PirateBay loses

Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were each sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay $3.56 million in damages together.

The court said,

"By providing a website with ... well-developed search functions, easy uploading and storage possibilities, and with a tracker linked to the website, the accused have incited the crimes that the filesharers have committed"

Some ISPs refuse to cooperate to shut down the Pirate Bay, saying that the ruling doesn't apply to them. Patrik Hiselius, a lawyer at Telia Sonera said:

"In part, this is not a legally binding decision, but above all, this is a judgement against Pirate Bay and nothing that effects any service provider. We will not take any action [to block] the contents if we are not compelled to do so"

Via The Local

Happy April Fool's Day!

Some of the jokes I've seen:

Starcraft 2: The terratron, which is basically a transformer assembled from your base. From the video, it seems like a command center forms the head and bunkers are the foot pads.

Team fortress 2: The Jarate pee jar.

For some of the day, Youtube flipped the video and reversed the text.

Google CADIE, or Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. It has its own blog that includes a video and

Gmail Autopilot, which would answer emails for you.

Google Chrome in 3D. It suggests you begin by printing out your 3-D glasses then enabling 3-D with a special option in Chrome.

Gizmodo cleansed itself of a "worm" that was messing up the site.

Amazon's cloud computing, or Floating Amazon Cloud Environment (FACE) that would consist of giant helium balloons.

Reddit for a while looked like Digg.

Fark looked like Facebook.

Sqeez Bacon. From the same site, interactive portal shirts.



Pizza Hut creating portrait pizzas.

Warner Brothers is acquiring the Pirate Bay.

Expedia is offering flights to Mars.

Obama ordered all Chevies and Dodges out of NASCAR.

The Guardian announced that it was moving completely to Twitter. The headline: "Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink."

Al Gore announced a new line of Vegan food.

A yodeling game for the Xbox.

Yahoo! added an Ideological search where you can search for terms then clarify to search only within Republican or Democratic sources. This one probably isn't an April Fool's Joke, as it works well.

Game pricing

In a recent article from Edge.com, Valve's video game pricing system was looked into as an experimenting ground to test the maximization of games sold versus price. At first it seems like a simple two-variable maximization: the lower the cost, the more units sold. However there are many other factors involved that will require more testing.

This is subject to diminishing returns, of course. Valve cut L4D's cost by half and got a 3000% increase. If the price was cut by 1/4, there wouldn't be a 6000% increase but more like a 4000% or 5000% increase.

It is impossible to completely eliminate piracy. People will either "try out" a game or be too stingy to part with their money. Lowering the price of a game will reduce piracy, but can never eliminate it until the game is free.

When people see that something is on sale, they are more likely to buy because of the urgency the sale presents. If the game was always cheap, then the actual increase in sales would be lower than the one-weekend 3000% increase Valve saw.

My view is that in the long term, lowered game pricing could possibly work. As games become more specialized and cater towards specific gaming populations, the number of total games will increase. Because there would be so many games, each one would take a smaller percentage of the total gaming population. In addition, the the cost to produce the big-ticket games increases as players expect higher quality. So, the price to program games would go up while percentage of the total that buys would drop.

Of course, it's not this simple. People can own more than one game and play more than one actively. As the plugged-in culture matures and more people become accustomed to spending time on the Internet and playing games, Also, the gaming population is increasing, so although each game may have a smaller percentage of the total, the number buyers would increase. In the end, it is possible for game producers to make money by reducing the price of games.

Partial victory for the Pirate Bay

The prosecution, lead by Håkan Roswall, has decided to drop the charge of aiding the copying of the material. Everything connected to reproduction was removed from the claim. However, it will still continue with the reproduction of torrent files and making available copywritten works.

The problem was that Håkan Roswall couldn't explain the bittorrent technology adequately and show an actual link to the Pirate Bay.

Via Torrentfreak.

Facebook clarification

The Facebook response to the allegations by saying that even when the information is kept after closing your account, it will be covered under the privacy settings you had in place when your account was working:

We are not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload. The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site. That is, if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc...), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend). Furthermore, it is important to note that this license is made subject to the user's privacy settings. So any limitations that a user puts on display of the relevant content (e.g. To specific friends) are respected by Facebook. Also, the license only allows us to use the info "in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof." Users generally expect and understand this behavior as it has been a common practice for web services since the advent of webmail. For example, if you send a message to a friend on a webmail service, that service will not delete that message from your friend's inbox if you delete your account

From Consumerist.

Edit (2/19/08): Facebook has removed the new terms of service, indicating that it is very willing to respond to user feedback.

Bad Facebook

Not only was Facebook stolen by Zuckerberg from his former classmates, but it can now hold on to your information after you quit and if you're still in, it may sell your information.