Media and Political Bias

May 4, 2005

While trolling around Lawrence Lessig’s blog, I chanced upon this interesting article about Media and Political Bias.  It’s a great read. Enjoy!

Digital Ragnarok Murder

Thirtysomething blogs about the alleged hacking incident involving Level Up’s 2005 Ragnarok Philippine Championships.  Some guild masters believe that someone within Level Up Games hacked into their accounts and deleted their characters.  I’m not too familiar with the details but if what they say is true, then the crime of hacking has been committed.  What’s interesting for me is that this seems to be a case of digital murder because characters were irretrievably deleted.  In the end, however, the “murdered” victim was virtual — composed of so many 1 and 0’s.  So, the law treats it the same way as any other piece of electronic data without regard for its underlying value or other extraneous factors.

If the gulid masters go to the NBI to complain, this story will get some press coverage in the traditional media.  Level Up is one of many local game companies vying for the right to license “Worlds of Warcraft”. A security breach of this nature probably won’t sit well with the game’s publisher/licensor.  I would think that Level Up is the front-runner in the current beauty contest of local game companies, having single-handedly proven the viability of MMOG/RPOG in the Philippines.

Here’s the Telcos’ Legal Strategy for Killing VoIP

As I understand it, there are about 50,000 lawyers in this country of 80 million people.  That’s about 6/10 of 1% of the population.  In yesterday’s NTC hearing on the draft VOIP rules, there were about 20 or so lawyers from among the 100 or so present.  In short, there was an unusually high concentration of lawyers in the NTC. So much so, that if the building were bombed, then some would say, it would have been a good thing for this country.

We should not forget that the NTC Commissioner is a lawyer. Apart from himself, the lawyers for Smart, Globe, and PLDT were present.  Other lawyers representing VoIP clients were also in attendance was well as lawyers (like myself) who were there just for the fun of it.  Everyone likes a good fight and the hearings did not disappoint.

The lawyers were not only present.  They dominated the discussion.  This was equally lamented in INQ7’s report on the hearing.  The lawyers for the telcos took their turns laying out to the Commission the meat of their legal strategy:  WE WILL SUE TO STOP ANY FORM OF VOIP BUSINESS THAT IS NOT LIMITED TO THE TELCOS (aka the PTEs).  There’s a bit of irony here especially since the new players are beneficiaries of the NTC’s policies that de-regulated the telecom industry in the mid-90’s.  Now, as part of the entrenced status quo, they want to keep things the way they are. 

Back to the legal issues.  Here’s an outline of the telcos’ arguments: (more…)