Bad to the Bone (Part 4)

Last time I discussed the strategy of making false or misleading statements in the classified section of Magic Online  This whole concept of misleading statements to sell a product or a service has a name: marketing.   Some have described the field of marketing as legalized lying.

Whether or not a soft drink is the best soft drink around is purely a subjective statement.  Whether the taste of a diet food is the same as its equivalent is open to legitimate debate.  These debates center on subjective matters; designed as such to get around the legal barriers to the truth in advertising laws.

Objective claims typically not made because fact checkers will indeed attempt to verify the authenticity of said claims.  If your bot claims to have 60,000 cards in its inventory, it is much easier to verify than stating that your bot has a large inventory.  (How is large defined?)

But this bad behavior is trivial compared to what some botters do: change the credit their customers have.

Why would a botter openly change the credits of one of their customers?  Maybe the customer is a cherry picker, picking only the best cards and leaving the chaff.  Maybe the customer is really another bot and one does not want the competition to profit at their expense.

One might even be tempted to think that this is a profitable strategy.  After all, they’ll reason, the bot gives the customer their balance at the start and end of each trade.  Most customers have multiple accounts across the various bot chains and who is going to be meticulous enough to actually verify each and every account?  Plus, computers do not lie, right?  So who is going to notice if their balance drops?  We all trust computers, don’t we?

There are several reasons why this unethical approach will not work.

It is not cost effective.  In terms of your time, the amount of time it takes to alter a customer’s credit is not worth the fractional ticket you will gain.  (Even the most casual customers will notice a negative credit balance.)

Getting caught will bring about serious consequences.  First off, you will have one extremely angry customer who will definitely publicize that your bot alters credits.  The accusation alone would be enough to cause some players to black-list your bot so that it could never happen to them, which naturally means no customers and thus, no profits.

WotC could intervene.  While the bot owner would argue that this is not the prevue of WotC as trading has little to do with the game experience, the legal arm of WotC might see things differently.  Ripping off customers would be considered a violation of the Terms of Service and thus, terminate your account without prejudice.  This would mean losing all your inventory.

OK, so you use a mule bot for such things.  WotC could up the ante and decide to terminate all accounts which the bot owner has.  No problem, register each bot under a different name and email address.  But WotC would track all MTGO activity from your IP address, making it real simple for them to suspend or terminate your bot chain.

Is losing your business really worth 0.35 credits?

Bad to the Bone - Part 3

On Sunday, my colleague posted that putting the names of popular bot chains in their classified

messages was unethical and used by bad bots.

http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-comprehensive-guide-for-aspiring_13.html

Simply putting the name of the competition in your advertising message so that your bot will show up in search results has been done since marketers realized they might be able to curtail the competition by using such strategies.

Bad bots however do far more than simply inserting the competition’s name so that their bot shows up in the results. 

• Saying that your bot will sell a card for X when the bot sells it for X+Y
• Saying that your bot will purchase a card for X when the bot will buy it for X-Y
• Saying that your bot will purchase X copies of a card when in reality it is set to only accept X-Y
• Saying that your bots are linked when in reality they are not.
• Saying that you have X cards in your collection when in reality the bot has significantly fewer cards.
• Posting an email address or a website which does not exist or gives the customer a way to contact the owners

These tactics may give the bot a little publicity and maybe even an up-tick in sales, but customers will notice and over time, such tactics are not successful.

Doubt me?  Look at your own life and your own purchases and the brands you trust.  Would you buy an eye-pad from a company named Aqqle?  If gasoline was listed at $4 a gallon on sign buy $5 on the pump, would you purchase gasoline there?  Would you go purchase it a second time?

Bad to the Bone - Part 2

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

When one uses this phrase to describe someone, they usually are referring to a positive attribute, typically work ethic. 

Of course, this also breeds copycats.  In sports, it causes imitation.  What was successful for a time becomes copied until it no longer works anymore.  In American Football, the Miami Dolphins unveiled the Wildcat offense which was trendy for a couple of years.  Currently, the read-option has become that trend.

In the business world, this can have more serious consequences than it can in sports.  Ask Rolex if they like people copying their design for watches.  This problem, along with counterfeiting, have created a niche industry of copyrights, patents, and the enforcement of such laws.  Some even say that this is a world-wide problem.

So how does it affect us bot owners? 

Suppose I own a bot chain Bot1, Bot 2, Bot 3 and Bot 4.  I am happily making a healthy profit on my chain and am satisfied.  Now suppose someone comes along with Bot5, Bot6, Bot7 and Bot8.  The confusion is going to cause me to lose business.  As you can imagine, I will not be too pleased about this.

So what can I do about this?

WotC probably will not do anything about it.  They will not step in because nothing was done to violate their Terms of Service.  They won’t get involved in a bot spat and this would set a bad precedence.  WotC has very little to gain by interfering and a lot to lose.  So I suspect they would not get involved.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t purchase Bot5, Bot6 and so on for your purposes.  If nothing else, they can be used for future expansion of your bot empire.  Even if you never use those accounts, just having those accounts means no one else can have them, preserving your integrity and reputation.  You can even use these accounts as mules, a place to put inventory while transferring from one bot to another, or when purchasing a collection.

Bad to the Bone - Part 1

United Airlines to honor tickets sold for $0.
Computer glitch sending wrong bills for toll roads.
Hollywood condo owner receives $154,000 water bill.
Google flags the entire Internet as malware.

Each of the above is a real headline.  The news media loves stories like these as it breaks up the monotony of the local crime report and it also allows the media to subtlety pin the blame on an inanimate object instead of a real living human being. 

They are constant too.  This past Sunday, a Miami Marlins pitcher tossed a no-hitter, a pretty rare feat for baseball.  The Marlins organization allowed people to purchase the un-sold tickets.  If you chose the print-from-home option for these tickets, you’ll soon discover they were printed with the wrong date.  Computer errors are simply all too common.

Computers have deeply integrated into our society and will continue to integrate itself even more in the foreseeable future.  It is hard to imagine where society will be in a few years with technology like Siri and cell phones becoming more like personal assistants than an emergency communications device.

Yet we seem to forget that computers are nothing but tools.  Extremely powerful and useful tools but they are tools nonetheless, doing nothing of their own initiative, only doing what someone else has programmed them to do.  (Even Artificial Intelligence is nothing more than a randomization of a pre-loaded set of instructions.)

We all can agree that for the most part, computers have benefited society.  Who hasn’t been mesmerized by Wikipedia?  If you’ve ever used online bill pay, you appreciate not having to write a paper check once a month and making odd trips to the post office trying to get more stamps.

But as much good as computers have done for society, there are bad people in this world who also have computers.  These computers are programmed to do things which are judged by others as “bad”.  These exists a whole industry whose purpose is to protect your computer from the over 200,000 pieces of malware which is discovered daily.

Even we bot owners are not immune.  We’ve all profited from Library and we are satisfied with its operation.  However, there are those who think that their profits are not enough and will do unethical things to attempt to get those profits.  We’ll be discussing those in this series and we’ll start next time.

You Can't Get What You Want 'til You Know What You Want

While trying to come up with an idea for my next topic, I looked at recent topics mentioned on this blog and went back in time.  The list of topics is fairly impressive:  ESXi, VMware, how to operate a business, economics, and market trends.  We’ve had discussions on how to draft, how to construct a deck, and how to market to clans.  We’ve had discussions on computer hardware, computer software and how to integrate them when configuring your bot.  It’s been quite an education.

But in all of this is that the reader can get lost.  After all, this blog exists for you, the reader.  While it is the responsibility of the writer to make the articles interesting and entertaining, we do not always hit the mark. Topics will be brought up that are of little interest to some botters.  Those who only run one (1) part time bot does not particularly look forward to reading VMware articles meant for bot chains.  In the same manner, bot chain owners do not particularly care for the Botting 101 articles.

So I ask the readers, what is it that you want us to write about?  Do you wish discussions on bit coin and how that might affect our business?  Do you wish a more business oriented blog?  Do you wish feedback on the viability of a wish list of bot features?  (Suggest a feature and we comment on it)  Do you want some real life examples of how to deal with irate customers? 

Write down your thoughts and suggestions in the forum below and we’ll go from there.  After all, this blog is for you, the reader.

Force of Will - not the card one!

I would love to say that I am a navigated businessman who found the secret of growing a company :-) Of course this is not true, but yet I find a common pattern on the successful companies and how their CEOs manage them.

in two words: "Force of Will" (not the card!)

You have to be smart, brilliant, passionate.. but if you lack the capacity to "stay at it", to hold on, to work hard in the tough periods... you won't succeed. Running a business is not a sprint, 

it's a marathon. 

Albert
staff@mtgolibrary.com

History of Magic Online: Once Upon a Time…

We host the first of a series of articles from our friends blog http://www.mtgeconomist.com , a top blog dealing with mtg and mtgo economic aspects.
You can read the original article here: 
http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/historia-de-magic-online-parte-2/


The current version of Magic Online you can download from the official website is quite different of the first one that appeared back in 2002. Some features of the original version were removed and new ones were included in order to slowly debug the game. What is certainly true is that you must know the changes that have taken over the history of Magic Online to be the reference on the digital card market. In this article I introduce you a brief resume to give you an idea of the evolution of the game.

The beginning of Magic Online History

Before Magic Online firstly appeared, Wizards experimented with various proposals to transfer the Magic game experience to the digital world. Several games were developed, some with an adventurous format like Magic: The Gathering created by Microprose, and others as strategy games like MTG Battlemage that had little to do with the mechanics of the card game.

Later in the year 1999, a game called Magic Interactive Encyclopedia was released. It basically consisted of a software in which you classify your collection and build your decks to avoid using physical cards. The program was updated online with each new expansion for free, so you had all the latest images of the cards available. This idea had good critics, and in fact it was the seed for the creation of Magic Online in 2002.

The first major difference between Magic Online and the Encyclopedia was that on Magic Online a player possessed digital cards instead of marking the ones that he belonged on the physical world. Therefore, it required a central server to control the collections of the players. Secondly, the rules of the matches were controlled by the software itself so players only have to focus on playing the game. These two features were essential in order to get Magic Online experience closer to the physical card game. The expansions that firstly came out in the history of Magic Online started with the Invasion cycle and Judgment to Scourge afterwards.

Magic Online 2.0

Version 2.0 of the game came shortly after to the public, and its main goal was to adapt the deep changes introduced by Eighth Edition rules. It is also important to consider that the original development team was changed from an independent company (Leaping Lizards) to another group inside Wizards. On the other hand, at that time the programming of mechanics of the cards was not yet dominated, so the newest sets were released much later than the physical cards.

Since the beginning, on Magic Online you could play both constructed and sealed. The traditional formats were Standard/Extended/Legacy for constructed, of course only with existing cards in their digital version (from Invasion onwards). Regards the sealed format, you were able to play Limited (tournament deck and 2-3 boosters) and Draft (3 boosters).

Additionally, some time after version 2.0 was launched, the new format denoted as Leagues was born, which consisted of a 256-man Sealed, although it had several differences:

• Each week you could play 5 matches. Each match won gave you 4 points, 2 points for a draw and 1 point if you lose. 
• You could play more matches on that same week but they counted as tiebreaker points. For each match won this way you took 3 tiebreaker points, 1 for a draw and 0 for a loose. 
• After the first week and before you started the following 5 matches you could open an additional booster to add those cards to your pool and improve your deck.

As you can see, you could play a whole month with the same sealed cards and improve the deck week after week. A great deal for the players and at the same time losses for Wizards (compared with draft queues). Besides, the infrastructure required to manage the huge amount of users playing this format led the League format to disappear from version 3.0. Today people are still speculating on whether Leagues will appear shortly. Wizards keeps saying so, but there are no news that points out we will play this format someday.

The need for a Magic Online 3.0

The main problem with Magic Online at that time resided on its scalability: the game could only support a maximum number of users connected at once. The crashes happened almost daily, so Wizards had to develop a version 3.0 from scratch. When the old version finally turned off, leaving 3.0 as the only valid version, problems like the transition to 2.0 appeared again: errors during the matches, crashes and even the report of cards disappearing from collections.

Although it took quite, in the end the programming team finally fixed most of the bugs and let the Magic Online as a good game from the functional point of view. However, many players disliked the interface design because it looked much less intuitive than version 2.0. I think the biggest problem is that people is usually reluctant to changes, especially if they have learnt and used the same tool for several years.

At that time, Wizards decided to publish old sets at Magic Online. On one hand, they launched the expansions from Mirage up to Mercadian Masques cycle as is, because they were designed for drafting purposes. On the other hand, the oldest collections did not follow this philosophy so they created Masters Edition, a series of sets which compiled Pre-Mirage cards so they could be drafted. In this way, nowadays almost all physical cards are already edited on their digital version. Some of them will never be published on Magic Online (i.e. the ante cards) and others such as Power Nine has been confirmed to appear but we do not know how yet.

And now, do you really need a Magic Online 4?

Once again history repeats with the new version of Magic Online, the v4. The same problems with bugs, the interface is chaotic (or at least completely different from the v3)… Eventually they will probably solve but it will surely require time and money. Furthermore, the transition from version 2 to 3 was justified from the number of simultaneous users point of view. But what justification has this new version? It does not even adapt to new trends on interfaces and consumes more resources than before, despite the game is simply an interface with images that manages a remote database with built-in chat (from a technical and low-level point of view). As an example, you can compare the current collection section with the new one with the following figures.

I would understand a redesign of the interface because they were to release a new version of the game for consoles/tablets/phones or even Mac. Do not get me wrong, I like the improvements on a software but in this case I also think that the update of the client could have been more progressive by maintaining the current version.

Moreover, the last version of the client also may affect, at least initially, to the digital card market and its economy as it already happened before with version 3 of Magic Online. I will tell you more details about this market on the next chapter of this series.

Passionate.

We are often told we need to be passionate about our work, our company or the product we are selling. And while it is true, it is also a little bit ephemeral.

Today I heard a better way to describe this:

Transfer our enthusiasm. 

 I love it, and I’m going to use it as a way to judge myself after I present an idea or project to people in the future.

Do not give up

We live in a "startup" world.
We are bombed with news about Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook and Android... all growing at embarassing rates and earning millions of dollars. This is ok but... it's not the real world. It's a tiny lucky fraction.

For the rest of the world (and for the rest of the world I mean: "everyone", 99.9999999% of the persons) working hard and staying at it is foundamental. The good part is that you can easily avoid failure, especially when botting: do not give up after 3 weeks, don't get discouraged, insist, iterate and learn from your errors. Stay up late at night, prepare yourself a good coffee, wake up early in the morning.

If you want to be successful, get ready for a lot of long days followed by long nights. I really like the mantra from Jason Fried and 37 Signals. He has a smallish company, 20 or so people that profits Millions per year, and that’s my goal for my companies, but here’s one thing I just found out about how to get there… Stay at it: everyday you continue to build things, the closer you get to a kick-ass, super-profitable business empire.

Future-Proofing: Competition

"And what does that mean for us?  Much more business!"

Or much more competition as the bot/human ratio keeps growing. - Carlos Lazaro

Carlos’ comment from my last entry is a rather depressing one, and one that I’d like to dispel. 

First of all, we do not fear competition.  Competition is what makes us stronger, as a community and as business owners.  If there were only five (5) bots on MTGO, what would we see?  Outrageous prices and constantly busy servers.  If there were five thousand (5,000) bots on MTGO, what would we see?  Very realistic prices, and an easy way to trade unwanted cards for products the customer does want.

So how does that help us?  More bots means less profits for all.

Because when a player gets a good trade experience, be it from our bots or another bot, the player will keep playing Magic.  If there was a bot monopoly, there is a chance that players will leave the game, and they might not return.  It is very difficult for us to make a profit when there are no players logged into MTGO.

Let me illustrate using a recent example: Remember when Microsoft said that they were no longer going to work on Internet Explorer.  After all, why should they spend money improving a product (Explorer 6) that is given away at no charge and that browsers are done, ie completed.

This lasted awhile and then some high school student takes a chunk of code and re-works it into what we now call Firefox.  Then Google decides to jump into the browser field with Chrome.  Should I mention the plethora of browsers which now exist? 

And what has that done for us?  We have features that we couldn’t even conceive a few years ago.  We are more productive, get more enjoyment, and can be safer by using now-standard features like tabbed browsing, a slew of addons and community-based rating systems like Web of Trust.

Competition has made the browser programs better.  And in this same manner, competition makes us better botters.  Next time I will explore the competition question in more detail.

Future-Proofing: Magic the Gathering

Today we begin a new year.  As with any new year, people make resolutions and about half of them are already broken.  As we near the conclusion of this series on Future-Proofing, last time I described my succession plan and how it hinges on just one thing.  It also happens to be the one thing I, nor any of us, can control, what the future of MTGO actually is.  So let’s look at MTGO and its future.

Five years ago, MTGO accounts numbered between 1,000 and 2,000 users on at any given time.  This is a particularly small number when compared to the number of actual players.  But we can dismiss this as MTGO at the time, could only host 2,000 users maximum and there were a large amount of bots slowing things down.  In computer terms, the architecture was not scalable, meaning there was an upper limit.

In 2008, times were fairly good; the Great Recession didn’t hit and WotC was actively reworking their architecture to allow many more simultaneous users.  While it was annoying at the time, it is fine now, with 4,000 to 5,000 active users on at any given time.  While this is an increase of up to 500%, that MTGO is scalable means there is no limit to growth.  Things slow down, just add a server.  Lag gets to be an issue, just open up another Internet pipe.

So the capacity is not going to be a problem in the foreseeable future.  What about the health of the card game itself?  While people moan about four sets being released annually, people do purchase the new sets, and draft these sets.  This is a good thing for Magic.  It is also good that players can leave and return at any time, and with just some minor retraining, can jump straight into a draft and be competitive.  Old cards from Tempest, Ice Age, etc, are still playable as the core game mechanics are the same.  A fifteen year old deck can still play against any Standard deck today. 

Another thing has changed: people are accustomed to online transactions and digital objects.  Ten years ago, this was a controversial topic of discussion.  These days, only nit-pickers complain that they could lose their investments in digital items. 

People are also realizing the value of online entertainment.  A movie provides only two (2) hours of entertainment.  A dinner at a restaurant only an hour.  A draft can take three (3) hours and if played well, can provide even more.  You even get to keep the cards!

So what is the bottom line?  As the lines between physical and online Magic blur, as more cross-promotions are done, as more and more people get into the game, and when this economy improves, the number of players will increase.  Seeing 10,000 simultaneous users in five years should not be unexpected.  25,000 should be what WotC is going after.  And what does that mean for us?  Much more business!

Future Proofing: Selling (Part 1 of 2)

With all this talk of the world ending on Friday, at least to those who believe the Mayan Calendar.  One of the unintended consequences of this quirk of time keeping is that many people are taking long views of their lives and asking questions that they had never really considered before.

Some of them are the obvious, the meaning of life, what am I doing with my life, why am I in this relationship, why am I living in this situation, etc.

Couple this with the traditional New Year’s Resolutions that people will inevitably make, stop smoking, lose weight, start a diet, write a book, read more books, etc, there are a lot of questions that are being asked and answers few and far between.

One of the strategies that some do is read what successful people do, and then emulate their thoughts and conduct and hope by osmosis or formulaic behaviors will bring them success.  (I do find it funny that many of these people will not even define success but that’s another story.)

One of the patterns that  separate successful people from those who are not is successful people ask questions:  When buying a stock, successful people answer the question “when am I going to sell this stock”?  This implies a strategy for buying and selling where unsuccessful people will simply open an account and buy stocks not thinking of when they should be sold.

Many people start businesses and never answer the obvious question, “when should I get out of this business which I am starting up?”  Usually the answers are death, forced retirement, or when some random person comes around and makes an offer to buy the business.  As you can imagine, this leads to unsuccessful results.
 
So, in our series on future-proofing, let’s go over this question: When are you going to leave the bot business?  I will expound on this topic next time.

Future-Proofing: Intellectual Property (Part 4 of 3)

From the comment section:

Milagre:  Hi. I follow your blog and i was wondering could the legal action against WOTC be connected to the ebay ban on MTGO card sales?

The short answer is no.  But I suspect you’d like a detailed explanation.

[1] Wildcat’s lawsuit is based on a patent for online card games.  The Ebay ban is on digital objects.  The Ebay ban is not just limited to tickets or online cards.  If you look on Ebay, you will not find items for World of Warcraft, Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2, or any other online game.  (You’ll find the games themselves, but not any of the items found inside the game.)

[2] I did a series on Ebay auctions a couple of months ago, http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2012/10/ebay-auctions-part-3-of-3.html where I postulated that Ebay was taking down these auctions as protection against copyright and patent lawsuits.
[3] I suspect there is more to Ebay banning digital items than simply copyright violation protection.  What could that be?  Sales tax.  Let me explain.

Here in the United States, there is talk of the fiscal cliff and how the US will fall into it if some deal is not made.  As we all know, there are two (2) ways to balance a budget: reduce spending (Not likely with the re-election of President Obama) or increase revenue.  This means raising taxes, seeking out revenue enhancements, increased fees, or whatever politicians wish to call them.  It means more money into the Treasury.

One of the ways that has been proposed is an Internet sales tax.  This has cropped up every now and then so the idea isn’t new.  It is just that there is so much opposition that it is politically unpopular and no politician who wishes to be re-elected will vote for this. 

But there are other ways such a tax could be levied.  One of the proposals was on the sale of digital items.  As you can imagine, this has far-reaching implications, even for us.  Diablo 3 was to have a real money auction house; where you could purchase digital items for real world cash.  As controversial as this is, Blizzard had plans to do this.  But even the mighty Blizzard buckled at the legal quagmire that would ensue.  For instance, is a digital item new or used?  I don’t mean just in the pedestrian way, but in the legal sense of when the tax was imposed on the item.
These and many more questions need to be answered and will eventually be addressed by the US Supreme Court.  But this is many years away and will not affect us bot owners for the foreseeable future.

Future-Proofing: Intellectual Property (Part 3 of 3)

I began this series with an introduction to patent law and last time I discussed the nuisance of patent trolls, companies which exist solely to get patents and sue anyone else who makes a work which violates their monopolistic idea that they are just squatting on.

MtgoSoS did a post about Wildcat’s suit against WotC and makes the claim that nothing major is going to come from it.  Let’s analyze that claim.

Wildcat has a patent for online electronic card games.  So this would mean that WotC could easily have MTG in paper form, but could not have it in online form.

But doesn’t having a patent imply you actually have to do something with it?  Wildcat has had this patent for over a decade now and has no products or services to show for it.  Shouldn’t a court take that into consideration and toss out this lawsuit over revoke the applicable patent?

Sadly though, Wildcat will simply make the claim that they are “still in development” of their Ultimate Electronic Card Game.  They’ll say, look at Diablo 3.  That took over eight years to make that.  How long was Starcraft 2 in development?  This is not just limited to Blizzard either.  Duke Nuk’em Forever was in development for fifteen years. 

Now, to many of us, we can see the flaws in that logic.  But to a judge who is not well versed in technology or the subtleties and nuances of game development, those arguments will not hold much weight.

So what normally does happen in these cases?  It depends on the target.  Smaller companies or those with inexperienced legal representation tend to be forced to pay, which usually means bankruptcy.  Since it typically costs at least $1,500,000 to defend such a suit, some companies will negotiate a settlement.  Larger companies with some backbone in management will fight these suits.  They figure that you can always negotiate a settlement based on how the trial goes.  Plus, larger companies can hire better legal representation which helps their cause in court.

So what is the long term prognosis?  WotC may win in a trial.  Wildcat may win in a trial.  Other card game makers may join this suit as this patent is the only reason why they have not made such a game.  (Did you ever wonder why there are no other card games online?)  But typically a settlement is reached.  Terms of such agreements are confidential.  If WotC has to pay a substantial amount to Wildcat, players may have to pay extra for their booster packs. 

But the bottom line, it is unlikely that MTGO is going to be shut down because of this lawsuit; and that is good news for us bot owners.  Knowing that MTGO is going to be around and alive and kicking makes it easier to do what we do.

http://www.cardboardconnection.com/news/law-of-cards-wildcat-files-lawsuit-against-wizards-of-the-coast
http://www.google.com/patents?id=tEIfAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=true
http://www.patentarcade.com/

Future-Proofing: Intellectual Property (Part 2 of 3)

Last time I gave an introduction to copyrights and patents.  It is through this mechanism that many advances in technology and culture are made because through this encourages people to take risks and profit from ideas which prove beneficial to mankind.

But patents are not as objective as other laws, like theft and murder, which are much more objective.  There exists a lot of “wiggle room” when it comes to defining what is a violation of a patent and what is not.  Here is where the lawyers and law-makers work their magic.

In the United States, patent law and intellectual property laws in general, are considered too strict.  What I mean by this is that it is considered too easy to sue a company for violations.  This has created a cottage industry where companies exist, which never make a product or offer a service.  But these companies will rent out a small office space, put a name plate on the door, but are “never open for business”.  They hire no employees.  But they are extremely willing to sue someone else for alleged patent violations.  As one of their slogans puts it, “Look at many ideas.  Pick an outstanding one.  Patent it.  Commercialize it.  Reap the rewards.”  They are known as Patent Trolls.

Note that making a product or making significant improvements to an existing product is never mentioned.  Just patent an idea, and wait until someone else independently does something with this idea , the patent troll will sue.

This has led to some pretty silly lawsuits over the years, but because patent law is this way, these suits have merit.  Namco has a patent which prevents playing mini-games during a loading screen.  Simpson’s Road Rage had to change an arrow which points where you should go in a driving game to a finger because the arrow violated a patent. 

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130122/the_trouble_with_patents.php?print=1

Clearly, this kind of patent abuse is not what Thomas Jefferson and others had in mind when they founded the patent laws.  Next time, I’ll wrap up by going into the Wildcat lawsuit against WotC in detail.

Future-Proofing: Intellectual Property (Part 1 of 3)

As we continue our series on Future-proofing, I thought I would take this opportunity to look into the recent blog post by mtgoSoS about WotC being sued by Wildcat Intellectual Property Holdings and do a little research and throw in what little I know about such topics.

First off, the name of company is a little weird. “Intellectual Property Holdings”.  A quick internet search revealed a plethora of lawsuits that this company has filed against other companies, not just WotC.

But first, we need a little background.  When normal people think of copyrights and patents, we think of artists and inventors who make something and want protection from vultures who simply want to copy their work.  For example, MGM/United Artists holds the rights for the James Bond series.  What copyright law is intended to do is to prevent me from making a Single-O 9, who works for Special Branch in Scotland Yard or Interpol.  This makes sense to most people.

The same thing applies for products.  If I make a device that turns sludge into potable water, I should be allowed to profit from it.  This is an important point.  The reason that patents were permitted was to give incentive for people to create new products that over time will improve all of mankind.  This is one of the main reasons why the United States went from a fledgling nation to a Superpower in a century and a half.  Contrary to what many people and world leaders believe, profits are not evil.

Generally speaking, countries respect patents from other countries.  So that smartphone I create and patent in the United States will be respected in Europe.  However, not all countries respect patents and copyrights.  When Mitt Romney stated that he would get tough on China, he was referring to the well-known fact that China routinely ignores other countries’ patents.  Basically whenever a new product is introduced, you can find a clone of that same product, made by a Chinese company, on the streets of China for pennies on the dollar within weeks of the product’s release.  Even sooner if that product was made in China.

So how does this affect us?  I’ll get into those details next time.

Return to Ravnica Lifetime Licenses

We are ahead of a very exciting period in the history of Magic Online. Return to Ravnica release events has just started out and also the new client (Mtgo v4) is going to be released in the next few months. To celebrate this, mtgolibrary.com discounts the lifetime PRO license to 1380 usd and the lifetime LITE license to 138 usd!

Mtgolibrary.com offers a second discount too - the lifetime PRO license to 1200 usd and the lifetime LITE license to 120 usd. These extra discounted licenses will be active from the release of Mtgo v4. Of course all the other license will still work and will smoothly work on Mtgo v4.

When to Cash Out (Part 2)

I was invited to a wedding anniversary dinner some time ago and as the evening was winding down, I found myself speaking to an acquaintance: He was telling me that attending this event was depressing for him.

“Why”? I inquired.

“Even though these events are supposed to be a celebration, all they do is remind me that I'll never be a part of them.” he said.

“Go on.” I urged.

“I just do not understand it. I am not in debt. I am not a criminal. I don't do drugs. I have been employed with the same company for over fifteen (15) years. And yet John and Jane have been married for a dozen years and have two (2) kids. They're the same age as me. I've not made any major mistakes in life. So what am I doing wrong?” he confided.

“OK, let's take a look at your life.” I replied. “You live in a trailer. You drive a jalopy. The only time you leave your domicile is to go to work and play softball.”

“Nothing wrong with any of those things.” he countered defensively.

“That's true.” I said. “Yet the facts remain. The reason you do not have a house is because you never made a decision to buy one. The reason you drive a jalopy is because you have not looked for another car.” The reason you are not married is because you've not decided that you really want to be married.

I continued. “You live in a trailer because you were forced to move and have remained there ever since. You do not have a `better car` because you do not really desire one. You are single because you have not chosen to actively date. In short my friend, you are coasting through life.”

This is my point: my friend has proved the old axiom: If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. This is used mostly for businesses, although it has implications for life as well.

We'll continue this discussion next time.

PS: I do read the comments. Just that for some odd reason, I am unable to respond.