As regular readers will know Evony are trying to sue me for libel in an Australian court. So we have a plaintiff from country A trying to sue a defendant from country B in country C. They can do this because judgements from Australian courts are enforceable in England. And they are trying to say that because internet content is available globally they can sue me in any country they feel like. Obviously they have chosen Australia to create the maximum difficulty in my defending myself, they are misusing the Australian legal system to censor the internet.
Libel is incredible expensive to bring to court, some cases end up with legal costs of over a million pounds. To get my case just to the first day of court in Australia should cost me over £50,000. You can see why freedom of speech is threatened here. Because my case is setting a precedent my lawyers have agreed to act on a no win no fee basis with no win no fee. In other words they will try and extract costs from Evony for bringing a frivolous case before the courts. But in the mean time there are a lot of costs to cover in putting the case together.
Obviously I can reduce myself to penury and send every penny I have to them. This seems a little harsh for just telling the truth. I have already sent them a substantial sum, as much as I can reasonably afford. So I have created a way that you can contribute to the fighting fund with the PayPal donate button at the side of this article. Anything would help, £1 even. It all adds up. So please help with a donation. And a big thank you to those who have already donated, it is much appreciated.
For those who live in the UK, a letter to their MP may help. Here is a draft that could be used:
Dear MP,
As you know there is a significant threat to freedom of speech with lawyers practicing reputation management on the internet. They threaten libel action against the authors of content that their clients don’t like, whether it is the truth or not. Those authors are then forced to withdraw that content because of the massive costs of defending their, often truthful, position. Obviously this mechanism is used most frequently by those with the most to hide. The libel law is thus being used against the interests of your constituents.
In a further twist we now have a Chinese video game, Evony, with a recently incorporated Delaware front company, sueing a British blogger, Bruce Everiss, in an Australian court. They are indulging in this extreme libel tourism firstly because Australian libel judgements are enforceable in England and secondly in order to make it as difficult as possible for Mr Everiss to defend what he maintains to be a truthful position. If Evony succeed it will open the floodgates of undefendable action being taken against British people in Australian courts.
As your constituent I would like to know what you are doing to maintain the freedom of speech on the internet. Also I would like to know what the government are doing to prevent the total abuse of the legal system that is happening in the case of Mr Everiss and Evony,
regards, etc
So there we have two ways that you can help. Please do so because what Evony are doing is a threat to every one’s freedoms.
We have a general election coming up and I won’t be voting for my current MP, Bob Ainsworth. And the reason is simple, I asked him about the Evony thing and his reply was, to me, less than helpful. Judge for yourself:
from
Bruce Everiss
to
smithn@parliament.uk, ainsworthr@parliament.uk
date
5 October 2009 11:28
subject
Big problem
mailed-by
everiss.com
Hi,
I am a constituent of yours.
I have a big problem in that I am being sued by an American front company for a Chinese video game (Evony) in an Australian court!
Firstly, Evony are indulging in litigation tourism of the very worst kind, they are using the Australian legal system in an attempt to make it impossible for me to defend myself properly. Australia has reciprocal arrangements with the UK for enforcing judgement.
Secondly what they are doing is a threat to the freedom of speech of tens of millions of bloggers around the world, if we can’t write the truth because the Australian legal system is sitting waiting to zap us then it is a sad day for everyone.
There is now a lot of interesting stuff about this Chinese browser game on this blog. Much of this has been contributed by readers with experience of the game, so I strongly suggest that you read the comments after every article, they contain some absolute gems.
The Chinese gold farmers came to my attention when they first started spamming the forums and blogs that I run. Gold farmers are part of the underbelly of the interweb alongside pornographers and fake Viagra sellers, so they use the same black hat marketing techniques that abuse the internet and its users and which are illegal in many countries, such as spamming everything they can spam. One of these gold farmers is an organisation with many names including Super Continental, UMGE and WoWMine. Article:
Then earlier this year Bruceongames was comment spammed regularly by a Chinese MMO called Evony, which was publicising itself as being the product of UMGE. (They have since gone into denial and tried to remove all mention of this association from the internet, including deleting the whole website UMGE.com). Because of the spamming I recommended that people avoid Evony in this article:
The response to this was so big that I found out a lot more about this game. And so on July the 15 this year I wrote the article More about Evony. On the same day The Guardian newspaper published an article: Has Evony become the most despised game on the web?
As a result of the feedback from this I got a lot of information from players of the game saying that it was causing problems with their computer, so I put this together as an article on July 16, specifically pointing out “I am not saying that Evony has a trojan in its client software”. This article attracted further comments from players with bad experiences:
Evony were obviously unhappy with the truth about themselves reaching the light of day so they made a tactical change. On 22 July they incorporated Evony LLC, a Delaware company. They then tried to become American and removed all mention of their Chinese heritage from the internet. Evony LLC then started to act against me for what I had written before they even existed! I got a threatening letter from Dean Groundwater, a solicitor from the Australian small town firm Warren McKeon Dickson:
At about the same time Valerie from Evony distributed an email that told a whole pile of easily demonstrable lies about Evony, the issues I had raised and about me. I reported this and rebutted the lies with this article:
Then on September 14 Evony issued a press release saying that they were taking me to court for telling the truth. In the press release Dean Groundwater accuses me of fraud, a very serious allegation.
I also reported a few further bad things about Evony, brought to my attention by readers of Bruceongames. Racialism and the online gambling in the game:
I don’t like Evony, that much should be obvious. I don’t like their black hat marketing, spamming blogs and spamming Google adsense. And I don’t like the way they have put gold farming inside the game, subverting the game mechanic by the payment of money so as to extract the maximum wealth from the player. But most of all I don’t like the way they try and suppress freedom of speech by trying to censor the internet to prevent people knowing the truth about them.
My personal experience of Chinese video games goes back to the Chinese government banning the Codemasters game IGI2 in 2004. A massive blow when we had no sales or distribution there!
I have pointed out on here before, China has a rich heritage of Gold Farming with about 400,000 people employed in this “industry”. So there is a very big understanding there of game mechanics and business models. And it is hardly surprising that the dominant games are MMOs and the dominant platform the PC. One of the largest PC manufacturers in the world, Lenovo, is Chinese.
Also there is a cluster of game development studios in Shanghai which grew out of Ubisoft’s decision to site a major development studio there.
An Internet Publishing License will be required to publish online games.
There will be an approved management system for imported online games.
Unapproved online games cannot be exported.
Bodies promoting the export of unapproved games will be banned.
Games not registered before publication will be suspended.
The Chinese General Administration of Press and Publication has inspected over 200 online games (which gives you an idea of just how vibrant the market is there). They found:
3 websites were publishing unapproved imported games. It doesn’t say whether or not these were pirated
25 Chinese made games had added unsuitable content after approval. Which gives you an idea how much they respect the rules. Unsuitable content includes violence, gore, and sex. They don’t seem to have twigged yet about the gambling content in some of these games.
9 Chinese games hadn’t followed the correct publishing procedure.
7 Chinese games didn’t have a fatigue testing system. Presumably the government don’t want people playing these games for excessively long periods of time. And quite right too.
So we have a big market that will grow to be immense but which is dominated by government red tape and some “interesting” local game producers.
There are two lessons here. One for the many other companies who are going down the application store route. They must put technical protection into the store, otherwise thieves will destroy the business model. The second lesson is for Apple and their upcoming home console. If they do it with exactly the same mechanism as they have done iPhone applications then it won’t work commercially. They need to be far closer to Xbox Live in what they do.
And, to finish off, Ngmoco are going to in-game payments on iPhone to beat the thieves. Doing this they would probably be best giving the game away.
Leonard Riggio is board chairman of GameStop and until recently owned 6.9% of the company. He now owns 5.5% of the company having sold 2.3 million shares for about $60 million. A very smart move. And one which shows us exactly where the video game industry is going.
GameStop and other high street game retailers rely on video games being distributed and sold in cardboard and plastic and there is a lot of reasons to think that this practice is at the start of a very significant decline. In fact physical inventory for content in this industry may well be about to go the way of the Dodo. And all because online distribution is better:
No physical inventory to manufacture and distribute.
No need to give a share of the sale proceeds to distributors and retailers.
Instant global distribution.
Ability to update the game for bugs and to give or sell further content.
Possibilities of more sophisticated business models.
The internet can stock a far bigger inventory and can keep it in stock for ever.
So online distribution wins hands down. But over the last year the market has changed significantly to rapidly accelerate the move away from physical stock.
Retailers have moved hugely and aggressively into the secondhand game market over the last year. It runs at far higher profit margins than selling new stock. Unfortunately it has massively angered the game developers and publishers who receive no revenue from the resale of their content. They are very unhappy and are now highly incentivized to move away from physical product.
All three platform holders, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, are seeing uptake of digital distribution on their current generation platforms that massively exceeds their wildest predictions. The customers are voting with their feet. To the point that it is rumoured that the next generation Microsoft home console, the Xbox 720 or Phoenix, will have no disk drive at all. That it will receive content 100% online.
So the process of moving from physical stock to online distibution is speeding up in front of our eyes, every week we see news of the industry moving in this direction. And moving far faster than anyone predicted. A very good time indeed to bail out of share ownership in high street game retail.
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.
