One wonders if she’d have admitted her ignorance if angry gamers hadn’t destroyed her book’s rating on Amazon. But it’s good in any case that she tried to correct her mistake in an interview with The New York Times.

Cooper Lawrence, author of “The Cult of Perfection: Making Peace With Your Inner Overachiever,” appeared on “The Live Desk With Martha MacCallum” on Fox News, and, as previously mentioned, joined in on the slander party, lambasting Mass Effect for its “pornographic” sexual content.

She’s the one who laughed before saying no, when asked if she’d ever actually played Mass Effect.

Deciding to do some research after the fact, she came to discover: “It’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”

“I recognize that I misspoke,” she said. “I really regret saying that, and now that I’ve seen the game and seen the sex scenes it’s kind of a joke. Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography.”

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According to the MTV Multiplayer blog, Fox has said that EA (the new owner of BioWare, developer of Mass Effect) has been invited to appear on ‘Live Desk With Martha MacCallum’ to discuss the controversy over Mass Effect’s sexual content

I’m about to say something potentially controversial myself: Just because you invite the slandered party onto your TV program to refute your lies, it doesn’t give you permission to spew those lies in the first place. You’re still lying. You’re still liars.

In my ever-so-humble opinion of course.

via Joystiq

Surprisingly enough, they get it all wrong.

No doubt due to the controversy stirred up by Kevin McCollough, who’s since apologized for misrepresenting the game and gamers, Fox News decided to tackle the issue of sexuality and Mass Effect.

Games journalist Geoff Keighley does an admirable job of trying to set the liars straight, but he’s outnumbered. One “expert” suggests that the game desensitizes the player to sexuality (without mentioning that the sexual content is PG-13 levels at the most), and a member of the “panel” asks why the game wasn’t rated Adults Only (again, PG-13…).

Of course, the host admits that she only recently bought a video game for the first time, and another says she feels old, wondering where the Atari went.

And they’re telling viewers what to think about video games. They’ve all made idiots out of themselves, being willfully ignorant and spreading what’s tantamount to lies.

The whole issue would be hilarious if people didn’t actually watch, and believe, Fox News. Instead, it’s really, really frustrating, and more than a little scary.

Update:
Joystiq reminds me that the “expert” actually laughs when Geoff asks her if she’s ever played Mass Effect. Then she says no.

What is wrong with these people? It’s like they insist on making everything as terrible as possible.

Because a rootkit wasn’t bad enough. Because admitting DRM is a bad idea by telling people how simple it is to get around wasn’t bad enough.

Well, now that they’ve finally decided to drop DRM, here’s how they plan to implement it:

“DRM free music from Sony BMG will be available from January 15 to those who purchase a plastic card called the “Platinum Music Pass” for the album they want from a retail store for $12.99. Buyers will then have to visit MusicPass.com and enter a code to download the DRM free album they selected in the store.”

You have to go to the store, by a piece of plastic, go back home, and then download the songs DRM-free.

Wow. I hope lots of people get fired for this.

TechCrunch suggests that maybe they’re setting this up to fail, so that they can claim there was no demand for DRM-free and go back to selling DRMemd music.

Me? I think they’re just idiots.

Link.

Photo credit: swanksalot on Flickr, used under license. 

According to BusinessWeek, the last DRM holdout of the major music publishers might be getting ready to dump it, too. Not entirely surprising, as they’ve created more than their fair share of bad press with it, and they’re already telling their customers how to get around it.

“In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned.”

Link.

via The Register

“How did copyright become cool?” is perhaps one of the most well-informed and thought-out articles in the mainstream press on the subject. Sadly, it appears to be web-only, so I guess it didn’t make it into the real paper. But this is a start!

The Globe and Mail is, essentially, Canada’s New York Times. It’s based in Toronto, but available throughout the country. The fact that such a major source has, not only covered the issue, but considered it, is something of a big deal, web-only or not.

“Maybe he just didn’t think that copyright legislation could capture the public imagination. It would be hard to blame him if that were the case; at politician school, they don’t teach you to watch out for that third rail of Canadian politics, “anti-circumvention legislation.”

Suddenly, though, circumvention is a word that people are getting hot and bothered about. As anyone who has bought music from Apple has learned the hard way, companies are in the business of putting technological locks on their content. The classic example is songs bought on iTunes, which have built-in limits on where they can be played (iPods only!) and how they can be copied (hardly at all). The happy euphemism for this technique is Digital Rights Management, or DRM.”

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“The Industry Minister’s press secretary has advised journalists that the bill will not be introduced today or tomorrow. Since the House of Commons will break at the end of the week, the Canadian DMCA will not be introduced until at least late January.” Link.

This sounds to me like the Minister is hoping to delay long enough so that the intense opposition to the bill will wane, get distracted, and forget about it.

Which isn’t going to happen. This is the internet. Not TV. Not newspapers. When this gets brought up again in January, as long as Cory makes a few posts on BoingBoing, everybody will wake up, again.

The mainstream press probably won’t talk about it again. They’ve done their stories, they’ll forget.

But a month or so from now, when this rears its ugly head again, the opposition will be as fierce as ever.

As Cory said earlier today, “this thing won’t die until we cut off its head, sew its mouth full of garlic, and bury its head at a crossroads.” And activists aren’t going to give up until that happens.

Last night I linked to Charlie Stross’s outrage over the Science Fiction Writers of America putting the guy responsible for their last “piracy” PR debacle in charge of their new anti-piracy committee.

Cory Doctorow’s written his opinion of the matter at BoingBoing. And, yeah, he doesn’t sound too impressed by SFWA’s decision, either.

“Burt’s copyright projects for SFWA have been controversial and divisive. He created a push-poll that attempted to convince the membership to stop Amazon from indexing their books; he created a non-working system for poisoning ebooks and ruining the download experience and then patented it, in his name, at the organization’s expense (he has promised to return the money); he helped create a loyalty oath in which members were told to swear to “respect patents and trademarks” and so on.”

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Vimeo, a video sharing site I have reviewed in the past (and personally endorse for all my video content) has released an update to their player that supports native resolution HD in Flash.

Needless to say, the update is being widely embraced by the video community and beyond, getting coverage in Motionographer, Kottke, and many others. Although I’m no Flash expert, I’m guessing this is using Adobe’s new “Moviestar” technology because

1. Flash Player 9, the latest version, is required. Found this out the hard way when I was using a crappy old Windows PC with outdated software earlier today.
2. Jakob Lodwick, Vimeo’s founder, wrote about the Moviestar technology at his personal blog.
3. Really, how else could they do it? Current Flash tech doesn’t support high def video (at the codec level, like H264 does), and certainly streaming video with the VP3 codec at a high def size would kill your average server.

Why do I care if Vimeo is using Moviestar? Mostly I’m just curious, but I also am interested because this would be the first major real world application of the technology. If so, props to Vimeo; this is a very strong addition to their recent series of changes that have turned Vimeo into a world-class video sharing community.