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THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALLThomas L. McDonald has been covering games
for 17 years. He is an editor at large for Games
Magazine.The Justice Department has ended its
two-year investigation of Nvidia and ATI
following the companies’ announcement
that they had settled a class-action
lawsuit alleging price fi xing. As part of the
out-of-court settlement, the chipmakers
will not admit to any wrongdoing but
will each provide $850,000 to a fund that
will make payments to individuals who
purchased GPUs from the companiesbetween December 4, 2002 and
November 7, 2007. Nvidia alone made
a separate settlement of $112,500 for
individuals who bought GPUs through
third-party companies.
Much of the Justice Department’s
investigation centered on email
exchanges between executives of the two
companies—in particular, comments from
Dan Vivoli, Nvidia’s senior vice president
of marketing and ATI’s president, David
Orton. In one exchange, Vivoli stated, “As
you and I have talked about, even though
we are competitors, we have the common
goal of making our category a well
positioned, respected playing fi eld. $5 and
$8 stocks are a result of no respect.”
Details of how affected parties
can make a claim are expected to be
released soon. – T EDOJ Ends GPU Investigation
Nvidia, ATI agree to settlement for alleged price fixing
If you purchased a card from the ATI or
Nvidia website, you may be owed some cash.I
want to let media rights-holders in on a se-
cret. They’re making pirates. They’ve got their
own pirate factory—it’s called digital rights
management, and it comes with most of their
download sales.
At fi rst, the advent of iTunes and other online
services seemed like a godsend. It was easy: You
just clicked things and they appeared. This was
the culmination of a part of musical history—the
steady contraction of the time people spent hunting
around for the song they wanted to hear.
But there’s this catch. Because DRM made mu-
sic software instead of just music, coding glitches
could make it unplayable. Worse, a service disap-
pears, or a software version leaves you fi ddling,
confi guring, and patching longer than you’ve ever
looked for the music in the fi rst place.
Eventually you give up, purple with rage.
You Google “index apache gloria gaynor i will
survive” because, dammit, you paid for it and
you’re entitled.
While you’re there, you just might be
tempted to grab the rest of The Best of Gloria
Gaynor, too. So now you’re a Dirty Rotten Pirate
Destroying Music. Might as well head over to the
Pirate Bay and get everything else you’ve paid
for so it doesn’t happen again.
I found myself in Sweden talking to Peter
Sunde of the Pirate Bay, and a couple days later I
spoke with Monique Wadsted of Sweden’s Motion
Picture Association. They didn’t agree on much.
Except for this: A usable commercial alternative
would kill the Pirate Bay. Forget prosecution,
security, or morality. There’s only one thing large-
scale piracy can’t survive: ease of use. People will
pay good money for convenience. The problem
with DRM is that it adds all the bother of piracy and
charges you for it.
That really galls, and the bitterness can send
former customers to piracy for life. The more
unbreakable DRM becomes the more customer
hemorrhage makes it commercially self-defeating.
People who once might have supported artists
through legitimate commerce view piracy as simply
more reliable in the long run. But we’re so close to
click-it-and-it-works—if only the DRM would get
out of the way.BYTE RIGHTSStop DRM Crime
Spree
QUINN NORTONQuinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired
News and other publications. Her work has
ranged from legal journalism to the inner life
of pirate organizations.Sanyo has developed a blue-laser diode that puts
today’s best consumer optical tech to shame. The
laser can emit a beam of 450 milliwatts, double
the power of lasers found in current Blu-ray Disc
systems. As a result, we can expect 12x read/write
speeds as well as 100GB four-layer media—in two
to three years time. – K S12x Blu-ray
It’s cliché but true: One
man’s trash is another man’s
treasure. And thanks to the
Internet, it’s never been
easier to connect the two
parties. In fact, the practice
of trading unsellable goods
has gained enough traction
to spawn a new term:
freecycling. And there’s an offi cial network devoted to the cause:
Freecycle.org, a collection of local email groups where people post
stuff they want to unload and others take it. –K SWORD WATCHFreecycling