Free for a Fee

Who owns the firmware on a smartphone, the device manufacturer or the purchaser?  Ownership of copies of computer programs is a thorny issue with which the federal courts have grappled in numerous cases. The issue arose during the most recent round of triennial rulemaking that resulted in the promulgation of a new set of exceptions to 17 U.S.C. § 1201(a), which prohibits the circumvention of technological measures deployed to limit access to copyrighted works.

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Tuesday at GDC Microsoft announced a number of upcoming additions to Games for Windows, including stronger protection against piracy, as well as some nifty features to make playing your PC games simpler if you have multiple systems. There will also be storefront support added so publishers can add sales directly into their game. Drew Johnston, the product unit manager for the Windows Gaming Platform, and Dave Luehmann, GM for Microsoft Game Studios, described to Ars what these updates will entail.

You can call it whatever you want—as long as you don’t call it DRM. “What we have is anti-piracy measures we’ve put in place. I wouldn’t quite categorize it as DRM,” Johnston tells Ars. “We have zero-day piracy protection—this helps reduce the leakage of IP before release. The bits are encrypted, and there is a one-time activation that checks to see if the game has been released or not, and we’ll send out a decrypt code so the game can be played.”

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It’s becoming clear that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is not, as backers have  suggested, just a minor tuneup to worldwide intellectual property law, one done for the purpose of cracking down on fake DVD imports or Coach handbag ripoffs.

Such a law—one that amounted essentially to some streamlining and coordination in the fight against actual pirates—might well be hashed out between nations operating in secret. But a treaty that seeks to apply criminal penalties to peer-to-peer file-sharing? Let’s open a window and let the sunlight in.

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A new Firefox extension called Pirates of the Amazon lets users download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s free of charge by cross referencing Amazon’s product pages with torrent files from the Pirate Bay.

If the content can be found on the Pirate Bay’s search index it shows up as a “Download 4 Free” link on the top of the Amazon product page. This links directly to the hosted .torrent tracker file, letting the user avoid having to make a purchase from Amazon in place of acquiring it illegally via BitTorrent.

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