Topic: Capcom Clarifies Their Stance on SOPA

[Patchkid15]

They are a part of the ESA, but have taken no official side.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/28898

Capcom attempted to clear up misconceptions regarding their support of SOPA in a forum thread on their site.

Earlier this week, a Capcom spokesperson released a statement regarding SOPA, claiming "The ESA represents us on these matters". The ESA, a group comprised of many game developers including Capcom, remained on a list of supporters of SOPA. However, Capcom now explains that despite the ESA representing them on the legislation, they do not have a stance on the bill.

Senior Vice-President Christian Svensson called earlier reports on their stance "bad journalism." Svensson went on to explain that they are a game making company, not legislators, and not planning to actually take a side. He also sought to allay fears that individuals streaming and uploading videos of their games would be targeted if the legislation passes.

SOPA, short for Stop Online Piracy Act, is a controversial piece of US legislation that would grant copyright holders and law enforcement a greater ability to fight online piracy and counterfeiting. Critics worry that the bill would, among other things, curtail free speech and the operation of legitimate online services.

[ThePerm]

being part of the ESA primarily means you get to attend trade shows like e3 to game creators. ESA does lobbying activities, but this doesn't make all members of ESA lobbyist. If we didnt have the ESA lobbying we would have more draconian restrictions on ratings systems and greater censorship. Unfortunately, an organization like ESA represents content makers and this creates grey area with supporting anti-piracy laws. Most of us can take a stance against piracy, but most of us agree the SOPA bill goes too far.

[TJ Spyke]

The ESA was originally created to give the game industry a unified voice in Washington, DC. During the Senate hearing over violence in video games (which ultimately led to the video game industry voluntarily creating the ESRB so that the government wouldn't create their own rating system), you had each game company having to represent themselves at the hearing. So they have the ESA representing them in terms of lobbying, organizing events, etc. In the past few years you have had some big names leave the ESA (like Activision and LucasArts), but also a lot of smaller companies joining and most of the big companies still belong.

[MegaByte]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/esa-members-and-sopa-where-they-stand/
So far, every ESA member on record is either against SOPA or have no position. So either the big names are for it and don't want to admit it, or the ESA is going to have to reverse their position if they want to continue representing the industry.

[NWR_insanolord]

Who would want to admit it at this point? Even Nintendo's historically questionable PR people were smart enough to back away from it. By now it seems relatively safe to assume that anyone who hasn't publicly denied supporting it is in favor of it, because you've got nothing to lose by dropping support and it's a PR win because outside of TJ Spyke there doesn't seem to be any real public support and quite a lot of opposition.

[TJ Spyke]

Public supporters of SOPA include (http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue%20Websites/List%20of%20SOPA%20Supporters.pdf):

CBS
Comcast
Disney (including subsidiaries Marvel and ESPN)
Director's Guild of America
HarperCollins
Hyperion
L'Oreal
Major League Baseball
MCA Records
McGraw-Hill
National Football League
National Songwriters Association
Random House
Screen Actors Guild
several branches of Sony (basically the music branches)
Time Warner
Universal Music
US Olympic Committee
US Tennis Association
Viacom

[Chozo Ghost]

That isn't the public.

[TJ Spyke]

Do you mean individuals? Because technically those companies are part of the public. I am sure I could find notable people who support it if I looked, but I don't know if it would be worth it.

[Chozo Ghost]

I think "the public" refers to average joes. Obviously you support SOPA, but you are in the minority and I would guess a very small minority at that. Democracy is supposed to be about the interests of the people, not the interests of corporations. So I don't really care that you can produce a list of mega-corps who back the bill. They aren't the people.

[UncleBob]

I think "the public" refers to average joes. Obviously you support SOPA, but you are in the minority and I would guess a very small minority at that. Democracy is supposed to be about the interests of the people, not the interests of corporations. So I don't really care that you can produce a list of mega-corps who back the bill. They aren't the people.

To be fair, the people who run corporations are people too.  I know this is hard to believe, but they are.

Additionally, our government (we're not a democracy) is supposed to allow for "majority rules, minority rights" - meaning it doesn't matter if 99.999999% of the population wants to do something, if it harms that 0.000001% of the population, the government is supposed to protect their rights.

With that said, SOPA is just bad legislation.

[Chozo Ghost]

But that's the thing: SOPA infringes on rights.

And Corporations are made up of people, but just because a corporation supports a piece of legislation doesn't mean everyone who works at said corporation does. Its actually very possible for a majority of employees to oppose something, because its the white collar people at the top who decide these things, and they might represent a very slim percentage of a corporation's employees. The blue collar majority might have a completely opposite opinion. But the bottom line is corporations aren't people. They are made up of people, but they aren't people.

[Atari_usr]

@UncleBob The people who run corporations are obviously individuals.
 
But they are fighting as proponents and authors of SOPA solely as huge world-wide monopolistic enterprises, worried only about profits even if getting more and more degrades technological infrastructures they don't even understand or aren't central part of, nor of its community (i.e., any and all of us); fighting to force their users into giving them more profit without them actually having to innovate or improve their products, or to fix their prices so it is actually possible for most people to buy one of their movies, songs mainly after another but just force ALL OF US, and with this law, even reach people who don't even consumes their products, pirated or not...
 
--------

 Meanwhile, on the side of opponents you have the most prominent companies on the Internet (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Paypal, and free ones like Wikipedia) and even the very creators of the Internet.
 
 Such corporation owners have rights, but if you let them do whatever they want you allow them to establish monopolies and abuse their users, and you know it.
 
 _____________________________________________________________
 
 So this is more about extremely powerful corporations with obsolete views pretending to degrade the Internet contents and limiting its legal possibilities as long as it allows them to control it so much that they would be the ones in charge and dictating what is good and what is bad.
 
 And sooner than later, those powers would be abused by other powerful people other than those who created SOPA (and by themselves too, as shown by fact because of bogus claims with current copyright laws), and then they would be used to censor anything they would wish to disappear from public view.
 
 The result wouldn't be any different from an Internet that would first be completely wiped out and then filled only with the (commercial and promotional) content those mega corporations wanted to allow, in a world wide scale.
 
 Being people mainly in the entertainment industry, and generic commercial products, the actual information on the Internet would be so controlled and non-free, so complicated and risky to edit by users without any risk to run into more bogus claims, and so bureaucracy-bound, that it would be much more difficult, if even possible, to have a lot of quality information than what it already is.

[UncleBob]

Again, as I said, SOPA is a bad bill.  Period.

However, the fact that you might think that the entertainment being provided by "corporations" is "generic", "worthless" or "without innovation" doesn't mean that anyone should be allowed to take this content and use it for its intended purpose without compensating the owners of this entertainment.

This debate is tired and old and no one is going to change their minds on it, so let's not get into it, okay?

[Chozo Ghost]

Piracy sucks and it should be illegal. But it is illegal... I don't think anything more needs to be done than that. Passing new draconian laws which infringe on freedom may curtail some piracy, but nothing will ever eradicate it entirely. It will always be around, just like how there will always be rape and murder and every other bad crime no matter what anyone does. That doesn't mean you shouldn't fight these things, but lawmakers need to realize no amount of legislation will ever rid the world of evil. As a matter of fact, legislation like SOPA only results in more evil in the world... just in a different way.

[UncleBob]

Piracy sucks and it should be illegal. But it is illegal... I don't think anything more needs to be done than that. Passing new draconian laws which infringe on freedom may curtail some piracy, but nothing will ever eradicate it entirely. It will always be around, just like how there will always be rape and murder and every other bad crime no matter what anyone does. That doesn't mean you shouldn't fight these things, but lawmakers need to realize no amount of legislation will ever rid the world of evil. As a matter of fact, legislation like SOPA only results in more evil in the world... just in a different way.

If there was a huge rash of murders, you'd see new laws created at curtailing those murders.

In recent times, piracy has gone from occasionally getting a mix tape to individuals downloading thousands of songs in an hour.  We've gone from dubbing movies from the rental store to downloading entire libraries of films.  Instead of occasionally copying that floppy, you can download the entire NES catalog in about fifteen seconds.  There's virtually no risk involved, practically no costs and, as some very simple minded folks see it, there's "no harm".

What's the answer?  I don't know (it isn't SOPA)...  Perhaps you're right - there is nothing that can be done.  We'll just keep pirating everything until the only entertainment is YouTube Poop and mainstream crap like American Idol.  Studios will stop funding smaller movies and we'll only get theatrical releases of **** like Transformers because those will be the only movies to make money.  Small, independent film makers won't be able to get funding, so they'll be stuck attempting to use the internet to distribute their works.  And that will make them tons of money, as no one will just steal if from the internet.  They'll be trying to make their next film while working two shifts at McDonald's.  And music - yay for mainstream pop.  Oh, you might have a few small artists that you'll get to hear - but good luck ever seeing them live unless you want to travel across the country - they'll never have the funds for any kind of a tour.  And don't worry about games.  I mean, piracy won't hurt games.  It's not like the release of any game has ever been cut due to the lack of sales.  That never happens.

[Chozo Ghost]

As I said, piracy can never be eliminated entirely... only reduced. Even if SOPA goes into effect (which it probably will) it will not eliminate piracy, and may not even do much to reduce it.Even if it does reduce it, it will do so at a great cost which is worse than the piracy itself.

Its like trying to kill mosquitoes with an assault rifle. Sure, there's an outside possibility your spray of bullets might actually hit a mosquito, but its much more likely innocent people are going to be hit instead. And that's exactly how it is with SOPA. I'm sure some pirates will get taken down by it, but so will alot of innocents, and at that price its just not worth it.

[MagicCow64]

Even using the term "piracy" is a big PR win for media companies. Piracy is a crime that involves theft and coercion. Downloading files on the internet is not theft and it doesn't involve coercion. What internet "piracy" actually is is copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is a crime, though one not nearly of the same degree as actual piracy or even theft. When you download files illegally, you're not taking anything from anyone. As much as legislators want to push the moral equivalence of shoplifting on illegal downloaders, it's not the same. And that's their problem; the vast majority of people won't shoplift, but they will download files illegally on the internet and not feel bad about it. It doesn't feel like stealing because it isn't.

Copyright law was originally created to ensure that citizens would have the motivation to produce works of art that would serve the public good. "Piracy" hasn't created some dearth of content. There's more content than ever. As a society we're going to have to seriously rethink how we view all of this, unless copyright protection is going to cover anything the age of Mickey Mouse in perpetuity. The notion that you get rich by practicing your art is actually a fairly novel societal expectation that arose in the 60s and 70s following the post-war economic boom and the introduction of new technology. For most of human history artists made a living practicing their craft and that was the reasonable expectation.

I recommend checking out this Cory Doctorow talk about what the real danger of SOPA-like legislation is: http://freethoughtblogs.com/lousycanuck/2012/01/07/cory-doctorow-on-sopa-the-coming-war-on-general-computation/

[UncleBob]

You keep bringing up SOPA - which, I guess, is appropriate, since this is a SOPA thread... However, as I said, I don't think SOPA is a good bill.

That said, I also don't think SOPA justifies the mentality shown in this (and other) SOPA threads where it's "screw the people who run the corporations.  screw the people who make this entertainment.  it's all worthless, so we can take it and not compensate them and they owe us for spending our time even watching/listening/playing it."

"Piracy" hasn't created some dearth of content. There's more content than ever.

There's more content than ever, but the overall quality of it has gone downhill.
I'm curious as to how history will judge the "artistic" values of this era.  Will Simon Cowell be the Da Vinci of our time?

[Chozo Ghost]

So what can be done about piracy? Well, one thing that could be done is content owners could make more of an effort to ensure their products are always commercially available in all markets. One commonly used argument pirates use for old NES games is that they are no longer commercially available, which is often true. A lot of them are now available on Virtual Console, but not every game is. Why are they not?

And look at the Xenoblade Chronicles game for the Wii which was on the list of the top 10 pirated games of the year. There was almost 1 million pirated downloads of it, and a lot of those could have been sales but the game isn't commercially available in NA and it was only about a month ago that we found out it was coming to NA eventually in April. I'm guessing at least part of the reason the game was pirated so much is because it was not available commercially. Had it been maybe it wouldn't have made that top 10 piracy list.

So that's one thing that could be done to help reduce piracy. I'm not saying it would eliminate piracy, but at least having your product commercially available to consumers at least provides them with the option to get the game legally.

[MagicCow64]

You keep bringing up SOPA - which, I guess, is appropriate, since this is a SOPA thread... However, as I said, I don't think SOPA is a good bill.

That said, I also don't think SOPA justifies the mentality shown in this (and other) SOPA threads where it's "screw the people who run the corporations.  screw the people who make this entertainment.  it's all worthless, so we can take it and not compensate them and they owe us for spending our time even watching/listening/playing it."

"Piracy" hasn't created some dearth of content. There's more content than ever.

There's more content than ever, but the overall quality of it has gone downhill.
I'm curious as to how history will judge the "artistic" values of this era.  Will Simon Cowell be the Da Vinci of our time?

Simon Cowell won't, but someone else who is actually talented will. Probably no one's even heard of whoever that is yet. I think you can legitimately argue that the quality of Hollywood films and mainstream music is guttering, but video games are thriving, as is independent music, as is serial television, as is digital art, however you want to define that. The internet is driving a lot of cultural change that I believe will shift the focus of what we consider great art. Hell, some group of cavedwellers inside of /b might be looked back upon as important figures in retrospect.

[Chozo Ghost]

Comparing Simon Cowell to Leonardo Da Vinci isn't a fair comparison, because I'm sure in Leonardo's day there was a lot of mediocre Simon Cowell types running around. We don't know their names because they sucked and weren't worth remembering. That's how it goes. So a few hundred years from now Simon Cowell will be forgotten too, but someone more noteworthy like I dunno Stephen Hawking or whatever will be remembered.

[rlse9]

One commonly used argument pirates use for old NES games is that they are no longer commercially available, which is often true. A lot of them are now available on Virtual Console, but not every game is. Why are they not?

A lot of them are because the publishers don't have the rights to release the games anymore because they don't own the license anymore.  Or it's just not worth it financially to release some of the more obscure games.

I'd bet that most of these game companies are still supporting SOPA behind closed doors and want the ESA to support it, even if they won't publicly say that because they don't want the negative publicity.

[ThePerm]

Chozo when he says public he doesn't mean privately owned verses publicly owned, he means Overt or Covert. If someone overtly supports something out in the open they are public supporters, if someone supports things covertly in secret they are private supporters. Miscommunication and a half.  The use of public means "people know", whereas private "people don't know for sure", whearas the other use is "every person owns", and "some people  own".

[NWR_insanolord]

"Piracy" hasn't created some dearth of content. There's more content than ever.

There's more content than ever, but the overall quality of it has gone downhill.
I'm curious as to how history will judge the "artistic" values of this era.  Will Simon Cowell be the Da Vinci of our time?

Not Simon Cowell, but maybe David Simon. There's a lot more content available now, meaning there's a lot of shallow garbage but a lot of more obscure but still high quality stuff. Maybe the overall quality's gone down, but the best stuff out there is just as good as, if not better than, it ever was.

[UncleBob]

So what can be done about piracy? Well, one thing that could be done is content owners could make more of an effort to ensure their products are always commercially available in all markets.

This leads well into this...

And look at the Xenoblade Chronicles game for the Wii which was on the list of the top 10 pirated games of the year.

http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-games-of-2011-111230/

A misleading article title (it list the top five Wii, 360 and PC titles)...  So, out of those 15 titles, one wasn't widely available.  And even then, those numbers don't differentiate between downloads from Japan, Europe, Australia vs. NA (i.e.: areas where the game was sold vs. areas were it wasn't sold).  And that's only the illegal downloads /they/ track.

Look at the #2 PC and #2 360 title... Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.  Pretty much the most widely distributed game of all time (dunno how it compares to Madden).  You can get it via (legal) download on the PC, a physical/retail copy for the PC, on the 360, the PS3, the Wii - hell, there's even a DS version and probably an iOS/Android version.  I'm pretty sure it had a mostly simultaneous world-wide release, so no one can cry foul about not getting it/not getting it quickly enough.

The idea that "oh, they should make the game available to me when I want it and how I want it" is just another lame excuse pirates use to attempt to justify taking someone's hard work without compensating them.