Tag: sopa

MAGFest X Roundup, Part 3

PRELUDE:

Our apologies for the length of time between Parts 2 and 3. We’ve been super busy with…

  • A new release from R_Garcia
  • Protesting SOPA/PIPA
  • Our upcoming podcast

However, we are committed to telling the rest of our MAGFest story — so grab a delicious beverage, sit back, relax, and prepare to be regaled with a tale of EPIC MUNDANITY!

DAY THREE: SATURDAY, JANUARY 7, 2012

Saturday was a barn-burner! The surge in attendees was significant, as all the folks who had to work on Friday began washing up on the shores of MAGfest. We rolled out of bed at the crack of 11:00am and went down the exhibition hall to crank up some tunes and enjoy our morning coffee. As with all cons, the first half of the day is best spent people-watching, because the cos-players are still fresh looking and the drunks from last night are still comically trying to make sense of their ambulatory abilities. Unlike MAGFest 9, we chose to stay away from the fire-water this year — lest we wind up singing Bill Withers songs with Duke Nukem again.

Q. What kind of music do you guys release? – A: Spacecore

We must admit: the daylight hours of Saturday were all work and no play this time around. Luckily, we met many awesome people from all over the country who were willing to give our music a listen. Many remembered us from the previous year, and some of those folks even came looking for our new releases. We had a great day selling our wares, and before we really had a chance to relax, it was already 9:00pm — so, rather than become dull boys, we opted to temporarily close the booth and take on some of the evening’s scheduled events. First on the list was the main attraction for the evening: Earthbound Papas.

Just in case you have no idea what we are talking about:

“The Earthbound Papas are a band formed by veteran Final Fantasy composer, Nobuo Uematsu, after his other project, The Black Mages, disbanded. According to Uematsu, they will play Final Fantasy music that The Black Mages had not played. It has also been suggested that they will play video game music from titles other than that of Final Fantasy.” --Final Fantasy Wiki

The fun certainly didn’t stop there. At some point we stumbled into one of the performance halls and happened upon An0va, who’s track “Flow” opens our 99 Problems but a Chip Ain’t One compilation.

An0va writes really awesome chiptunes — some of the best we’ve heard to date. On top of that, he is one of the nicest people on the planet. It was cool to see him slinging a guitar + gameboy live rig. You can download his latest album, The Teaching Machine for for free. Check out a bit of his MAGFest X performance below.

Following the evening performances, we returned to the booth for a brief red-eye sale and impromptu DJ set by R_Garcia. We then ate more pocky and drank a every variant of Mt. Dew before closing down for the night and heading over to the arcade for some sweet-sweet retro gaming love. However, our attention was drawn to something much more interesting…

Ya… Srsly.

Stay tuned for the final installment of our MAGFest X recap where we develop a new sales strategy based entirely on polyhedral randomizers!

A Message from The Pirate Bay

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition. We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe – but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world – because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

Blacking Out Against SOPA/PIPA.

FOREWARD:

We are strongly against censorship of any kind, particularly censorship that is anti-information and anti-technology. SOPA/PIPA are not your run-of-the-mill PMRC obscenity witch hunts, they are (with no exaggeration) two bills designed to give censorship control to large corporations that have built enormous fortunes on the backs of artists, musicians, journalists and other creatives. These corporations are now beginning to lose their iron grip on “intellectual property” and are struggling to adapt their archaic business models to be sustainable in the modern age.

We strongly oppose the SOPA/PIPA bills and those who would support them. Internet censorship is going to a vote in the Senate on January 24th. While Senators are in their home states for the January recess, we need to flood their public meetings and offices with our concerns about the bill. We have done a little “stealing” of our own and borrowed the information below from the craigslist.com SOPA article. Please take the time to arm yourself with information — and be prepared to defend the Internet, which has arguably become one of the most influential and powerful tools ever invented!

How to Stop HR 3261 (SOPA) and S 968 (PIPA) Internet Blacklist Bills

Congress needs to hear from you, or these dangerous bills will pass – they have tremendous lobbying dollars behind them, from large corporations reportedly hoping to prop up outdated, anti-consumer business models at the expense of the very fabric of the Internet — recklessly unleashing a tsunami of take-down notices and litigation, and a Pandora’s jar of “chilling effects” and other unintended (or perhaps intended?) consequences.

Please let your Members of Congress know you OPPOSE H.R. 3621 “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) and S. 968 “Protect IP Act” (PIPA):

Learn more about SOPA, Protect IP (PIPA), and Internet Blacklisting:

Internet Giants Consider Blackout Against SOPA!

Where does your Member of Congress stand on SOPA? (Project SOPA Opera)

Opponents of SOPA: Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, eBay, AOL, Mozilla, Reddit, Tumblr, Etsy, Zynga, EFF, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Ron Paul (R-TX)

Supporters of SOPA: RIAA, MPAA, News Corporation, VISA, Mastercard, Pfizer, Comcast, Time Warner, ABC, Nike, Walmart, Dow Chemical, Tiffany, Chanel, Rolex, Monster Cable, Teamsters, Lamar Smith (R-TX), John Conyers (D-MI)

THE BLACKOUT

In solidarity with many other opponents of SOPA/PIPA, we will observe a 12-hour blackout of all Nophi web and social network activity on January 18, 2012 from 8am to 8pm Eastern Time. Our regular site URL (www.nophi.net) will be replaced by the following message “Nophi has gone dark from January 18, 2012 at 8:00 am until January 18, 2012 at 8:00 pm to protest SOPA/PIPA and Internet Censorship.” Additionally we will not post any updates to Twitter or Facebook during the 12 hour blackout. Our store at http://www.phitunes.com will remain open and we will still answer your emails or direct messages.

Additionally, we are suggesting a boycott of all products and services provided by supporters of SOPA/PIPA and their sponsors. Here is an extensive list of companies that are in support of internet censorship: http://bit.ly/uVPNcR

Thank you,

Your friends at Nophi