Let’s get started with the copyright news for the week. It’s a well known fact that the current White House is very much a friend to the copyright lobby, then again, it’s hard to find a politician in Washington that isn’t, considering the fair and balanced way the RIAA/MPAA spreads their lobbying efforts.

Biden and Copyright Czar Victoria Espinel were instrumental in getting the copyright lobby their ISP 'graduated response' deal, new emails reveal

But a freedom of information request by a curious Internet security researcher has revealed just how much work the Obama administration is actually doing on behalf of the copyright lobby, helping them to get a good deal against America’s largest ISPs in the recent ‘graduated response’ deal. It appears that the newly appointed Copyright Czar, Victoria Espinel, was not only on perhaps too friendly terms with the RIAA/MPAA, but may have also neglected to involve other interested parties in the negotiations, such as consumer rights groups, until it was too late. Vice President Biden’s office has also been revealed as working hard to help the music and movie industries get the best deal, but this is no surprise because Biden’s pro-copyright views were well known before he teamed up with Obama.

So once again, we have a government elected by the people that is only looking out for the interests of private corporations, because in the end, lobbyists are more important than voters in Washington, it appears. And the most depressing thing about it all is that a change of administration won’t change things, and may actually make things worse, as the RIAA/MPAA have been clever in their lobbying, much like how Wall Street does it, by giving all major parties a piece of the pie. It’s precisely things like this that make people want to occupy streets, squares, and other public venues.

While not strictly copyright related, but you can’t rule it out, but Google’s decision this week to ban FrostWire from the Android Market has people talking. Well everyone, except Google themselves, as they still refuse to release the reason why file sharing app FrostWire was given the boot. It could be related to the recent troubles FrostWire had with the FTC, in which the FTC sued the makers of FrostWire for possible privacy violations – the crux of which is that FrostWire shares downloaded files by default, and while most people don’t mind or don’t care, the FTC thought it was problematic enough to take action. But the case has since been settled, with FrostWire long ago making the required changes to its software, including the Android version, and so Google’s recent decision is a strange one, especially as it comes almost immediately *after* the settlement of the FTC case.

But once again, the biggest criticism of Google is its lack of transparency and even basic communication. Anyone that has actually tried to reach a real person who works for Google will know how hard it is, and sometimes it’s just downright impossible. App makers are also not too unfamiliar with Google bans that defy explanation, and the only information they receive (if they receive anything at all) is some vague message about violation of the terms and conditions.

For now, the FrostWire app is still available on their website, but without a listing on Android Market, all those that purchased the app will find it difficult to update to the latest version, so the Google ban is also unfair to the more than million end users who have downloaded FrostWire so far.

Steve Jobs accused Android of "stealing" from iOS, a new biography reveals

And while we’re talking about Android, did you hear about the latest revelations about what Steve Jobs thought of Google’s Android? In the authorized biography that is released this week, Jobs apparently went crazy when HTC released an Android phone that Jobs thought copied too much from the iPhone. Apparently, Jobs threatened to go “thermonuclear” to “right this wrong”, even if it meant spending “last dying breath” to do so. Fortunately, from what I read, Jobs made peace with Google towards the end, and so hopefully, he didn’t spend too much time thinking about the “stolen product” Android during his last days.

This isn’t the normal sort of copyright issue I post about here though, but it just goes to shows how trivial allegations of non commercial, home user copyright abuse is, when compared to what a corporation can get up to, at least according to Steve Jobs. I don’t know if Google really is guilty in this, but I think the smartphone market is better having someone like Android competing with iOS, and it forces Apple to make iOS better as well. And with Apple’s policy of not allowing others to use iOS, someone was always going to come up with an operating system that’s  ”iOS for non Apple devices”, because it’s such a huge market segment to ignore.

Getting back on track again, we also have a brewing story this week that involves the Anonymous, AiPlex and WNR. Yes, this WNR. Last week, I received an email from AiPlex asking us to remove this particular WNR edition, because AiPlex weren’t happy at the way they were portrayed in the article. But if you read the article, all it did was report on then recent events, particularly quotes published in a TorrentFreak article that appears to show AiPlex engaged in some fairly illegal denial-of-service activity against torrent websites, as part of their anti-piracy strategy. AiPlex later denied either making the quotes or alleged they were misquoted, but it was too late, and then Anonymous decided to take matters in their own hands and launched the first in a series of attacks that still continues today. Of course, most people have forgotten about AiPlex, but their latest effort to “erase history” may very well re-ignite people’s interest in the company, as apparently, a lot of bloggers also received similar messages, reports TorrentFreak.

On my part, I’ve offered AiPlex space on the WNR and in our (currently down) forum to post their version of what happened, but I’ve not heard back from them since.

In HD/3D news, it’s been a historic week for Blu-ray (well, the history was actually made a couple of weeks ago, but we’ve only just got the data now), as Blu-ray’s weekly market share went over the 40% mark for the first time ever.

The Lion King Blu-ray was released in four separate Blu-ray+DVD combo packs, and all sales are counted as "Blu-ray only"

It was down to a bit of statistical manipulation, but it’s still a significant milestone for the format. The statistical manipulation comes from counting Blu-ray + DVD combos as Blu-ray only, and with Disney’s policy of timed exclusives for the combo version (with no Blu-ray only version, and the DVD only version coming more than a month later), all it takes is a classic re-release to push Blu-ray market share to record levels. This time, it was The Lion King that was responsible, which was released with no less than 4 distinct editions, none of which was actually Blu-ray or DVD only. The release of Fast Five also helped greatly to take Blu-ray above 40%.

Will Blu-ray push through the 50% mark this year? It could in the next few weeks, but once the real holiday season starts in December, it will be more difficult as DVD sales are high as well during this period. Blu-ray revenue, for sure, should reach record levels towards the last few weeks of December, and will probably go over the $150 million mark for weekly sales.

But the biggest threat to Blu-ray is not DVD, but perhaps web based content, as a new survey shows that 20% in the US are already enjoying web content on their primary television sets, as opposed to just on the computer. And it’s largely thanks to Blu-ray that this is the case, since Internet connected Blu-ray players have helped the likes of Netflix expand their coverage. Game consoles are probably primarily responsible, but the PS3, which is also a Blu-ray player, has been key as well. So overall, Blu-ray has been the needed Trojan Horse to get web streaming into people’s homes, and the survey conducted by Boston’s Strategy Analytics seems to show it has worked. What I found interesting was that the rate of viewing web content on TVs in Europe was much lower, 10%, and I think that has a lot to do with the lack of available free content such as that offered by Hulu, and the lack of an almost ubiquitous service like Netflix being available.

The most attractive thing about web content is probably the on-demand nature of it, as you can choose what to watch and when. And if the right content is available at the right price, stats show that people are willing to pay, and this could help fight the online piracy problem as well. And with TVs now integrating online streaming support directly, web streaming should grow considerably.

But for cinema quality HD, Blu-ray is still the king at the moment, and will be until 100 Mbps fibre connections become more common.

Not much going on in gaming, and I really need to take care of the server situation, so this is as good a place to end this week’s WNR. See you next week.

We start with copyright news as we usually do, and we start with a quite unusual story, one that I still don’t really know what to make of.

PC gaming piracy is a big problem, I think everyone can at least acknowledge this fact (whether ever more intrusive DRM is the solution to the problem, I think, is where the debate is at the moment), but if the goal of anti-piracy is to increase revenue, and intrusive DRM doesn’t seem to be producing, why not try something else?

A sample result from the Vigilant Defender questionnaire, which shows that DRM not only does not really help encourage pirates to buy games, it may even drive them to pirate in the first place

Except, I probably wouldn’t try what startup anti-piracy firm, Vigilant Defender, has tried – to actually help the spread of pirated content. Yes, you heard right, the first step in Vigilant Defender’s experiment is to actually help seed a leaked beta version of the hit game, Deus Ex Human Revolution. The second step is slightly tricky, as the version of the beta they seeded was slightly modified to drop out of the game after the first few levels, and direct users to an online questionnaire, in which they were asked questions about why they decided to pirate the game. While data collection is essential to solving the piracy problem, especially given the industry’s often biased “research” on the matter, the key question asked of gamers was “what would you be willing to pay for this game”. Not only will the answer to this particular question prove useful in finding out just why people pirate, and what price point can influence the same people to go legit, Vigilant took this one step further and proceeded to offer downloaders the opportunity to buy the full game at a price determined by average answer to this particular question. And amazingly, 8% of all those who downloaded the modified leaked beta actually went on to buy the game, at the user voted average price of $24.99 (half of the retail price) and that’s actually quite a high rate of return for games, especially when the target demographic is often described by the industry as “criminals” and “freeloaders”.

In my opinion, what Vigilant Defender tried to do was very clever, even if they went about it perhaps in too much of a roundabout way. What they’re actually advocating is a system where users vote for the price they want to play, and where pirated versions of games actually become demos of sorts. The gaming industry may not want to believe it, but a lot of gamers do use pirated games as an extended demo, and many, I’m not saying all (or even anything close to a majority), to end up buying the full version if they like the game. Game publishers, on the other than, would rather prefer people buy games they don’t like by making sure they can’t test it fully before they buy it, and perhaps that’s how it used to work before Internet piracy became ubiquitous, this kind of business model no longer works. But on the other hand, by offering downloaders cheaper version of games, it’s perhaps encouraging downloads, and this kind of distribution model would be a hard sell for game publishers. But there’s definitely something here, and perhaps a little bit of tweaking could bring us a new distribution model that takes advantage of P2P networks such as BitTorrent to not only distribute the games, but to promote them. Imagine if games came with a thin layer of unobtrusive DRM that simply nagged users to buy the game from time to time, a DRM so not annoying that release groups don’t even bother to have it (so it remains in the pirated versions floating around the net). Users would then be given an offer to “upgrade” their pirated version to the full legit version for a discounted price, but the caveat is that their save games/profiles would no longer be compatible with the full version unless they pay the full price, or some kind of incentive that still makes buying games at full price an attractive proposition. And if you want pirates to help you sell games, then let them join some kind of commission based affiliate program, where for each downloader that “upgrades”, the seeder would get a small commission for their “help”.

The even easier alternative is to lower game prices and improve services for legitimate customers, so that piracy becomes more trouble than its worth.

For Vigilant Defender though, they have a slight problem on their hands at the moment since this Deux Ex experiment was not actually approved by the publishers of the game, Square Enix, which could land the anti-piracy company in a bit of bother with anti-piracy laws.

Bad news for Australians lately on the copyright front. Only a couple of weeks ago, we got our first taste of mass copyright lawsuits, and this week, our government signalled changes to our existing copyright law which would make it even easier for mass copyright lawsuits to happen. Namely, the Attorney-General wants to make it easier for rights holders (or agents of them) to match IP addresses to real identifies, by “streamlining” the legal process. In other words, due process has to go out the window to make Hollywood and the RIAA happy. Even the idea of a ‘graduated response’ system was mentioned, at a conference sponsored by the copyright lobby, of course. Still, there were some other proposed changes that were positive, such as extending “safe harbour” to protect more types of Internet businesses, rather than just ISPs – search engines like Google and Bing will benefit the most with this proposed change. But as long as politicians still continue to believe that a single IP address is evidence enough of a “crime”, and that the “crime” itself is costing the creative industries insane amounts of money and jobs, then politicians will always be on the side of the copyright lobby, made more likely by the uneven spreading around of lobbying cash from both sides of the issue.

In HD/3D news, this week could prove an important one for advocates of managed copy, who want legal alternatives to “ripping”. UltraViolet has been talked about quite a lot, and this week, we finally get our first taste of this “in the cloud” based managed copy system. Unfortunately, the taste is not quite palatable.

UltraViolet from Warner Bros. is being distributed via Flixster, and it isn't a very convenient user experience

Warner Bros. released Horrible Bosses and Green Lantern with UltraViolet digital copy included, but the way Warner has decided to deploy UltraViolet is the biggest problem at the moment. The current WB process requires users to enter in a 12-digit redemption code online, which in itself is annoying, and then users will have to sign up to Flixster, and then install the Flixster app on the device they wish to view the UltraViolet copy. And it’s all wrapped up in various layers of DRM, as you would expect.

And as WB owns Flixster, and to add to the problem, when other studios release their version of UltraViolet, they will use their own distribution network. So right now, if you asked me on which devices an UltraViolet digital copy works on, I can’t tell you, because it will depend on each studio, and this is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. For UltraViolet to be viable, I think it really has to either tie in with iTunes, NetFlix, Amazon or one of the existing players in video distribution, or all the studios have to come together and come up with a single distribution method, with all of the major devices supported (the iDevices, Android system, game consoles and Blu-ray players, at least). And then, streamline the process so it’s as simple as scanning a QR code, or just a matter of inserting the UltraViolet Blu-ray or DVD into a UV compatible player – none of this 12 digit code nonsense, or having to figure out each studio’s UltraViolet system and having to have an account for each.

A two parter Sony related story, the first part goes here in the HD section I suppose. Sony has had to issue a massive recall/repair for 1.6 million LCD TVs they produced since 2008, apparently due to a fire risk in a faulty component. It’s not exactly what the company needs at the moment, but the “good” news so far is that there haven’t been any reports of actual injuries, and that the damage so far has been restricted to the TV set itself.

Less costly for Sony, financial wise, but perhaps more costly in terms of image is the news that a further 93,000 Sony online network accounts have been “hacked”, in the latest security breach.

Fortunately for Sony, the breach which led to hackers gaining access to 93,000 accounts on the Sony Entertainment Network (SEN), PlayStation Network (PSN) and Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) networks appears to have originated elsewhere. According to Sony, hackers managed to source the email/password combinations for an unspecified (non Sony) online service, and proceeded to use the same login combination to try their luck on the PSN, and managed to get access to the 93,000 accounts. Sony have disabled 33,000 SOE accounts, while have forced password changes for the rest. Sony says that credit card info was not accessed during this attack, but personal information may have been.

While Sony is right that the data breach occurred elsewhere, the security issue here still lies with Sony, because allowing hackers to launch this type of massive attack can easily be prevented. Simply limiting failed login attempts from any individual IP address or range, which is standard practice, could have prevented the 93,000 accounts from being accessed. And some kind of “CAPTCHA” system, or human verification, would have prevented the hacker’s bot based login attempts. Both of these are common techniques used to prevent dictionary based attacks. And once again, it took Sony days to spot the unusual activity on their networks, when it really should be a matter of hours if not minutes.

Life to date Xbox 360 sales in the US (in green) is catching up to Wii sales (in blue), but the PS3 (red) languishes in third place

But while Sony’s security problems have been highlighted recently, it doesn’t seem to have seriously affected the fortunes of the PS3, as price, as always, seems to be the main driving factor behind sales. So Sony’s $50 price cut to the PS3 in the middle of August has seen PS3 sales rise, although as the September 2011 NPD US video games sales analysis shows, the rise was not big enough to really endanger the Xbox 360’s position as the best selling console in the US. The gap has closed, however, between the PS3 and the Xbox 360, while the gap between the Wii and every other console seems to be widening. If the gap remains as big as it was during September, the Xbox 360 is set to overtake the Wii as the best selling home based console of this generation (in the US) within 39 month – but it will be well after the Wii U is introduced, so that’s what Nintendo are holding on to at the moment.

Alright, that’s enough for this week I think. Hopefully more of a newsworthy week this next one, and I have a feeling it will. Have a good one.

I've been wasting time playing the Battlefield 3 Beta, and it's mostly fun, even if some technical issues can ruin the experience, plus the fact that I suck at it

I hope you’ve had a good week. We’ve just had Daylight Savings time turned on overnight, and of course, I forgot all about it as usual. I hate it when DST starts, you lose a precious hour that I could have used to do so many things. Like play the Battlefield 3 Beta. I think I’m officially the worst BF3 player in Australia, if not the world, mainly because I’ve not played much FPS multiplayer games before, let alone the more team oriented BF series. I’m such a complete noob, and if you’re just like me, then the first step to solving this problem is to admit you have a problem. The next steps would be to watch these two videos to find out how you can become a better BF3 player.

While I can’t really help you with any gaming related tips, but I can with some technical issues. My C2D E8500 + Radeon HD 6850 is not the best rig for BF3, but I find it playable at 1080p if I keep the detail settings on Auto. It still looks great, the odd glitches apart. But the biggest problems I’ve had to far is the looping sound crash problem (if it happens, you don’t need to do a hard reset, at least not in Windows 7, as you can press the “Windows” key on your keyboard to switch back to the desktop and use task manager to kill the bf3.exe process) – you’re most likely using on-board audio, which then suggest a Realtek chip, and updating the driver should be your first priority. The other issue I had was with the ATI drivers crashing, and I found that closing down any opened software does help (MSN Live Messenger is a particularly bad culprit). Both Nvidia and ATI have released preview drivers that is optimized for BF3 (it really does help), although it appears ATI have removed the drivers for some reason, but you can still find it here. Alright, enough BF3 nonsense, let’s get started with the news roundup.

Update: Just a bit more nonsense, the ever useful FRAPS tells me that @ 1080p on Auto (which was detected to be ‘High’ for my system), I can average around 40-45 FPS, with the occasional framerate drop, but nothing that makes it unplayable). I tested ‘Ultra’, and found that I could only get around 25 FPS outdoors, and just above 30 FPS indoors, less when there’s more action on screen (but it did look fantastic). I had to quit many times to my team’s displeasure to record these results for you (as BF3 beta won’t allow you to change video settings during games).

Let’s start with copyright news for the week, we start with what is apparently a new strategy in anti-piracy enforcement online – $10 fines.

On the surface, this sounds like a much better idea than $3,000 settlement fees, but dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that it’s probably $10 you don’t need to pay. The reason Digital Rights Corp (DRC) can still profit from a $10 piracy fine, is that they don’t actually do any of the legal work required in order to get the $3,000 settlement fees. They don’t bother to match IP address to a real person, as they let the ISP do it, and until you actually click on the link in the email that the ISP forwards to you, and give them your credit card numbers for payment, DRC doesn’t even know who you are. And unless DRC goes to court to obtain a subpoena, they can never find out – but if they do go to court, then $10 won’t even come close to covering their costs. Still, it doesn’t stop DRC allegedly “warning” users that they could still face $150,000 fine, or ISP disconnection, both claims are not true, and a $10 fine is not going to get your account unbanned, if that’s what has already happened. DRC also appears to only represent older artists (most of them dead, actually), and so the likely target for their emails will probably be the elderly – those that can’t afford the $3,000 fine (so will fight it), but are also not technically knowledgeable enough to know that they probably don’t have to pay the $10 fine – a niche, but potentially profitable market sector.

Canada's Heritage Minister James Moore says that if people aren't prevented from backing up their own DVDs, the results could be "quite disastrous"

Across the border in Canada, the Conservative government there is trying, for the third time, to bring in harsh copyright laws that will try to mirror US laws, possibly as a way to get out of the “rogue nations” copyright list that the US produces every year. Taking from some of the worst aspects of the US DMCA, Canadians will find themselves on the wrong side of $5,000 fines if they even attempt to circumvent the “less-than-useless” DVD copy protection, even if it’s just to make their purchased disc playable. A totally useless clause that does nothing to prevent piracy, but strips away consumer rights, all in an attempt to make Hollywood happy. For me, any provision about DRM circumvention should distinguish between the various reasons for DRM circumvention (fair use), and also should take into account the strength of the DRM. If I simply wrote on a piece of paper “DRM – do not remove”, and stuck it on a DVD using sticky tape, it cannot be a crime to “rip” the “DRM” away, because it never worked in the first place. To me, these kind of laws offer legal protection to bad technical solutions, and threatens anyone who dares to test the system for security holes – this will end up hurting computer security, not help it. Imagine if the DVD people had allowed hackers to play around with DVD’s CSS copy protection and re-engineered it based on their feedback, maybe, just maybe, they would actually still have a DRM system that can’t be broken with 6 lines of Perl code, or code that can be printed onto a tie. And then there’s the introduction of a “notice-and-notice” scheme, which forces ISPs to forward infringement notices to end-users, which I guess is at least better than “notice-and-takedown”.

And maybe, in the end, the best way to prevent piracy is to actually compete with services being offered by pirates. After all, it seems to be the most effective anti-piracy method, at least in Sweden. A new Swedish survey has found that music piracy rates has decreased by 25% since the introduction of Spotify and other free streaming services. I dare the RIAA to find any DRM system that’s as effective as simply giving the people what they want. And let’s not forget that Spotify makes money too, which also means the music industry makes money too. Interesting was also the data that showed 40% switched from illegal and legal due to better selection of tracks. This is a huge clue to the music industry, and even to Hollywood, as to how to combat the piracy problem. The way Torrents work, particularly, depends on seeders and large enough swarms – both of which are unlikely to exist for rarer, older stuff. By offering greater selection of content from their archives, and at an attractive price, these “long tail” sales can potentially bring in a long of money. Do it as a package, that includes new content, for a small monthly fee, and you’ve got a competing product to piracy. Because if you can’t compete on price (it can’t get cheaper than free, although if the industry works together with ISPs to  offer free bandwidth, then that’s another way to compete on price), then you should at the very last compete on quality, and quantity, of the content being offered.

In HD/3D news, of course, I can’t let this week pass without mentioning Star Wars. I was totally surprised that, in the week Star Wars was released, it wasn’t even the best selling Blu-ray title – that honour belonged to Thor.

Star Wars on Blu-ray was not even the top selling Blu-ray disc for the week it was released in - beaten by Thor in the end

But with both Star Wars and Thor combined, Blu-ray market share did rise to an all time high, at nearly 35%, easily beating the previous record set by Avatar (around 27%). Of course, I think it’s still a little disappointing that “Star Wars week”, even with Thor included, didn’t even get close to beating the revenue figures set by “Avatar week”, although you do have to take into account the fact that the Star Wars boxset was quite expensive, and so in this economy, it’s a luxury most cannot afford. Plus, all the nonsense with the George Lucas changes might just have affected sales, because I know quite a few people who claim they’ve cancelled their pre-orders because of the “Nooooo” thing.

I didn’t pick it up either, mainly because I know if I do pick it up now, it will be probably a year before I have the time to watch it (got a backlog of about 2 dozen discs I’ve not yet watched – I mean, I only recently watched ‘No Country For Old Men’, and I got that in 2008 when it was first released!). Hopefully, it will either get cheaper or a better version will be released, by the time that I actually have time to watch them (and to be honest, I’ve watched the movies so many times that, it’s just now that exciting for me any more – maybe I’m finally growing up!)

A new report says that, by 2015, sales of DVD recorders will stop and be replaced by Blu-ray recorders. Make sense, and I think it won’t even take that long either. In fact, I don’t think even DVD players will be around for much longer when Blu-ray players start to drop below the magic $50 mark. I mean $25 for a DVD player, or $50 for a Blu-ray one (that, let’s not forget, also plays DVDs, and probably upscales too) – no brainer really.  And it doesn’t even matter if you have the other hardware to get the best out of Blu-ray, a lot of movies are now cheaper on Blu-ray or are released exclusively on the format, so Blu-ray is starting to make sense from a financial point of view too.

And while it doesn’t really fit into any of the three major categories of the WNR, I should mention Amazon’s Android based Kindle Fire tablet, which looks like an exciting product, mainly due to the low price. With Amazon backing Android, there’s finally a company with the content clout to compete with Apple, even if the Kindle Fire is probably not good enough to compete with the iPad 2. But not everyone needs a premium tablet, again I point to the economy, and so perhaps the Kindle Fire can find the right market niche to be a huge success. And Amazon are subsidizing the price a bit, by lowering their profit per unit (they claim that they do still make a profit on each unit sold), and this could be the tablet to compete with the generic brand budget Android tablets as well, which is also a big market segment.

Not much in gaming news this week, other than what I’ve already mentioned above BF3 at the top, so that brings us to the end of another, slightly abbreviated, WNR. See in next time.

So let’s start this week’s RIAA hate with the story that, one of the four major backers of the RIAA, EMI,  “lost” their lawsuit again cloud hosting website MP3tunes, although they could still end up the winners.

While the judge ruled in MP3tunes favour, allowing the website’s business model to continue, the judge still found MP3tunes and its founder guilty of several more specific cases of copyright infringement, mostly relating to MP3tunes’ sideload.com website, which allows music found on the net to be loaded into people’s cloud accounts without doing the manual download and upload routine (so a sideload, basically). MP3tunes had in its favour a strong policy against copyright infringement, and they mostly responded to DMCA takedown requests and acted promptly. And this allowed them to call on DMCA’s “safe harbor” provisions. It’s actually a good lesson for web businesses these days to take DMCA requests seriously, because in this case, the judge basically ruled that due to the existence of the DMCA and “safe harbor”, the responsibility for identifying infringing content falls to content owners, not the website operator. And this makes sense, because only the owner can identify their own “goods”, and only they can decide whether there’s need to pursue a course of action.

Sideload.com was sued by EMI as part of the MP3tunes lawsuit, and the judge found copyright infringement had occurred in some cases

And this is an important decision, because recent judgements, and mooted government legislation, have more frequently identified website operators, your Googles, YouTubes and Megauploads, as being responsible for having some kind of passive anti-piracy system, to remove offending content even without the content owner’s intervention. This is  of course something content owners would want, because it means less work. But such a system would always be “false positive” heavy (there’s no way websites can know if you actually did have permission to upload the content or not), and there are also privacy issues (for example, if you uploaded a ZIP file to Megaupload, do they have permission to unzip and read your files to check for copyright infringement?), and self-censorship is a dangerous road to take. This decision is also a confirmation that the cloud hosting business model can work, but only if copyright protection is taken seriously by the cloud host.

Where MP3tunes lost was that some of the anti-piracy actions weren’t strong enough, for example, removing links on sideload.com for infringing content, but not actually removing the already “sideloaded” versions of the same songs from people’s cloud accounts. The founder of MP3tunes had also sideloaded some infringing songs, the judge found, and that could mean that EMI could still yet receive a good sized damages amount.

While EMI was busy losing one lawsuit, they, and the other three majors, were busy suing others. The four majors, and 25 other labels, have decided to sue TubeFire, a website that allows people to download YouTube videos.

If you’re first reaction is like mine, then it would be something like “what?”. YouTube download services have existed almost as long as YouTube, and there are so many out there that I don’t think anyone even considered them to be a source of piracy. I mean, when you upload something to YouTube, you kind of expect people to view it, for free, so why does Universal, EMI, Sony, Warner think TubeFire deserve to be sued? Apparently, people are downloading officially uploaded music videos and, I don’t know, viewing them or something, and that has angered the four major labels, and 25 other labels that are also part of the suit. It’s probably because their music video sales on iTunes has been affected or something – if they’re that concerned, then don’t (officially) upload to YouTube.

And since YouTube doesn’t have any serious DRM that prevents “downloading”, is it really illegal? Also, while downloading copyrighted YouTube video does occur, what about all the legal uses where people download non copyrighted video, or download for delayed “offline” viewing, a sort of time shifting if you will? And why TubeFire, and not the dozens of other websites and download tools? And what about browsers, who also “download” the video before it plays, the only difference is that they don’t allow people to keep the “download” beyond the current browser session? It is, in my opinion, a ridiculous lawsuit, especially when a lot of these online video download services do nothing more than a URL rewrite, with the download actually occurring from the original location (because even online video needs a “source” file, and a lot of download tools simply allow people to download this source file – so in effect, it’s the online video site that’s offering the download).

And the whole idea behind a music video is to promote music sales (do people buy a lot of music videos?), so does it really matter if people are downloading or streaming the videos, from a promotional perspective? Free creates hype, and that’s really an immeasurable benefit, but hugely important these days.

Fox content on Hulu (free) will be delayed by 8 days, and this has caused piracy to surge for Fox shows

Which is why Fox’s withdraw from the free edition of Hulu is surprisingly, to say the least. Hulu was created to offer free catch-up content, usually delayed just a single day after the original airing, to both help fuel Internet hype for shows, and to compete with pirated downloads of the same shows. Instead of people downloading pirated shows in the hundreds of thousands, people can instead go to Hulu to enjoy a totally legal alternative, and most are more than happy to put up with the ads, which then allows revenue to flow back to the networks. It’s a win-win situation, which is why Fox’s decision to delay free airings on Hulu to 8 days, instead of one, seems to be me like a self inflicted wound. For one, nobody would bother with a 8 day delayed airing – it might as well be 8 months in today’s “instant” culture. People will just find alternatives, and piracy being the prime choice. TorrentFreak wanted to test this theory, that Hulu prevents piracy, and conversely, no Hulu can cause piracy, and it seems they’ve found a correlation. Of two Fox shows (Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef), pirated downloads on BitTorrent networks increased by 114% and 189% respectively compared to before the Fox Hulu change. So instead of earning ad revenue for Hulu airings, Fox has simply “forced” users to migrate back to BitTorrent.

Fox says they’re doing it because they want to promote certain cable services that bundle Fox shows with paid for Hulu accounts that still allows users to get access to Fox shows in a timely manner. But to me, this seems like a short sighted move for a quick hit of sponsorship money, and for all the things that “promote” piracy, actions (or inactions) of content owners probably has the biggest effect. It’s like the Netflix price rises, and what the lady says at the end of this video. People don’t want to pirate stuff if they have a legal alternative, but if you take away that alternative, well …

So, on to copyright law firms. The US Copyright Group has sued a deceased for piracy of the film “The Hurt Locker”. To be fair, the USCG are only the intermediaries, the real blame goes to the producers of “The Hurt Locker”. And to be fair again, the dead seemed like the next logical target, after the blind, and then the elderly, were both sued for download porn videos. If only zombies could be sued (and if they were real). High profile mistakes aside, who knows how many other mistaken lawsuits have been filed, which is always likely to be the case with such a scatter-gun approach to lawsuits. I mean, when your only piece of real evidence is a set of numbers (the IP address), which only at best gives you the subscriber account, and not the name of the actual person that made the download, then that’s not really evidence in my opinion. And for the argument that people should be held responsible for their own Internet connections, including securing it against unauthorised usage, that would be like saying if you forgot to lock your car and somebody used it to commit a crime, you would be held responsible.

The USCG’s other big client, Nu Image, producers of ‘The Expendables’, has made a drastic change in their suing strategy as well. They’ve dropped all remaining defendants from ‘The Expendables’ lawsuit, but before we celebrate a major victory against mass copyright lawsuits, Nu Image are not finished yet with suing ‘The Expendables’ downloaders. Instead of clumping all defendants in a single case and then getting the bulk of it thrown out for jurisdiction issues, Nu Image plan to re-file numerous smaller lawsuit in different locations, and thus avoid the jurisdiction issue. And not only that, they’re going to file lawsuits for downloaders of more of their films, including ‘Drive Angry’, ‘The Mechanic’ and the still-in-theaters ‘Conan the Barbarian’. You know, if Nu Image spent more time actually producing “good” films, perhaps they might not need to spend so much time and money on suing downloads. Just a thought.

In Blu-ray/3D news, Star Wars is going to be available on Blu-ray soon, and the first Star Wars release is a big event for any video format.

Star Wars getting released for the first time on any new video format is a big deal

But with every new release of Star Wars, there’s always the threat that George Lucas might do more “tweaking” to the Star Wars films, especially the original trilogy (the prequel trilogy, nobody really cares about). So when Lucas hinted that there would be new stuff on the Blu-ray release, fans got, understandably, a bad feeling about it all. An all digital Yoda is probably coming for Episode I, but imagine the outcry if the puppet Yoda in the original trilogy was replaced with a digital one (for consistency, you see)? Not even Lucas would dare to do that of course, but this is the Internet, this is Star Wars, and so there will be hysteria at any and all rumours. To be fair, the puppet Yoda in Episode I looked weird and out of place, so a digital Yoda in that film (and that film only) is welcomed. There are also other improvements, for example, you get to see more of Episode I due to better transfer techniques that allows more of the picture to be shown on the screen (yeah, more Episode I, that’s what fans want!). Lucas also continues to “rewrite history” by removing special effects mistakes in the original trilogy, including the infamous Wampa puppeteer arm in Empire. While some fans would welcome the removal of obvious mistakes, some others are happy with the originals the way they are (even the pre-Special Edition editions, which I was hoping would be included on the Blu-ray), while most simply don’t mind either way, probably.

Is DVD on the way out? Well, it’s definitely not on the way in. A new study seems to suggest it is, but it was only really looking at portable DVD players, which the research say is being replaced by video capable smartphones and tablets. Common sense really, the same reason people no longer carry their portable electronic Sudoku player, their MP3 player, their PDA, and their pig destroying avian targeting contraptions.

As for the future of the DVD format? Every Blu-ray player is also a DVD player, so I think it will be around for a while yet.

Not much in gaming, so skipping …

And that brings us to the end of this WNR. Have a good one.

In copyright news, a couple of weeks ago, the story of a 70-year-old grandma being “caught” downloading video porn by a copyright law firm made the headlines.

If you have a Wi-Fi connection, you need to use WPA2 encryption

This week, a blind man is accused of doing the same. In a scenario that is likely to be repeated over and over again, the man, only known as Doe 2057, suspected that the Wi-Fi router his wife set up might not have been secured, which possibly led to neighbours abusing the connection to download Japanese porn, despite the man living in a “very upscale building”. Before we get to the rights and wrongs of copyright law firms, people really need to be more careful with their Wi-Fi routers. By not securing it, anyone could connect and use up your Internet bandwidth, and that’s actually a best case scenario. Worst case, they would have access to your network, and hence any file shared on the network. The same also applies to routers that use the default password (or no password). And I think router makers have to take some responsibility as well, as far too many routers ship with factory settings that do not have security turned on or use the easily broken WEP protocol – it makes them easy to install, a bit more compatible with older wireless devices, but a little bit of hand-holding in the set up software wouldn’t make the process that much more difficult either.

But with nobody taking any responsibility, the large majority of consumers ignorant of the need to secure their routers, copyright law firms are taking advantage of biased copyright laws. It’s certainly opportunistic, you have to say. The problem is that to actually fight the charges, as Doe 2057 found out, it’s usually more expensive than just paying the on average $2,500 settlement fee. And the copyright law firms know this, and have exploited it beautifully. It was also revealed this week that the number of people being “sued” this way, in the United States lone, has reached over 200,000, according to stats being kept by TorrentFreak. That’s half a billion dollar worth of settlement fees, but assuming not everyone pays up, it’s still a 8 figure amount that many law firms would be delighted to take in over the course of several years. If you ever get caught, you should definitely check out EFF’s page on mass copyright lawsuits, and learn about your options.

A new study seems to show that good games are pirated more, which might sound like common sense to you and me, but nevertheless the study “confirms” it as fact. Except it sort of doesn’t. The TorrentFreak article on this study has more details, including the top 10 list of most pirated games, there are a few cases, such as the awful TRON Evolution game, that still managed to be popular with pirates, despite being unpopular with critics. Similarly, the fairly average and not all all popular (sales wise) ‘Two Worlds II’ managed to get into the top 10, and the hugely popular Starcraft II wasn’t the most pirated game (Fallout: New Vegas was, which is fair enough I suppose). I would actually like to see a study that tries to find a correlation between game sales, piracy rates and the quality of the game. What I would like to know is that if high quality games have a higher or lower ratio of pirated copies versus paid for copies. And then take into consideration things like the exclusive online features of the game (eg. Starcraft II’s Battle.net support), as well as any DRM employed (eg. Ubisoft games). I think the results may be very interesting.

Speaking of DRM, Walmart is pulling out of the digital music business according to leaked memos, and this has implications for those that purchased DRM’d music from them prior to 2007 (before they went DRM-free). Luckily, Walmart seems to be doing the right thing and will keep the DRM servers online (they learned the hard way about turning off DRM authentication, back in 2008 when they tried it and met with strong public condemnation). But how long will they do it? Indefinitely? At some point, Walmart will decide unilaterally that it no longer needs to maintain DRM authentication, and all those “purchases” would be made invalid. The sensible thing for Walmart seems to be to transfer the DRM’d songs to DRM-free version, which should not really be that difficult, but I suppose it means extra licensing costs. It again highlights the problem with DRM, not only for consumers, but for content providers having to get locked in to a proprietary system for an undefined number of years.

In Blu-ray/3D news, I posted a 3-in-1 news story just yesterday on developments in the 3D world.

The first of the three is not really that interesting, a story about 3D glasses vending machines outside of selected cinemas in California. The fact that people may pay $70 for a pair of passive 3D glasses out of a vending machine, in this economy, just seemed funny to me.

A standard for 3D glasses could help end consumer confusion and lead to cheaper glasses, but will it help 3D uptake?

The second story is slightly more interesting, but let’s talk about the third one first, which is about AT&T’s U-verse no longer carrying the ESPN 3D channel, due to low consumer demand. The blame is either with lack of 3D devices being sold, or lack of interest, and both could be true. The thing is, 3D is a gimmick, and one that perhaps you might want to give it a go from time to time, but the majority of TV watching will be in 2D.

Back to that second story, and this one is about a new standard for active 3D glasses being formed by Panasonic, Sony and Samsung, three of the biggest manufacturers of 3D. Panasonic hinted at this quite a while ago, especially when it found that Samsung’s active 3D glasses can actually workon Panasonic sets, but only if you wear them upside down, the ridiculousness of this probably prompted a rethink by these manufacturers. They also plan to address a major problem with home based active glasses, in that they’re mostly based on infra-red or RF signals, both of which are susceptible to interference, and in the case of IR, line of sight issues. Hopefully, with a standard in place, and other manufacturers signing up, the cost of 3D glasses can decrease over time.

And finally in gaming, as mentioned earlier, the July NPD figures have been released. Microsoft, as usual, were the first to provide actual hardware sales figures, not surprisingly because their Xbox 360 was the best selling home based console yet again. They also made it interesting by announcing the market share figures, at 45%, which meant that as long as one Nintendo or  Sony release figures for the Wii or PS3, then we would know the sales number for the other (based on a simple calculation).

Unfortunately, neither companies came out with any figures, and it was left to Analyst Michael Pachter to come up with the good, via a sneaky reference to the Wii’s year-on-year result. So once I get all the maths done, I should have the NPD analysis up.

Alright, another short-ish WNR, but if there’s no interesting news, then there’s no interesting news, it’s not as if I can make it up or anything. Or maybe I can?

See you next week.

Starting as usual with the copyright news, we start with the MPAA’s win against Zediva, as the judge in the case handed down a preliminary injunction against the “innovative” video rental service.

Zediva is a great deal for consumers, but it can only do it by using loop holes that Hollywood is trying to close

A little background info. Zediva’s service works by allowing you to rent physical discs, but instead of sending the disc to you like what Netflix would do, they do what Netflix’s other service does, by offering you a streaming version of the same movie. Zediva then reserves the disc you “rented”, and removes it from circulation. Or basically as Zediva puts it, you rent the disc, and they play it for you over the Internet (imagine a DVD player with a really really long cable). Why did Zediva do this? They did this – and this is where I think Zediva’s downfall will be – to avoid having to pay licensing fees for streaming content.

You see, the problem is that Zediva’s motivations, it seems to me, are born out of trying to avoid paying these licensing fees and release restrictions, and make more money than they would otherwise. If this is Zediva’s real motivation, then good luck to them, but I don’t think they have a snowball’s chance in hell with their case. And in the judge’s summary of the ruling, it’s made quite clear that the judge sees real problems with Zediva’s argument, and that if Zediva was allowed to continue operating, it could harm the existing video-on-demand industry, Netflix included.

Now, it could be debated that what Zediva is doing actually does not hurt Hollywood if you compare it to traditional disc rental, but that it does hurt Hollywood studios when compared to what they can make from streaming deals, and even Zediva won’t deny this, as after all, their business model is to save on licencing costs. This then leads to the debate as to why streaming should cost more than traditional rentals, why Hollywood should choose to not only “tax” new innovative distribution methods, but to place artificial limits (like a 30-day embargo to help increase disc rental income), when these help to fight piracy. But that’s their business decision, and they may be right or wrong, but that’s not for Zediva to decide. So people get pissed off with Redbox waiting times for new releases, or the somewhat hysterical reaction to the Netflix price increases (best encapsulated in this video), and it might hurt Hollywood more to be too greedy when it comes to streaming licensing fees and release schedules, if people do decide to “screw it” and use BitTorrent.

Pron magazine/website Perfect 10 is making legal headlines again this week, twice actually, as they launch yet another lawsuit against yet another online company, this time Megaupload. As you may or may not know, Perfect 10 has in the past sued Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the middle of these three recorded a win against Perfect 10 this week in which the Ninth Circuit court rejected Perfect 10’s appeal over an earlier decision favouring the search giant. But while courts are reluctant to rule about top tech companies that have been Perfect 10’s target before, they may be more favourable to ruling in Perfect 10’s favour against Megaupload, especially since the MPAA’s case against similar file hosting provider, Hotfile, seems to be going okay. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be Perfect 10’s first victory, but it all depends on how frequently their content has been uploaded by users of Megaupload, and if it’s not frequent at all, why Perfect 10 didn’t file DMCA notices to get those content removed, instead of launching a lawsuit (“to make more money” is not an excuse the court would accept, I think).

Diablo III will use 'always-on' DRM, but not for anti-piracy, says Blizzard

Good will amongst gamers is something every game developer needs, and up until this week, Blizzard, the makers of the addictive World of Warcraft and Starcraft series,  probably thought that the had enough good will stored in the bank to pull a nasty surprise. But, as Blizzard will admit, they might have miscalculated. What happened was that Blizzard announced the next episode in another one of their addictive franchises, Diablo III, would have “always-on” DRM, meaning gamers won’t be able to play the game offline, even for a couple of seconds. So Blizzard decided to do a Ubi, and as I talked about last week, nobody likes Ubi DRM. The funny thing was that Blizzard probably never intended to do this as a form of anti-piracy, but only as an anti-cheating feature. This may very well be true, but Blizzard could have avoided this whole controversy (and still used “always-on” DRM) by including an offline mode, much like how Test Drive Unlimited 2 does it (offline and online progress are recoded separately). The statements made by Blizzard immediately after the backlash began didn’t help either – executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo’s statement about there being other games to play when people are offline, for example on long plane trips, was the most ill-conceived of them all (yes, “other games” that people will buy instead of your games).

So it’s a lesson for Blizzard and any other company that chooses to use draconian DRM, for whatever reason – beware of the backlash, which might ultimately hurt revenue more than a couple of extra pirated copies would have (or the cost of adding an offline play mode).

In Blu-ray/3D news, exciting news, sort of, although it’s technically neither HD nor 3D (not yet anyway).

I’ve been talking up UltraViolet for a while now, and it’s not like me really to voice my support for anything Hollywood comes up with, especially if it’s wrapped up in all sorts of DRM, which UltraViolet will no doubt be. But for me, UV is a huge shift in the way we “buy” movies, and it comes just at the right time when cloud storage is all the rage.

UV, simply puts, turns buying a movie into really buying a movie. The idea is that, instead of buying a movie on each platform, on disc, then on iTunes,  then another version for your Android device … instead of doing this, you buy the license to watch the movie, and then you get access to all the versions via the cloud, for all of your popular devices. It’s like Digital Copy, except it’s all done in the cloud. So when you buy a Blu-ray movie at Walmart, you can instantly get the movie to play on your Android phone, as long as you have a good Internet connection. And at home, instead of finding and popping the disc in or pre-ripping it to your media player, you can just fire up your TV’s UV app, and watch all your purchased movies from the cloud.

Flixster is already available on a variety of mobile devices, and so, it's the natural fit for delivering and managing UltraViolet

The big news this week in regards to UV is the first announcement of UV compatible movies, as Warner Bros. announced both Bad Bosses and Green Lantern will feature UV support. I’m not surprised at all WB is one of the first companies to announced UV support, as they’ve always been quite open to new formats, having supported VCD in Asia, and HD DVD before they decided not to. And WB’s recent acquisition of Flixster is starting to make sense as well, as it seems Flixster is the app that WB plans to use to allow users to manage and watch UV content. As Flixster is already available on a wide variety of mobile devices, it’s an easy decision for WB to use it for UV.

What was more interesting was that WB also announced that it would even be possible for users to bring in their old DVDs to retailers, and have them “enable” access to the UV version of the movie. I don’t know how this will work, or whether there might be a way to do it without having to go to the store, but it does sound interesting. And as mentioned earlier, I really hope TV and console manufacturers embrace UV as well, as this would allow me to digitally stream my movie collection without ripping (also need studios and ISPs to work out some kind of deal to offer free bandwidth for watching UV movies).

In related news, Time Warner owned HBO plans to make available console versions of the HBO Go app, which is great news for those that are actually in the regions that can access HBO Go, which sadly does not seem to include Australia (we miss out on Hulu as well … boo!). The announcement also mentioned other “connected devices”, which sounds a bit vague, but hopefully will include things like Blu-ray players and TVs, for easy peasy catch-up viewing.

And finally in gaming, Sony has, as expected really, announced a strong degree of integration between their upcoming portable console, the PlayStation Vita, and the PS3.

This will include the ability to use the Vita as a controller for the PS3 (so allowing the touch surface, gyroscope, microphone, camera … all to be used to control PS3 games), plus the PS3 can also send graphics data to the Vita to display. Sounds familiar? It should, because this is exactly how the Wii U controller would work.

PS Vita will offer Wii U like features, much earlier than Nintendo's console

With the Vita coming to the US probably early next year, and the Wii U much later than that, it’s a shot across the bow for Nintendo, if not directly at them. The only issue is the price. At the expected price of $249, and add the $299 cost of the PS3, yes, you might have a system that rivals some of the innovative parts of the Wii U, but might be more expensive, and not have as good  graphics as the Wii U (which must surely be an ironic situation for both Sony and Nintendo). But then again, the Vita can be used as a standalone gaming console far far away from the Wii U (the Wii U controller also allows independent play, but only within close proximity to the main Wii U console). So a Vita + PS3 combination could in fact replace the Wii U + DS combination, and if that’s true (and if graphics quality is discounted as a factor), then Sony becomes the better value proposition. And a PS3 price drop, or a PS3 + Vita bundle, may help.  Of course, Nintendo knows how to make fun games, and Sony struggles at times, and this could be the deciding factor.

For the Xbox 360, they’re going in a totally different direction, which could work for and against them. But Microsoft has demonstrated Windows Phone integration with Kinect and the Xbox 360, so they’re planning something similar too – and it will be even better value for those already with Windows Phones.

So we come to the end of another WNR. Hope you enjoyed this issue, and see you next week.

In copyright news, let’s start with more bad news for isoHunt. Not only did they get sued again last week, now, even a potential ally in Google has come out blasting the BitTorrent search engine.

Now, on first glance, you might expect Google to back isoHunt, considering both are search engines. And since Google is fighting its own copyright battle against Viacom, surely this puts them on the same side as isoHunt. But that’s not really the case. Viacom’s strategy in their appeal of the YouTube verdict is to say that it’s no longer enough for websites to be DMCA compliant, that is to remove infringing content when requested. Instead, Viacom says that there is something called “red flag” infringement, which means that if it’s somewhat obvious that infringement is occurring, then Google/YouTube should take action even without any specific DMCA complaints. The problem for Google in regards to the isoHunt appeal is that the MPAA might just win the case against isoHunt on the basis of “red flag” infringement, and it would set a precedent that would disadvantage Google. So what’s Google’s legal strategy? It’s to paint isoHunt not as a search engine, but just a really really bad copyright infringer. It’s arguing that there’s no need for the MPAA to even use “red flag” infringement, because isoHunt is plainly guilty of actively and deliberately supporting piracy, something that Google/YouTube cannot be accused of. Yes, it really hurts isoHunt’s defence that they’re just a search engine, like Google, but this is Google in self-protection mode.

The so called "red flag" infringement ruling could spell an end to online innovation

Regardless, “red flag” infringement is actually quite a dangerous precedent to set, so I do support Google’s efforts in trying to fight against it, even if it means that isoHunt will be sacrificed as a result. The problem with “red flag” infringement is that it potentially could kill innovation on the Internet, because let’s admit it, a lot of even today’s most popular and mainstream web services had to tolerate or even support “red flag” infringement, to get their business up and running. Would YouTube exist today if people weren’t allowed to upload copyrighted content back when it first started out? Would Google, the search engine, have become the most popular search engine if it blocked all piracy related search results when it was first launched? Would any of the free file hosting websites even exist, allowing us to share large (legal) files that otherwise would be too big for email? “Red flag” infringement is basically the content owner’s way of stopping all innovation, even if there is a remote chance that infringement could occur at some unspecified time in the present or future, and that’s dangerous. And it also puts the onus on identifying infringing activity on the side of the website publishers, as opposed to the content owners, which doesn’t even make sense, since how would I know what content belonged to whom and whether it’s really authorized or not (case in point, Viacom’s own employees uploading copyrighted clips under fake accounts, to create fake hype and promote their shows)?

And so we move on to the next set of news, which is also about appeals. This time, it’s the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft’s (AFACT) appeal of a verdict from a year ago which found Internet Service Provider, iiNet, not guilty of authorizing copyright infringement committed by its subscribers, even though iiNet failed to act on infringement notices sent by the AFACT. The result of the appeal was announced this week, and it’s victory again for iiNet, even if it’s mostly symbolic at this point. While iiNet won the appeal, several decision has been overturned in favour of the AFACT, and it probably paves the way for AFACT stepping up its campaign to make ISPs the copyright police. iiNet’s victory apparently was more due to technical reasons, the precise design of the copyright infringement notices which the court found inadequate, and really, the decision probably gives the AFACT a very clear set of guidelines on just how to send infringement notices to ISPs. Basically, a symbolic victory for iiNet, but probably a more substantial win for the AFACT in the long run.

What frustrates me most about these types of trials, and about ISP warnings and/or three-strikes system, is that, in the end, it will be so so easy for users to bypass monitoring and escape being caught, or even cautioned. This is because anti-piracy monitoring today is basically just based on monitoring BitTorrent networks, which is only one way to obtain pirated content. Encryption, VPNs, or even just direct Internet downloads via digital lockers, can all escape the watching eyes of the piracy police, and so with millions of dollars being spent on lawsuits, and even more millions per year for monitoring and policing, the result will, as always, just push people towards using new piracy tools that will make online piracy harder and harder to track and stop. Remember in the good old days when websites simply hosted the pirated files, and how easy that was to stop compared to stopping torrents? Civil liberties are being sacrificed to give corporations a *false* sense of security, and that’s a really really bad reason to force us to give up our rights (is there even such a thing as a “good reason”?)

Again, not much happening for HD/3D news, and I’m not even going to mention the stupid “Inception to be converted to 3D” news, because if there’s one thing worse than the 3D hype, then it’s “taking a 2D movie and converting it to fake 3D so we can squeeze more money out of the fans” phenomenon. Note to studios: not everything has to be in 3D!

XviD 1.3.0 has been released this week

While not exactly HD news, exactly, but a new version of Xvid has been released, version 1.3.0, and it’s the first new version in quite a while. MPEG-4 ASP based codecs may no longer be as sexy or “cool” as the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 ones, but there’s still a place for the good old Xvid codec  for medium quality video files.

And the absence of real news means that I will have to plug my weekly US Blu-ray (and DVD) sales analysis feature, the latest analysis found here. It’s a place where Blu-ray fans can go to bask in the glory of “their” format’s sales successes, and where die hard HD DVD fans like myself can go and find any signs that show Blu-ray’s weakening stance, no matter how statistically insignificant (“OMG, Blu-ray sales fell 20% compared to last week – it’s doooomed!!”).

And as part of compiling the stats, I also regularly update a series of related graphs, that are never actually posted anywhere (other than on our on-and-off “Blu-ray: The State of Play” feature). So instead, I’ll post some of the graphs here right now, for your enjoyment.

Every week, there are stats to show how Blu-ray revenue as a percentage of combined disc (Blu-ray + DVD) revenue, and here’s the stats plotted that compare the most recent weeks (in red) to the same week a year ago (blue):

Blu-ray Sales Percentage: Currents vs a Year Ago (as of 2011-02-12)

The graph below shows the same stat as above, except plotted in a linear time fashion, with a trend line showing Blu-ray’s growth.

Blu-ray Market Share Trend: As of 2011-02-12

And finally, this graph shows the Blu-ray growth rate (so if Blu-ray’s market share was 5% a year ago, and now it’s 10%, the the growth rate is 100%, or doubled), again with a trend line.

Blu-ray growth rate trend: As of 2011-02-12

And finally in gaming, which these days, should probably be renamed to the “PS3 Jailbreak” section instead. Last week ended with Sony banning a bunch of users from PSN for using hacked firmware, and now the hackers have fought back by hacking PSN to un-ban themselves, as well as make it possible to ban anyone they want.

Note to Sony: don’t try to out-hack hackers.

geohot's takes the battle with Sony to rap form

Then we had the news of Sony attempting to bring out a new PS3 SKU that would be hack proof (famous last words). geohot and others have already said that the only way for Sony to really combat the PS3 hack is to release a new hardware, and it seems Sony has taken their advice. At the same time, Sony is beefing up their own legal team as they seek to sue their way out of this mess (what could possibly go wrong?). Sony have also got the German police to raid the home of PS3 Linux hacker graf_chokolo, which will please the Linux/hacking community. You can read more on these stories here.

For those that think I’ve been too hard on Sony, perhaps you’re right. Personal history with the company aside, the main reason I and a lot of people detest Sony is solely based on their recent actions, best described in this Make article/rant. I started Digital Digest talking about how to play DVDs in Windows, back when commercial solutions were few and far in between, and with Pentium 4’s still an expensive early-adopter thing, you just needed to hack your way to  play DVDs on PCs smoothly, from tweaking drivers to using custom decoders and more. And from then on, it’s always been about using products and software beyond the purposes intended by manufacturers and publishers. Sony’s hatred towards anyone that wants to do things outside of Sony’s own limited imagination, and their arrogance of forcing people to use Sony products in Sony’s own prescribed manner (and it’s not just end users, it’s also developers too, having to adapt themselves to Sony’s way of doing things, as opposed to the other way around – a philosophy that Microsoft, for example, do not share, which is why the Xbox 360 is a much more developer friendly platform). And it’s also the arrogance in their response, which is almost always an overreaction (eg. CD root-kit fiasco), because it’s as if they believe that using, developing for or even selling a Sony product is a privilege, and so if you make Sony angry, expect retribution. Point out a flaw in their security design? Sony will get you. Make their products do more than advertised? Sony will get you. Sell products to help Sony users in a way Sony doesn’t like? Sony will double get you (as geohot wisely raps in his video, “I shed a tear everytime I think of Lik Sang”).

Speaking of Microsoft as a “good guy” when it comes to consumer right seems quite wrong to me, but compared to Sony, there are a lot of “good guys”. But Microsoft’s response to the Kinect hacks (not the first response, which was similar to Sony’s, but the subsequent responses by openly welcoming the hacks) is to be commended, and really, it’s the best business decision as well (Sony’s actions have often hurt themselves more than anyone else, to be fair). And now Microsoft is following up by releasing an official PC developer kit for Kinect, available for free to non commercial users and researchers. Of course, opening up the development of an console accessory is different to the reaction of seeing your product hacked into oblivion, but still, it’s hard to imagine Sony reacting to the hack in the same manner (as the Make article mentioned, the Aibo hacking incident kind of shows what a typical Sony response might have been).

Also, Kinect will work with Windows Phone sometime in the future (not this year though), which given the recent Nokia announcement regarding moving to the Windows Phone platform, can only be a good thing for Kinect. Still, Kinect needs some better, more varied games, because frankly, I’m a bit tired (in both sense of the word) from playing Kinect Sports soccer and winning 4-3 all the time (I’m not that good at goalkeeping, which for me, consists of flapping my arms wildly).

Alright, enough ranting for this week. Have a good one.

And don’t forget our Facebook/Twitter competition where anyone who likes/follows will enter into the draw to win some $20 Amazon gift cards. The more likes/follows, the more prizes (up to 15 GCs – I have to save the rest of the website earnings  for food), and from the current count, I should be handing out something like 7 or 8 of these GCs. So get clicking, and good luck!

Let’s start with the copyright news. Last week. I talked about how increasing access to content reduces piracy, and if you take the same principle and use it for the other side, then decreasing access should lead to more piracy.

Making TV shows exclusive to a subscription channel could increase piracy

Which is exactly what experts are warning now that the UK has a new subscription channel that has made a lot of shows, previ0usly available on free-to-air TV, a channel exclusive. It means that for popular shows like Boardwalk Empire, the only way to actually watch these shows is to sign up to Sky Atlantic, or wait until the show hits DVDs/Blu-rays. Legally, that is. Illegally, well, you won’t really have to wait more than 2 hours after the original US airing date to find torrents posted everywhere for that particular episode. In fact, I bet that the torrent release schedule probably beats the airing schedule of Sky Atlantic, probably even by days or even weeks. So release windows, exclusive broadcasts, and no legal free option will only really drive people to pursue less than legal options. Those more adventurous (and technical minded) will go for torrents, while there are still plenty of file sharing and streaming sites that offer the rest the ability to watch the shows without the associated legal risk (since most of the legal focus is on BitTorrent downloads these days). Now, somebody will benefit financially from exclusivity and release delays, but it all seems very short term to me, and the reason why TV piracy is on the up. It’s more understandable for US cable based shows, that were never really on free-to-air anyway, but for shows that air in the US on the big networks, there’s no reason why these shows shouldn’t be shown simultaneously around the world (taking into account time zone differences). Do that, and I think piracy rates will be lowered by quite a bit. Yes, pirated shows don’t have ads, which is a big draw card, but with PVR/DVRs and a little bit of fast forwarding, it’s probably worth the pain to avoid the risk of receiving a letter from an opportunist law firm.

Hotfile is being sued by major Hollywood studios for promoting web piracy

Speaking of file sharing sites like Hotfile, Hotfile has just been sued by the MPAA and five movie studios it represents. Now, I don’t think anyone can deny that there are lots of pirated files on Hotfile, but it is an upload service, and it’s the users that populate their servers. Like how people upload pirated Viacom clips to YouTube, and look how that turned out for Viacom, in the court room. The MPAA claims that Hotfile rewards users for uploading pirated movies and TV shows, because Hotfile has an affiliate program where you can earn movie depending on how popular your downloads are and how many of your downloaders sign up for the premium service. Now, I think it’s also fair to admit that many pirates are probably making money this way, but then again, in my line of work, I see a lot of software publishers that also use Hotfile and other file hosting services to save money on file hosting, as well as make a couple of bucks back. So Hotfile’s affiliate program really is just about growing their business and rewarding their customers, whomever they may be, and can you really blame a business for trying to do this? As for the ratio of legal to illegal downloads? I have no idea. But what can a company like Hotfile do to fight piracy, other than not exist (which is the MPAA’s preferred option – in fact, I think they’d rather the Internet not exist either, the same opinion also held by quite a few dictators around the world right now). They can try and filter based on file names, but all users will do is to name their downloads sdkj3489sd.zip or something similar, and piracy will continue. They can actively scan downloads, but pirates can then simply password protect and/or encrypt files (if they’re not doing it already), and piracy will continue. Hotfile can put in a system where copyright holders can submit removal requests, but they already have such a system which the MPAA studios appears to be not very fond of (mainly because it means they will actually have to do a bit of work themselves). So what’s a digital file locker hosting website to do? What can they do? They can get sued, apparently. And the likes of RapidShare and MegaUpload are surely not immune from similar lawsuits, although it’s understandable why the MPAA chose a lower profile website like Hotfile to sue, since it’s like RapidShare, which already has a lot of experience in the courts, will put up a much stronger fight.

6,500 people have been added to the “The Expendables” mass lawsuit. Nothing really surprising there, because as long as you have producers who don’t care about public opinion and a negative backlash, law firms like the US Copyright Group will continue to have clients.

The PS3 jailbreak stuff will be posted under the Gaming section as per usual.

In HD/3D news, again, not a lot happening. I did catch a few 3D Blu-ray titles on sales at Amazon and elsewhere online recently, and so even without Fox/Panasonic’s mean-hearted/short-sighted-ness in making Avatar 3D an exclusive (now selling for a little bit less on eBay, around $150).

The one I was tempted to buy was Piranha 3D. I loved the original Piranha movies, and this latest edition of the latest remake has both the 2D version, as well as the anaglyph version (red/blue glasses version), in addition to the 3D Blu-ray version, so it’s a good introductory package for 3D (because you can always go back to the 2D version in case 3D is not for you, or if you don’t have a 3D Blu-ray system right now, you can still enjoy the old fuzzy, washed out colours, style 3D with the cheap paper glasses).

While neither HD or 3D related, I did post a news item about publishers moving away from Apple’s iTunes towards Android and other more open marketplaces. While software restrictions are the real issue right now, it also I guess applies to movies, and some of these movies might be HD (I’m really stretching here, aren’t I). Basically, you have Apple who wants to control everything and then some, and it may be their right since they did produce the excellent iDevices in question, and most of their income is derived from having so much control. And there’s also the issue of quality control too. But being able to play any movie you want simply by using a USB cable to copying it, like you would do with any USB storage device, means that Android phones appeal to those who simply cannot stand iTunes or the idea of being locked to the software. And for publishers, it means they can publish without having to hand over 30% for every transaction, or to have to abide by Apple’s stupid licensing restrictions, which requires even free software have use Apple’s DRM (hence the whole VLC player for iOS debacle).

And finally in gaming, most of the news as you may have guessed relates to Sony’s legal action against the security researchers who uncovered the major security hole within Sony’s own security infrastructure, and famous/infamous PS3 hacker George Hotz, who did the awful thing is re-enabling homebrew on the PS3 (but not piracy).

The week started with Sony attempting to get the likes of YouTube and Twitter to hand over user information in relation to anyone remotely related to the PS3 hack, even those who simply watched the hacking video on YouTube. Their intention was to expand the case to include anyone who releases or distributes custom firmware and other security hacks. Basically, a fishing expedition. But one that was ultimately denied by the judge for the case.

I might have some sympathy for Sony if they only went after those that release firmware that included the ability to play copied games. But to go after fail0verflow, basically just a security research team, and also geohot, who has time and time again denounced piracy and went out of his way to ensure his custom firmware cannot play pirated games, it seems Sony have chosen the wrong targets really. And then to try and go after Linux hackers like Graf_Chokolo, whose sole aim was only to bring Linux back to the PS3, a feature that Sony once fully supported, it just seems unnecessary.

Major Nelson pokes fun at Sony's Kevin Butler "Battleship" SNAFU

And then Linux community responded by fooling fake PS3 VP and twitter personality Kevin Butler into re-tweeting a hacked PS3 security code. Embarrassing, and even Xbox 360’s Major Nelson poked fun at the incident, but what’s more worrying for Sony is that all of these are taking attention away from the console and the great games that they will have out this year, and that’s something they can’t really afford at the moment, not when the race with the Xbox 360 is so close and with the threat from Kinect hanging around.

And speaking of Kinect, the PlayStation Move’s creator (Dr. Richard Marks) seems a bit jealous of the attention Kinect has gotten with the PC community, and wants something similar for the Move, except to make it even more accessible. I suppose this means that instead of having access to just the raw data, some of the software and processing algorithms may be opened up too, if Dr. Marks is able to overrule Sony’s “we don’t like anyone poking their heads under the hood” stance. Of course, what most interested the programmers was the potential of Kinect, and how different it was to any consumer tech on the market (something like this would otherwise be thousands and thousands of dollars, for the professionals market). The Move, while somewhat innovative, is really just a more accurate Wii, and programmers have already had their fun with hacking the Wii-mote when it first came out. If anything, the PlayStation Eye is a more interesting device, but one that still can’t compare to the Kinect in terms of innovation.

And so, we come to the end of another edition of the Weekly News Roundup. Enjoy your week!

This Android game I made may look crudely drawn, it's gameplay is only slightly better

The current set up means every news article posted on the Digital Digest website, plus every blog and posts in the deals & freebies section, will all be added to the feeds, allowing for an easy way to get notified of updates on the websites. And occasionally, I will post a few things that aren’t really big enough to make the news, but are nonetheless interesting. One thing I did post about was my first attempt at an Android app, a game based on a paper based game based on video games based a movie. Paper (Star) Wars is my take on a paper based Star Wars game that I used to play with friends in middle school. It’s my first app, so please be kind and tolerant of the numerous bugs within the game. There’s a free “Not Very Special Edition” and a paid for version for around a buck, depending on exchange rates.

Self promotion finished, time for this week’s news, and there’s plenty to go through so let’s get started.

Let’s start the copyright news, the UK may have seen a change of government, the non violent kind, but its anti-piracy policies remains unchanged it seems. Their proposed three-strikes system, which will first start with a warning-but-no-action system, is set to be introduced, and UK ISPs will have to pay 25% of the cost of enforcing this law which will see private subscriber data being given to copyright holders.

In other words, the UK government thinks that ISPs are at least 25% responsible for anti-piracy policing on the net, even though they don’t receive any benefits from it at all if this thing works (and the UK government optimistically thinks that it will reduce online piracy by 50% – amazing!). So it seems ISPs have been cast as a guilty party. But ISPs will no doubt pass on the cost to subscribers. So it seems, we’re all being cast as the guilty party. And with higher ISP costs, and so less money to spend online, and when people start getting booted off the Internet, all of these actions which will no doubt affect the Internet economy, most likely the legitimate kind. Pirates will be pirates, and they will find (and have found) ways around being monitored, so I would really like to see how the UK government comes up with the figure of £200m as the amount of benefits that will result from this. They would be lucky to get away with less than £200m of damages to the economy. But this whole thing has become an ideological crusade, so common sense went out the window ages ago.

ACS:Law may have quit the mass lawsuit game

The new UK law should come into affect as anti-piracy law firms in the UK might be starting to wrap up their profit seeking mass lawsuit enterprises, when the head of one of the most notorious anti-piracy law firms, ACS:Law, said in court that his firm was no longer involved in anti-piracy stuff due to “death threats and bomb threats”, amongst other things (no longer profitable?). Not to condone threats of this kind, which is totally unacceptable despite the number of people ACS:Law has pissed off in recent times, but that’s the side effect of the kind of business ACS:Law is involved in, just as its predecessor Davenport Lyons realised when they also quit the game. And they were in court because the judge found their lawsuit somewhat dubious and wanted to examine it further, despite ACS:Law’s attempt to drop the lawsuits against the downloaders in question, in a last ditch attempt to avoid having any kind of court ruling on the matter (because it could go either way, and it looks like it’s going the wrong way for ACS:Law). The best way to go after these law firms is to take a leaf out of the entertainment lobby’s latest doctrine on online anti-piracy: go after their revenue source. If no profit can be made via mass lawsuits, because perhaps it’s difficult to ascertain jurisdiction or that people are fighting back by tying up these law firms in paper work, then these kinds of law suits will stop.

Google is the net's new piracy cop

But these lawsuits are still gaining popularity in the US, where this week, hundreds more were sued for download the Paris Hilton sex tapes. I wonder if Paris Hilton gets a percentage of the settlement fees, and if she does, then that’s one more reason to fight these lawsuits as tenaciously as possible. And people seeking to download this “movie” illegally be warned – the publishers, XPAYS, is still monitoring download networks for potential targets. But finding a torrent of this film may have just gotten about 1.5% harder, thanks to Google’s new filtering scheme which became active this week, something they warned us would happen back in December. It’s no doubt Google’s way to try and appease the entertainment industry, not that they would be pleased much by this, since only the suggested search phrases as part of auto-complete and instant search have been filtered – the results are still the same as before. And the way Google has did it was full of inconsistencies, like why a BitTorrent client software like uTorrent needs to be filtered at all (and yet, other popular clients like BitComet or Vuze are not filtered), or why RapidShare is filtered, but not MediaFire. In any case, this latest move by Google sets a very dangerous precedent, and goes completely against the Mountain View company’s principles on the open web. And as mentioned before, it will do little to appease the entertainment industry and instead, it will just make them ask the question “if you can filter recommended search phrases, why can’t you also filter out the results”. An appeasement of groups backed by a Fascist launched organization, yeah that doesn’t sound familiar at all. Maybe it’s just me, but has Google abandoned their “do no evil” policy, since they’re very much acting like just any other corporation these days. Even their recent withdrawal of support for H.264 in Chrome was very much an exercise in protecting self-interests (dropping H.264 so people will have to adopt their own WebM, for example), as opposed to their stated goal of supporting open software – this is the very same company that bundles Adobe Flash with the same browser in question, so it’s a bit rich for them to lecture other on support of open platforms.

For all of the entertainment industry’s pomp and bluster, they still haven’t even managed to close down The Pirate Bay. They talk big about closing down a lot of websites, another 50 this week apparently, but they don’t dare mention how many new websites spring up the second they close down one, fairly obscure, torrent indexer. And if The Pirate Bay people are to be believed, the RIAA are in for a rude awakening when TPB launches its music sharing service in a few months time. No details as yet, or even confirmation as to whether this thing is real or not, but a TPB insider has promised that this thing will scare the pants off the RIAA. It’s set to be launched around the 78th birthday of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and I thought it was interesting that this organization was launched by none other than Mussolini in 1933 (yes, that Mussolini).  So when old Benito said that “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power,” he wasn’t that far off the mark it seems (ignoring the fact that he was talking about a totally different kind of “corporate” to today’s corporations).

And in potential silly DRM news of the week, how about DRM’d web images? Not quite, but it only takes a little bit of effort to turn this thing into the online newspaper’s favourite new toy, as expiring image links is quite effective at cutting down hot linking. Of course, those that really do want to steal your pics will just do so via a print-screen, while you make your legitimate visitors download and install plug-in after plug-in just to view the damn image. A totally ineffective DRM which only makes the life of legitimate users that much more painful. So definitely happening, then.

Onto HD/3D news, price of Blu-ray players are tipped to drop below $40 in 2011. Not that surprising when you consider that it’s been available for around $50 already.

But this does mean one thing: if you don’t have a Blu-ray player now, you may just not want or need one. They’re so cheap now, when they’re not being given away freely with TV purchases, that there really aren’t any other excuses left for people not to have one. And with retailers often discounting Blu-ray/combo versions of movies below the price of DVD sets, it’s a no brainer. And so much for the higher premiums manufacturers had hoped that Blu-ray hardware (and movies) would bring on a more permanent basis.

Not everyone can enjoy 3D without wanting to throw up

So if plain old Blu-ray isn’t  helping to bring in higher premiums, perhaps the 3D kind will. And when manufacturers and studios are not trying to kill the format by signing excruciatingly long exclusivity deals (I’m looking at you, Panasonic and Fox) on titles that will launch the format, there’s also the issue that many people just can’t stand watching 3D. I think I’m one of these people, since watching 3D for more than half an hour makes me uncomfortable, and watching something like Avatar all the way through would probably kill me (or at least make me very very sick). But I did still buy a 3D TV, and I’ve definitely paid more money for even less interesting gimmicks before. Expect all TVs to have 3D support by the end of the year though, and competition will ensure the higher premiums will be gone by then too.

And going back to the Chrome/H.264 decision I referred to above, there’s a new service that aims to end the problem of cross-browser compatibility for uploaded web videos. Vid.ly takes in your videos and then transcode them millions of times (or just a dozen times, I don’t know) so that it will work on any browser, regardless of whether it took the very corporate decision to back one of its own, albeit open, video standards, or whether it’s backing a video standard that it owns a lot of patent on. And the same for mobile videos, iOS, Android, Blackberry. I fed the service my recently uploaded Transformers: Dark of the Moon HD 1080p Trailer. Vid.ly ate it up, and spat out a link half an hour later, and I’ve put the sample embed video and mobile video links in this forum thread. For no other reason, it’s a great way to compare the various qualities of web video standards, H.264 vs WebM vs Theora, as the same embed code automatically detects what software you’re using and gives you the compatible stream (it looks by far the worst on Firefox at the moment, as it uses Ogg Theora). Anyway, an interesting service that may bypass the whole very confusing, and annoying, HTML5 format wars.

And last but not least, in gaming, Sony has reacted to the hacked 3.55 firmware by releasing the 3.65 firmware. And it was hacked within hours. Stable. Doors. Horse. Bolted.

Sony did have better success in the courts, with the judge granting a temporary injunction against, I don’t know what, geohot’s firmware or something. Because a temporary injunction on fail0verflow’s research into pointing out the security flaw on the PS3, doesn’t seem to make much sense, as it’s now common knowledge that Sony doesn’t know the difference between a constant and a randomly generated number.

Sony's Next Generation Portable is packed full of the latest tech, but at what price?

But Sony are at their best when they show off cool stuff, as opposed to trying all sorts of anti-piracy measures, and they did impress a lot of people and refocus people’s thoughts away from the PS3 security disaster, by revealing the NGP – the Next Generation Portable – the successor to the ailing (some would argue, dead and buried) PSP. It does seem pretty cool, all the best features from phones (Wi-Fi, GPS, multiple cameras, multi-touch), a kick-ass processor that can run PS3 games, albeit at the reduced resolution of the still kick-ass OLED screen (960×544). Still, it faces stiff competition from smartphones, the 3DS and tablets, all vying for a share of the portable gaming market these days (although Sony has promised a common development platform for its Android phones and the NGP, so we know at least Angry Birds will be on the NGP). Nobody knows what the price of the NGP will be, but with so much tech inside, it can’t be cheap, or can’t be cheaper than the 3DS, right?

Speaking of the 3DS, yes, it will have region-control, and downloaded games won’t be transferable to another console, at least not at first.

And so that’s it for another week. Have a good one and see you at the same time, same place, in 7 days.

And there might be something in it for those of you that goes through the laborious process of clicking on a button to indicate your “friendship” or “cult follower status” with me, and the earlier you do it (and the greater number of you who do it) will increase the likelihood of something like this happening. Did someone say prizes? Amazon gift certificates? Details (if any) to be released soon. Just to be clear, yes, I am trying to buy some friends, so fingers crossed it works and I get enough likes and followers to make launching a competition possible!

Lots of news this week, so let’s get started.

Let’s start the copyright news. The big wigs at the music arms of Sony and Universal did some brain storming the other day and came up with a new brilliant way to combat piracy: allow people to actually buy the music!

Apparently, not allowing people to legally buy something actually encourages people to seek illegal ways to obtain the same content, which must have come as a big shock to the Sony and Universal execs when their million dollar research revealed these findings, or something. Currently, when new music is released, it’s given airtime on the radio during an exclusive period before it was possible to buy the music legally, but research found that people searching for the new songs peaked weeks before the start of the sales period, and so, naturally, people just managed to get the song from “other” sources. So now, music will be made available for sale at the same time as when the radio airplay period starts, in a bid to curb online piracy. And it will only take a dozen more research reports before Sony, Universal and others realize that the same thing works for TV shows and movies, and that rental, release windows and delaying new TV show episodes by as long as 6 month in overseas markets, all contribute to the online piracy phenomenon.

Still staying in the music industry, the RIAA this week issued more threats to companies and organizations that it perceives as potential partners in the CRusade Against Piracy (CRAP™). The RIAA knows that the only way it can get others to do their dirty work in the futile war against online piracy (FWOP™) is to threaten them. This time, it’s ICANN, the people responsible for making the domain name standards, and the RIAA warns them that piracy syndicates might hijack planned music based TLDs like .music. Like as if music piracy websites would need to bother with .music, not if .riaasucks is available. It’s very likely though that the warning comes because the RIAA wants control of .music, but doesn’t have the cash to bid for it, and so they’re dreaming up an imaginary threat to force ICANN’s hands, a tactic that has worked well with governments around the world.

Malware is a more serious problem than online piracy, yet it receives almost no attention at all

A threat that is not so imaginary is malware. Hands up those that *haven’t* been affected by malware, or know someone that has. Malware costs the economy something like $50+ billion a year, that’s even more than the imaginary numbers that the RIAA likes to invent, and yet it seems there’s hardly any action against the spread of malware, apart from the odd arrest of hacker or two, and only when the malware story makes national news (and this happens only because it  infected all the computers at said news network). And yet, the US government alone is throwing millions of dollars and resources of the FBI, Homeland Security at fighting the online piracy problem, which may or may not even be a problem. I mention all this because of the story this week that malware writers are now using that old RIAA favourite, DRM, to protect their toolkits to sell or rent to those seeking to make a profit infecting unsuspecting servers and computers. But we already know for a fact the resources at the FBI have already been diverted away from investigating online and identity fraud, towards online piracy investigations, but I guess that’s because there is no such things as the “online fraud victims” lobby, or at least it doesn’t have as much cash to splash around compared to the entertainment lobby (probably because all of their cash has already been stolen via malware and identify fraud).

Onto HD/3D news, I posted a story about LG’s plans to make people buy more 3D TVs that use passive glasses, but mainly, it was just an excuse to post a link to this video.

But 3D TVs using passive glasses do have some advantages, after all, cinema 3D presentations are mostly based on the same technology. Sure, you won’t get a 1080p picture, but if it means less headaches and cheaper glasses, then it’s probably a good thing. Having had my 3D TV for about 6 month now, I’m still firmly convinced that 3D is still very much a gimmick, although one that’s very likely to be in every TV pretty soon (but only the active glasses kind, since it’s very inexpensive to add active glasses 3D support to HDTVs).

Smell-O-Vision may be coming to games and movies for a low price, but not all smells are pleasant!

Something that also smells very gimmicky, possibly literally at some stage, is smell-o-vision. But what caught my eye about Scent Science’s new ScentScape machine is the low price attached to it. I don’t think it makes a huge difference to me if I can smell burning petrol or not as I blow up yet another car with my RPG in GTA IV,  but for $70, the price of the ScentScape machine, it might just be worth a try. I wonder though what the most popular smells would be. Gunpowder would be one, blood another. But I do have reservations about playing a game like Fallout: New Vegas. I can’t imagine the post apocalyptic world and its inhabitants (and mutants) smelling very nice at all! Nor would watching Generation Kill (brilliant mini-series by the way) be pleasant if “a MOPP suit that smells like four days of piss and ball sweat” was made a reality, smell wise.

And Star Wars on Blu-ray now has a solid release date. September 27th, 2011. It will be the best seller on Blu-ray to date when released, I suspect.

And finally in gaming, some new developments in the PS3 hack saga. Sony’s court case against fail0verflow and geohot has been delayed due to jurisdiction issues relating to the fact that geohot, aka Geroge Hotz, does not live in California where the lawsuit was filed. Sony reasoned with the judge that, due to various clauses in the PSN user agreement and whatnot, it could still sue someone who doesn’t live in California, in California, but the judge has reservations about allowing Sony to bypass jurisdiction so easily this way. The EFF has also come out attacking Sony’s lawsuit, saying it sends a ‘dangerous message’, suing security researchers for exposing security flaws, when really, Sony should had worked with people like Hotz to plug any security holes before the console was released. Both fail0verflow and geohot stressed that they did this for academic purposes and for enabling homebrew, and all have made sure that piracy would not be promoted or allowed directly by their hacks (although indirectly, the hack can be further modified to enable piracy). So instead of suing those that actually use this hack to allow piracy, Sony are suing the guys that actually exposed the hack. It’s like arresting the guy who pointed out to you that your car is unlocked, as opposed to the guy who actually stole your car.

Waninkoko has a custom PS3 3.55 firmware that played backed up games, but it's bricking some PS3s (screencap credit: PSGroove.com)

More custom firmware has been released, this time by infamous Wii hacker Waninkoko, and this ones does allow pirated games to work. But the firmware apparently bricks older PS3s, those with 256MB NAND chips, a list of affected models here. The warning forum user Budreaux posted in the forum thread should be listened to … playing around with hacked firmware is a quick way to brick your PS3, void you warranty, and get you banned on PSN probably, not to mention possibly breaking the law depending on where you are. So do it strictly at your own risk!

And games that relied on the PS3’s now hacked security framework are beginning to feel the effect, with Modern Warfare 2 servers hacked to erase gamer scores and all sorts of other things that make the experience unbearable to gamers. Not all games are affected because developers wisely decided that solely relying on Sony’s framework wasn’t a good idea.

And the worst is yet to come, since Sony’s official response will almost certainly be harsh. Remember that this is the same company that thought a rootkit was a good idea. And so it comes as no surprise that Sony may be planning to bring serial keys to PS3 games in a bid to curb piracy. Not only do you have to type in the 16 character serial code into your PS3, which is painful enough already, these keys may only be reused 5 times, which makes selling and buying second hand games that much more annoying. And it will also mean that you won’t be able to play offline games without going online for authentication. But at this stage, this is just a unsubstantiated rumour, so who knows.

Another unsubstantiated rumous is that the Nintendo 3DS, still weeks away from an official release, has already been hacked despite Nintendo’s assurance of better anti-piracy measures. This does not surprise me one bit, if it’s true.

And even though geohot is busy defending himself against Sony’s legal onslaught, he still has time to hack, this time, Windows Phone 7. But Microsoft, probably giddy from the disasters befalling the PS3 at the moment, isn’t so mad at geohot, and has even promised to work together to “let dev creativity flourish”. This after Microsoft actively not caring about people hacking the Kinect … has the corporate monster changed?

Speaking of Kinect, the PR machine rolled on, and just like how the Wii gained public exposure due to the thousands of broken TV screens and vases, “Wii tennis elbow” and other medical phenomenons, the Kinect is gaining similar public exposure via YouTube ‘Kinect Fail’ videos and reports of even more serious injuries, and even a potential arrest. These fluff pieces may all sound like bad publicity, but there is no such thing as bad publicity, because everyone thinks that these things only happens to stupid people, not themselves, so there is no way one would get ‘Kinect Sports volleyball shoulders’ that is so painful that it makes sleeping difficult. Ow.

And that’s all for this week.

… checks FB and Twitter for the 15th time today … still no likes or followers  :(