Free Trade
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Pub owner Karen Murphy wins appeal in TV-decoder battle against Sky
It's been a few months since we last heard about the legal kerfuffle between Sky and pub owner Karen Murphy. In case you've been out of the loop, it all started when the UK broadcasting giant went after Murphy for using what was deemed to be an illegal method for screening FA Premier League matches at her, or any, bar. The Greece Nova decoder, which is considered a legal bit in the privacy of your own home, was helping Murphy bypass Sky's £480 ($740) required monthly fees for bar owners and saving her over £350 ($555) in the process. Now, over $260,000 in legal fees later, Mrs. Murphy's conviction has been overturned by the relentless High Court. The ruling allows her to keep using the troubled Greek gadget to screen any EPL game without facing any troubles -- except the occasional drunken fracas. So, now you know where to go the next time you're in Portsmouth and want to catch a good ol' footy match.
WTO ruling revives debate over China's rare earths trade
China suffered another setback at the WTO yesterday, thanks to a ruling that could spell trouble for its controversial rare earths industry. In a decision issued Monday, a WTO panel determined that the Chinese government has been acting in violation of international trade rules, due to export restrictions on a number of raw materials. These restrictions, the panel said, allowed Beijing to inflate global market prices, while giving an advantage to domestic producers. As a result, China will likely have to adjust its trade policies to comply with WTO regulations. In a statement, the country's Ministry of Commerce said it "deeply regrets" the decision, but confirmed that the People's Republic will adhere to it. This week's ruling applies to materials like bauxite, coke, magnesium, manganese and zinc, but, most notably, does not apply to rare earths -- a group of 17 elements critical to the production of tablets, smartphones and myriad other gadgets. China has maintained a rather tight grip over the world's rare earths market, thanks to a slew of export controls, quotas and government-erected barriers to entry. The country has come under intense international pressure in recent years, with the US, EU and Mexico filing complaints with the WTO, arguing that China's price-inflating restrictions violate international trade agreements. Beijing, for its part, has long maintained that its export controls are designed to minimize the environmental impact of rare earth mining, while meeting the country's surging domestic demand. It's an argument that's come up a lot during this debate but one that the WTO, on Monday, deemed illegitimate, stating that China has thus far been "unable to demonstrate" the environmental benefits of its policies. The decision won't have any immediate bearing on these policies, but some observers are hopeful that it may be a sign of things to come. Michael Silver, CEO of rare earth processor American Elements, told Reuters that the ruling "confirms the existence of the two-tiered price structure that has caused so much concern," with EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht adding that the decision should force China to remove restrictions on both the aforementioned raw materials and rare earths, alike. Others, however, aren't so optimistic, pointing out that, with a full 95 percent of the rare earths market under its aegis, China could realistically afford to ignore any decisions handed down from the WTO in the future.
European Court: It's free trade for a reason, dummy
Primer: The EU is many nations with a single market, if wine is cheaper in France, a German can simply purchase it there. It's why Apple was censured back in 2007 for territorial iTunes stores that stopped people from shopping around. Anything sold in Europe on a per-country basis hangs within a grey area of free trade. That includes what many call "The Greatest Show on Earth" -- The FA Premier League. Sky, the Premier League's media partner in Europe charges £480 ($740) a month for pub and bar owners to screen their matches in their establishments. That's what prompted cash-strapped publican Karen Murphy to buy a decoder box and card from Greece's Nova company for only £118 ($180) a month. Following a legal challenge that has lasted nearly 7 years, the European Court of Justice has ruled that whilst it's legal (or at least, not illegal) to own a foreign decoder in your own home, it is illegal for pubs and other public spaces to use them on copyright grounds. This means that many home users could snap up cheaper European services and erode the value of Sky's £1bn ($1.5bn) Premier League deal, which would make the greatest show on earth just a little less great.
RuneScape: Sixth anniversary retrospective
When it first launched back in 2001, RuneScape was a primitive beast. Its blocky three-dimensional world was littered with hand-drawn two-dimensional sprites, and most of its sound effects could have been created by whacking random objects with a hammer. Only a handful of quests and skills existed, and there wasn't much land to explore. After over a decade of development, the RuneScape we have today bears little semblance to its primitive ancestor. The map is an order of magnitude larger, the list of quests has grown immensely, and there are countless things to do in the world. With several million actively playing free accounts and over a million paid subscribers, RuneScape has risen from its humble beginnings to be one of the world's most popular free-to-play MMOs. It's been a long road, with a few important milestones along the way. Today marks the sixth anniversary of the date that the RuneScape 2 beta was officially completed and the game's first major overhaul was launched live to players. Anyone who played back then will remember the beta fondly as the rebirth of a game they loved. Since then, regular game updates have added a huge amount of depth and content every year. In this retrospective article, I look back at RuneScape's past to see how it got to where it is today and what's new to the game over this past year.
Massively's guide to RuneScape's wilderness and free trade
Back when the open-world PvP of Ultima Online was more than just a memory for most people, it just seemed natural for a game to let players beat each other to death. Having open-world PvP in an MMO checked off another item in the list of things that attracted people to the genre. RuneScape's wilderness area was Jagex's compromise between letting players smash each other's heads in and not alienating players who don't want their heads smashed in. While most of the game remained PvP-free, the wilderness to the north was an open PvP bloodbath complete with corpse-looting and rude language. PvP was removed from this area several years ago as part of a major effort to beat the RMT business. At the same time as wilderness PvP was removed, limitations were placed on the amount of gold a player could gain or lose in player-to-player trades every 15 minutes. Trading was migrated largely to a new Grand Exchange system with built-in price limits. This all but killed the game's emergent trading professions, severely limiting the scale of shops and making life harder for the wheelers and dealers out there. Both the trade and PvP restrictions were lifted just over a month ago, and players are quickly learning to take advantage of all that's been brought back to the game. Skip past the cut for Massively's look at how you can take advantage of free trade and wilderness PvP and how RuneScape's community has reacted to the revival of these long-lost features.
RuneScape's wilderness PvP and free trade have returned
At the end of December, developer Jagex put the fate of its browser MMO RuneScape in the hands of its players. Several years ago, in an effort to combat the game's growing RMT problem, Jagex placed severe restrictions on PvP and the trading of items. To make transferring gold harder, Jagex made changes to deny trades in which one party gained a significantly higher value of items and gold than the other. Limits were also placed on the stakes players could fight over in one-on-one duels. The biggest changes came to the wilderness, RuneScape's open PvP area. Wilderness PvP was completely removed in order to remove the possible use of PvP looting mechanics to trade large quantities of gold. Jagex opened a public referendum and vote to ask players if they wanted wilderness PvP and free trade to return, and over a million players answered with a resounding "YES!" Just over a week ago, we interviewed RuneScape's lead designer Mark Ogilvie on the details of the changes and how they'll affect players. In an announcement today, Mark confirmed that those changes are now in effect, along with some tweaks to the gravestone and drop party systems. If you're a fan of RuneScape, stay tuned to Massively's RuneScape coverage for our upcoming guide on making use of the new free trade and wilderness PvP options.
Massively's exclusive interview with RuneScape's lead designer Mark Ogilvie
Last month, Jagex did the unexpected when it opened up a major game-changing decision on its popular MMO RuneScape to a public vote. As part of RuneScape's 10th anniversary this year, Jagex gave players the chance to vote on whether they want PvP in the wilderness and free trade between players to be restored. These are two key features that were removed from the game around three years ago as part of an anti-RMT campaign. Over 1.2 million votes were cast in the public referendum, with over 90% of them asking for the revival of wilderness PvP and free trade. The much-loved game mechanics should be returning to RuneScape in early February. At Massively, we took the opportunity to interview RuneScape's lead designer Mark Ogilvie on the upcoming changes and what the future has in store for this popular browser MMO. Massively: When you initially put out a vote on the restoration of wilderness PvP and free trade, did you expect the response to be as overwhelming as it turned out to be? Mark Ogilvie: We really weren't sure. I spend a lot of time talking to my players, but you often find that PKers are a vocal minority. We wanted to run a referendum to see what the truth was, but we really weren't sure what was going to happen. We had a bit of a friendly sportsman's bet to see where the percentages would be, and I'm quite proud to say my guess was pretty spot on. I was really pleased when my bosses said, "let's ask the players and see what they think." Taking the risks to do something like that, putting a decision that big in our players' hands -- that's quite brave. Skip past the cut to read the rest of our exclusive interview with RuneScape's lead designer Mark Ogilvie.
Jagex offering fans a chance to shape the future of RuneScape
Outspoken fans of RuneScape (and more specifically, the game's former Wilderness implementation) are being given a unique opportunity to shape the future of the title. Jagex has just announced a public vote to determine whether the old mechanics will be restored. "We have released a host of new content which provides a comparable PvP experience to the old Wilderness, and mechanics to allow increased trade limits with long term friends but we are still regularly told by players that they want more. We want to find out whether the passionate voices we hear on this topic are truly representative of entire community or just a vocal minority. If the vast majority of our players support the campaign then we will restore these features to the game as quickly as possible," says Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard in a press released dated yesterday. So, whether you want to score one for virtual worlds with consequences or you'd prefer your online games (or at least RuneScape) be safe havens and relatively free of risk, Jagex is offering you the chance to shape an MMO that is quite rare, if not unprecedented.
