DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Going to do a very quick WNR this week, as I’m still feeling under the weather. Had to do a bunch of tests at the clinic to see what’s wrong – having things inserted, extracted, and cables plugged in wasn’t a nice experience, but I now know how my DVD player feels. And no, it’s now Swine Flu, although everybody here in Melbourne, Australia seems to have it.

In copyright news, more lawsuits, but this time in Ireland, where the record industry representatives are suing two Irish ISPs. It’s heartwarming to know that, despite the bad economy, that at least the lawyers are still finding excellent amounts of work available (at at $765 per hour as well).

Lawsuits, three-strikes, throttling – the industry’s favourite tactics, but not all government agree. The Spanish government’s strong dislike of the three-strikes rule has promoted their music industry to change tactics and abandon the three-strikes system. If only other government were as strong in their beliefs that due process is still something that needs to be protected.

And onto our favourite court case, you must have heard a lot about how The Pirate Bay case has been denied a retrial. This is true, but it is by no means the end of the road for the TPB guys. What happened, and as explained clearly a few weeks ago by Cynthia, our Swedish expert, a higher court has ruled that the judge in the original case was not biased. All this is means is that instead of having the retrial in the original court, the retrial will have to take place in a higher court. There are still a few more couts to go before it is all over. I don’t think we will find out anything definitive in 2009 in any case.

Real says RipGuard and ARccOS are not copy protection systems, and so do no fall under the DMCA

In my second favourite court case, the MPAA has filed new complaints against Real Networks, claiming they lied during the RealDVD trial. It all pertains to patent filings from a couple of years ago in which Real Networks claimed that ARccOS and RipGuard were copy protection systems, even though Real claimed in court they were not. The argument goes that Real thinks neither ArccOS or RipGuard can fully prevent the copying of a disc (only delay the process), and so they are not anti-copying features. The reason why the MPAA may be going after Real on these two additional anti DVD-copying measures, as opposed to CSS, is that Real does have a CSS license and it may be harder to argue that Real has ripped CSS, but in reality, it has left CSS intact in the copied file (and added a few other layers of its own DRM). The verdict is expected soon, but I don’t think Real will win if the argument is already on something as specific as whether ARccOS and RipGuard are copy protection methods – if the argument has been the higher issue of whether studios have the right to prevent usage that does not harm to them, which is the case when people make make digital copies of movies that they own and do not share with anyone else other than those that already have access to the original disc.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers say that your phone’s ringtone should be considered a public performance and they should receive royalty everything your phone rings. Yeah right.

Onto HD news, rumours abound that Toshiba will jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon soon. Is there some truth to this news story, or is this the new “Blu-ray add-on drive coming to the Xbox 360” line of stories that will always pop up from time to time, only to be refuted almost immediately. There does seem to be more truth behind this story as it comes from statements from Toshiba’s President when he was speaking to shareholders. And since Toshiba owns the Cell processor, it would be interesting to see a Toshiba Blu-ray player with high quality DVD upscaling as seen in their HD DVD players, plus ultra-fast response times like the PS3.

The rest of the stories this week were about last week’s story about a poll that showed HD DVD being more popular than Blu-ray, and hardly anybody cares about Blu-ray. There is a reason why I only devoted two sentences to this poll last week, because polls are misleading by themselves, and when you are trying to poll actual ownership stats, rather than relying on hard data, then it’s even less useful. The Blu-ray people’s response is that the poll is unfair because most people think their upscaling DVD player is in fact a HD DVD player, which might be the case, although it’s still the Blu-ray people’s fault for not educating people better on what is real HD and what is upscaled. Start by calling it “Real HD” to differentiate Blu-ray from “Upscaled HD” might be a good marketing idea.

And finally in gaming, a new PS3 firmware has been released. Firmware 2.8 doesn’t add anything major, but fixes a few things and improve some others, like a faster XMB, wireless controller auto-assign. Still a lot of people having bricked PS3s after each update, so read up the horror stories on the official PS3 board and see if you are willing to take the risk if your PS3 is already out of warranty.

Okay, the doctors are telling me to take it easy, so that’s what I will do. As if I needed encouragement to be lazy. See you next week, hopefully feeling a little bit better.

Sorry for this outrageously late WNR. Had a bit of a health situation that I needed to attend to. It’s a shame, since there’s lots of stuff to go through, so I will have to keep things short. And no, laziness is not the “health situation”. I wrote a mid-week blog about Nvidia’s Ion platform. An Ion is a charged atom, which makes the name so appropriate as that exactly what the platform does – it gives Intel Atom systems a much needed boost in the graphics department, particularly for HD video. It won’t be too long before you will see Blu-ray capable netbooks that can also double as a HTPC, I think.

Let’s start with copyright news. The MPAA admits it is losing the PR war, to what they have dubbed the enemy of copyright. There are a few people who don’t like any sort of copyright, but I think the majority of people do respect copyright, it’s just that they don’t like the way that it is being enforced.

Personally, I buy lots of DVDs. All legitimate. I don’t buy music much, mainly because I don’t listen to it much apart from Net radios (also legal). I do buy games, not a lot, but I don’t have a lot of time to play them anymore. But I am one of the people that the MPAA says is an enemy of copyright, simply because I refuse to support their methods. I respect that they want to keep piracy under control, but I don’t respect the way they have gone about things, which has made piracy an even easier choice for those that can’t stand DRM and the sometimes ridiculous prices for digital content that the MPAA members want to charge. I believe the best way to fight piracy is to make it unnecessary, and this means tackling the difficult issue of how to make money in a digital world, and how to make it harder for people to share content they don’t own, but at the same time not seriously affecting their user experience. I think this is all possible, and the music industry has been forced down this road already. It is just a shame that their business is a declining one, even without piracy, and so it makes for a bad example. But even they can turn things around if they price music aggressively, and take advantage of the digital medium’s low cost of distribution, replication. There will be losers in this revolution, as there will always be, but it’s a necessity and fighting against the tide will only make things more difficult. Embrace the change!

It’s unfortunate that the music industry’s changed tactics of pursuing legal avenues to stop piracy is just as clumsy and overreaching as their attempts with DRM. They are lobbying governments and telling them scary scenarios about the end of music and movies, in an effort to scare them into passing laws which have no place in societies based on the rule of law. The so called 3-strikes is so against the nature of the Internet, and justice and civil rights in general, that it’s hard to believe people are taking it seriously, the latest call for it are in the UK. Japan has just tightened their copyright laws as well. Apart from having no due process, the method will also mean a lot of false positives, as the most used identification method, which is based on using the IP address, is in most cases insufficient to identify people a court has ruled. And in the end, all it will do is to force people serious about pirating stuff to get more serious about hiding their activities, which is possible through encrypted VPNs and other technologies.

Jammie Thomas-Rasse: Sharing 24 songs will cost her $1.92 million

So the only people that will be caught are those that haven’t done much pirating and don’t know how to avoid capture. But these are the people that will be made examples of, much like the single mother that has been successfully sued for $1.92m, to scare people into behaving. But it won’t work, everyone knows it. And to go so overboard with the lawsuit to demand a multi-million dollar settlement will be a PR disaster for copyright groups, because it just reinforces how much out of touch they are with reality. $80,000 per song, for 24 songs, is a ridiculous number. There is no proof of the exact number of people that have been able to obtain songs from Thomas-Rasset, the sacrificial pawn in this game, so the figure is largely for punitive damages. Does sharing 24 songs seem like a $1.92m crime to you? Well it does to groups like the RIAA, and they’re not going to stop – the next on the hit list is AM/FM radio stations, which has just been labeled as “A form of piracy”. Let’s just stop people playing, sharing, listening to all songs – that will surely help save the business, not to mention the money they are paying to lawyers to fight these cases which might have been better used to find alternative strategies to operate in this new digital world.

The US had its digital transition, and for all purposes, it went off pretty smoothly. It is just as well that plans to do this were set in motion many years ago, before the crazies took control of the copyright debate, as otherwise digital TV would be saddled with DRM, most notably the Digital Flag. This would have prevented people recording any TV show that has this flag set, so no TiVo or delayed viewing, just to make sure that if you can’t catch something on TV live, or want to watch it again, you’ll have to fork out bucks to do it. If these crazies had been in control far earlier, the tape recorder, the VCR and even the PC might not have been allowed to exist, and is this really what we want, or what’s good for the industry and economy in general?

Onto HD news now. Another report which seem to indicate that while Blu-ray sales are up, DVD sales are down by much more. It’s going to be a while before Blu-ray can gain enough of a market share to really make a difference, but the decline in DVD sales probably has as much to do with the increase in gaming purchases as with anything seriously wrong with the industry it self.

The other piece of news is a poll which showed that Blu-ray standalone uptake is not quite increasing fast enough, and was even outpaced by the dead HD DVD format in the last year. Polls are interesting, but figures for uptake shouldn’t need to rely on polls, as there are real figures to be found.

And finally in gaming, Activision’s CEO has joined the chorus of people to call for a PS3 price cut. There is a veiled threat in there about pulling support for the PS3 (and PSP) if action isn’t taken, but I wouldn’t take it all that seriously. Do game publishers want cheap consoles? Yes. Will they pull support for the PlayStation family? No. But hopefully, this will give Sony extra incentive to even just consider a price cut.

That’s it for this week. Short and sweet. Long and boring coming up next week.