HomeWeekly News Roundup (3 April 2011)
This is probably the most difficult week for someone whose “job” is to go hunt for news to write about, a day that I really hate personally. While everyone was enjoying April Fool’s Day, I’m sitting here getting paranoid about which stories are real and which are not. The worst part is that some people fire off AFD news stories a day early, you know, to be clever and stuff (it’s not clever, IT’S CHEATING!). Did isoHunt really hire an anti-piracy tech guy? Did Obama really get caught downloading a pirated MP3 version of Rebecca Black’s Friday? Did the RIAA really try to claim a trillion dollar worth of damages … oh wait, that’s real.
So, disclaimer warning, some of the stories I will summarise in this WNR may very well turn out to be someone’s idea of a joke, so I make no guarantees, and if you quote something as fact and it turns out S0ny didn’t really kidnap geohot’s cat in a bid to try and get him to return from South America, and people point and laugh at you and stuff, it’s not my fault!
So let’s start this week’s news roundup, with increasing trepidation, with some copyright news. While the major music labels are trying to squeeze a trillion or two from LimeWire, it turns out that LimeWire’s demise has had a really positive effect on reducing online music piracy.
NPD reports that music piracy is down, probably for the first time in ages, in the last quarter of 2010, with 12 million less pirates, and fewer songs pirated per person. This shouldn’t really come as a huge surprise, considering the popularity of LimeWire, although also as expected, other downloading methods picked up due to the shut down, and over time, the download rate might creep up again. What I find most interesting though is that, given all of this took place last year, we have no heard a single peep from the RIAA about just how much more money (trillions?) they’ve made thanks to reducing piracy, quite dramatically I might add. Where’s the press releases from Sony, BMG and co about just how effective their anti-piracy measures have been in terms of increasing revenue, because this was the whole point behind the expensive anti-piracy efforts and lobbying, right? If reducing piracy does not increase profits, then why bother reducing piracy? And if piracy does not equal lost sales, then just what is responsible for the decline in revenue in recent years?
The decline of CD revenue has not been filled by the increasing digital revenue
By the RIAA’s own graphs, revenue has decreased, on a per capital basis, to a point lower than any time in the last 40 years, and I don’t actually doubt this figure. It’s based on a per capita basis, and since population has grown, it doesn’t actually mean that music industry revenue is lower than ever. And because it tallies results only based on sales of recordings, it does not take into account live music revenue, which from what I gather, is up. But looking at the graph, sales weren’t exactly hot just before CDs came out, and sales are only bad in comparison now because of the high peak that CDs sales managed in the early 2000’s. CD’s decline does coincide with the growth of the Internet in the last decade, but interestingly, it also coincides with the rise of DVDs. Is there no correlation between people spending more on DVDs and the same people spending less on music? I think most people have finite budgets, so it’s not inconceivable that this limited budget is being spent on other forms of entertainment, like video games (an industry also on the rise for most of the last decade), or not even on entertainment at all due to rising living costs and the poor global economic condition. But instead, all we hear are the billions and billions being “lost” by the music industry due to piracy. Once upon a time, companies realised that peaks and troughs exists in business, and innovation is what helps rejuvenate the cycle. Now, there’s this obsession with revenue, as if revenue has to rise every year, and by a significant percentage, as otherwise, the company or the industry is suddenly “in trouble”. The work force is downsized and/or moved offshore, books are being cooked, all just to avoid the share price decline, a decline (or rise) is largely determined by speculation these days, as opposed to it being an accurate reflection of company value and revenue expectations. And then, of course, they blame the Internet for it all.
Newzbin2 now uses Tor to allow its website to be accessed without a domain name
And so the powers that be, trying to please their corporate buddies, will try more and more things, even if it means screwing up the entire Internet. The US government has hinted at implementing domain name blocking, at the behest of the RIAA and MPAA of course, a move that experts, including those that invented the Internet (working under Al Gore’s leadership), have warned will damage the Internet irrevocably. And you know what, it still won’t stop people who want to download pirated stuff. In response to the imminent threat of domain blocking, Usenet website Newzbin2 is now using Tor to allow its website to be accessed even without a domain name. So even before domain blocking has been launched, it has already been circumvented. Decentralized, encrypted, piracy would be almost impossible to monitor, let alone stop, and that’s the direction we’re headed towards. And when we get there, egged on by an obsessed industry that’s too arrogant to change their business model, what will we do then? When people know for a fact they will never get caught pirating songs or movies, how will the RIAA and MPAA stop them then?
And there’s always the slim hope that the industry might embrace the Internet, and allow innovation to blossom and create new revenue streams. Or they might just sue Amazon for daring to allow people to store their legally purchased MP3s in the cloud. Instead of working with Amazon to create a new distribution method, one which gives consumers more freedom, and also perhaps allows for a new way to make money in the Internet age, the RIAA labels simply voiced their arrogant displeasure at Amazon daring to make things easier for users without gaining their kingly approval first. They argue that Amazon, by allowing people to stream their music from their cloud accounts to their Android devices, that this somehow breaks licensing agreements. But Amazon argues that this is no different than playing your MP3s from an external drive, the only difference being that this external drive is accessible from anyone where there’s an Internet connection. But the fact of the matter is that if people legally purchased their songs, then streaming them to their Android device does not harm the record industry in any fashion, since there’s a million ways to get songs to an Android device. Now, if people are storing pirated songs on their Amazon cloud drive, then the people that do that have broken the law, and I don’t see how Amazon is in any way responsible (because if companies handling data transmission can be found liable, then every Internet and networking based company in the world would be liable for all sorts of piracy, because raw data simply goes through everything. But of course, suing Amazon is easier than suing individuals, just like Viacom suing YouTube is easier than suing the actual users that upload pirated content, so that’s where we’re headed, where another piece of innovation may be stopped in its track (or severely limited) because one industry does not want to change and adapt to the times.
Meanwhile, in Righthaven-land, another week, and another lawsuit, although this one didn’t last for very long. Righthaven this week sued tech website Ars Technica (or at least a writer for them). What for? For using a photo that Righthaven sued Drudge report for. Except this photo wasn’t the original photo. It was black and white for a start. And it also came from Righthaven’t own legal documents, that they’ve submitted to court. Not to mention that fair use would have covered Ars Technica’s use of the photo anyway. And also the fact that Righthaven sued the writer of the article, and not Ars Techinca. Even Righthaven realised that something was not right and pulled the lawsuit only a day later, but it brings up the question, if they can make a mistake like this with a high profile target like Ars Technica, how many other mistakes have they made in their filings? And when you can “accidentally” sue someone, perhaps it shows that these lawsuits are not really worth the paper they’re being filed on.
This week’s anti-DRM message is brought to you by Christofer Sundberg, and Avalance Studios, makers of the Just Cause franchise. And the message is, DRM is stupid and useless. And it is a message that I think is hard to argue against, simply because I’m a pragmatist, and DRM simply does not work at stopping piracy. It works well in annoying legitimate buyers though. And controversially, Sundberg says that making better games will mean more people will buy those games. Having to make a better product to keep your customers? How does that even work, and more importantly, why do you need to do it when you can simply lobby the government to destroy competition and innovation.
Not much happening in 3D/HD this week, but I’m contractually obligated to write something for this section at least once every fortnight, and so I will write something this week.
While doing the weekly Blu-ray/DVD sales analysis, I’ve noticed that so far for 2011, there has only been one week in which Blu-ray and DVD revenue, combined, have produced an overall gain compared to the same time last year. In other words, almost every week of 2011 has been worse, usually to the tunes of at least $20-30 million, compared to the same week a year ago. That’s an alarming decline, and while some of it is down to digital distribution (which is not included in these figures), still, the decline seems too rapid to be just due to downloads.
Piracy? Perhaps that’s a cause, but piracy has always been a problem, not just in the last year. Only one of the weeks did Blu-ray revenue actually drop compared to last year, so the decline is definitely all DVD related (which makes sense, since digital distribution should affect DVD the most, considering most downloads and streams are still SD or relatively low quality HD, that does not compete directly with the quality offered by Blu-ray). I think the economy has a lot to do with it, and also the quality of the releases.
And a warning to those, like me, that buys movies and don’t test them out until you decide to view them, which could be weeks, months or even years after the purchase, you might want to think twice. I purchased the Godfather Blu-ray trilogy pack way back in 2008, and for whatever reason, I never got around to watching it until now. It turns out the second movie’s disc is faulty, a known production glitch, and it only took me two and a half years to discover the problem. Apparently, Paramount may still have a recall program for this disc, so I’ll try my luck and hope that they won’t require explanation as to why I waited so long to watch, what are, some of my favourite movies.
And finally in gaming, lucky Xbox 360 gamers in the US can sign up for a new beta-test with the reward of a free copy of Halo Reach. The testing is apparently for a new disc format that promises to allow the dual-layer game DVD, which is now limited to 6.8GB, to hold a GB more, as well as new anti-piracy measures.
Yet another Xbox 360 Blu-ray rumour surfaces ...
And of course, the old time tested “Blu-ray coming to Xbox 360” rumour came out again. I’ve tried to explain why I think this rumour keeps on getting repeated, having blamed it on PS3 and Blu-ray fanboys who think that Microsoft supporting Blu-ray is the ultimate trophy in the Blu-ray vs HD DVD war, and an admission that Sony was right in delaying the PS3 for a year while they waited to put the Blu-ray drive in. Anyway, it looks like if a Microsoft console is to have Blu-ray, it will have to be the Xbox 720 or whatever it will be called, and if I were a betting man, I would definitely put money on Blu-ray being used for the next-gen Microsoft console.
Speaking of fanboy wars, the news this week was that global PS3 sales finally overtook Xbox 360 sales, which has PS3 fanboys so so excited. “We we we so excited”, so they will all say. Xbox 360 sales are largely non existent in Japan, I think it was outsold by the Sega Genesis last week, and they haven’t been doing too well in Europe either, although the “slim” and Kinect has helped the Xbox 360 do well in 2010 in the UK at least. But in the US, the Xbox 360 continues to dominate.
Anyway, I think that’s all there is this week. Yes, I conveniently ignored one news story I wrote which, if it isn’t clear to you by now, was a very much failed attempt at an April Fools joke. I hate doing these kinds of stories, either you’re too subtle and nobody even notices that it’s fake news, or you’ll have to make it so obvious that you might as well just put “April Fools Joke” in the headline. And even when it’s a good one, when people think it’s true, you have to beg and cry on the phone to the MPAA’s lawyers and explain just why you don’t think you’ve libelled them when you posted that they were forming a partnership with Al Qaeda.
I hate April Fools.