Grand Theft Audio : A History Lesson
The original title for Grand Theft Audio fared poorly in focus groups.
Grand Theft Audio is a 2007 video game produced by a small development
studio formed within the Recording Industry Association of
America. It was designed to educate the player on the
implications of illegal file sharing, which the RIAA claims is
the cause of up to $14 billion in lost annual revenue for the
music industry, and unauthorized tape recordings, to which the
association has not attached a monetary amount of lost profits
but insists on its website that the practice is "really just not
remotely kosher."
The original advertisement for Grand Theft Audio
shows conspicuous similarities to the poster for the 1931 Western
Fair Warning (below).
The RIAA first announced the development of Grand
Theft Audio in 2005, which, along with the years 1952-88, 1992,
1994-2002 and 2004, the trade group has identified as "critical
junctures" in audio intellectual property rights. Originally the
website set up for the game, gtaudio.com, displayed only a poster
of two cowboys in a fistfight with the phrase "FAIR USE" across
the top. This poster was soon removed after it was discovered
that it was actually a manipulated advertisement for the
1931 Western Fair Warning starring George
O'Brien, and still under copyright. It was replaced with a
text-only "COMING SOON" notice which constituted the site's only
content until late 2006.
In November 2006 print ads began appearing in many
large trade magazines, including Audio World, IP
Monthly and RIAA Weekly Office Newsletter. Many
movie theatres’ also ran 30-second spots before popular films,
although the organization was criticized for using violent and
sexually explicit imagery in ads that were shown before
children's fare such as Happy Feet. Former RIAA
president Hilary Rosen applauded this measure, claiming that such
startling content was necessary if "we wanted to get 'em when
they're still young and impressionable."
[Edit] Release
Grand Theft Audio was released for online download
January 3, 2007, and accumulated over 100,000 downloads on its
first day of availability. Nearly 5000 of these downloads were
from gtaudio.com, with mostly illegal, BitTorrent and other
peer-to-peer programs accounting for the remainder.
The website was soon snowed under by claims of a bug
in the software that prevented the player from advancing past the
game's introduction. A preliminary voice loop warning the player
that "illegal duplication of any element of this program is
subject to legal action" repeated over and over for nearly twenty
minutes. In a wonderfully ironic, textbook example of ‘One
man’s glitch is another man’s unspecified design feature’,
the RIAA has since claimed this as a purposeful feature and has
made no modifications to the code except, via a January 8 patch,
to append "...and fines" to the end of the announcement.
[Edit] Reception
The overwhelming response to Grand Theft Audio was
confusion. Aside from the few thousand players who downloaded the
game directly from the gtaudio.com site, most others were under
the impression that the game was a legitimate new release by
Rockstar Games, the developers of the popular Grand Theft Auto
computer and home console games, who were currently working on
the much-anticipated fifth game in the series. This may be due to
the designation of the compressed installation file as
"gta4.rar," which the RIAA has claimed was simply an inadvertent
coincidence.
The organization has not responded to the fact that
the text help file for the game makes no mention of the game's
full title, referring to it only as "GTA" and, at one point,
"Grand Theft Au to make the public aware of the dangers
of file sharing," with the "dio" of the title in hidden white
text.
GTAudio received mixed critical reviews. Some felt
that the game was too derivative of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto
series, with PC Gamer claiming that "replacing the lead
pipe item with lawsuit papers is simply not enough to keep the
game feeling fresh." Others were more positive; in a New York
Times review, a critic lauded the game as the "single best
file sharing-litigation game with guns of all time."
[Edit] Nonlinear sequences
The majority of GTAudio sets the player in the
middle of the mid-size Pirate City, which has become overrun with
gangs, pimps and intellectual property violators.
The player is encouraged to chart his or her own
course in these segments, although to keep the player on track
thought bubbles will pop up periodically over the on-screen
character's head with messages such as "Hey, it's been a while
since I've popped a cap in some P2P punk" and "I think the guy
next to me may be listening to a burned CD. Where's my
knife?"
The RIAA claims that there are over fifty activities
possible in the sandbox sequences of GTAudio, all of which affect
the game's "Justice Meter" to varying degrees and are rated from
one to five Bainwols, defined by the help file as "a unit of
measurement denoting one's dedication to protecting our
struggling music companies artists."
The simplest activity, rated at one Bainwol, is
destroying the burned compact discs scattered throughout Pirate
City. This can be done in several ways, from stomping to smashing
with a baseball bat to microwave exposure. If the player
successfully finds and destroys all 500 compact discs in Pirate
City, he receives a digital coupon for one RIAA-sponsored iTunes
download (with iTunes' sharing capability disabled).
Other activities include:
No mention is made of the facts that these ‘based
on reality’ actions would undoubtedly end in a large custodial
sentence.
[Edit]
Courtroom sequences
The long arm of justice corrects a wrong done to Ace
of Base.
Periodically the player will receive a virtual court
summons. When this happens he or she can choose to be the
prosecutor or defence for an individual accused of audio file
swapping.
Currently a fatal error occurs when the "defence"
option is chosen, but the RIAA has claimed that they are working
to fix the issue.
The courtroom sequences are primarily text-based:
the player makes decisions on what to say to the accused file
swapper, and the outcome of the case depends on the eloquence and
forcefulness of the player's arguments.
The RIAA has claimed that the courtroom segments are
intricately nuanced and that no two sequences will play out the
same. In reality, most of the differences between court cases are
the result of random variables such as band or artist
names.
Some possibilities include:
Despite the cosmetic differences between the
prosecutor's claims, they invariably result in the defendant's
being incarcerated, and sometimes
tortured.
[Edit] Scandals
Less than forty-eight hours from the release of
GTAudio, an internet hacker released instructions for how to open
a hidden sequence of the game. The unearthed segment, encoded
within a file named hotdrm.bat, featured a playable scene in
which the player could strip a compact disc of DRM restrictions,
slowly tease out a digital audio file containing the CD
recording, and thrust the recording out into the ether of the
internet for others to enjoy. The rising excitement of the scene
climaxes in the recording's release as a BitTorrent file, after
which the on-screen character smokes a celebratory
large-cigarette.
The RIAA initially claimed that the hidden sequence
was an unauthorized addition by a disgruntled coder. After
downloads of the game tripled within two hours of the revelation
of hotdrm, however, the RIAA retracted its original statement and
released a replacement that gave the organization full credit for
the hidden scene, albeit it with the claim that its intention had
been to "draw a parallel from the carcinogenic properties of
tobacco to the dangers of the removal of Digital Rights
Management measures."
[Edit] Sequels and Ports
The RIAA has already announced plans to port GTAudio
to the Xbox 360 and PSP, and has commenced work on a full sequel
for the PS3. Tentatively entitled "Grand Theft Audio: Price
City," it will be a radical departure from the structure of the
original game. Players will control a start-up music label and
have to make decisions about the content and pricing of their
product and how to manage their artists' intellectual property.
Early reports reveal that good decisions regarding IP will be
rewarded with "Integrity Points." Players who make what the RIAA
considers "poor" decisions about intellectual property will be
referred to their local law enforcement agency.
Doctor
A P Scott (retired) reporting;
And
here is the news.
Tonight
much to the consternation of the duly elected authorities, an
unkempt mob of anarchists and unemployed workers of the isle,
stormed the houses of parliament following their frenzied
participation in an intergalactic sit-in staged at the Royal
Albert Hall in London’s new red-light
district.
After
laying siege to the speakers’ podium they peed on the carpet
and they peed in the halls. They then proceeded to use their
disposable cigarette-lighters to fuse the workings of Big Ben
into a fifteen-foot high bronze statue of Smokey Robinson, whilst
singing ‘How sweet it is to be loved by you’. It is not known
at this time their exact demands for the return of the several
police-dogs that seemingly joined in on the side of the horde.
Further reports as we see
fit.
WIN PRIZES! Just send
us an e-mail telling us what the hell you think this video is all
about and win a MYSTERY PRIZE. All valid suggestions will win an
individual prize; the best five will be published on the site at
some future date.
The management’s decision is final and binding, all
suggestions will become property of the Grand Theft Audio
Corporation, no correspondences will be undertaken or considered
worthwhile in the slightest GRAND THEFT AUDIO©
2010
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