DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

How was your week? Mine was busy, but not so much working on the website, so no mid week blog post or new articles to promote in the intro paragraph of the WNR for this week. So let’s do the most efficient thing and get straight into the news.

Let’s start with copyright news. The Consumerist published the account of one user with the THQ/Volition game Red Faction Guerrilla, which once again is the story of how DRM prevented a legitimate paying customer from enjoying the product he/she purchased, and once again piracy became the only solution.

Red Faction Guerrilla DRM caused user to resort to piracy

The user tried his or her best to get THQ/Volition to resolve the issue, who didn’t want anything to do with it and instead referred the user to Microsoft, which maintains one of the DRM system used by Red Faction Guerrilla. But Microsoft then asked the user to go back to THQ/Volition, and so the only solution left was to download a pirated copy of the game, just so the user can enjoy the game that he or she paid for.

First of all, it’s totally irresponsible for game publishers to bring out poorly implemented DRM and then not provide support for it. It’s exactly this kind of attitude that make buying games not worth the trouble, since you’re not getting any extra services compared to pirated version. This is especially true for PC games, most of which will barely run without crashing on half of the PCs out there, mostly due to poor programming. What is more annoying is that game publishers justify these kind of stories, which are becoming increasingly common, by saying that this prevents piracy. But does it? Only the recent Ubisoft effort has managed to stifle pirates, but it may only be a temporary reprieve. But most other forms of DRM have been comprehensively cracked, and as I’ve analysed in my PC DRM discussion blog post, the only thing DRM manages to is to give publishers a false sense of security, to make them feel like they’re doing something. The argument is that why should publishers make it easy for pirates, but the problem is that they also make it harder for legitimate paying customers. The only kind of DRM that is acceptable is one that does not cause paying customers any inconvenience – if this means that it will be less effective against pirates, then so be it. I mean, it’s like asking people to accept a lock to your front door that occasionally locks out the owner, and then rewrite the law to make it illegal to try and break the lock (so you can get into your own home). And then to add insult to injury, the lock maker refuses to offer any help in trying to fix the problem, mostly because they know they can’t do much to fix it. In the real world, nobody would accept any of this, but somehow when it comes to DRM, we’re supposed to be okay with it all.

And it’s not okay to just say “well, the user resolved the issue after downloading the pirated copy”. What that user did was still highly illegal, and he or she may get caught and face big fines, even prison – all while having tried to do the decent thing in the first place. There are now more and more firms that have been set up to take advantage of the unfair copyright laws to go after users that have attempted to download pirated content, and if the user who wrote in to the Consumerist was caught, then that would mean a double whammy – having paid for the game and then “fined” for piracy of it. Of course, the actions of these firms is another point of contention with the current set of biased copyright laws. These companies are only interested in making money, or monetizing, off piracy, not preventing it – this is not an educated guess, but it’s very much out in the open and these firms openly admit to the fact that they’re only there to take advantage of copyright laws to make a quick buck. You may call the actions of these firms legal blackmail, but as long as the law allows it, then they’re not doing anything wrong. What is wrong is a law that can find an user guilty just because they attempted to download pirated content. Up to the point an user downloads something to their computer, it could be the case where no damages has actually been made against the copyright holders. Only until that user starts to enjoy the content in question, then that’s when possible damages could have occurred, but of course only if the user has intentions to purchase the content in the first place. The situation is a little bit more complex in relation to BitTorrent, since you’re uploading while you’re downloading, so you are “making available” pirated content. But for straight HTTP downloads, this is pretty straight forward. Imagine a scenario where I download an illegal copy of a movie from RapidShare, and then upon completion, I delete the file right away without viewing it – what harm exactly did I do to the copyright holders of the movie? But even with BitTorrent, you’re only sharing small chunks of the file in question, unless you become a seeder and share the file for an extended period, you’re not contributing much at all to the sharing process (as leechers who are annoyed at the lack of seeders, will agree).

The Digital Economy Bill passes through the British House of Commons

It’s these nuances that legislation, like the recently passed UK Digital Economy Bill, do not cover sufficiently, as the people writing the laws usually often do not have a clue how the Internet works, let alone sub-networks like BitTorrent. Politicians equate the Internet with distribution channels such as books and movies, where they say censorship and monitoring needs to occur to prevent harmful content being distributed, and that copyright holders get their deserved rewards. But the Internet is really more like the telephone system. Should the government monitor your phone calls just to see if you’re talking about something wrong? And then ban you from using the phone if they find you doing something they, or rather the corporations that they serve, don’t like? It’s these real world examples that exist in which politicians should be drawing parallels with when writing new legislation, but their ignorance is exploited by lobbyist and then we get things like the DMCA and now the DEB. The DEB was passed without any serious debate, because I think the MPs involved wouldn’t know what to say even if they cared enough to say something.

And the Net Neutrality debate will be yet another one in which political entities will have the final say despite not being able to fully understand just what it’s about, the issue has come to the fore because the FCC lost a court case in which they wanted to see if they could enforce Net Neutrality standards, but it appears it is beyond their scope.Even for someone who has done reading on the issue, and generally speaking, somewhat knowledgeable on this interweb thingy, I can’t say I’m fully versed in all the arguments on this front, although I’m definitely in the “pro Net Neutrality” camp at the moment. The reason is that movie studios, via ISPs, can implement all sorts of nasty anti-piracy measures if Net Neutrality was defeated, and ISPs will have the power, whether intentionally or not, to promote preferred content and push other content aside into web “ghettos”. The highest bidder will ensure their content gets full speed access, while other content will have to share a very limited bandwidth pool, for example. ISPs are already doing this with P2P filtering and throttling, and it’s a dangerous road to go down.

The greatest thing about the Internet is that any idiot can write something (say, a weekly news roundup, for example), get it published and read by anyone, without limitations being imposed by the powers that be (ie. big media). You can’t do this on radio, and you can’t get things shown on TV unless you hand over a big wad of cash (and even then, it might not be enough). With the Internet, there’s no such limited, but if Net Neutrality is preserved, then this power to publish will be in jeopardy. While not really the same issue, but the increased frequency in which videos are being removed from YouTube due to false allegations of copyright abuse shows what could happen if your right to publish is at the hands of a powerful entity (in YouTube’s case, it’s the copyright holders and Google arbitrarily sometimes deciding whether a video stays or goes). I bring up YouTube because I want to segue to the next story about the removal of RedLetterMedia’s hilarious, accurate, and sometimes disturbing, movie reviews, the most famous (or infamous) of which is the Star Wars Episode One review. The reviews are quite long and uses a lot of footage from the movies, but this kind of fair use is allowed. The auto scanning tools used by firms that scour YouTube for copyright abuse (so they can make money off copyright holders when they take action to get the videos removed) are usually not smart enough to distinguish between genuine fair use and blatant piracy, and so this is probably why the review was removed. Luckily, they were put back up soon after, but only after much public outrage. For the videos that are not as popular, then the less audible outrage will often fail to make an impression, no matter how many times you email YouTube asking for your account to be re-enabled. And our power to publish diminishes the more big media comes to try and control our Internet.

Let’s move onto high definition news. The Blu-ray specifications has seen some additions this week, although it’s not something that should concern most Blu-ray owners, especially those that are using Blu-ray for movie playback, as opposed to archiving and other computing based applications.

The changes are the addition of two new sub-formats to Blu-ray, called BDXL and IH-BD. BDXL increases the capacity of Blu-ray discs to 128 GB for write-once discs, and 100 GB for write-many discs. Unfortunately, BDXL is not backwards compatible with currently Blu-ray drives, and so it will unlikely be used for publishing movies. Expect BDXL to be supported by certain Blu-ray writer drives for PCs, but not used extensively except by specialist applications such as data archival. IH-BD is a similarly specialist sub-format, where the Blu-ray discs has both read-only and writable layers on the same side, allowing important data to be stored on the read-only layer, while the writable layer allows for the entry of new data. This is actually something I had expected the original Blu-ray specifications to include, since I think these kind of discs has great potential. Imagine a Blu-ray game disc that allows all the saves and changes to be made to the disc itself, and you can carry it from console to console without having to import/export your save files.

Fellowship of the Ring on Blu-ray is chock full of Digital Noise Reduction, note the lack of grain in the background

The Lord of the Rings theatrical trilogy on Blu-ray has been released, and reviewed on Blu-ray.com. While the review says that it is still something people should want, they also referred to the lack of the extended edition content, lackluster extra features and poor video quality for Fellowship in particular. It is still the best quality version of the Lord of the Rings movies to date, but it isn’t the definitive version that people that had already purchased several different versions of the movie had expected. So hold on to your theatrical edition DVDs, as these can still look pretty good on a quality upscaling player, and then wait to grab the extended edition Blu-rays when they arrive later in the year, hopefully with the Fellowship video quality issues fixed. As far as I’m concerned, the Lord of the Rings movies are made for Blu-ray, and it should deserve the attention of the best of Blu-ray releases, that we known Warner are capable of producing (the Blade Runner 5-disc set, for example). Instead, they’ve been treated worse than some second rate B-movies, and keeping the extra features on DVDs in this set, instead of transferring to Blu-ray, and not even bothering creating new disc art other than to slap on the Blu-ray logo, just shows how much of a rushed effort this was. Which is strange because Warner/New Line had plenty of time to create a proper Blu-ray set. But I guess they’re saving that for the eventual quadruple dip release. The sales stats for LOTR will be available next next Tuesday, and it will be interesting to see if it was a huge seller or not. A title like this should easily be one of the best selling titles ever on Blu-ray. Right now, I can see it winning the week in terms of sales, but even that is not certain.

Lower bitrate HD broadcast version of Fellowship, without DNR problems - compared it side by side with the screenshot above

Also a note on combo discs. Blu-ray stats usually count Blu-ray/DVD combo discs as Blu-ray only, and with more studios releasing movies in a single, combo only edition  (Disney, for example), this can lead to inflated figures for Blu-ray as even those that only want the DVD version are forced to get the combo and then counted as a Blu-ray buyer in the stats. And even when a “DVD only” version is available, these are often priced not very competitively compared to the Blu-ray version (usually only a couple of dollars cheaper), and again this favours the Blu-ray stats. It would be better if combos were not counted as part of either DVD or Blu-ray stats, maybe even having their own separate stats. This would actually be quite useful when it comes to stats analysis, and may point to whether we should have more combos or not, since I think they’re a good idea and should become standard during the transition from DVD to Blu-ray.

And finally in gaming, Sony may yet regret their decision to remove the “Other OS” option from the PS3. Some say it was due to cost cutting, as keeping up support for the “Other OS” function in every firmware update is troublesome to the extreme.

Some think the recent work towards making Linux based emulators has Sony worried about people using the PS3 to play illegally downloaded games, and maybe even emulated PS2 games. But most others feel it is an preemptive strike that those aiming to hack the PS3, and amongst the most infamous is Geohot, who has just shown us a video of firmware 3.21 (the one without “Other OS”) running Other OS.

Regardless of the reason for removing Other OS, many PS3 owners are unhappy, since this was a well advertised feature of the console, and many feel that Sony remotely removing the feature is a bad precedent that could see other features removed. One user did complain to Amazon UK, who just happened also to be a moderator at the Neogaf forum, and amazingly, he got a refund from Amazon for 20% of the cost of his PS3 purchase. He cited European laws regarding product descriptions. No doubt others will try the same, and it’s unknown if Amazon or Sony will be paying up, if they continue to do so (I suspect not).

Sony, for example, could easily disable Blu-ray playback via a firmware update, to help promote their standalone players. Of course, this is as likely to happen as Sony releasing a free PS2 emulator on Xbox Live for Xbox 360 owners, and if they do this, then expect the world’s largest and most successful lawsuit ever – full refund for all PS3 owners, yeah!

Now to a firmware update of a different, more traditional nature – you know, one that actually adds features. Xbox 360 owners will now be able to use flash drives to complement existing Xbox 360 storage, allowing things like downloadables, games saves to flash drives that have 1 GB to 16 GB capacity. A large range is supported, although Microsoft and Sandisk will be releasing “official” flash drives for the Xbox 360 (but at about double the price of non official drives). PS3 owners have had the ability to swap out the built-in hard-drive themselves without having to void their warranty, so while the PS3 storage capacity cannot be upgraded using an official solution, they’ve always been able to increase storage at an extremely low price point (compared to flash drives or the over priced Xbox 360 hard-drive add-on).

That’s it for the week. I will try to post a mid week blog or something so I won’t appear to be lazying through yet another week.