In any case, we should be able to get through this one rather quickly.

And as all of the news were copyright related, this should make things go even quicker – we’ll start with the SOPA related ones. Having forced a policy change at GoDaddy, albeit one that’s still not 100% convincing, Reddit users have now decided to target politicians that support SOPA as their anti-SOPA next move.

Operation Pull Ryan aims to unseat Republican Paul Ryan for his alleged support of SOPA

There are quite a few politicians to choose from though, considering most of them seem to support SOPA or the senate version, PIPA. But with a few key SOPA backers not facing re-election, Reddit has decided to make an example out of rising Republican star Paul Ryan, even though he may not actually fully support SOPA. Despite Ryan’s spokesperson coming out and clarifying the Congressman’s stance on SOPA, or rather, some expertly crafted political language that implies fence-sitting without actually coming out and saying so, Reddit plans to get Ryan’s opponent, Democrat Rob Zerban, elected at the next election. A fantastic result if they can do it, but the successful completion of Operation Pull Ryan will not be easy. Bigger than the issue of SOPA for the Reddit people taking part is Paul Ryan’s controversial budget plan, as well as his support for the equally controversial National Defense Authorization Act.

But the truth is that Ryan’s fence-sitting wouldn’t have been needed just a few month ago, when SOPA was widely supported by politicians on both sides of the aisle. And that’s progress, I suppose. The popular uprising on SOPA shows that people can affect political change, and while SOPA may still get passed, those in the US still retain the right to punish those who openly supports SOPA at the next election. But as expected, it’s perhaps the industry and monied interests that are having the most effect on the weakening political support for SOPA. We already know that most tech companies are against it, but this week, it was revealed that the major gaming companies, who have long complained about web piracy, are also withdrawing support for the controversial bill. Microsoft have already distanced themselves from SOPA (and may have even been secretly working behind the scenes to get others to come out again SOPA), but now, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, and even Sony Electronics, have apparently withdrawn themselves from the official list of supporters for SOPA as well (Sony music is still very much a supporter). Now, the cynical side of me says they’re only doing it to avoid the negative attention SOPA is receiving, perhaps very much the same reasons behind GoDaddy’s change of heart, but maybe that’s the best we can expect from companies like them. Not supporting SOPA is not as good as being all out against SOPA, but at least it’s better than supporting SOPA. And if there’s one positive to come out of this whole mess, it’s probably the realization by many of the real power of the Internet, how it can empowered anyone to make a stand on issues that affect them. And that’s even more reason to fight SOPA and help protect the valuable tool that is the Internet.

MPAA using questionable calculations methods to derive losses due to piracy, and may be triple counting non existent losses

At the heart of the argument *for* SOPA is the economic damage caused by web piracy, but it’s been common knowledge that the entertainment industry frequently stretches the truths when it comes to publishing “losses” figures. So when the MPAA made the statement that they estimate there to be $20.5 billion in losses due to piracy every year, it came as no surprise to people that what most likely happened was that the MPAA simple multiplied the number of illegal downloads by the full retail cost of each piece of content. But what most didn’t know was that the MPAA’s figure manipulation went even further, by double and sometimes even triple counting the already exaggerated figures. If you have a $10 DVD, in which $2 goes to the manufacturer, $2 goes to the transportation company, and another $2 goes to the retailer, then the MPAA (or rather, the group the MPAA tasks with making the calculations, the Institute for Policy Innovation) calculates the loss by a clever bit of maths: $10 + $2 + $2 + $2 = $16. This is an  absurd way to calculate losses (that people downloading a $10 DVD costs the economy $16), as this kind of methodology is usually reserved for calculating changes in output and employment.

The MPAA also fails to take into account that SOPA doesn’t affect non US visitors visiting non US websites, and most importantly, it fails to realise (or deliberately ignores) the fact that just because people save money by illegally downloading movies, it doesn’t mean they don’t spend the same money on other parts of the economy. In fact, with the economy so bad and so many families struggling, perhaps the most simple explanation for piracy is that people just don’t have the money to buy movies, preferring to spend all their money on things like food and rent instead (which means they still contribute 100% of the earnings back to the general economy) . In the past, they simply stopped watching movies, now, they don’t have to make that sacrifice as long as they can still afford a cheap-ish Internet plan. But even if the bad economy isn’t to blame, then there are so many different (and some would argue, better) entertainment choices out there, such as video games, that people may simply be shifting their resources towards other parts of the economy. Regardless, the net effect of web piracy might be zero for the overall economy if people have not been hoarding money or throwing it away, although the loss for the affected entertainment companies is still very real.

But that’s what’s actually most wrong about SOPA. It will cost tax payers 10 million dollars a year to maintain the bureaucracy for handling SOPA, and to provide pro bono legal services for billion dollars companies, courtesy of the Department of Justice. And even after all that,  it may not help the overall economy at all, even if it worked to stop piracy (which it won’t). And that’s also if we don’t count the cost of damaging the Internet, innovation and other industries. It ends up being corporate welfare for the music and movie industry, and in the end, it will benefit nobody, not even the very same industries that will be better served in the long term by embracing innovation.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, just one of major releases for 2012, which will probably help Hollywood have another record year

And the industry should also take a long hard look at itself and see if there are any reasons within for their current problems. With box office receipts down in 2011 compared to the record breaking 2010, it would be easy to blame piracy. But piracy is very likely not the cause of the relatively small 3.5% decline, at least not according to film expert Roger Ebert. Ebert’s opinion is that the decline in revenue is largely due to the lack of a blockbuster the likes of The Dark Knight or Avatar, the high cost of going to the movies (3D and refreshments), and the greater choice people have these days when it comes to watching movies (whether it’s at home with Blu-ray on their big screen TV, or via Internet services such as Netflix). The MPAA always seem to believe they “deserve” ongoing revenue increases, but it’s only sensible to accept that this will most likely not be the case, given how much choice people have these days. Although with that said, I think 2012 will be another record breaking year for Hollywood (assuming the world doesn’t end) – what with The Hobbit, the Alien prequel Prometheus, a new Bond film and The Dark Knight Rises. And the music industry should stop conning people about its losses, which are almost 100% to do with the shifting buying habits of music lovers, from CD albums to digital tracks (the industry used to derive almost 90% of its revenue from album sales), and also the improving indie scene (thanks in some degree to the Internet).

That’s all the news I have this week unfortunately, I apologise if you were expecting more. I think there will be much more next week, not just because CES 2012 starts either, but due to everyone waking up from their holiday hibernations. See you next week.

I guess it would be customary, at the end of the year, to review the just ended orbit around the sun and summarise the major events. But that would require actually remembering what happened, all year, when I can barely even remember writing last week’s WNR. It should also be a time to look forward to the brand new, still in shrink wraps, year, and make some bold predictions about 2012. But that would require insight and imagination, both of which are in short supply in this 36C (97F) heat.

With the award season upon us soon, I guess I can format this WNR “a look back” in similar fashion, but without spectacular musical numbers, or comedic writing. So basically an award show without any of the interesting bits. Or any actual awards. Sounds like a great idea!

There has been many deserving winners of the prestigious Loser of the Year award, from Sony’s PSN SNAFU, to recent events involving GoDaddy being pwned by Reddit, but there can only be one winner, and of course, it’s Righthaven. The group that helped to redefine the term Copyright Troll has had a horrible year, not only losing court cases, but eventually their shirt (and domain name), as the company is now on the verge of bankruptcy. Will they still be around to compete for next year’s award. Doubtful.

SOPA: winner of our Villain of the Year award

Competition for the always popular Villain of the Year award has been fierce this year, as individuals and companies fight to be total d*cks (hint: not “docks” or “ducks”), in the field of copyright, gaming and beyond. But this year’s award winner is neither an individual, nor a company (and it’s not a duck either). It is, of course, SOPA. The always controversial Stop Online Piracy Act stormed to a clear lead in the voting for the award, at the very last minute I might add. SOPA has managed to unite all against it, be it the conservative Heritage Foundation, Republican as well as Democrats, and even the sworn blood enemies, Reddit and 4chan, and that’s quite an achievement.

The Best Blu-ray of the Year award goes to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, mainly because it was split into two parts and both parts still managed to not only get released in the same year, but both also topped the sales charts. Star Wars just misses out due to a point deduction for George Lucas being a total d*ck (hint: not a duck, named Howard or otherwise).

Skyrim wins our Game of the Year award, for wasting time that could have been used to cure diseases and save the planet

The Best Game of the Year should probably go to the best seller, which would be Modern Warfare 3, but that wouldn’t be fair to the game that everyone is talking about. The amazing world of Skyrim has drawn in thousands of gamers, most of whom have spent hours upon hours arrowing people, and assorted creatures, in the knee, and as a result, the game would have been responsible for breaking up thousands upon thousands of relationships if only gamers actually had real life relationships.

And finally, the Hero of the Year award goes to, in a lame effort to appease my readers, You! For helping to fight SOPA and to punish companies for not agreeing that SOPA is the worst thing to happen to the Internet since Rickrolling, for not buying into the Ultraviolet hype that, I have to admit, I was sucked into when I first heard the phrase “your movie library in the cloud”, for putting up with Sony’s PSN outage and that $600 invoice for adult toys that hackers charged to your credit card account when your details were stolen from PSN, for fighting the likes of Rigthhaven and the US Copyright Group and actually winning, and most courageously of all, for keeping on reading the WNR, rant after rant. You’re a deserving winner!

And as you can probably guess by now, it wasn’t exactly a very newsworthy week. The only real notable piece of news was the GoDaddy anti-SOPA boycott, which Digital Digest was proud to join in, having moved 22 domains out from GoDaddy. It would be easy to feel sorry for GoDaddy right now, as there’s almost nothing they can do or say to repair the damage caused by their ill advised support for SOPA in the first place – even their statement of “we oppose SOPA” was attacked by people claiming the company was opposing SOPA for the wrong reasons (not because SOPA is bad, but because GoDaddy was losing money because of supporting SOPA). Namecheap, hosting the Move Your Domain Day event by offering discounted, below cost domain transfers out of GoDaddy, also managed to raise $64,180 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, $2 for every domain transfer – not bad work for a day, considering how much of a pain moving a domain (especially an active, website hosting one) is.

And that was it for the week really, so I probably shouldn’t babble on any further, especially on a day most of you will be nursing hangovers of varying degrees. So there’s nothing left to do except wish you a great new year, a prosperous one, a safe one, and one that’s heaps better than the awful, awful, 2011. See you next week.

Let’s not waste more of 2011, and let’s started with this week’s copyright rants. We start with a scary peak into the future, if the likes of SOPA and PIPA are made into law, with the story of website that was seized as part of last year’s “Cyber Monday” seizures by the Department of Homeland Security.

I’ll leave you to read the full story for all the details, but suffice to say, domain was seized on the instance of music industry executives, website owner argues fair use, government, probably knowing that they didn’t have justification to make the seizure in the first place, stalls, and a full year later, domain name is returned to owners. Website ruined, financial costs incurred, and all for nothing.

Seized domains displayed this message, except it now seems some of the seizures were improper

The website in question was DaJaz1.com, who offered leaked music for downloads. The record labels told the government to seize the website, but the owners of DaJaz1.com says that the songs they linked to (not hosted) were often provided to them by employees of the record labels, for promotional purposes. But you have government agents too stupid to realise they’ve become pawns of the record (and movie) industry, too lazy to do any real research on the list of “bad” websites handed to them, and a justice system too biased towards rights holders. The full financial cost to DaJaz1.com is incalculable, and for most websites, being offline for a whole year basically means the end.

I do have my little theory about why the RIAA wanted DaJaz1.com shut down, as they also took down a few similar websites during the same operation. At its heart, the job of the RIAA companies is to help promote artists. But these days, the Internet can be leveraged by artists themselves for promotional purposes, and even music distribution, once relying on manufacturing/distribution/retail chain, can be all done digitally these days. In other words, there’s little justification these days for studios to be taking as much from artists as they are, and for all the talk of web piracy, this is what scares the RIAA companies the most. So any website that helps artists to directly promote their work, generate hype by using leaked music, and thus bypassing the studio system, will be seen as a major threat. Maybe not today, but soon enough. And PIPA/SOPA will then allow the record companies to get their dirty hands around the Internet, close down websites that threatens their outdated business model.

But even if the mistake was just an innocent one, how many websites will have to become collateral damage in this un-winnable war against downloads, before a real innovative website, like the next YouTube, will be the ultimate victim (it if hasn’t already occurred). The rights holders keep on saying that websites like YouTube getting blocked is hyperbole, and they may be right at present, because nobody is going to shut down YouTube without facing a mighty smashing courtesy of Google’s legal hammer, but would YouTube have been so safe in its infancy had SOPA/PIPA existed then? People uploading copyrighted clips was what the early days of YouTube was all about, before people realised they could create their own videos and it would be even more popular than a re-upload of something people can get on BitTorrent anyway. While it is now the bastion of creativity, it once was a haven for pirates (at least according to Viacom, in their lawsuit against YouTube), and it might just fall into the “dedicated to piracy” category of SOPA/PIPA. And if YouTube had been destroyed back then, would the web, and creativity and innovation, and the economy, be better off, or much much worse off? Is this a risk we should be taking?

It seems many are finally realising that, SOPA/PIPA, is very very dangerous. And it was a pleasure to read the quotes attributed to the CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, Gary Shapiro. Not only does the CEA produce the excellent CES exhibition, and represents all the major electronic manufacturers, it appears they’ve joined the anti-SOPA brigade as well. Shapiro used language that even I might be a bit scared to used in the WNR, for fear of appearing too biased, but he’s absolutely right that SOPA will kill “innovation, wealth and jobs”, and that SOPA is nothing more than “a bunch of Hollywood and music industry lobbyists destroying the Internet”. Couldn’t have put it better myself (really, I couldn’t). I wonder if Sony, the only company to actually both belong to the pro-SOPA RIAA, and anti-SOPA CEA, might reconsider their CEA membership, although Shapiro did mention quite clearly that his views had wide ranging support amongst CEA members.

Other trade groups, some staunch supporters of SOPA, are also now reconsidering their support following the public backlash. The BSA, the anti-piracy lobby group for software makers, has in recent days, softened their support for SOPA, basically calling it overreaching. No doubt after many of their members complained about the group’s position of a bill aimed directly at tech companies, and one which ultimately only benefits the music and movie industries. But if the BSA continues to even partially support SOPA, then other companies could join Kaspersky in withdrawing from the group in protest over SOPA. The threat to Internet security posed by SOPA is well known, but it’s nice seeing a security company take a significant step in their protest of SOPA and the damage it could unleash on the Internet.

The MPAA has launched a stern defence of SOPA, by first attacking an alternate, less controversial bill as being too friendly to dirty old web pirates. As the MPAA was most likely the people who actually came up with SOPA, it’s no surprise they aren’t accommodating to any alternatives.  But the MPAA’s Chairman, Chris Dodd, also added fuel to the fire with a couple of curious comments. First up, he question why Google is not accommodating when it comes to filtering search results, by saying “When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites.”

That comment is simply too stupid to even come up with a reply, it would just be too easy to point out everything that’s wrong with the statement (and at the same time, it’s hard to resist point out the fact that Google pulled out of China for being forced to censor results, are we really comparing the US to China when it comes to web censorship, of all issues). To be fair to Dodd, he was probably referring to the technical aspects of result filtering, but it’s one thing to filter the BBC or CNN, but it’s another when you have to filter the thousands upon thousands of website the MPAA deems “bad”, as well as pre-emptively blocking “red flag” sites.

In Chris Dodd, the MPAA's chairman's eyes, downloading is the same as bank robbery

But Dodd wasn’t finished, because he had an analogy to share as well. Still referring to Google, he added “A guy that drives the getaway car didn’t rob the bank necessarily, but they got you to the bank and they got you out of it, so they are accessories in my view”. You see, in Dodd’s scenario, Google is the getaway driver, while Internet users are the robbers, and the MPAA studios are the bank. Again, too stupid to pull apart, but … can’t … resist. First of all, downloading a movie is not like a bank robbery, and I’m guessing it would be armed robbery as well. Downloading a copy of a movie, isn’t the same as stealing real money from a bank either. And if Google has some role to play in the analogy, it is not the get-away driver. It’s a stupid analogy to compare to downloading, because none the roles match up to anything related to downloading, but at best, the getaway driver would be the guy that transports or shares the burnt DVD copy of The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (in analogy: the bags of money) to your friends after it has been downloaded (in analogy: stolen at gunpoint), and even then, it doesn’t really make much sense. As for Google’s role in all of this? It’s the phone book company that helped the robbers to find the bank they robbed. The ISP would be the manufacturer of the car or the people responsible for the roads. Are they all “accessories” too, Chris?

The RIAA has been busy too, “helping” copyright troll Righthaven. Or rather, they’re trying to hurt Righthaven’s opponent by making sure Wayne Hoehn and his lawyers do not win the case based on fair use issues, which could hurt the RIAA’s stance (which is that there’s not such thing as fair use). At the same time, the RIAA is also trying to hurt Righthaven’s case by agreeing with the court that Righthaven don’t have standing to sue, and because this automatically throws the case out, there’s no need to consider the fair use issues. So the RIAA is basically out to hurt everyone in order to protect their own self interest, and you know, that’s totally within their M.O, and I guess it is kind of “neutral” if you think about it, even though Hoehn’s lawyers would disagree.

Speaking of fair use, the US Copyright Office entertains new suggestions for exemptions to existing copyright laws every couple of years, in the spirit of not allowing copyright to hamper innovation and consumer rights. A couple of years ago, the issue of smart phone jailbreaking was one of the exemption suggestions, and the US Copyright Office last year approved the exemption, to the disgust of Apple. Now, Public Knowledge and the EFF are submitting briefs that call for the exemption of DVD ripping and game console hacking. PK says that DVD ripping should be legal because so many devices these days don’t have DVD drives any more (eg. the iPad), and so in order for consumers to watch the movies they purchased, they should be allowed to bypass CSS and the DMCA restrictions, and rip for personal use. Makes sense. EFF, following their successful application of the smart phone jailbreaking exemption, say the exemption should be extended to game consoles (probably muttering “take that, Sony” while they were preparing the brief). And it also makes sense, because the same issues exist for smart phones and game consoles, being able to run your own apps (like, oh I don’t know, Linux), and both have issues with piracy if jailbreaking is allowed (but if it’s okay for smart phones, then it should be okay for game consoles).

This anti-piracy message was brought to you by the RIAA, and it's not at all an exaggeration or anything

But perhaps the US Copyright Office should take note of the Swiss’s decision to exempt “piracy” for all personal use. The Swiss government found that there was hardly any financial damage from piracy for personal use (as opposed to re-selling the pirated copies for profit), as people’s spending on entertainment products have not been reduced, merely shifted to other things that can’t be pirated, such as concerts or merchandise. And as there’s no financial loss, the Swiss didn’t feel it was right to have laws that hamper innovation, or help protect outdated business models. And they also made note that the industry’s “Chicken Little” response to web piracy is not new, and that these industries should just get over it and find ways to profit from it. Remember when the music industry warned us that hope taping, on cassette tapes, would kill the music industry, and when the MPAA compared VCR taping to leaving a woman alone in a house with the Boston Strangler? Yeah, those industries.

I haven’t had a HD/3D section for a while, so I thought I would add one for this issue. I could talk about the Black Friday sales week sales figures, which were somewhat disappointing for Blu-ray (only a 5% gain compared to last year’s Black Friday), but I really wanted to rant about two, slightly disturbing trends, when it comes to Blu-ray.

The trailers you find at the start of discs is beginning to really annoy me, mainly due to the quantity present, and two (not so new) developments. I’m a big fan of movie trailers, evident by Digital Digest’s growing collection of movie trailer downloads, but when you insert a disc to watch a movie, you don’t want to have to skip through half a dozen trailers mostly for movies you’ve already purchased, or have no interest in. Luckily, most can be skipped, but there’s the odd annoying one that can only be fast forwarded.

But the two developments are non movie related advertising, and BD-Live trailer downloads. The first one is particularly annoying, and a trend that has gotten worse in paid for content. I mean, I’ve already paid for the disc, or for the cable TV subscription, why should I still have to sit through ads? They’re not even funny ads, or ads related to movies, or the movie in question, and that to me is unacceptable.

BD-Live trailers is also extremely annoying, as it uses your Internet connection to download an average quality trailer from the Internet to show you. Supposedly, this is to guarantee “fresh” trailers, but in reality, it’s the movie studio’s way to make you pay (via your Internet connection charges) for its own advertising. And the trailers aren’t so fresh anyway, and sometimes you get the odd effect of having the same trailer show up twice. And again, it cannot be skipped, only fast forwarded.

Add these with the anti-piracy trailers, the “Blu-ray is a new format blah blah blah” disclaimer for badly produced, incompatible discs, the other disclaimers for commentaries and stuff, plus studio logos (which gets shown again at the start of the movie anyway), it’s minutes wasted just so I can get to the movie I paid to watch. It’s probably faster to download a pirated copy, than to sit through all of that crap without skipping, and they wonder why people pirate movies.

And on that rant, we come the end of another WNR. See you next week.

There is only one issue that dominated this week’s headlines, and it’s SOPA. I bet the politicians that sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act didn’t expect the kind of public backlash that has happened, but if you try to mess with the Internet, expect a reaction.

I’m going to do this a bit different, so I’ll just briefly go through the news stories covering the week’s events, and then provide a bit more analysis on the whole thing. We start off with the EFF’s warnings against the dangers of SOPA, including ones that others haven’t thought of. Apparently, the bill is so broad that it calls into the legality of a lot of existing Internet tools and standards. Tools and standards like VPN, SSH could all be ruled illegal, as all could be used to bypass SOPA filters (and the legislation makes any tool that does that illegal). But with VPN, SSH, businesses would no longer be able to do anything securely on the Internet, and it could potentially cripple the economy. Of course, I’d doubt the government would have the guts to go after VPNs or SSH, but because the legislation is worded so badly, it gives the government the power to do so, and the copyright industry might just go after VPN and encrypted/anonymous downloading services if people start using these as ways to bypass SOPA.

As the Congressional hearing on SOPA was this week, Internet companies decided to make a stand this week against SOPA. The majors (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, eBay, AOL, LinkedIn, Mozilla and Zynga) all signed an open letter to Congress urging them to reconsider SOPA, with many others also urging Congress not to pass SOPA. And they need to stand up because their own interests may be hurt by SOPA, and they will be made the targets of copyright infringement as SOPA tries undo the DMCA’s ’safe harbor’ provision. Plus, a lot of these firms have been fighting the good fight trying to support free speech in countries that want to curtail it, and if the US passes such a “draconian” (terms used by Google’s Eric Schmidt to describe SOPA) legislation, then the US loses its moral high ground on the matter, making global Internet censorship a step closer to reality.

This long infograph shows the full result of American Censorship Day, a day in which the Internet decided to fight back against pro-copyright interests

And finally, we have the hearing. A show trial if there ever was one, with one token voice against SOPA compared to the 5 that supported it. The US Chamber of Commerce was involved, as were drug company Pfizer (perhaps to try and highlight the counterfeiting aspect of the bill, but we all know it’s about movie and music downloads). As a rule of thumb, you should be against pretty much everything the US Chamber of Commerce supports, as the official sounding group is nothing more than a big business lobby group. Google was the only anti-SOPA voice as part of the very very small witness pool for such an important legislation, and even it was supportive of the “financial blockade” part of SOPA. No consumer, rights, public interest  groups were called up to testify. But while these groups, and other tech companies, were not heard at the hearing, they made their voices heard in other ways, as the day of the hearing was officially declared as the American Censhorship Day. The event, in which Digital Digest was proud to take part in, was supported by more than 6,000 other websites, including Mozilla (where I first heard about this event), in which websites blacked out their logos and linked to americancensorship.org or offered a splash page where site visitors could contact Congress to tell them to stop supporting SOPA. Tumblr did the best work by making it easy for people to make phone calls to Congress. But it was you and people like you in the end that made the most difference, with over 1,000,000 emails sent to Congress, 3,000 hand-written letters via sendwrite.com, and more than 87,000 phone calls to Congress, with some 1,293 hours spent talking with actual representatives (that’s 161 representatives talking non-stop for 8 hours!). Amazing effort by everyone!

Whether it will make a difference, I don’t know. But we already have Nancy Pelosi on the Democractic side and Darrell Issa on the Republican side tweeting their opposition, or at least reservations of SOPA, so that’s some progress I suppose. Also, the petition put up on the White House’s own petition website has now officially gone over the 25,000 signatures required for an official response from the White House, and the number of signatures is still climbing – 41,463 at last count. While I’m sure the response will emphasize the importance of stopping piracy and protecting jobs, basically a MPAA/RIAA press release, but at the very least, it tells those in the position of power that we are watching them, judging them, and if they choose to side with corporations against the interest of the people, we will make them accountable for their actions.

So the battle-lines have been drawn. Congress and the White House now needs to decide whether to act in the interest of the people that actually elected them, or in the interest of one industry (at the expense of another). The truth is that the Internet and Internet related industries account for more of the economy than the movie and music industries combined, and these industries are just as creative, if not more so, than Hollywood and the four major music labels, which create nothing, but merely profit from the work of real artists. They’re the middlemen in an era where their usefulness is diminishing by the day, and they know it too, and desperate enough to do anything to keep their dying business model alive, even if it means having to curtail the growth of the Internet. The US Chamber of Commerce is involved because they’re for anything that takes away the rights of consumer and give it to big business, like tort reform (watch HBO’s Hot Coffee documentary to find out why you should care). This is so much more than just about piracy.

Does CNET deserve to be sued for allowing people to download LimeWire?

I’m still not quite sure if FilmOn’s Alki David is serious about suing CNET for copyright infringement, or whether he’s trying to make a point after CNET’s parent company, CBS, sued his FilmOn for copyright infringement. Probably a bit of both perhaps, as David re-files his copyright infringement lawsuit against CBS/CNET for their distribution of the, now illegal, LimeWire software. Doing as he promised back in July when the lawsuit was withdraw, the lawsuit has been re-filed with more plaintiffs added, and it alleges that CNET profited from distributing LimeWire, and even promoted the use of it by providing tips and instructions on how to use it for site visitors. If David is trying to make a point, then I do agree with him that big media often acts hypocritically when it comes to copyright infringement, often stealing ideas, entire works from others, while blaming all their woes on college kids and other downloaders. But looking at this case in isolation, and as an operator of a download website, I can’t really see any merit in the case. LimeWire the network may be illegal, but the software that connects to it is just a tool, and should be no more illegal than say a browser that can also be used to download pirated content. And it’s yet another situation where apportion of blame seems to be far too wide ranging, because if individuals who shared songs on LimeWire is guilty of copyright infringement, and that extends to the operators of the network due to the court decision, then extending it further to third party websites that distributed the software means you might as well also sue the ISP that allowed the download to happen, and so on. The blame has to stop somewhere.

In HD/3D news, the fallout from WB’s botched launch of UltraViolet continues, with reports that Flixster, the app used to delivery WB’s UltraViolet movies, is giving away iTunes vouchers for those that complain about not being able to get the digital download/streaming working.

The idea behind UltraViolet seemed sound. One central system employed by all the movie studios (except Disney) that enables buyers of DVD/Blu-ray versions of movies to get a digital copy/stream version of the movie instantly, available to view on a variety of devices.

The actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired. As far as I know, it seems while UltraViolet is indeed one central system, and that all your “owned” movies are listed under one UltraViolet account regardless of which studios (other than Disney) you purchased disc was from, the actual delivery mechanism is left up to each studio. WB has chosen their own Flixster app to do the delivery, but a lot of people are having trouble with it.

200+ "one star" ratings for the UltraViolet Blu-ray edition of the latest Harry Potter movie, as people protest WB's poorly thought out implementation of the new cloud based digital copy service

The way it should work is that UltraViolet should act like the new iTunes, where it not only tracks your movie collection, but also delivers the movies via a single app, or better, just downloads that are compatible with multiple devices. There should only be one signup needed, and that’s when you use UltraViolet for the very first time. After that, it’s all about adding movies to your UltraViolet collection, and that should be done through the simplest method possible (barcode/QR code scanning from a tablet/phone, for example).

Otherwise, you’ll end up like the current WB rollout, where people are so angry they’re posting one-star reviews on Amazon to protest against UltraViolet, and where you have to give out iTunes vouchers, when Apple is actually one of the main competitors to UltraViolet. Hollywood really does get in its own way sometimes, especially when it comes to the whole Internet thing (remember when they thought that nobody wanted a Blu-ray player with an Internet connection and made the feature optional?)

Stop fighting the Internet, and embrace it, you stupid fools. Advice for all, I think.

And that’s probably a good note to end this edition of the WNR on. See you next week.

P.S: Black Friday sales on next week. It looks like the sale has already started with Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection [Blu-ray] already on sale for about $24 cheaper, with The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy Extended Edition [Blu-ray] also going on sale at $27 cheaper (might be even cheaper tomorrow, when the sale officially starts for this item).

Which is just as well, since it gave me more time to put the finishing touches on a new website I was making for Australians, called Faraway Deals. It’s my way of helping Aussies take advantage of the generous exchange rate, by helping them to spot the best movie and games deals and discount for shopping overseas. And by overseas, I mean the UK, since there are fewer region issues (Australia is in the same Blu-ray region as the UK, and we’re both PAL countries in terms of game regions), plus the exchange rate is even more favourable than compared to the practically worthless US dollar (hurrah for European debt crisis!)

Plenty of news to go through, so let’s get started.

In copyright news, it’s been a busy week. Actually, almost all of the news that I’ll be talking about this week are copyright related, but with thing happening in the courts, in congress, and all of them potentially seismic changes.

We start with the slightly ridiculous: Justin Bieber. I never thought that I would have to talk about the “Biebster” here in the WNR, but this day and age, anything is possible. But nobody really expected Bieber to be caught in the middle of a copyright war, and I don’t think a single soul expected him to be on both sides of the war at the same time, if that’s even possible. The FreeBieber.org website was set up to protest the Commercial Felony Streaming Act (S.978), which would make it a streaming copyrighted video a felony. The link to Bieber is that he actually became famous on the back of a bit of copyright infringement, of the streaming kind as well, when he uploaded videos of himself singing popular, and copyrighted, songs on YouTube. Had Bieber done it after S.978, he might find himself facing 5 years in prison for having committed felony. And this kind of “copyright infringement” seems to be quite a preferred way to become famous online, maybe not Bieber famous, but YouTube famous (or infamous) at least (the alternative is to hire a production company to write you an original song, and we know how that can turn out). And how does this kind of copyright infringement, a felony under S.978, actually hurt anyone? Would people stop buying Chris Brown’s ‘With You’ just because one Justin Bieber uploaded his, poor recording quality, version of the song? And had the rights holders to ‘With You’ filled a takedown notice with YouTube and removed the Bieber version before people had a chance to view it, would the music world be better or worse without Justin Bieber? (on second thought, don’t answer that)

Anyway, Bieber was asked what he thought of FreeBieber.org and S.978, and obviously, as someone who got famous on the back of what is now potentially a felony (and not only that, anybody that embedded the video on his or her blog would also be committing a felony under S.978), he came out supporting the anti-S.978 movement. To the point where I think he got a bit overboard with the sentiment and recommended the incarceration of the US Senator that sponsored the bill. But at the same time, his lawyers were doing all they can to kill off FreeBieber.org, by sending a cease and desist letter to the people behind the website asking them to stop using Bieber’s image. Of course, the EFF stepped up to defend FreeBieber and attack Justin Bieber’s lawyers for not knowing about the First Amendment, especially when this is part of the core First Amendment rights, the freedom to espouse political views. I think Justin should get in contact with his lawyers and get them to tone it down a little, especially when FreeBieber.org isn’t actually hurting Bieber-nomics, and it may be helping to boost his rebellious image. And the website also serve to entertain those that like seeing pictures of Justin Bieber behind bars, so it’s a win-win.

Petition Obama to kill off the E-Parasite Act, by signing this petition

Despite all the ruckus over S.978, it isn’t even the most controversial copyright bill up for debate on Capitol Hill at the moment. That would be the E-Parasites bill, also known as Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently being mooted for debate in the House of Reps. I’ve already talked about SOPA in previous WNRs, so have a look if you need more background info. But this week has all been about opinions, and most of them are against SOPA, with op-ed pieces popping up everywhere, and with the pro-SOPA opinions most limited to the usual suspects, the MPAA and RIAA. Not only that, there’s no an E-Petition up and running to oppose SOPA, but unlike most other E-Petitions (which are only slightly more useful than completely useless), this one is being run on a website set up by the White House, and if 25,000 signatures can be obtained before the end of November, the promise is that the White House would take the time to seriously consider the petition. Practically speaking, the copyright lobby friendly White House won’t do a thing to stop SOPA, but 25,000 names is a nice and achievable goal (over 10,000 signatures already, in the first week), and if the power of the Internet can be harnessed and much more than 25,000 names added to the petition, then it will definitely send a message.

The ridiculous coddling of copyright interest isn’t just in the US though, over in the UK, ISP BT has to now officially block Newzbin2 this month, a court has ordered. This is despite Newzbin2’s “guilt” never properly tested in a court (the original verdict was for the original Newzbin, not the second incarnation, most likely run by totally different people), and Newzbin2 not having any sort of profile in the UK itself (as it’s based in a foreign country, run most likely by foreigners), and so not even jurisdiction is clear. But yet, BT will have to comply and use its child-porn filter to do the filtering, which really shows where the priority is these days, taking resources away from fighting child porn to use on anti-piracy. The ridiculousness of this ruling, which basically opens up the door for corporate backed censorship in the UK, is already getting the copyright lobby excited, with the music industry already signalling it will ask BT, and other ISPs, to start blocking The Pirate Bay. And with the precedent already set, getting other sites blocked should be much easier, although getting around the filter may be just as easy too.

And so with one ridiculous, overreaching bills and court rulings, after another, and with the copyright lobby working overtime (by working, I mean of course spending) and the statements they’ve made, you would think the piracy problem must be really killing the creative, copyright industries. Talks of hundreds of thousands of job losses, the threat of good content disappearing, movie studios and music labels going out of business, so surely, there should be plenty of facts just lying around to highlight the financial toll of online piracy. Well, there’s definitely “lying” anyway.

The copyright industries seems to be doing pretty well, according to a new report, despite "huge piracy problems"

You see the problem for the copyright industries, but really just to vocal ones that pay the salaries of the RIAA and MPAA, is that while they have to paint a bleak picture of the effects of piracy, they also have to highlight just how important they are to the economy, the US economy in particular. And to do that, they have to show how much money they contribute to the economy, and they have done it via a new report. The problem of course is, on the one hand they have to say “we’re important because we’re doing great”, and on the other hand they have to say “we’re not doing great because of piracy”. But as the report highlights, the core copyright industries have never had it better – they’re making more money despite the recession, and job losses have been relatively subdued compared to other industries. So where’s the online piracy induced disaster? Surely, with web piracy at an all time high, revenue should be down the drain compared to say 10 years ago, and while that may be true for the music industry, it has much more to do with people’s changing buying habits than actual piracy (people buy fewer albums, instead, buys more tracks – choice, if anything, is the real “killer” of the music industry it appears).

And speaking of job losses, the current Boogeyman that the RIAA/MPAA likes to use to scare politicians, pay in copyright industries are actually 15% to 27% higher than other industries. So much for massive job losses and not being able to afford to make new content, while other industries are “forced” to tighten belts by embrace the “work more for less” principle (*cough* exploitation *cough*).

The reason for the industry’s resilience against surging piracy rates may very well be due to the fact that piracy has a bigger effect on the segment of the “market” that traditionally don’t buy a lot of stuff. These people may have been participating in casual piracy, “borrowing” content from friends, or recording stuff from TV, or buying dodgy discs from street vendors, before Internet piracy became the easy way to get content for free. And if so, then the only real effect is that the increase in the amount of content these people have access to. And this can be a good thing too, as while the conversion rate, the rate at which people who get free content decide to buy the content, may be low, it’s still better than zero, and so piracy does lead to sales, and there are plenty of evidence to support this. At the very least, it gets people talking about the content in question, and it can create the kind of peer pressure that forces others to get the content, via legal means if they’re capable of doing so.

And it was surprising to see the same argument being used in court, but not by the defence, but by the judge, in making a ruling for a piracy case in Spain. Finally, the argument that not all piracy, if prevented, would have led to sales was used in a court of law, and accepted by the judge in question. The copyright industry, even as they wash their hands of the responsibility for protecting their own content (handing it to the government instead), should at the very least prove that they have actual, financial losses stemming from piracy, and if so, how much. If they cannot provide even a rough estimate, and not the kind of that RIAA/MPAA like to produce (1 x piracy = 1 x lost sale at highest retail price), of their own losses (and their own report seems to indicate not much loss going on at all), then they shouldn’t have a legal leg to stand on. And this wasn’t even the most controversial part of the Spanish judge’s ruling. The judge also came to the logical conclusion that piracy may actually help sales, for the very same reasons I explained above. Now, I’m sure this judge’s ruling will be appealed to the high heavens, but at the very least, in this one moment, we have some legal precedents being set that sets the bar that much higher, or at least even have a bar at all, for rights holder to prove their actual losses. Can’t prove it? Then no damages, it’s as simple as this.

And not being able to prove actual losses, and still intent on suing, should be punished. Just like the way notorious copyright troll Righthaven is being punished in courts right now. By not paying Wayne Hoehn and his lawyers the cost that was awarded against Righthaven, the judge has seen fit to nearly double the amount payable, from $34,000 to $63,700, for interests and additional incurred costs, and if Righthaven don’t pay up soon, then the court has ordered the US Marshals service to intervene if needed. While the judge’s ruling didn’t really reflect this point, but the fact that Righthaven (and their client, Stephens Media), still cannot prove the actual financial damage that comes from non profit bloggers posting a small segment of their newspaper articles, surely didn’t help their case.

And in the latest case of “DRM is teh suck”, we have RealNetworks’ decision to shut down support for their DRM portion of their online music service, Rhapsody. So all those that purchased tracks prior to July 2008 will have to quickly convert their tracks to audio CD, and then rip them back to a non DRM’d MP3, or they may lose the ability to listen to the songs they paid for, if they change or upgrade their computers. Once again, content holders force us to put up with annoying DRM, and at the first sign it becomes a pain to maintain, they ditch it and force us to jump through hoops again to retain the content we already paid for. It seems Rhapsody is not even providing any detailed instructions on how to do this conversion (other than the warning that if you don’t do it by tomorrow, bad luck), even though they should be providing DRM-free MP3 versions of DRM’d tracks, which isn’t even very hard to do since they already have them as part of their current music store. There ought to be a law to force rights holder to be responsible for their own DRM, that if they either provide indefinite support for DRM (which would probably fail most cost benefit scenarios), or if they decide to withdraw support, then they must ensure users get continued access to purchased content, if that means providing a DRM free version. Otherwise, to me, DRM is nothing but a fraud to make people pay multiple times for the same thing.

In HD/3D news, we’ve had yet another near record week for Blu-ray market share, but looking closer, the numbers are less clear.

For the week ending 22nd October 2011, Blu-ray market share reached a near record of 38.87%, just shy of the 40.22% set a few weeks earlier. But both weeks had one thing in common, or rather two. One – for both weeks, the top selling title was a Disney release. And two, both were Blu-ray “exclusives”.

Combos are appearing in DVD packaging and is the only option for DVD owners, but are still counted as Blu-ray in the sales stats

I put the term exclusives in quotes because, while both titles (The Lion King and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) had DVD versions that could be purchased, the sale of these versions would only count towards Blu-ray sales, because the DVD versions were locked inside combos. And the decision to count combos only as Blu-ray exclusives may have made sense when these were few and far between and aimed mainly at early or potential Blu-ray adopters, the situation has changed with these high profile releases, particularly the A-list ‘On Stranger Tides’, now using combos as an easy way to sell people what they don’t need and charge a slightly higher price for the privilege.

A combo is better value if you need both the Blu-ray and DVD version, but that’s not really the case for most people. For kids movies, like The Lion King, it perhaps makes a bit more sense, since you can give the DVD copy to your kids to destroy. But for A-list releases?

And even worse, these combos now come in DVD packaging (those taller boxes), and so are placed in DVD sections of stores. This ensures people buy the Blu-ray version even if they don’t need it, and I suspect some won’t even know what it is. But if they’re willing to pay for it, then it does provide them some future-proofing, and that’s not a bad thing, but really, these combos should be counted separately in sales, particularly ones that come in DVD packaging (or just count the ones that come in DVD packaging as DVD sales). Otherwise, my weekly Blu-ray vs DVD sales figure analysis will quickly lose what little meaning it has, and this possibly leads to more work for me, which is a terrible, terrible thing.

And on that note, let’s end this WNR and the end of my work on Sunday. See you next week.

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.

More than expected number of news items this week, so let’s get started.

In copyright news, it’s hard to know where to begin. I guess we should start with the source of the problem, the money. More precisely, the money flowing into Washington and other capitals of the world, as the copyright lobby spends millions scaring politicians into believing  ”net piracy plague” hype.

It was revealed this week that the MPAA spent $470,000 in lobbying in the last quarter alone, mainly to promote the hugely controversial PROTECT IP act, which if you’ve been following the WNR, you should already know that it has come under attack by a variety of professionals, from engineers, to entrepreneurs, to law professors. The idea of messing around with the foundation of the Internet, the domain naming system, just so the billion dollar movie industry can feel a little bit better, without actually solving any real problems, is I guess what these professionals are most concerned about. Basically, the MPAA has convinced politicians that the few harmless flies are actually killer bees, and that the only way to solve the problem is to launch a tactical nuclear strike (except in this analogy, the nuclear strike would probably solve the fly problem, whereas PROTECT IP won’t do anything to piracy).

What surprised me more was that, despite being only a fraction of the size of the movie industry, the music industry via its lobby group the RIAA actually spend almost three times as much money – $1.25M, in just one quarter. And somehow, this was still down on last year’s $1.4M, in the same quarter. Had the RIAA simply spend the money they’ve spent on lobbying and DRM, on actual innovation, they would have been the ones making the iPod and running iTunes, not Apple. Instead, they spend a million plus trying to get new legislation through that would allow labels to receive royalty from radio station airings – once upon a time, labels were happy to just get free airings for promotional purposes, but not any more I guess.

RapidShare will hope its recent lobbying spending of $260,000 is enough to convince Washington politicians not to kill off the file sharing industry

The same story also showed some lobbying from the other side, specifically, by Rapidshare. If PROTECT IP passes, they have the most to lose, since they will probably be the first website to get filtered, after having appeared in all the copyright blacklists. There would be far too much collateral damage if lawmakers outlaw public file sharing, because while I do admit Rapidshare has its fair share of pirated files, it’s also an essential service for many others to share large files without having access to your own FTP server. I can’t see how you can have a public file sharing service without the problem of piracy cropping up, but it’s not as if Rapidshare doesn’t have tools for rights holders to get infringing files removed – it’s just that rights holders don’t want to have to do the work to get them removed. Automatic filters are easy to escape by real pirates, but makes false positives hard to avoid – think of the YouTube false positive copyright thing and times it by about 1,000, since at least with YouTube, some kind of audio/visual analysis could be performed, while it’s harder with generic files.

The world’s second most famous music pirate, Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum, is back in the news this week as the RIAA’s appeal of an earlier reduction in damages, to “only” $67,500, was rejected by the appellate court. But not because they supported the original jury rewarded $675,000, but because they thought that Judge Nancy Gertner has jumped to the constitutional issues  a bit too early in citing the reason for the reduction, when there were other legal recourse that should have been taken before going down this route. It appears that the appeals court agrees that $675,000 was inappropriate, and in their summary, even urged Congress to consider reducing the excessive statutory damages in relation to copyright infringement (but we’ll be lucky if Congress doesn’t do the opposite, and increase statutory damages). This is become a bigger issue, because back in the day, most copyright infringement lawsuits were related to commercial infringement, and so the statutory damages are relevant to those types of cases. Today, most copyright infringement cases relate to non commercial infringement, such as illegally downloading a 99 cent song for free, and so $150,000 per act of infringement doesn’t really fit the “crime” any more. A sensible copyright reform would introduce a new tier of penalties dealing specifically with non commercial infringement, because a fine of $150 per act is enough of a deterrent for those that actually fear the law on the matter (most don’t, even with $675,000 in damages as a potential outcome). And so for now, Tenenbaum faces $675,000 in damages again, which will of course be appealed.

But Boston University students aren’t the only ones having money trouble these days. Righthaven’s refusal to pay the $34,000 in legal fees it owns to Wayne Hoehn, possibly through lack of ability to pay, has forced Hoehn’s attorneys to petition the court to send US Marshals to seize Righthaven assets in response. Now that would be a beautiful sight to behold, wouldn’t it? Righthaven took the risk in trying to scare Hoehn into paying a settlement fee, only for Hoehn to refuse to lie down and fight his way to a win in court, and so it’s only fair that Righthaven should pay up. After all, they’re the ones who send letters threatening tens and hundreds of thousands in damages, if people don’t settle. They should have taken their own advice and settled, if they didn’t want to pay up (except I think the judge refused them the right to do so, heh).

Over to Europe right now, whose financial system should collapse any day now, but before then, there are some deck chair shuffling that needs to happen. In Italy, MPs from Berlusconi’s party (why is the guy still prime minster?) want to introduce the world’s first “one-strike” system, where people may get kicked off the Internet for just a single allegation of copyright infringement. Sometimes I think politicians are actually just using copyright as an excuse to kill off the Internet, as the Internet is  making it harder to rule against the wishes of the people. And also to hide your bunga bunga parties. You know what this is? It’s fascism. And we all know how Italians deal with fascists (well, eventually, anyway).

The SFI's IP address being used for piracy should not be proof that the institute was engaged in piracy

On to Sweden, and the Swedish Film Institute has just gone through what hundreds and thousands of individuals have gone through, after the SFI was accused of pirating films because its IP address had been found in one of many BitTorrent swarms. It would be hard for the SFI to go with the “my router was hacked” excuse, because no hacking did occur, but because they operated a public Wi-Fi, and because the agency tasked with collection IP addresses aren’t cooperating with the SFI on the investigation, it has been extremely difficult for the SFI to find the source of the piracy. And if this doesn’t prove that an IP address does not equal the identity of the individual(s) who made the infringement, then nothing will. And if public Wi-Fi is now going to be the target of anti-piracy operations, then that’s taking a huge step backwards in terms of the Internet everywhere approach that we’ve become used to (and which many websites, like Facebook or FourSquare, rely on).

And this increasing perception gap between how the world works now, and how the copyright lobby/politicians want things to work, is probably why the German Pirate Party has won 15 seats in the Berlin regional elections. With their Swedish counterpart winning a seat in the EU parliament, pirate parties around the world could become the new Greens, as the issue of Internet privacy and rights become more and more important.

In HD/3D news, next week should bring us the Star Wars numbers, an early signs show that it will be a big one. I’m a huge Star Wars nerd, having watched the originally trilogies at least 50 times altogether (and the new prequels trilogies about 6 times), but I’ve actually not pre-ordered the set. It’s not a protest at George Lucas or anything, but while Star Wars on DVD was a special moment for me, I’m a bit more meh about Star Wars on Blu-ray for some reason. Probably because, upscaled, the DVD edition still looks quite good, and from early reviews, while the Blu-ray version definitely looks better, the classic trilogies aren’t the “hi-defy” experience that many would be expecting. It’s not only the age of the film that the cause, but I think not going with a new transfer, given advances in technology since the last one, seems like a step backwards. Which is why I suspect we’ll get a new transfer in time for next year’s 3D version of the films, which means a new Blu-ray set (hopefully with the remastered films in 2D, as well as 3D), and so it’s hard to get too excited. I will still probably get it, I mean I got the LotR theatrical mess on Blu-ray.

Plus, I’m finding it difficult to get the time to watch movies these days, got a dozen or more on Blu-ray that’s still under shrink wrap.

For 3D news, this week, YouTube announced a new feature in which you can convert any existing or new uploaded 2D video to 3D. Cool if you like this sort of thing, but the 3D hype is definitely dying, and the 2D to 3D conversion could be the jump the shark moment for the format, because really, it’s an admission by YouTube that nobody is uploading any real 3D content.

And finally in gaming, those that saw and agreed to the new PSN user agreement, without reading it (obviously didn’t watch that South Park episode), may realise that they’ve signed over more than they realised.

Sony apparently sneaked a clause which makes it a lot harder for people to join in one of the many class action lawsuit against Sony for the PSN data theft. Those that signed the agreement will have agreed to go through binding individual arbitration before being allowed to join any class action lawsuit, with a Sony appointed arbitrator. If you don’t sign the agreement, then you won’t be allowed to use PSN, but you can opt out of the arbitration only by sending a letter to Sony HQ detailing your wishes, and within 30 days of signing the original agreement, and of course, all of these details were “hidden” in the wordy user agreement. I’m not going to comment on whether this is an underhanded move by Sony or not, but all I will say is that this is exactly what you would expect from such a company, and probably why it’s such an attractive target for hackers.

Diablo III could be a great game, but Blizzard are doing all they can to ruin it with "always-on" DRM and MMO restrictions, without any of the MMO benefits, in the single player mode

Diablo III is an eagerly awaited game, and Blizzard has a great reputation as a game producer. But the company’s insistence on using always-on DRM, they say for anti-cheating purposes, not anti-piracy, could really hurt their reputation, not to mention sales of the game. A recent play of the beta version seems to show a lot of quirks related to the always-on DRM, including the inability to pause games, and game glitches whenever the connection goes down (and it went down a lot, thanks to the flaky beta Blizzard servers), and eventually users get  thrown back to the main menu, losing unsaved progress. Hopefully, the final version will not be as “crippled”, but without adding in a true offline mode, Blizzard is always going to set themselves up to fail. The good news is that there’s still a lot of time between now and the game’s release, so enough public pressure could make Blizzard do the right thing.

And that’s all that was for the week. I’m off to play Starcraft 2 in 1080p, extreme quality mode (which is more than playable at 50/60 FPS on my new 6850, at least when the on screen unit count isn’t too high). See you next week.

As for news this week, not a lot, but good in quality always makes up for quantity. And after last week’s acidically toned mega long post, I think this week’s will be a lot “better”, well, hopefully shorter anyway.

Copyright news up front, I’ll start with a news post that I’m actually quite proud of, because I actually spend like more than 10 minutes “researching” it (aka copying what others reputable news organisations have posted), and it also involved use of arithmetic and statistics, two of my favourites things based on the stuff I like to write on a regular basis (NPD analysis, and weekly Blu-ray stats analysis).

This is what the MPAA thinks a movie pirate's movie collection will look like if they stopped pirating, by spending $1,000 more every year on legal goods

But full credit to the MPAA for releasing the info-graphic that I based my “analysis” on, which came to the conclusion that, if the MPAA’s numbers in regards to piracy rates and the cost to the economy are true, it means that every pirate would be spending $1,000 more every year buying legal content. The MPAA’s “statistics” are mostly conjecture, and (in my opinion, wildly inaccurate) estimations. Because you can’t really estimate losses due to piracy, because this would require knowing what pirates would do if they did not pirate any more. This is impossible to calculate because, one, you can’t guess what a group of largely independent people will and will not do, and two, there’s not way to stop piracy and force these people to “do the right thing”. But let’s give the MPAA the benefit of the doubt and let’s say their figures are correct, then what the MPAA is effectively saying is that probably 25% of all Net users in the United States are pirates, and that each pirate is costing the creative industries $1,000 per year, per person, to get to the $58 billion yearly losses that the MPAA mentions. If the MPAA counts every instance of copyright theft as a loss of revenue for the full price of said product, then $1,000 is probably about right. But this is misleading to the extreme, as it would be like saying if jewel thieves didn’t steal $1m worth of diamonds from a jewellery store, they would have purchased the $1m worth of diamonds (I wanted to use my usual car theft analogy, but I think I’ve gone over my allowed quota for the year). And any theft analogy is incorrect anyway, as file sharing is not theft – it’s not paying for stuff you should have, like reading a magazine at a news stand without paying, but it’s quite different than say shoplifting the same magazine.

What’s more disturbing for me, as opposed to a rather harmless, but propaganda-ish infographic, is the MPAA getting involved at the law enforcement level when it comes to anti-piracy operations, even those that are outside of the US. Of course, infographics and misleading stats help the MPAA scare politicians into giving them this sort of access, so this cannot be discounted either. What brings me to this is the news this week that newly leaked Wikileaks documents show the MPAA and the IFPI, two lobby groups, all involved in high level discussions with South Korean anti-piracy law enforcement agencies, and with ICE detailing their operations against warez topsites, the sites that are acts as the point of origin for pirated content on the Internet. On one hand, you might say that having an industry group involved in tackling the industry’s own problems makes sense, but if it’s the industry’s problem, then why is a government agency and two governments, spending precious tax payer resources, to tackle the problem that many experts say are the industry’s own creation anyway, due to outdated business models? This whole idea comes from politicians believing that copyright theft *is* a $58 billion per year problem, but it isn’t, and it’s not costing 300,000 jobs a year. If you want to make such flimsy conclusions from nothing but wild guesses, then I have a few more I would like to make, such as that piracy creates jobs by allowing website operators to make money to provide  content to people who had no means to pay for it in the first place. And the people enjoying pirated content end up spending their money on other more essential services and products, and their money won’t end up in the pockets of greedy studios who are already making record profits, or end up giving more money to rich, spoilt Hollywood stars and autotuned pop musicians.

And if the government is to spend tax payer resources to help a well to do industry, while others are struggling, and to do it at the expense of one of the most innovative and fast growing industries, the Internet industry, then this will hurt the economy even more. Which is why a “who’s who” of the Internet business has come out attacking the MPAA/RIAA backed PROTECT IP act, which, despite the controversy, is gaining support in Congress (lobbying money helps soothes the aches from migraines, back aches, and lack of conscience). The founders of Twitter, Zynga, FourSquare, and key people from StackExchange, LinkedIn, and Tim O’Reilly, yes, *that* Tim O’Reilly, has signed a letter asking Congress not to go ahead with PROTECT IP, as it could hurt small Internet businesses, and the broad nature of the act means that it could hurt innovation as well. This comes after more than 100 law professors also signed an open letter asking Congress to reconsider, and after Internet pioneers and top engineers also writing a similar letter urging caution when it comes to messing around with DNS. Hmm, it seems that open letters are not a very effect form of mass action, or the US is run by politicians that don’t care for expert opinion as much as they care about where their next campaign contribution is going to come from. Or both.

Is Righthaven about to file for bankruptcy?

But there’s also good news for those that believe in karma, as Righthaven might have to file bankruptcy due to their recent legal and financial setbacks. Not only has judges started to see through Righthaven’s scheme, which in my opinion, is nothing more than a money making scheme, they’ve started punishing Righthaven by rewarding damages *against* the firm. Righthaven’s biggest mistakes is that they haven’t been able to avoid going to court, and they haven’t been able to do so because the people they’re suing weren’t willing to give up so easily. It’s one thing to sue movie pirates, but to sue those that are interested enough in the news to copy/paste articles and post it on their own blogs, is just asking for trouble. These are clearly opinionated people, who love a good fight, and will stand up for themselves out of principle, even if it end up costing them more money in the process – and these are not the right “targets” for mass copyright lawsuits. And then there’s the news that Righthaven’s second largest client, MediaNews Group, has now pulled out, leaving Stephens Media, which are also the money behind Righthaven, as their only big client. And even that money may no be as forthcoming as before, as Righthaven have apparently asked a judge if they can delay paying the $34,000 or so they owe to one of the “targets”, as they’re having trouble coming up with the cash. If Righthaven does go under, nobody would shed a tear for them, as to paraphrase the new MediaNews Group chief, it was a stupid idea to being with.

It’s not the first time Christofer Sundberg has spoken out against gaming DRM, but it’s always good to hear from developers on the issue. Sundberg is the founder of Avalanche Studios, the makers of the Just Cause series amongst other games. And this week, Sundberg let the world know what he thought of the latest trend in using “always-on” DRM. Suffice to say, he’s not a big fan, mainly because in his opinion, in this day and ages when piracy is rampant and people have a lot of “choice”, even if some are illegal, if publishers are not providing extra incentive for consumers, then they’re doing something wrong. “Always-on” DRM in fact takes away incentive for consumers to pay for games, and even those that do, will have to rely on pirate solutions to play the game without annoying interruptions. For Sundberg, it’s also about trust, and he believes that “always-on” DRM basically says to the paying customer: “Thank you for buying our game, we trust you as far as we can throw you”. Instead, developers and publishers should listen to gamers, even though that don’t buy the games, more – listen to their suggestions, make them feel like part of the development process (because they are a part of it, the end “using it” part of it at least). But Sundberg also stated that it’s mostly up to publishers as to what kind of DRM to use, and if Avalanche’s publishers decide to use “always-on” DRM, there’s not much he can do about it, even if his whole studio will be up in arms against such a move. And this also reminds me to play Just Cause 2 a bit more, since I haven’t really played it after getting it on Steam – I’m such a reverse pirate when it comes to games sometimes, I buy a lot (usually on sale), and then never play them!

In HD/3D news, it’s a contractual obligation for the  WNR to cover a rumour about Blu-ray coming to the Xbox 360 at least once twice a year, and so with much regret, I bring you the latest rumour.

To be fair, it now makes a lot more sense for Blu-ray on Xbox 360 than even just a year (and a bit) ago, mainly due to the new, slimmer, quieter, faster, stronger (and now less shiny) Xbox 360. And with games coming on multiple DVDs, perhaps Blu-ray is also finally needed for games, although due to noise and loading speed issues, it’s always better to install games to the built-in HDD – so you really only need to do a single disc swap for a game that requires 2-discs, during the install process, and while Blu-ray removes the need to do this, the extra cost of getting the add-on drive would negate any benefit when it comes to gaming, leaving only the benefit of being able to play Blu-ray movies. But with Blu-ray standalone players available for so cheap these days, you can get a budget standalone for the expected $50 cost of the add-on, and so having a Blu-ray add-on doesn’t even make that much sense for movies either. And with Blu-ray competing against Microsoft’s preferred streaming platforms, that’s another reason why Microsoft is in no hurry to launch a Blu-ray enabled Xbox 360.

And that brings us finally to gaming. The NPD report for August is out, and I should have the analysis up in a few days. While only Microsoft and Nintendo provided hardware data for this month, Microsoft again provided some extra info that allows for the PS3 numbers to be deduced.

Despite the PS3 $50 price cut (coming in at the middle point of the month), the Xbox 360 was still comfortably the best selling home based console of the month, selling some 41% more units than the now discounted PS3. This is probably why Sony felt the need to withhold sales data yet again, because many, including myself, predicted the PS3 to at least give the Xbox 360 a run for its money this month, but it did not happen. Maybe, with a full month of discounting on hand, the PS3 will put up more of a fight, but September is a huge month for the Xbox 360 due to the release of Gears of War 3, and with Battlefield 3 and MW 3 coming in October and November respectively, these will again heavily favour the Xbox 360, so it looks to be a good holiday period for the console, even if Kinect Star Wars has now been delayed until after Christmas.

And on that note, I shall end this week’s WNR. See you in a week’s time.