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Censorship Your Rights Online

Valve Censoring Torrent References In Steam Chat 216

dotarray writes It seems Valve is restricting just what you can talk about when using the Steam chat service. Specifically, any reference to a particular torrent site is being stripped from conversation, while mentions of other pages trigger a warning that the site is "potentially malicious." In the wake of website KickassTorrents being taken offline earlier this week, people quickly noticed that references to the torrent site were being stripped from chat - with no warning, notificiation, or acknowledgement that anything is missing. We've seen censorship before, with chat providers blocking certain words, replacing key letters with asterisks or simply substituting inoffensive words for those considered 'problematic.' That's not what Valve is doing here though - the entire message is disappearing, not just the troublesome domain.
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Valve Censoring Torrent References In Steam Chat

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  • Well duh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2015 @03:22AM (#49064667)

    Most pirated games go through the Steam client. Valve obviously wants people to buy games on Steam, not use Steam to play pirated games.

    • Re:Well duh (Score:5, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday February 16, 2015 @09:03AM (#49065855) Homepage Journal

      Most pirated games go through the Steam client.

      You try to play one of those games on the Steam network, you're gonna have a bad time. Valve will detect your sorry ass and you may lose your whole steam account.

      • It's a cat and mouse game, but the pirates have been quite successful from time to time. Download the game content and update from somewhere, and most games can't tell you haven't bought it. At one point steam would completely trust the list of games you owned that was saved on disk, but most of the time there has been a crack of some kind that would convince steam you owned everything. I think there may even be a reverse engineered steam server that you can set up for any number of users to download games

        • Steam has been going for ages, and most crackers have burnt out or gotten real jobs.

          I've noticed that the older I get, the more willing I am to wait for a Steam sale or even (gasp!) pay full price for a game I really want rather than download a torrent.

          • I find I'm waiting for the Christmas blowouts typically, and until them I'm loading up on the $20 indie titles.
            • Re:Well duh (Score:4, Insightful)

              by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Monday February 16, 2015 @07:48PM (#49070077) Journal

              I find I'm waiting for the Christmas blowouts typically, and until them I'm loading up on the $20 indie titles.

              Heck, last year I distinctly remember buying the new Wolfenstein and Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag for less than half the full price, and I had a great time with both of them. I don't have a problem with waiting a little while. Waiting also has two other big benefits for me. First, by the time I buy a game, it has been patched and tweaked and actually runs properly and second, it gives me a chance to upgrade my PC to play the game as it was meant to be played without getting fleeced for premium prices for new components.

          • Steam has made buying games convenient and affordable, I don't even think about pirating a game anymore. Today I work along the lines of "if it's not on Steam I'm not going to bother buying / playing it". A reduction in piracy simply because a market started doing what the consumer wanted, you reading this music industry guys?
            • by jandrese ( 485 )
              Steam did the same thing for PC games that iTunes did for Music. It make digital buying so easy and affordable that there was little reason to pirate anymore. Lo and behold the piracy rates plummet as a result. It doesn't even require intrusive and invasive DRM, all you need to do is allow people to buy the product at a reasonable price without throwing up a bunch of roadblocks. It's like magic.
              • It's like magic.

                It's almost as if companies that produce a decent product and treat customers with a little bit of respect are gonna do a lot of business and be successful.

                Who knew?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Most pirated games go through the Steam client. Valve obviously wants people to buy games on Steam, not use Steam to play pirated games.

      Most pirated games deliberately avoid using the steam client because the steam client likes to screw around with games and this has some bad effects with pirated games (I.E. replacing a cracked .exe with the DRM'd original).

      And thats one of the more benign effects.

  • Good for them (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bovius ( 1243040 ) on Monday February 16, 2015 @03:42AM (#49064747)

    It's interesting to see how Valve his handling being the titan in the game distributors market for several years running. I know that not everything they do is best for the long term health of the industry or their consumers, but this deterring piracy on communication channels they sponsor seems pretty reasonable, and overall they've handled things quite well.

    Maybe they can come up with a better way of dealing with it instead of just silently removing messages, though. Maybe wag a finger disapprovingly at the person sending the message and don't even make it look like the message got sent from their end.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "but this deterring piracy on communication channels they sponsor seems pretty reasonable, and overall they've handled things quite well."

      Indeed. Let's watch and see what else they start to censor in the future. Slippery slopes are a bitch that way.

      If they were going to do this, I'd just as soon they inform people that they ate their message and for what reason. At least then you know what's going on and not having to piece together why your friend isn't responding to what you said.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by mvdwege ( 243851 )

        So you are using their chat app to talk about how to infringe their copyright, and you think they are in the wrong?

        Entitled little bitch much?

        • by jandrese ( 485 )
          They aren't blocking messages that talk about infringing on copyright, they're blocking messages that so much as reference something they don't like. That's heavy handed and ineffective.

          "You know you can download on ka.to, good seeds and everything". Not blocked
          "You think the new Piratebay is just a FBI sting now? I hear it's just one guy and everything is shady. You'd have to be crazy go go there now." Blocked.

          The smart thing to do would be to have a system that silently flags people's accounts
  • by tsotha ( 720379 ) on Monday February 16, 2015 @03:43AM (#49064753)
    Would you go to Walmart's site and leave links pointing to instructions for shoplifting at Walmart? Valve's site; Valve's rules.
    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday February 16, 2015 @04:01AM (#49064815)

      Do you expect to walk into a Walmart and shout out instructions for shoplifting but have people mysteriously unable to hear you?

      The problem is not the censorship, it's the covert censorship. With any kind of chat system we expect acknowledgement of a message. I don't care if the message doesn't get through as long as I know about it and as long as I know why.

      • If it is done from a company or a none government organization it considered moderation. If it is because of laws or government it is censoring.
        When a TV show bleeps out Sware words it is censoring because of the FCC regulations. Valve is trying to maintain a particular image on its message boards so it can and should moderate its boards to prevent it from going bad.

        • The same arguments apply for moderation. Moderators very quickly get called out on their shit when they blindly delete posts. Proper moderation has always been about marking a post as deleted and better still marking why.

          When a TV show bleeps out a sware word it is the exact opposite of what I'm talking about. That is not shouting into a room where no one can hear you. That's shouting into a room and everyone knowing you said something that was blocked by someone. It's not at all covert. Blocking the link w

          • If it is there site, then they should be able to moderate it as they see fit. While we as individuals are entitled to free speech. Such rules do not apply to the distributors. It is probably easier to delete then to correct.
               

            • I didn't say entitlement. I said calling people out on their shit. A site can do whatever the hell they want. Just like users can, and do (and frequently end up in the news as a result) advertise that the moderation scheme is shady causing messages to disappear into the ether without any reason given.

              It's not about correction. It's about getting an error message saying: "This message could not be delivered". I don't even care if the message doesn't give a reason why. Steam isn't the first one to do this, bu

    • by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Monday February 16, 2015 @04:03AM (#49064821) Homepage Journal

      Valves site, Valves rules, so next week don't be so surprised when a friend messages you back that they bought a game they thought you recommended to them.

      it's valves site after all so why not?

      • it's valves site after all so why not?

        And yes, they could do it. (I doubt they'll do it any time soon in practice. But in theory that's entirely possible for them to implement. A la Facebook: "This list of friends are also checking/following[*] this page" - [*] meaning that you once clicked by mistake on the link and now this incident will be used as a tool to pull as many of your friends as possible).

        Want to trust your communication channels ? Then you MUST use end-to-end encryption, a la OTR. The only way to transmit your messages in a comple

      • by RyoShin ( 610051 )

        it's valves site after all so why not?

        Because that goes from private censorship to impersonation, which can run afoul of a lot of laws in a lot of countries even for something as relatively "innocent" as game recommendation.

        In this case, Valve is simply refusing to pass on the message to the other party in one circumstance (one specific domain). Not a good thing, but not illegal or even necessarily amoral (though that is up for debate) when done through their own service. In the other circumstance (related

    • True, this is the benefit of a free market. Another benefit is it's my money so I get to choose where I spend it, so guess what? Not another dollar off mine will go through Steam. I have no problem with santising comms, but the nature of blind censorship just reeks of abuse. I can't support such behaviour.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      That's a pretty poor analogy because no one's leaving anything in a public place on Steam chat, I think it's private chat isn't it? If so then you're analogy is actually akin to two people in Walmart talking about how shoplifting could occur and then someone from Walmart coming over and covering their mouth when they say certain sentences, except even that doesn't fit well because at least the other person in the conversation could see the other person is having their mouth covered when they say certain thi

  • Not offline (Score:5, Informative)

    by Meneth ( 872868 ) on Monday February 16, 2015 @03:45AM (#49064761)
    KickassTorrents [kickass.to] is still online, though its address has changed back to the original (from .so).
  • by Anonymous Coward

    How many times do we have to teach idiots the lesson?

    1. Create a service.
    2. It gets popular.
    3. Apply heavy handed censorship.
    4. The Streisand Effect causes the censored items to propagate further (see: TFA)
    5. Lose the damn service by hemorrhaging users due to bad press.

    This day and age the profit step is Zeroth, gotta have money already to build popular platforms now.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday February 16, 2015 @05:56AM (#49065167) Homepage

      How many times do we have to teach idiots the lesson?

      1. Create a service.
      2. It gets popular.
      3. Apply heavy handed censorship.
      4. The Streisand Effect causes the censored items to propagate further (see: TFA)
      5. Lose the damn service by hemorrhaging users due to bad press.

      This day and age the profit step is Zeroth, gotta have money already to build popular platforms now.

      The story goes more like this:
      1. Create a service based on user supplied content, everything from YouTube to TPB.
      2. It gets popular because of illegally shared content, since most people ignore copyright law.
      3. You get big enough to get noticed and they threaten you with very expensive lawsuits
      4. You apply heavy handed censorship to keep them from putting the thumbscrews on you
      5. Discover that your users are fleeing while the copyright goons are never happy.
      6. Service collapses from dwindling income, high legal costs and closes doors.

      The only exception is if you get bought out by someone with deep enough pockets, like when Google bought YouTube. I don't see Steam having the same problem though as they deliver games from publishers, who pick the channels they'd like to publish through. I expect that soon torrents will be known as t0rrents on Steam Chat and the world will carry on as before.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Is this about public forum, or a private chat between two people? If it's the latter, I don't see how this is acceptable.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 16, 2015 @07:13AM (#49065415)

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  • I think this is a significant misstep for Valve. There is zero realistic expectation it will provide any benefit and it has a huge potential for negative effects. Valve has built Steam into the 800lb gorilla of the digital distribution of games (and now, some software as well), making generally good decisions. However, this is one of their rare blunders that cannot help anyone involved.

    Steam thrives due to a multifaceted system of technical and logistical policies that one could consider "open handed" in

  • Ok, so, they want to censor, the best response is for them to feel a strong, immediate Streisand Effect.

    I have no interest in tormenting or torrent sites in general, but since they're attempting to silence it, I now really want to know what domain(s) they're trying to cover up.

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