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Patrick Charnley of Eversheds obviously want to draw as much attention as possible to my original article about Train2Game. And provides further evidence for my article about how the internet is being censored.

I would like to point out to Patrick and to Train2Game and to Metropolitan International Schools Ltd that there is an automatic right of reply built into an internet blog like this. At the bottom of every post there is a comment section where they can put their side of the argument, without the need for any recourse to law. This is what most people do and it gives the reader a balanced view of the issues. I suggest that they do this.

Patrick Charnley of the solicitors Eversheds has sent me a letter on behalf of their client Train2Game. This is eactly how legal reputation management works. They are trying to bully me into censoring an article that their client does not like, even though that article self evidently only contains the truth. They have succeeded in getting YouTube to remove the three videos that showed a Train2Game salesman at work. You would wonder why Train2Game wanted these removed. In fact their actions speak volumes.

Bruceongames now comes top of quite a lot of Google searches, this makes me a target for people who only want their version of the world reported on the internet.

I took the article down for a little over a week whilst I spoke to various legal and journalistic experts including no win no fee solicitors. One told me that the charges against me are ridiculous. Obviously the article is now back up.

Read this letter, it is amazing stuff, they are even trying to prevent me from talking about the Blitz Academy website. How blatant an attempted suppression of free speech can you get?

You may think that with tens of millions of bloggers and millions of forums that we live in an age where there is a free flow of knowledge and information. That you can go to Google and get a balanced and rounded view on any subject by reading the results of a search. And you would be very wrong.

The mechanism for the wholesale denial of free speech is the English libel system. Here are some of the factors at play:

• A plaintiff can sue you for libel and make a whole list of grievances. They don’t have to prove that any of these are the truth. It is up to the defendant to disprove each claim to the standards required by a court. So the whole system is weighed very heavily in favour of the plaintiff.
• Going to court to defend a libel claim is immensely expensive and there is no legal aid. Many cases now get to over a million pounds in legal fees.
• Libel tourism is a reality with plaintiffs now making London their city of choice when they want to take action because the libel laws here are so repressive. This alone should tell you that there is something wrong.

Once you realise the above you can see what the mechanism for suppressing free speech is.

• A company does a Google search to see what is written about it on the internet.
• The company gives a list of all the stuff it doesn’t like (whether it is the truth or not) to an English solicitor.
• The solicitor writes letters to all these websites threatening legal action.
• The solicitor also writes to the website hosting company threatening legal action.
• The owner of the website and/or the owner of the hosting company immediately remove the content, they have no option because of the financial consequences of the threat.
• The internet is censored and no longer tells the truth.

This mechanism works for getting the truth off the internet as well as lies, because it is not tested. The authors and site owners are in no position to defend their content. And once the content is removed it is removed for the whole world. So a heavy handed bully in London will deny free speech in America, Canada, everywhere.

This mechanism is now being used on a massive scale. Solicitors in London are making a very nice living by processing large numbers of these threatening letters. Vast amounts of internet content is being removed. And of course it is the bad guys, the people with something to hide, who use this mechanism most. So the world is denied the knowledge that it most needs for people to protect themselves.

What is deeply ironic is that the blogs and forums that are being acted against have a built in reply mechanism. So when somebody sees something that they think is wrong then they can say so. This happens  millions of times every day. These sorts of websites are far closer to a conversation in a pub than they are to the printed newspapers that the libel laws were intended for. So all sides of an argument can be discussed.

And so to Bruceongames. The success of this blog means that it now comes near the top in many Google searches. And I am often saying what I think about companies. (In law this is called fair comment and is allowed). So I have been threatened with libel action now by two companies. Evony and Train2game. Evony are taking the action in Australia because it is almost the same as English law (and there is a reciprocal arrangement for collecting judgement) but I have the added inconvenience of trying to defend myself on the other side of the planet. Train2game seem to have succeeded in removing a lot about themselves from the internet. I have also temporarily removed my article about them, even though it is 100% truthful, whilst I consider the implications. Another successful censoring of the internet.

But remember that the internet is archived. In the short term Google archive many sites, so going to the archived version will reveal what has been removed. Then there is the Waybackmachine, which stores 150 billion internet pages going back to 1996.

The best defence against a vexatious plaintiff is the Streisand effect, a good example of which is in the video above. By taking inappropriate action the plaintiff opens themselves up to far more publicity, scrutiny and ridicule than if they had kept quiet and done nothing. There is even a website devoted to people and companies who have brought this upon themselves.

Finally, never, ever host a website in England. Hosts here have been proven to pull the plug on websites at the first whiff of a solicitor’s letter.

There are now a huge number of people out there who have video gaming as a hobby. Quite a lot of these have thoughts about working in the industry, even though they don’t have the faintest idea what working in the industry is like (mostly boring, repetive, underpaid, hard slog). Most say they want to be “game designers” though they haven’t the faintest idea about basic game mechanics and also though there are actually relatively few game designers in the industry compared with other skills.

So there is a ripe market out there of wannabe game industry workers who are pretty ignorant about what it actually means. So the universities have set up loads of courses to take their money off them, 330 at both university and college level, according to UCAS. The thing is that relatively few graduates of these courses actually end up working in the game industry. And I have seen it said that there are more people on these courses at any one time than there are working in game development in Britain. So there is a pretty big missmatch between the requirements of industry and what the education system is providing.

In the real world what the game industry is desperately short of is people with good physics and maths degrees. But then the whole country is short of such graduates. They can get jobs very easily and command good remuneration.

Now to add to the options for wannabes there are home study courses from an organisation called Train2Game. These are “Designer Courses” and “Developer Courses”. As far as I can find out they send a salesman round to your house, the course costs £5,000 and they will “lend” you the money for it. They have a promotional video which in my opinion paints a picture of the industry and anyone’s chances in it that is perhaps a little bit rosy.

The good news is that these courses have industry input, from DR Studios (formerly Deep Red Games) who are specialists in strategy games. Further good news is that the courses are endorsed by TIGA.

On the Train2Game website there is no naming of the company behind it. Just: “Train2Game is part of the UK’s most successful and one of Europe’s largest distance learning colleges”. Which doesn’t tell you much. In fact Train2Game is trademarked by Metropolitan International Schools who are also the providers of Train4Trade Skills which had this written about them last year.

They also have an Advertising Standards Authority judgement against them and have been criticised by the BBC Watchdog programme. They also tried to sue Google for libel for showing search results that were critical of them.

If you are a game industry wannabe my suggestion is that you have a look at the Blitz Game Studios Academy website. This gives you good inside information from a top game developer for free and is one of the best places to start looking on the web.