Gamer of 15yrs+ Father of 1yr old. Married 7 years. I can wait to buy it or wait until its approved for distribution. I think Bluesnews' handling of this distribution issue is mature and showed forethought.

Cheers

you all are bigt stupid losers go ouitside and play a gAME IN REAL LIFe THIS IS MAKE BELIEVE S BUTrn UP IN THELL I HOOEP U GO AWya

@ #2: You are my hero

I think its time for Ray's "old" Tagline:
Just say no to anonymous posting.

CU
Akira

it has been happening for years, thief 2 hmm ring a bell, the 1st demo was from a mag exclusive and i did not hear anyone scream, especially at websites posting new + links to it. the only debate should be wether ea is right to hold back the web demo so amazon/pcgw have enough pre- orders.

I wonder if Blue posted the leaked q3atest! (not???) This seems to be about the same thing... The demo was obtained from other-than-legitimate sources and duplicated in an other-than-legitimate manner. I haven't looked at the demo or its distribution agreement, but given all the controversy I'm assuming that it doesn't explicitly allow this distribution. I hope EA doesn't feel intimidated by the potential of bad publicity/PR...

The publisher doesn't need to contact you to tell you to stop. Unless you are explicitly allowed to distribute something by the owner, you Must not do so, unless you are an enemy of all intellectual property rights (some of which I must admit are overextended - this is NOT an example).

How about I put up my own copy of Blues News, but with my own banner ads in place of yours, so I can rake in a portion of the considerable income this site must generate. That's about what Blue's is doing to the magazine who we can presume had some arrangement to distribute the demo - to enhance the sales of their magazine. Theft of advertising and publishing revenue...

I'm getting a little bit tired of all the "fair use" that people are trying to make money off of...

For shame, Blue. This is not honorable, and is probably outright illegal. Remember more than 10 instances of piracy (for profit, in this case) is a federal felony. It's too bad the laws are so sparsely applied that it always falls on some 14-year-old on IRC to be prosecuted, while business enterprises conduct wholesale piracy (we could come up with many many examples) and get away with it.

Anal? No. Just tired of some people getting away with flaunting the law and intellectual property rights while other people get nailed. Have some respect for other magazine publishers, and the software publishers. Cripes guys, what are you sniffing...

With all these banner ads I'm sure some of you think Blues News is on a shoestring budget. Quite the opposite, given the number of banner ads and hits, we can estimate the moneys Blue may see from this...

Each page shows 5 major ads (and a few smaller ones I guess). I don't know what UGO pays, although it *does* have an awful reputation for not paying its affiliates. But the standard rate for banner ads is about $1-2 per ad per thousand impressions. Or 1 cent or so per click. Either way it works out about the same (per click is better if you have targetted ads), and these are industry standard rates.

So at 5 ads per page let's say that's $5 for every thousand viewers (if it's pay per click instead of impression, you can assume a respectable clickthrough rate on those nice rendered titty pictures of the MMORPG girlies and the very tastefully done X-10 spycam pics depicting half naked women for you to spy on - that's class, Blue).

Blues news has had over 900,000,000 visitors since 1997. 4 years. 225,000,000 visitors per year. 18,750,000 visitors per month. If Blue were getting industry standard banner ad rates, that would be on average $93,750 dollars a month (18,750 x $5).

$93,750? I thought there was a crash in the advertising market, you quip? Those are standard rates today. Let's assume Blue isn't pulling in a million dollars a year off this, and is getting a raw deal from UGO (bad financial decision man). Let's say it's more like $10,000-40,000 per month (but could easily be $100,000 a month) and has a few hundred to a few thousand in web hosting and network costs. i.e. almost all profit.

In other words, when Blues News republishes the exclusive content of another magazine, this is not a situation of a hobbyist helping his friends. He's basically snaking readership away from another for-profit venture into his own.

Hook me up with some of your ad impressions man. I mean, sharing is only fair...

Not to mention that X-10 pays like $15 or some craziness to the scummerchants who peddle their spycam. Oh and I see the lovely semi-legal casino-on-net up top as well.

Classy operation. Spycams, gray market casinos and pirated demos...

Where's My FREAKING DOOM3 TEST LEAK?!?!? Hook us up.

Only the lawyers are pissed and who gives a shit about their feelings.

The game is great.
Nothing will hurt it.

As someone who runs a site generating probably as much traffic as Blues, let me tell you this:

$1-2 CPM (per thousand impressions) is drastically high. Try 50 cents, if you are lucky, and if all your ad companies actually pay you. Let's just assume 40 cents CPM.

That's nowhere close to what you were estimating. If Blues made anywhere even remotely close to the $10-$40k per month you estimate, I'd be wildly surprised. I think you need to cut that figure by at least 80%. Estimating $2k-8k is probably a lot more accurate. And I'd lean towards the lower of those two numbers. The ad industry is TERRIBLE right now.

With that being said, go click on a banner.

Damn, it's just a demo !!! Why ppl have to pay to a demo ?

Does Blue or Frans have to justify the thing they've made ? Does Blue or Frans have a EULA to respect to EA or some others "!/% mags ? I don't think so. It's gaming website after all !

sorry for my bad english btw

I don't think that you can presume Blue, that he offered the download for profit, beause the traffic for downloading the game will cost much more than the few bannerclicks it generates. Except from that i don't think that the redistribution of the demo is forbidden because it would be against the interests of EA to generate publicity with the Demo. On the other side it is simply bad luck for the Gamingmag that their exclusive demo leaked out.
To the Amazon.com demo: I would compare this demo with shareware-disks in the old days....you pay for the distribution and the medium not for the software.

Ok let's use your $0.40 figure (www.fastclick.net - no reason to be getting screwed. www.adbility.com. you're welcome)

18,750,000 visits per month. 6 paying ads (plus a small one). 6 x $0.40 = 2.4. 18,750,000/1000x2.4 = $45,000.

If you aren't making something *close* to that off a site with this traffic, it's being mismanaged... At any rate, the point isn't the exact number, it's that Blue's is for profit just like the magazine. And he's published something that may have driven up their sales.

Hey I like Blues news and have always felt that it was an honorably run site with little BS and childsplay. I don't know what's going on today...

I'm not saying he made a profit directly on distributing the file. I'm saying he probably cost the magazine some sales. And maybe gained a few readers in the process. And that it's a case of two competing magazine publishers.

Shareware? If you redistribute something, anything, without the permission of the owner, you are Plain Wrong. The law is clear. If freakin teenagers on IRC are going to get arrested for piracy, the same rules should apply to everyone. Shareware says whether it is ok or not to redistribute the package. If an item of intellectual property does NOT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT - then it is COMPLETELY PROTECTED FROM REDISTRIBUTION.

Sorry for the caps. This is a worthwhile point.

My tagline, you say?

GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Just joking ;P,
Ray

-------------------------
Just say no to [GTN]Akira

I said $.40 CPM, and that's if you're lucky. You mention Fastclick and Adbility, but he doesn't use those. This site uses UGO, and I have no stats on UGO. I do know they've faced a lot of tough times though. I don't know their mix of defaults:paying ads (not all those ads you see pay something), and of the paying ads we don't know the ratio of CPM ads:CPC ads:CPA ads. For all we know he's making .02 CPM. It's not as far fetched as it seems. Gaming/entertainment sites make very poor CPM nowadays. I suggest you try applying with your entertainment site to fastclick and see if they even let you in the network.

So, you can't assume the 6 paying ads. There might be zero if they happen to all be CPC, or if any are network defaults.

Also, it's quite possible both skyscrapers count as only one banner, since they quite often are the same. And it's also useful to note that this is all pre-tax, pre-hosting, pre-bandwidth cost.

Silly me, Adbility is just a resource site. I was thinking of another ad network with a similar name. But regardless, this site uses UGO.

Which one of the "effected" companies does 216.26 work for? I say this given that he's posted nothing but negative spin in regards to this issue in -every- thread that makes mention of it. All I'll say is that demos allow me to try a game before buying it. Those companies that choose not to release a demo (or charge for it, defeating the purpose of said "demo") get rewarded by me downloading it for free then loosing motivation to actually pay for the title. The ONLY reason I "warez" a game is to try before I buy. 31 flavors offers free samples, imagine if they wanted you to buy a magazine in order to try Jamocha Fudge (may or may not be a real flavor, you'll have to excuse me...I'm not an ice cream fan).

The DIFFERENCE here is that the leaked q3test was never
issued to the public. Hence the word LEAK. I believe that
a magazine DEMO should be considered free and fair use for
anyone to serve.

Jesus, man...You can't check with a game publisher every
single time you want to serve a demo. I think demo should
be synonymous with free in net terms. Now, if there had
been something in the installer that said it was only to be
used by owners of that magazine's disc, THEN I could
symphatize, but I don't remember hearing anything about
that.

Viva las fair use!

-Hyatus
"da da da"

What makes you think you can serve demos at all?

Were I to release a demo, I would want it distributed only from my site and mirrors I have arrangements with. And would not want it to be modified.

Just because something was released without charge does not mean that you can do what you like with it.

The leaked q3test was released to the public for some values of public, just like the magazine's demo.

I don't see what's so hard about respecting default property rights. Under US and International Law, no copyright notice of any kind is required at all. It doesn't mean anything to put "All Rights Reserved" on your page, because guess what - all your rights were reserved as soon as you created the work!

There might be some cases of implied consent for certain uses. If someone releases a quake map and uploads it to a map depot, he has consented for that to be used by quake players in the normal manner, in my opinion. Especially since they are already prohibited from making a profit off quake mods, it's a nonissue.

However, this is a very different situation which lies squarely in the "infringement zone". This is not a gray area. Amazon and CGW were denied sales... If you don't like the pay-for-demo scheme and want to give out the demo to your buddies - who cares. But a 20,000,000 visitor website is another matter.

you don't have a fucking clue about the ad rates or traffic figures this site gets. look at the visitors counter, it's at 118 million since 1997, not 900 million. your math stinks. stop distorting what you don't know anything about. just. go. away.