere, sites like 4shared, zippyshare, mediafire, megaupload, rapidshare, which all have legit files being hosted.  Under the TPP, the ISPS's have to filter and block ANY site that has been accused of infringement, that includes ANY of the following sites, and if one of these sites haven't been accused, they will eventually, I guarantee it. This list,  which I shall constantly print on any article bashing the TPP and use as tags to get the sites owners (hopefully) involved in the attack against the TPP.

Amazon
Youtube
Facebook
Moddb
Itunes
3dgamers archive
ANY and All of the following gaming sites:
Seriously
Duke4ever
Doomworld
TESNexus
Doom3world
Fallout3nexus
Planethalflife
Func-Messgboard (look it up)
Quaddicted
Unrealsp.org
Beyondunreal.com
Payne Reactor
Planet Deus Ex
The Admirals Command Chamber
Tenfourmaps.telefragged.com
Underworldfans quake review site
Darkplaces
Zdoom.org
Gzdoom website
D2x-xl
Kmquake2
Prboomplus
Doom Legacy
DarkXL
DukePlus
Eduke32 website
Reverbnation
Purevolume
Soundcloud
4Shared
Myspace Music
Myspace
4Shared
Dropbox
FileFront/Gamefront
Atomic Gamer
Rapidshare
4Filehosting.com
Completegamer.net
Mediafire.com
Sendspace.com
Vimeo.com
Zippyshare.com
Blogspot
Wordpress

Now to help out some people who might be thinking of boycotting any corporation that is involved in the stakeholder groups supporting this pile of trash.  Here is a list of all supporting corporations, gotten from this site.  I probably won't buy from them till they change their crappy law to make it so that exact proof of infringing links is required, and that temporary copies are not counted, and that the government falsely accusing anyone of infringement gets the members involved fired, nor should you:

If Anyone reading this likes any of those sites I listed above, I highly suggest you click the take action button on this linked page by the EFF, so that your Congressman know about  the BS that's being done behind their  back by the executive branch, circumventing the Supreme court, and Congress to allow the copyright moguls  to sue 1000X as much people, for simply viewing a video! Also, make sure to visit Open The TPP, to send your message to the stakeholders who all support the TPP at the current meeting by going to  this site and writing it and sending it there.

Why Mandatory Web Filtering is stupid....

There are people out there who praise web filtering, and say how It's the greatest thing to protect children online. There are others who say "these non-child friendly sites, why do we even allow them?" and mandate mandatory filtering for all, such as Australia and it's mandatory filtering program called the "great Aussie firewall" which was stopped a few years ago due to complaints that it would block video game sites...
You read it right... Gaming sites..  Censorship is never right, even if kids are the reason for it. Already many states have mandatory regulation in public libraries to block sites found "harmful  to minors", as vague as that seems. The statues are vague and have no specific content that must be blocked, so they basically allow the libraries to chose what sites are harmful to minors to block them.  This extends into schools, including colleges as well in many cases. I tried 2 filters, and both gave me complete control over what sites to block...
Talk about scary ways they could be abused to block out something the person running the school/library doesn't like.  So what's the whole thing about gaming sites being harmful to minors, anyway?

One of the internet filters I tried is a free one called OpenDNS. I also looked at another site called "free internet", which also blocks gaming sites by default...  OpenDNS is not just web filtering, it is a free DNS service to reroute traffic from dangerous (virus) sites that happens to offer a free internet filtering program. I tried it out.... And was shocked how much dubious, not so harmful to minors type stuff was included with full filtering. The following categories of stuff were filtered:

Gaming sites
Sexuality oriented sites
Porn sites
File sharing sites
Web mail
Forums (!)
Gambling
and some others I can't remember now..

Most of these could be considered stuff you don't want kids to see, but gaming sites, forums, webmail, why are they even on the list? So I got curious. I decided to sign up with OpenDNS's free filtering service to test 50 or so sites to see what ones are blocked, assuming I was browsing the internet where OpenDNS was forced down my throat due to mandatory filtering laws (hypothetical ones).  The results were, well stupid...  Number 1, a ton of gaming sites got blocked, including doomworld, planetquake,planethalflife, rockstar.com, planetduke, blood.com, and the site for my favorite video game, Deus Ex.   But even worse the following gaming sites which report on gaming news were also blocked, Rock Paper shotgun, Gamepolitics.com, g4tv.com, kotaku.com. Then you get the downright retarded entries which were blocked for no good reason whatsoever: Fpscreator.com, TesNexus.com, 3dgamers archive, filefront,com, bioware.com (!),  planetdescent.com (!) , and the site of a free descent 2 source port, d2x-xl.   But almost ALL sites for video games that are quite controversial were allowed by this filter, including duke4.net, fear3.co.uk, callofduty.com, seriouszone.com, and others, yet Planetdescent and d2x-xl's sites get blocked? Descent is pretty much the coolest and least violent series of FPS games, you fly around destroying robots, yet the big site for duke nukem 3d, which approaches x-rated terms in violence, is allowed?  Then sites like  rock paper shotgun, and kotaku get blocked for being gaming news sites, what good reason is there for that? Then comes the ones that "really" piss me off, Bioware.com, TesNexus.com, and Gamepolitics.com. Gamepolitics is a game related politics site, not a violent games site, bioware makes RPG games that are mildly violent with one or 2 with same sex relationships that got ripped on Fox News (Mass Effect), besides that their games are less about gore and more about strategy, yet their entire site gets blocked for 1 controversial game? (that shouldn't be, none  the less!). Then you get tesnexus.com, a modding site for a tame yet really good RPG games in the elder scrolls series. Why block that?  None of those games are really that violent at all. Fallout3Nexus, for Fallout 3 wasn't blocked and it's the most violent rpg ever made? Add in 2 file hosting sites for games, Filefront.com, and gamers.org, both blocked. Why? Are they afraid that some kid will download some mods for a game he probably doesn't own... Why filter out files. You need the game and a PC to even play them. Librarians would probably catch the kid trying to burn a cd with  the game demo or attempting to play it in the library. For mods, you need the damn game the mod is for to play it, and a demo won't do. Patches, same thing. Why block file sites whatsoever. There is no reason why, unless the people thought game file hosting would lead to school shootings, or something utterly stupid like  that. It makes no sense whatsoever to block this way, PERIOD.

Other types of sites blocked are web mail sites like gmail and yahoo mail, which have absolutely no reason to block. I had yahoo mail since I was 20 for gods sake. Why filter that out? You then get all the file hosting sites online like 4shared, mediafire, rapidshare, dropbox, etc. All of these have a reputation for hosting pirate files, and they do. But they also host plenty of completely legal files, including mods for video games. There have been plenty of links to video game files on sites like this, posted on forums. Sometimes the only way to be able to host a file is to use a service like this, and simply blanketing them as "pirate" sites is stupid, but unfortunately, it makes no sense to block the host, when you could block the actual warez sites with the links to the 200 files you need to download the pirated stuff, because without that you will never find all 200 files with a simple internet search due to the fact that each link to one of these sites has a completely different account character list and file name, and the character list is a random string of characters, 30 long, that makes it almost impossible to find one file after you found the previous file through a web search.

Then you get the complete ban on social networking, which is well... Stupid.  Almost every single big social networking site, such as myspace, youtube, facebook, etc, are all blocked and made it look like someone was trying to redirect me to a fraudulent site,  to boot. This will  scare people who try to go to these sites to make it look like their infected with redirection malware which normally does this kind of  thing, with an Error box in chrome  that fooled even me, thinking that some malware had infected my PC when I tried to visit youtube, until I read it closer. I simply cannot understand the reasoning behind the panic on social networking. Sure, a kid could become obssessed with them, and they give out personal info, but as long as you know what you are doing, you're fine.  But the  youtube thing pisses me off. Youtube's primary focus is video streaming, NOT social networking, unlike myspace and facebook. By demanding these things get blocked, the mandatory filtering groups will be cutting off all lets plays, all walkthroughs, and tons of other stuff that simply are not even close to harmful to minors.  Now, none of this was meant as an attack on OpenDNS, I just think if they mandate filtering in the US, and use something similar to OpenDNS, in terms of site types to block, they will end up blocking TONS of sites that aren't even remotely harmful to minors, and let a lot in too. Filtering is not the answer, really.

The Trans-Pacific Partnerships Gigantic threat to the internet.

This is my first post here, and I've decided to write about what I've been writing about on that

blog for the last few days, the secret treaty called the "Trans-Pacific Partnership", which will
 basically force US to adopt copyright laws so broad and corrupt that it will make SOPA look
nice.  Under the law, the ISP's are required to A) filter all communications looking for possible
or alledged infringement, and then they are forced to hand it over to the government. The
government would then look through it looking for possible infringement. The problem with
this is that the government can then say that this site needs to be taken down to google and
other similar sites, force ISPS to filter it out, and worse. No actual proof is required that the
transmission or site is actually infringing on something, just one infringing link, or the
assurance that the site contains lots of infringing links. Also temporary copy infringement, is 
not exempt to this. Everytime someone watches a video on youtube, 1000's of temporary 
copies are created by the streaming process. The ISP would be forced to use deep packet 
inspection to find these and if one of these temporary copies is a youtube packet that is part 
of a youtube video stream that has one "alleged" infringement on it, the person watching the 
video could get arrested, and sued, because the ISP is forced to tell the "alleged" copyright 
holder. The most recent RIAA case defendant had to pay $22,500 dollars per songs for 
illegally  downloading only 30 songs, each only 99 cents each... Imagine that multiplied by 
1000 for listening  to a video on youtube where video game footage is overlayed with 
copyrighted music, because of the  1000's of temporary copies produced on the persons
HDD, all caught by the ISP. That's $22,500,000  dollars for watching a video!


Under this, there is an almost certain chance youtube will be shut down. Youtube is filled with
infringing videos uploading copyrighted music. At least a few million.  But the other video types
uploaded to youtube, such as video game lets plays, walkthroughs, etc, could all be sources of
"alleged" infringement, due to the fact that many videos showing off games are put under fair
use, which TPP seems to be made to eliminate.  But even worse,  since the government simply
has to say a site is filled with infringing links, a lot of sites will be targeted under this. Expect all
the big file sharing hosts like 4shared, mediafire, etc to be shut down first. They have tons of
copyrighted material on them, and many people keep assuming they profit off pirated files
because they allow people to buy premium accounts for more upload space, even though the
pirated files are all tiny files, all tiny portions of an archive, split into 200 parts with 200 accounts
registered to upload a file. There is no way sites like this are profiting off of files uploaded to
their free account due to the fact that ads on these sites are part of every download, no
matter how legal.

But even worse, is the threat this poses to video game modding sites. Each modding
site for a game hosts at least one mod that borrows content from the game it mods, or 
another game. Since these modding sites are many times subsites of big community sites 
like planetquake, etc, which are hosted under a bigger site called "atomic gamer", bad 
things will happen when someone decides to give them (intentionally or not)
one false accusation of infringement and the whole thing (atomic gamer, ALL the 
Planet<insert name here>.com sites would all be shut down. That's about 75% of 
the big game fan  sites right there... Even worse, 3dgamers archive, which hosts 
mirrors to the idgames and  idgames2 ftp  servers, massive ftp sites hosting millions of 
Doom and Quake Addons, levels, mods,  editors,etc,  has at least one mod that borrows 
content. Imagine if  the supporters of this treaty, abuses it to take down both atomic 
gamer  and 3dgamers archive. You lose 99% of the downloads for video games under a 
fraudulent copyright claim, because TPP does not require proof, just a claim that the site 
has copyrighted links. It's scary what could be done under the TPP treaty, to stifle websites. 
Already soundcloud.com (a host for indie music), telefragged (the predecessor to 
atomic gamer),  and filefront (a file hosting site for video game mods, patches and demos)  
found there way to a  piracy site list set up by GroupM, a big music industry advertising 
service.  So they are already  targeting  game modding sites. Neither of these sites has 
infringing material  on it, at  least to my knowledge. This still does not cover all the sites that 
could be targeted under the TPP, add in Amazon mp3 services, internet radio, and indie music 
hosting sites,  all it takes is one copyrighted upload or one alleged copyrighted upload for the 
entire site to be  taken down... Scary...