First the game itself arrived, but no sign of the microphones, which made me giggle and made her to grow increasingly impatient. Fortunately for her the mics arrived not too long after in the back of a van, so tonight has been filled with the sound of Take That.

I can only hope that tomorrow the other disk arrives so there’ll at least be some other artists available. Either that or it was all a big con to get me to order some tune off the SingStore. Hmm.

I shall now spend Friday humming God-awful Take That tunes to myself and anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity. What has become of me.

At least I got a high score on Eye of the tiger. Wait, what am I saying…

They still don’t know when we’ll be back in the flat again, when I stuck my head in the door on Saturday the carpet was still up and we were missing a wall, so I doubt we’ll be back in any time soon.

To top it all off, the new Burnout DLC is out on Thursday and the PS3 is back at the flat still. Nooooo!

Saves getting up though.

Then we get home to find a pipe in the bathroom has burst and is spewing water all over the bathroom. Fan-bloody-tastic! So now we’re waiting for the landlord to call back so we can sort out a plumber to come and fix it.

It does give me an excuse to get a nice hi def set though, although they’re still a little pricey. So much for the budget.

The thing is, is it worth picking up a PS3 while we’re at it. Would be a shame to have a nice new telly with nothing to watch on it…

No point though. Their clever protection blocks all the video from playing and renders a big red X instead. Pretty sure it’s because I use my TV out to watch films … on my TV. Shock horror. George Lucas won’t allow me to do that however.

The exclusive web content didn’t work either.

The film does exactly the same. What supprised me more is even with the TV out turned off it does exactly the same. It might be because I don’t have some special driver installed, but since when has that been necessary to watch a DVD?

This disk is entirely unusable in my PC. That’s fsking great copy protection. And there was no indication of whether any software was installed, hopefully not, but if it’s a specialist player, I’m sure something is saved to the HDD.

Now I never plan to put this disk in my PC again, I’ll play it in my Playstation from now on, thank-you, but has some software been installed, what is this mysterious ‘copy-protection’ which the box boasts?

Maybe I’ll email Lucas Film and ask them why the product they’ve sold is incapable of doing the job it was purchased for.

It’s not so bad though, about a week after it came out at the cinema I got a very watchable pirate copy of Ep3 which I watched a couple times before getting a true DVD rip which was far superior. Apparently ‘Piracy ruins your viewing pleasure’ or so we’re always told in these ads, but if I can’t watch the real disk having bought it, then what’s the point in this protection?

As I said, it plays perfectly happy in my Playstation2, which I used for watching the extras disk, but I shall be enjoying full pirated bliss watching Revenge of the Sith simply because Lucas Film don’t trust me enough to let me watch it on the shop bought version.

Also, it saves having to get up and put the disk in.

Which brings up another point.

I have a massive shelf of DVD’s at home in the living room. Why shouldn’t I be able to digitise all of them, encode them to a 700meg DIVX avi and leave them on my network to stream about the house. I bought it, why shouldn’t I be able to do it? Fair use I’d call that.

Unfortunately to do so would be bypassing the copyright protection, and under the DMCA I would be breaking the law. Thankfully, it only seems to be illegal to ‘share’ music and films, or so it’s preached by the media companies, so leaching must be OK.

You can probably tell by the length of this post that this is something which I have deep feelings about. When will people realise that:

PIRACY IS GOOD

The first time I played Half-life I had a pirate copy. I now own the ENTIRE Valve back catalogue, TWICE OVER! I have the full box-set of Half-life, Blueshift, Opposing Forces and Counterstrike, as well as getting the Silver package on Steam which gives me all that plus more. Yes, me pirating that game really hurt Valve, didn’t it.

Having looked for a decent space combat game for years I stumbled across FreeSpace, about 6 years ago, on an old school pirate download site. Having spent the best part of a week downloading it (and the whole weekend getting the intro sequence – remember the days of dialup?) I thought it was a damn good game, and showed it to a friend. He too thought it was great. We both now own BOTH Freespace and Freespace 2. Chalk another 4 sales up to piracy.

When the Matrix first came out I think I was given it on VHS tape, I played it a few time, but the quality wasn’t great, and after the other two were announced I knew there would be a box set containing all three around sooner or later, so I pirated firstly the first film, which had already been purchased legally, then the following titles also. I now own the full 10 disk box set, purchased by my own fair hand.

As for music, I rarely listen to music, and if I do I tend to chuck on the BBC or listen to a web stream. Who needs to buy music when there’s a billion and one radio stations out there broadcasting for every need. Besides, I pay my licence fee for that very reason. The BBC provides me with my content. Even if I download it before it’s meant to be aired, if it goes out on the BBC, as a licence fee payer I have a right, no, a duty to watch it.

BBC2, for example, have just got hold of Family Guy and American Dad. These are two series I download from the US on a regular occasion. I still find myself watching these new ‘repeats’ on TV when they’re on though, even with random crap like Lost on Channel 4, where they have commercial interests to maintain, I watch it again, including the ads.

This seems to illustrate only 1 point.

Piracy only harms shit products.

If someone likes a product/film/album enough they will go out and buy it to support the people who made it. I do, I know friends who do. Ebay was right, people are generally good. Companies who try and rip us off with crap will be shat upon from a great height as the internet levels all playing fields.

Of course, just having the internet as a delivery method isn’t enough. Even when films DO become available to download they’re still going to be copy-protected to hell, and will only play in the site’s custom media player (same sort of thing as the Sony BMG cockup) which isn’t getting us anywhere. To be honest, if I knew I was able to copy, move, and generally use the content I’ve purchased as I see fit, be that copying to a PMP (Personal media player), storing it on my network or hell, even simply watching it on a PC, I’d be inclined to go out and buy a retail edition of something rather than downloading it pirate first, to see if it’s any good.

The main problem is you can’t. And now the EU are going to add ‘Data Retention’ to the law, meaning every ISP must record who sends and receives from whom. Not necessarily the content, but the connection at least (even failed attempts at calling it seems). I personally think this is a bad thing. Although managed correctly it will be a good tool for the tracking of criminals and terrorists, I know it won’t be.

Already a group are lobbying MEPs to try and get this used to track down copyright infringement, not quite the heinous crimes we all imagined, and aimed squarely at the customers. Apparently we can’t be trusted, and Ebay was wrong. People aren’t good.

Shame the top level execs in these companies are such sub-human slime that none of this applies to them. Sony have already got caught with their pants around their ankles… I wonder who’s next.

Oh Joy!

Well, not so. Open the wrapper and a hint of green shines out of it. It’s no magic ticket, hell, it’s not even a PS2 game. The buggers sent me the X-Box version. Damn them!

Some nice chap on the phone is going to send me a new one though, hopefully the right one this time, and I need to send this one back, recorded post.

Not too unhappy though. They fucked my order completely, but answered the phone in 3 rings, so I walked away happy and knowing what was happening.

If anyone at Eclipse is reading this, that’s the way to do business.

*(See previous post).