More on this rediculous tax on violent games...

So I've been reading up on the really badly written violent games tax bill coming from Missouri. My previous Post goes into it more. It basically levies a 1% tax on all violent games sold in the entire country, giving the proceeds away to "treat" non existant mental illnesses associated with the "exposure to violent games". But much more sinister is it's tax related "personal property" used, consumed or bought in  "this state" (without saying what "this state" is, Missouri or USA). Basically it taxing anyone who is "purchasing",  "using", "storing", or "otherwise" consuming violent games in "this state", to a tune of 1% of all the "personal property" that the person owns. I quote:

"144.1024.  1.  In addition to any other tax provided for by law, there is hereby levied

 upon persons storing, using, or otherwise consuming within this state, tangible personal

 property purchased or brought into this state, an excise tax on the storage, use, or other

 consumption in this state of all violent video games, based on the gross receipts or purchase

 price of such property at a rate of one percent."

Here is the real issue. If someone lives in whatever the blue hell "this state" is, any property in this state would  be have their value added into to the tax on any violent games they buy, use or otherwise consume... Everytime someone buys a violent game they could have to pay up to 100 dollars tax for this. I am not kidding. Here is a spreadsheet which I used to count what I own and it's price according to amazon.com.

The total value is around 5000 dollars. If I tried to buy, play, or store a violent game in "this state", I would have to pay an EXTRA 50 dollars tax each time!!!! That's ridiculous. What this could effect is insane.. Number 1, "this state" is not defined, so it is theoretically possible that It could be abused to prosecute  anyone in the US. Even worse, every time I tried to even play a violent game, I would be required to play 50 dollars again! For people playing games a lot of the day, that could be a 500 dollar charge per run of a violent game. 

Now you could say "this is not enforceable". Not true. All they need to do is stick a keylogger in anyone buying Internet access in "this state" that is designed to look for program names of games run, by screenshotting the desktop so that they can see what "violent" games are being played. Then apply the tax to the person who owns the computer.... It's not as "un-enforceable" as it seems.

Basically this is designed to punish people for merely owning violent games by, A) forcing them to pay obscene amount of money per game bought or played, and B) mandating "Treatment" for people who play violent games... Notice in the law it does not say treatment is only for children playing violent games, it is for anyone "exposed" to them.  The tornado of bullshit is touching down. Contact your senators, it is really important!!!

Again with the legislation of Morality, the Missouri Game Tax Plan...

So I was looking through slashdot.com and Came up with this lovely article... Basically some Senator or something from Missouri wants to put a 1% tax on violent games that will fund treatment for "mental illnesses associated with exposure to  violent games". Blah. If the whole idea that violent games lead to child molestation brought up "indirectly" by Mr. Holier than Thou  isn't bad enough,  it now turns out that this 1% tax may also tax people who "use" or "consume" violent games in "this state". Read this.. (Section 1024 second page). Whether "this state" means Missouri or USA I don't know... because state can also mean country not one of the states of the US.

Now I need to do the following. I am posting a screenshot of the pdf in case they try to change or delete it which the anti-gamers have done in many cases (hide their evidence, or shut down sites debunking it).

The troubling part is the quoted part of section 1024 but I want to go first into the whole "mental illnesses associated with exposure to violent video games". To put it bluntly.... THERE ARE NONE.. The whole idea that violent video game exposure causes mental illnesses is based solely on a mutated version of 2 claims, the claim that Violent Games cause violence and that school shootings are caused by mental illnesses. The claimer just claimed that violent games cause mental illnesses for an excuse for whatever unethical "treatment" the "state" has for gamers. Now what do I mean by "treatment"...... Brainwashing.

Already mental illnesses are already being treated through military discipline, AKA Drill Instructors screaming, threatening, and abusing people to make them follow orders. This is the kind of "treatment" people like this want!!!  To fund this kind of "treatment" they want to steal tax payer dollars? Number 1, any kind of "military discipline" on any civilian should be outlawed. It involves verbally abusing people, intimidating people, working them till they are exhausted, depriving them of sleep, giving them no rights, then finally beating and/or raping them into submission. In a christian fat camp run with military discipline in Alabama or some other Southern state, several cases of instructors sexually abusing children occurred and it was shut down. Stuff like this doesn't happen in military boot camps but this law was drafted in Missouri. There already is a generation of (mostly) Military Vets that think we "aren't disciplined" enough and want mandatory boot camp for all 10 year olds, even if they aren't in the military, because we are all out of control. These people run their houses just like Military Boot camps complete with the abuse to beat and (maybe, I don't know) rape their children into submission. They want this to happen to everyone? You really want people to be beaten into submission to treat an Illness that doesn't exist. Already in the country electroshock therapy is happening in cases where "mental illness" is diagnosed in people the Bush administration did not like. You want the "next step" to happen to anyone exposed to violent games?
I sure do not. Half of my whole school was and we showed NO sign of violent behavior or mental illnesses. The idea that violent games cause mental illnesses is BS.

Now to get into the Tax Plan in section 1024 once this brainwashing BS is off my chest.  I quote:

"In addition to any other tax provided for by law, there is hereby levied
upon persons storing, using, or otherwise consuming within this state, tangible personal
property purchased or brought into this state, an excise tax on the storage, use, or other
consumption in this state of all violent video games, based on the gross receipts or purchase
price of such property at a rate of one percent."

This seems to enact a tax for merely playing a game in "this state", while being ambiguous on what "this state" actually means, Missouri, Or all of the country. "tangible personal property" means anything someone owns in "this state". Now the real problem is that anyone who brings this "property" into "this state" now has to pay an additional 1% "excise" tax just to "store, use or consume" any or all violent games. 1) How will this be enforced. Will they barge into people's homes and demand daily payment for all the "violent games" used or stored or consumed in any people's homes in Missouri or the USA, which? There is no way in hell that taxing people for doing any of these things is even needed. These people clearly want to get big funds quick and don't care if the entire gaming hobby just dissapears overnight due to  the million of people selling their video games because they can't afford the OBSCENE tax for simply PLAYING a violent game! I wonder if this was drafted to kill off gaming, because I think it would.



What goal do these taxes have? To make the gaming industry die, that's what. What tax would be effective enough for this goal? A) making games so expensive that no one can afford them cutting into the gaming industries? B) taxing all the companies so much that they cannot function without going out of business? or C) Taxing the fans of violent games so much that having them is not worth it so why buy them or even own them? A) won't work unless a 50% tax of violent games at stores is levied. For b) you need a 90% tax or so to affect all gaming companies, but C) which what this bill proposes "indirectly" (make no mistake, this could be abused like crazy to do this), only requires a 1% tax on people who own violent games in "this state".

"This state" (meaning Missouri), is DISGUSTING. Trying to extort money from owners of violent video games to the point where they are bankrupt themselves to "treat" victims of "mental illnesses caused by violent games" which don't exist, is a huge corruption of normal politics that must end.... If you are in Missouri or even in other states I highly recommend talking to your REP's about this. This COULD spiral out of control. DO you really want to owe millions for OWNING a violent game, or be sent to a "correctional facility" for being a gamer?

Moron right wing christian nutcase compares violent games and pedophilia (also blames violent games for sandy hook shooting)

So I am browsing the internets when I go to gamepolitics, and this fucking moronic article and video are posted... A right wing christian preacher has gone on and posted a video on youtube that 1) Blames violent games for the Sandy Hook Shooting, and 2) Compared violent games to Porn, Bestiality and Paedophilia. Paedofuckingfelia?

Number 1, not once has there ever been a substantiated or proven claim that playing violent games lead to ANY of these, never mind paedophilia... How anyone could even sanely claim that one is related to another (when one's old religion's practitioners have committed the third of these, none the less) is well, disgusting, hypocritical and just plain stupid.

I've heard tons of people complain violent games and their not so existing effects to cigarettes causing cancer, Violent games to porn, but Child Molestation. There hasn't been ONE case of this happening ANYWHERE, EVER. What kind of morons do we have in this country, trying to blame violent games for school violence and DARE to claim that they make school shooters want to kill but also molest children. This kind of crap has to stop. For 10 years I have been publishing articles that debunk this crap, but this is the worst. They always want to up the supposed crime that the games "cause" to the next level, from Murder, to Rape, From Rape to Paedophilia.  This just angers me to no end, because every time they make something or someone or the people who are fans of this something (if it's a form of entertainment) indirectly or directly responsible for molesting children, you will get tons of people put on sexual offenders registry for no crime, more than likely. And that is the great fall of justice folks... When Paranoia over violence leads to paranoia that violent games cause child molestation... Who cares if there is no proof. Why? Because that's the only way to start a bigger moral panic. A moral panic on violence alone won't get violent games banned and the players of them separated from the rest of society for being "evil". Spreading that moral panic to paedophilia, child molestation and similar will.

Google lists thousands of takedown notices of Fraudulent "Infringing" Content

So I was reading how google would put any site lower in their search results based on copyright takedown notices given to them by copyright holders. On an article about this (not the linked one), there was a link to this google site showing how many takedown notices google receives per month and what sites are complained about. Most are free file hosting sites, and warez sites, but some big surprises crept in..

First, nearly half of the 2000 links I looked through when browsing page 1 to the page where the 2000 link was posted, were porn sites. A lot of blogging sites crept in as well, and so did facebook, twitter, and other social networking. However, their have been copyright takedowns of gaming file hosting sites as well, probably fraudulent ones.

Here are 10 screenshots showing what sites were given fraudulent takedowns, all circled in red.. These results were set per month so the URLS listed were all complained about in 1 month.

I saw quite a bit of blogger listed, mainly because there are blogger blog with pirated content on them, but wordpress? Sounds like a fraudulent claim, because I refuse to believe that wordpress hosts 763 URLS that have infringing content on them.

Yahoo? WTF!  It's a search engine and doesn't actually host anything that could be considered pirated or infringing. With 1808 "Url's" to boot. I refuse to believe that this is a valid takedown notice, mainly because besides yahoo mail (which nothing pirated can be hosted on), and my.yahoo, what else do you have?

No We have the 335 Facebook takedown notices. Now on facebook, there might be some infringing content, but 335? Sounds awfully fradulent to me. I refuse to believe that 335 URLS have been found per month with obvious infringing content.  Same thing with the below twitter.com takedowns. Twitter doesn't even allow people to host anything but file links with very short descriptions and short 30 character "tweets", where are the 333 twitter infringing URLS? Made up, that's where!

Yet another fraudulent search engine takedown notice with 274 URLS of "infringing content" that is supposedly on a site that can't even host that stuff. Google.com has search results and the mere idea that they are linking to infringing material might cause these "takedown notices" but there actually isn't any material on google that is infringing, and notice how this said "google.com", as in the search engine, not youtube, not gmail, not anything else but the search engine itself... Sounds really fishy to me.

Now we got 239 quite possibly fraudulent takedown notices of content on Scribd.com, a document hosting site.  I've never heard of scribd.com even being used to host copyrighted material, and while these results could be genuine, I'm not so sure... Moving on...

Now HERE is the one that pisses me off. Gamefront, formally known as filefront, is a gaming file hosting site, a really big one. It has thousands of video game demos, patches, mods, etc. Not once have I ever encountered anything pirated being hosted there... And I have never even heard of it being associated with piracy, but yet we get 232 takedown notices per month on a gaming file hosting site which probably deletes anything that could be infringing. Are these legit? Hell NO! These sounds fraudulent beyond belief. It's like 2 copyright holders and 2 more organizations insisted on filing takedown notices on all legal files, because If you believe that filefront/gamefront has mostly legal files, how the hell can they have 239 pirated URL's discovered per month? It sounds really fishy, fishy like an attempt to take down mods or something like that...

Now we get 192 takedown notices for dailymotion.com, a video sharing site. Whether these takedowns are legit or not remains to be seen, but judging by youtube and it's thousands of fraudulent takedown notices done by people trying to make a buck off of innocent uploaders, you really cannot trust these to be genuine, can you?

Another yahoo.com search result... Moving on...

Finally, another 66 livejournal URL's being "found" per month, by 26 quite possibly bogus copyright holders, and 19 "organizations". I have never heard of livejournal as a source for infringing stuff, and I refuse to believe that 66 have been found per month.....

What we have here, is an example of Copyright Fraud being done on a large scale by people trying to shut down sites that host LEGAL, Non-infringing content. Not once have I discovered any infringing (full games,etc) files on Filefront, or infringing content on Google itself, or on yahoo or wordpress  or on Scribd, etc. Infringing documents maybe but 239 per month? Yeah Right!!! It seem like most of these circled ones are quite questionable at least and obviously fraudulent at worst. And to bring up another completely different subject : Look at all the porn sites listed.... Is copyright law being abused to shut down porn?

It looks like it is, maybe part of the GOP's "War on Porn" that they announced recently. If the morons in the right wing can over abuse copyright  law to take down Porn, then they can abuse it to take down any site that gets their panties in a bunch (Porn, Violent Games, Modding Sites, Youtube, Social Networking), because I don't believe that Porn is infringing, hell I don't see how 16,000+ notices on tons of  porn sites are all infringing on someones copyright. I see how they are all fraudulent to censor them too..

If these results are the ones that will all be listed lower in the search results, then the internet has already been censored, and it will only get worse...

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.