First up in copyright news, a recent trend has seen companies take advantage of the one sided copyright laws around the world to make money from “stopping” piracy. It’s actually not so much stopping, as that wouldn’t be good for business, but rather, using legal threats to get people to cough up. I posted about companies like DigiProtect and DigiRights Solutions doing exactly this sort of thing, and refining their business down to a fine art in terms of who to threaten, based on their ability and willingness to pay up, for example.

The funny thing was that most of the information I found in regards to these organisations were from interviews and presentations that people from these companies gave, quite openly. Obviously, there are still large parts of what they do that these companies would still rather keep secret. But secrets have a way to become well known facts thanks to the Internet, and now we have leaked documents showing us the inner workings of such an operation. One thing revealed was that, due to bad publicity, one law firm has already pulled out of this business, but it appears most of their staff went to a new law firm that obviously didn’t mind the bad publicity. Another thing revealed is the strategy to sue people who downloaded pirated porn, as the extra embarrassment and the instinct for most people to want to make the issue go away, whether they downloaded the porno or not, becomes extra incentive for people to pay the required amount. From everything that’s been released, leaked or public confessions, it’s clear that these companies prey on people’s fears of lawsuits, or public embarrassment, in order to maximize profit. But if these companies are acting within the law, then there’s nothing legally wrong with what they’re doing, even if it feels like bullying. It’s the laws themselves that allow for these things to happen, and it will continue to happen as long as these laws are biased towards one side.

And so the bullying goes on. Michael Fricklas, general cousel at Viacom,  has even admitted that suing downloaders is bullying. With the resources available to mega corporations like Viacom, suing individuals is the kind of one sided fight that really isn’t a fight at all. “Terrorism”, is what Mr. Fricklas called it. In the same candid discussion to a bunch of students at Yale, Mr. Fricklas also attacked DRM, at least the older kinds, as “really bad”, preferring fair use as the way forward. It’s all very nice to hear, but this is from the same company that is suing YouTube for people who upload videos that help to promote Viacom’s content, so you’d have to take all of this with a grain of salt. Obviously suing YouTube/Google is a bit more challenging and less like bullying than suing an individual, but YouTube now allows for “fair use” with its profit sharing programs, so why hasn’t Viacom dropped their lawsuit?

Verizon is the latest ISP to bow down to RIAA demands to pass on infringement notices

Speaking of lawsuits, the Australian AFACT vs iiNet trial continues, with closing statements by iiNet being made over last week. For those that haven’t been keeping track, the lawsuit centers around movie studios wanting to make ISPs responsible for their customer’s downloads, unless the ISPs act as copyright cops for the studios. The week 5 update thread for the trial is here. iiNet is at least making a stand, unlike ISPs in the US that have already bowed to the demands of the RIAA to pass on infringement notices to customers, the latest major ISP to do so is Verizon. The notices are designed to scare people enough so they stop downloading, but as such, Verizon and co have no plans to pass on customer details to the RIAA, and the RIAA has not indicated that they wish to pursue individual in court, something they’ve already said they would stop doing. So just how much fear these infringement notices will instill is debatable, unless the RIAA is really naive enough to think that some of the downloaders are actual unaware that what they’re doing is illegal, and that these notices serve as a timely reminder.

Oh, and remember that Lily Allen story from a couple of months ago where the singer publicly came out to support the industry’s attempts at copyright clampdown, and was subsequently, how would you kids say it, “pwned” in the process when it was revealed that she distributed pirated songs herself on her website? Anyway, the latest pearl of wisdom from Miss Allen is that she is absolutely fine with people downloading her songs illegally, as long as they burn the songs to CDs and then sell them on. Yes, that’s right, it’s not a typo. You see, if you sell these illegally obtained songs, and thus commit real piracy by profiting from it, you are actually just giving value to these songs, and so that’s alright.

The latest update in The Pirate Bay saga (I still have no idea whether they’ve been sold or not) is that the tracker is now officially dead and won’t be rising again. But thanks to the active pursuit of the RIAA and MPAA, new BitTorrent technology means that trackers are no longer really necessary, which means the decentralization of BitTorrent is approaching completion. When it does, BitTorrenting will be practically unstoppable. And with Magnet links, you don’t even need .torrent files anymore, so really, sites like The Pirate Bay can now only need to provide a link consisting of what appears to be a random set of letters and numbers, and really, can they be sued for that?

In HD news, Warner has a new offer that allows you to trade in your old DVDs for Blu-ray movies. You don’t get the Blu-ray movies for free, but they are discounted. It’s a nice idea in theory, but only a small range of less than spectacular Blu-ray movies are available, and the discounts don’t add up to much if you’re already getting them cheaply from Amazon.

Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy is becoming a very popular combination

It appears that the studio’s new weapon to promote Blu-ray is to try and kill of DVDs as soon as possible. The trade in offer is one thing, but Universal’s plans to introduce Blu-ray/DVD combos, just like Disney, will probably do more wean people off DVDs especially if their plan to discontinue the DVD only versions of these movies is true. It’s very likely though that these combos would come at a higher price than their DVD only cousins, and I’m not sure if that actually helps to put people onto Blu-ray or to put them onto piracy. It doesn’t really seem fair to “tax” DVD owners for the sake of promoting Blu-ray.

And following YouTube’s announcement that 1080p video is now available, and it is (hover your mouse over the HD icon and select between 720p and 1080p), there’s more good news on this front. I talked about the performance implications, in that 50% of an Intel C2D E8500 is going to be kept busy decoding the 1080p video, but the good news is that now both Nvidia and ATI will offer GPU acceleration support for Flash video, which should see that 50% fall below 10%. All ATI Radeon HD 4000 series cards and the new 5700 and 5800 (and newer) cards will be supported, as well as most Nvidia cards since the 8000 series. While we’re not talking about Blu-ray quality video, but it really is a significant step towards digital delivery of HD content. Once bandwidth becomes cheaper and connection speeds improve, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why Blu-ray quality video can’t be delivered online.

There’s a bunch of PS3 news, some of it HD related, but I’ll post them in the gaming section …

And lastly in gaming, PS3 firmware 3.10 has been released. This firmware adds Facebook support, which also came to the Xbox 360. But what’s a PS3 firmware without a chorus of complains, and this one seems to be particularly nasty from reading posts on the PS3 boards. I haven’t updated my firmware since 2.43, and don’t plan to unless some must have Blu-ray update arrives, or that Sony finally owns up to the problem and come up with some sort of solution that everyone is satisfied with, because I’m not paying $250 to repair it if things goes badly, which I suspect it will.

If the GeForce 3D kit is any indication, 3D Blu-ray will have quite a few hardware requirements

One of the “must have Blu-ray updates” might be for the 3D feature, which Sony says that PS3s will be able to support via a “simple” firmware update. Of course, you’ll still need a bunch of other equipment before you can have a 3D home theater experience, so it might be something to look out for if you’re buying a new TV (look for specific support for 3D, or failing that, at least 120 Hz refresh).

Another new to Blu-ray feature is a new Digital Copy feature Sony plans to introduce that copies the movie straight off the Blu-ray disc to your PS3 and then onto your PSP. The previous method required a PC, with a special DVD-ROM and unlock codes. Still, all these are just temporary solutions until Managed Copy arrives for Blu-ray on December 4th. There’s some confusion as to what December 4th means for Managed Copy, but the summary is that after this date, all new Blu-ray releases will have to support Managed Copy. What this means is a bit vague at the moment since the hardware (and software) for MC is not set to arrive until next year, but suffice to say that any movie released after December 4th should allow you to make a managed copy from them eventually. It is mandatory, meaning all discs must support it, and it took a fight to get MC being made as a mandatory requirement, so at least that’s some of the confusion out of the way. The news post for all three of these PS3 stories, none of which has much to do with gaming mind, can be found here.

And that was the week that was. Have a nice one.

Making a DVD menu is made simpler by Womble EasyDVD

As expected, following last week’s news blitz, this week has been relatively quiet. Which is a good thing because I managed to fill the gap with a new DVD authoring guide for Womble EasyDVD. Having played with the software for a week, I can say that it’s very easy to use and mostly intuitive. There are a couple of missing features such as subtitle support and multiple audio support, which I hope Womble can fix in future releases (this being their first effort after all, so you can’t have everything), but it’s mostly what you would expect, and the menu creation offers a bit more flexibility than your average authoring suite, without ever going into the semi-pro territory (complete with the much steeper learning curve) of tools like DVD-lab Pro. The other thing that was available this week was the October NPD US video game sales stats, I wrote the analysis for it yesterday here. The PS3 didn’t manage to sell over the Wii as it had in September, but it’s the Xbox 360 that’s the loser in terms of the recent price wars it seems, although it’s doing fantastically in software (for now, thanks to its larger install base). The coming months should give us an even clearer picture of what’s in store for 2010, and Microsoft will be hoping to see similar scenes as last year this time as people enthusiastically grab their cheaper holiday bundles. But I wouldn’t bet on it. Anyway, onto this week’s news.

In copyright related news, the BBC’s proposal for adding DRM to their HD broadcasts has been denied by the British Office of Communications. But the idea isn’t entirely dead and the proposed DRM scheme may appear later on, with existing hardware likely to support such a DRM scheme if it is ever introduced.

The MPAA are still of course campaigning vigorously in the US to try and get the FCC to allow them to introduce  Selectable Output Control. The old “pro consumer” argument was brought out, to argue for SOC’s use in bringing new release movies faster to the home if the studios were more confident of its resistance to piracy. Many studios are already doing this without the fake security blanket that is SOC. But SOC is just a trojan horse for the MPAA, because once you can control one aspect of how someone watches TV, you can then control all aspects of it eventually. If the MPAA and their cohorts can get away with banning all  TV recordings, then does anyone really doubt that this is exactly what they would do? Pro consumer indeed.

Further prove that movie studios really don’t give a crap about the people that are supposedly their customers – a free community Wi-Fi service that brings tremendous benefits to a huge number of people has been shut down all because of a single piracy complaint, from Sony (who else?). It’s a case of the studios exploiting people’s fear over lawsuits, and an innovation that helps the local economy, local law enforcement, small businesses and visitors is attacked and destroyed. Obviously the people who decided to shut down the network, as the cost of adding anti-piracy filters is excessive, must shoulder some of the blame for this over reaction, but the MPAA’s reaction to the story shows the depth of their arrogance. Instead of calling for a reasoned approach and balanced response, that a single movie download does not constitute a widespread piracy operation, they used the occasion to further spread their anti-piracy propaganda. But that’s what they are. They are an industry lobby group and they’re paid to say and do these things. What is really wrong is politicians and others in power taking their word as gospel, and acting without taking into consideration the serious consequences  for issues like privacy, and the economic damage that would occur if the MPAA’s wishes were turned into reality.

iiNet's freezone: damned if you do, damned if you don't

It’s week 4 of the Australian AFACT vs iiNet trial, and it was closing statements time.  Once again, you can check out a summary of the week’s events here, but the arguments from both side remain the same. The AFACT thinks iiNet is basically a piracy provider, even suggesting that  the ISP’s use of phrases such as “happy downloading” was in fact an encouragement for people to download the latest Harry Potter movie. And even iiNet’s attempt at promoting legal content, through their freezone service, was attacked. You would think the movie studios should be delighted that ISPs are providing quota-less downloads for legal content as a way to to provide further incentives to go the legal route, but you would be wrong. The argument is that because quota is not used, it leaves more free quota for downloading pirated movies. The same argument was made for iiNet increasing download quotas for their customers, as the AFACT assumes anyone who needs a large download quota must be a movie pirate. This “sky is falling” and “you’re a pirate until proven otherwise” attitude that these lobby groups have adopted is working wonders in their political lobbying activities and have proved useful in the legal arena as well in the past. Our only hope is the judge can see through these exaggerated truth to balance the need for anti-piracy and the need to protect consumer rights, and the rights of ISPs to operate without being burdened by the responsibility to prevent piracy. Surely the industry that profits, often in record amounts, from the movies and TV shows that are being pirated should be the ones responsible, at least financially, for the anti-piracy operations, not the ISP or its subscribers. Either put up, or shut up.

Most independent game developers say that piracy is not a significant problem, at least for now, according to the latest survey. While most fear that it can become a big problem in the future, only 10% felt that it was a serious problem at the moment. One thing to note about  piracy, including games and movies, is that people who do have the ability to pay for content will usually do so. It is only those that never had any intention to pay for anything, some because they don’t have the capability, that are the more dedicated when it comes to sourcing pirated content online, and these people were never likely to provide any sort of income for the content owners, now or in the future. So the key is to at the very least increase the number of people who have the capability to pay for content, and that can only be achieved through pricing changes. Digital distribution allows this to occur without the cost being a huge issue (certainly compared to physical media and the associated costs like packaging, shipping  …), and even more reasonable pricing can open up previously untapped markets, such as developing countries where piracy rates are even higher. Or the alternative is to fight against logic and try to stop all piracy through technology that has proved inconvenient at best, and completely unworkable at worst, or through ever harsher legislation that completely disregard some of society’s basic principles in relation to justice and human rights.

Microsoft banning 1 million Xbox 360 accounts over suspected system modding (which allows for piracy) may seem excessive, but console piracy is actually not a huge problem and that’s worth examining. The anti-piracy success is largely to do with technology, all games consoles carry some form of DRM for games and being closed systems, they are easier to enforce (unless somebody decides to mod their Xbox 360, that is). The DRM systems used are also fairly straight forward, usually just a DVD check, and with digital downloads being available, even the DVD check won’t be necessary anymore. There are still many aspects of the DRM system that are inconvenient, such as when one needs to move from one console to another, but there are at least solutions and workarounds. And I guess more reasonable pricing comes into it. Games are expensive, but given the number of hours of entertainment they provide, it’s still better value compared to your typical movie or MP3. Consoles are also now very good at providing demos for new games, thus eliminating the need for people to “play before they pay” (which I admit is often used as an excuse for piracy, and play doesn’t always lead to pay). They certainly aren’t going out there lobbying the government to throw people off the Internet for downloading games, or getting ISPs to work as their spies, or suing individuals for using pirated games.

HD news now. Not much on Blu-ray to report, but the holiday season is upon us and there will be a steady stream of big releases to give the format a big boost. But HD is more than just Blu-ray, and the future of HD may be SD.

Blockbuster tries SD digital rental

Not SD, as in standard definition, but SD as in the memory storage format. Blockbuster is trialling a new way to rent movies by allowing customers to download them to their SD memory cards. These movies expire after 30 days if unwatched, or 48 hours after the first viewing. Obviously DRM is involved, but further details are a bit sketchy. If compatibility with hardware players, then the DRM used may be the SD card’s own internal DRM system, CPRM. This would then allow the actual video file to be unencrypted, and playable in a wide variety of players, probably. The lack of DRM on your common USB stick may be why they didn’t go with the more common format.

The other path for HD is digital distribution. The main stumbling block has always been bandwidth, and also processing power (many of the Netbooks you see today will struggle with 1080p content). But YouTube is not waiting around for things to catch up, and will roll out 1080p playback support next week. The link to the left has a couple of further links to test videos that you can already use to see if your system is fast enough for 1080p. On my Intel C2D E8500, I recorded 40 to 50% CPU usage, which is reasonable, but you can see why some Netbooks will struggle. With GPU assisted decoding (unfortunately Flash does not yet support ATI based solutions), the CPU usage can be greatly reduced. This was proven when I downloaded the YouTube 1080p video (about 100 MB for 4 minutes worth) and used PowerDVD 9 to play it back (as it supports GPU assisted decoding). CPU usage dropped to below 10%, and my ATI Radeon HD 4850 was hardly worked (about 5% usage) despite the CPU savings. So it seems for 1080p video delivered through YouTube, most modern computers should be able to handle it, some better than others depending on whether GPU assist is available or not now or in the future. The bandwidth usage is reasonable, roughly the same as downloading a DVD movie (so the 1080p quality isn’t as good as say Blu-ray, not really close yet), but it will still use a large chunk of people’s quotas.

And lastly in gaming, not much to link to, except for the NPD analysis, which I’ve already linked to above. I think we finally have a proper console war on now, where there’s not much between the three top consoles, the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3. The Wii has the superior hardware numbers, but is weak on games, especially third party ones and ones that appeal to hardcore gamers. The PS3 has only started to do well to suggest it may take top spot eventually, but there’s still some catching up to do both in hardware and software. The Xbox 360 is enjoying software sales, at least in the US, for now, but it won’t last forever if it the last two months becomes a trend and they continue to sell less consoles than the PS3. But they have a great multi-player community and that counts for more and more these days. And of course, Natal, which may be beaten to the punch, innovative software wise, by PS3 Eye Pet (a new category of games, using the buzz word  ”augmented reality”) . But if Eye Pet is a success, then that may actually bode well for Natal, since it plans to offer similar things but in a more mainstream, and technologically advanced fashion. The only problem is the late release date, now semi confirmed as November 2010, which may be too late to help if things stay the way they are.

See you next week.

Copyright news first, and there are quite a few to go through. Right after my last WNR, news came that torrent tracker UK-T was shut down, and some kind of police action was involved, but as no anti-piracy agency had claimed responsibility at that time, nobody was really sure what went down. Still not really sure what happened, but from leaked reports, it suggest that the police had raided the homes of several of the site’s admins. The database was wiped before the police could get their hands on it, and so the subscribers are safe. One tracker down, only 362,621 to go.

Demonoid: Tracker back online. Database corruption, or something more sinister?

But while one torrent tracker was down, another came back up. Demonoid has been down for ages now, supposedly due to a database problem, but the tracker is at least up again, if not the main website. I’ve noticed that several torrent sites have experienced similar database problems recently, so it could be just a coincidence, or perhaps something more sinister? If it was just an accident, then these accidents have actually done more to stop torrent sites than all the legal actions. Take The Pirate Bay for example. The latest attempt to shut the site down, or at least prevent access to it in Norway, has failed. The entertainment lobby had asked the Norwegian court to get Norway’s largest ISP Telenor to shut down access to the torrent site, but the court said “Nei” as they didn’t think an ISP should be the one deciding which websites its customers get access to, and which it should block. And the implication of this ruling is that ISPs are not really responsible for what their customers get up to, since if they were, then the court would have told them to shut off access. To me, this is common sense,  and Telenor’s spokesman’s analogy of not being able to sue a ladder manufacturer because someone used the ladder to commit a burglary again seems to make sense to me. But common sense is in short supply these days when it comes to the copyright debate.

The failed attempt to shut down The Pirate Bay again deals another blow to the MPAA and their friends, but do they really want the torrent site to be shut down? According to a new study, they should be careful of what they wish for, because during the few days that The Pirate Bay was down, the number of torrent trackers and websites dramatically increased, and downloading continued. The way modern torrent clients work, even without a working tracker, downloads can continued thanks to a technology called DHT (Distributed Hashed Table), or so called trackerless downloads. The download speed is sometimes affected, but not always. And with TPB down, many sees it as an opportunity to become the new TPB, and so naturally, the number of torrent and trackers will surge during this period. It just shows how hard it is to actually try and stop file sharing, and I think it may actually be impossible. All the resources that have been spent on trying to stop file sharing seems like a big waste to me. And even more so when you consider the stats that show that people who download illegal songs actually spend more on music than those who don’t. This again seems like common sense to me, because people who download music (legally, or illegally) are the ones that love music, and many are using free downloads as a way to search for new songs and artists. This “buy before you try” argument has been made for other content as well, like games, although the percentage that converts from try to buy is rather low, nevertheless, there is a percentage. Music especially I think is something that you do need to try before you buy, that’s why we have radio stations that broadcast songs, for free. The music industry, and others, should be exploiting this phenomenon to their advantage instead of trying to shut it down. Spotify, the free online music service, seems to signal a possible future direction, basically taking the radio model online.

The MPAA's propaganda ministry is busy these days

There’s still more copyright news, we’re barely half way through. The MPAA has been busy lobbying the FCC for various things. And as a concerted campaign, they had the US 60 Minutes broadcast a copyright propaganda film that tried to link file sharing with organized crime. There are links between counterfeit goods and physical media piracy with organized crime, but online file sharing that’s mostly free? The downloading communism poster immediately springs to mind (see right). More propaganda as the MPAA says the Internet will die if piracy is not stopped. This is the same MPAA that has been trying to kill the Internet for ages now, that its members and supporters have publicly stated their wish that the Internet had never existed, so why are they so worried about its health now? And the MPAA is not just happy pushing their agenda on the US, they’re going global as well. You can just see their dirty fingerprints over the proposed copyright treaty that will be discussed in South Korea this month. The worst part is that the treaty is being kept super top secret, even though it affects everyone. Of course, the Internet being the Internet, part of the discussions were leaked and it was indeed what we fear most. Three-strikes, global DMCA, ISP policing … are just some of the MPAA’s favourite things, and all will be tabled at the secret discussions later this month. Sigh.

Sarkozy's defence of major US corporations' interests has even led to a fight with the EU

Three-strikes and ISP policing, very popular at the moment, but the EU has decided that something needs to be done to protect consumer rights, even if what they did was not nearly enough. But it’s a start. The EU has decided that Internet access is a basic right, and as such, cutting people’s connections off will require more than just an email from the MPAA. The EU has ruled that a fair process must be in place before bannings can occur, which is less than the full criminal trial that consumer and Internet advocates had first wanted. This all came after France wanted to introduce something that legalized their three-strikes plan (the original one that didn’t require the judicial system, which their own constitutional council found to be, well, unconstitutional), and that angered pretty much everyone at the EU, and the battle has been fought ever since, leading to this latest compromise. Just what has happened to France, a country that I’ve always considered to be quite liberal and would usually be at the front lines fighting *against* the three-strikes nonsense, and not on the side of mega US corporations. Freedom and liberty is also another thing I associate with France, but they just seem to be one the wrong side of that as well because time and time again, it has been shown that copyright laws have been abused to stifle free speech and the critics of corporations. The Electronic Frontier Foundation even has a Hall of Shame for the companies and organizations that have abused copyright laws for their own (non copyright related) benefits. It just shows that when laws are so biased towards one side, they are prime candidates for abuse. And for me it’s hard to digest the fact that a country like France is in there arguing to make these laws even more one sided, and even more open to abuse. But with a guy like Sarkozy at the helm, now using the nations divisions for his political gain, no one expect anything less really. Hall of shame indeed.

The global DMCA thing is particularly annoying, although not that much of an impact since most countries have adopted some draconian form of it. One country is Denmark, and one citizen is doing his unique way of protesting the illogical nature of the laws. Under the DMCA, or the Danish equivalent, any attempt (even unsuccessful) at breaking DRM is considered illegal. However, Danish law allows for DVDs to be ripped for legal home use, and so the two Danish laws actually conflict each other. This is why Henrik Andersen confessed his “crimes” of ripping hundreds of his legally purchased DVDs for use in his home theater setup, to a Danish anti-piracy agency. Under the DMCA, Mr Andersen is guilty and should be fined, if not jailed. But just whose interests has he actually hurt? Certainly not the movie studios that he purchased his DVDs from.

Still more copyright stuff, bear with me. The third week of the Australian AFACT vs iiNet trial continues, and please refer to my summary forum post to keep yourself updated on this rather important trial, possibly the most important in the world right now concerning the copyright issue, as it seeks to decide if ISPs should be turned into copyright cops.

And in all this bad news, there’s a glimmer of hope for a fair solution that everyone can live with. Google/YouTube is finding that their compromise solution to the copyright issue, of sharing revenue with content owners if they choose not to remove stuff from YouTube, might be working. And working well, as a third of all their YouTube revenue is coming from this trial program. And it’s not just the extra revenue, the exposure on YouTube leads to more business opportunities for content owners, like the case of Mr Bean, the popular UK comedy series, in which the content owners decided to keep the user uploaded clips online, as opposed to removing it, and then found that it actually led to deals with TV stations countries that have never heard of Mr Bean before. So a bit of technical piracy actually led to a successful TV deal, and all while still making money from YouTube  profit sharing. And yet others, like Viacom, are still hell bent on suing YouTube into oblivion. Shorted sighted or what?

Well that was a big section wasn’t it. On to HD news now, although it’s still copyright related, I’m afraid. Managed Copy, the so called legal solution to movie ripping, will soon be upon us. December 4th marks the date that MC becomes a reality on Blu-ray.

Managed Copy in a Pioneer demo for the movie Bolt

I’m excited about MC, because it signals the first step that the movie industry has taken to legitimize the need for people to be able to separate the movie from the disc that it came on. With today’s increasingly digital world and sophisticated home theater solutions, being able to have everything as pure digital data is increasingly useful. Imagine having all your DVD and Blu-ray movies stored digitally and accessible with a few clicks of your remote. It makes categorizing easier, searching even more so, and it will be faster as well, and quieter due to the lack of a spinning optical drive. But to make this reality requires you to break several laws at the moment, but MC might be just what is needed to solve this problem.

But while I’m excited, the movie studios are less so apparently, as there’s just no support for MC despite the December 4th deadline. I suppose this is something whose success and popularity will only be apparent after it has been introduced, and just like the “Digital Copy” feature that the movie studios have only now grown to love, it’s going to take a time before they overcome their fears. And this could be the feature to keep Blu-ray in the game when it eventually goes head to head with digital distribution  (with Best Buy the latest to get into the digital download market). Whether you get it from the Internet, or from a USB stick, or on a Blu-ray disc, in the end, it’s the digital movie that’s important, not the way it arrives to your home. And for HD content, Blu-ray disc (sent via the postal system) may still be the best solution, from a cost and even speed perspective (see pigeon test).

And lastly in gaming, Sony’s losses from the PS3 have now topped $4.6 billion. But Sony is hoping to add perhaps a couple of more billions to this figure, as the more they lose, it means the more PS3 consoles they are selling, and that’s a good thing for them in the long term, if extremely hurtful in the short. In the post I made there are also links to the losses being made by Nintendo and Microsoft. The amazing figures for Nintendo, in which they’ve been in profit every year since the stats were first available, shows that even though they’ve had a few failed consoles in between, their strategy of concentrating on fun first, and technology second, is still paying off.

And that’s the news for this week. I’m willing to bet that next week will be super quiet as news sources regurgitate this week’s news items in various flavours. Oh, I got my graphics card back from warranty (the first one, with the broken fan). It’s now working great and the average temperature was about 10 degrees (Celsius) lower than when I first got the card, meaning that even when the fan was spinning, it was still overheating.

Let’s start with the copyright news. Anti-piracy or anti-terrorism? Which is more important? Now this might seem a fairly straightforward question to answer, but it isn’t so in the UK.

Britain's spy agency is against the three-strikes anti-piracy law

The country’s chief intelligence agency, MI5, has come out against the government’s plan to implement a three-strikes anti-piracy legislation. And the police are siding with them as well. It’s not so much that they’re against the notion of anti-piracy, it’s just that the means in which the government wants to pursue it will make their anti-crime and national security operations much much more difficult. The reason is that by making your average ISP a spying organisation, it also makes every Net enabled citizen the subject of spying, and it’s not the secretive kind either, it’s all out in the open. This will then force even the average Joe to adopt better security to overcome this spying, which effectively means encrypted Internet connections might become the norm. This thus makes police and intelligence agencies’ work much harder, as even “listening” in on to characters of minor importance might mean an expensive and time consume decryption process. And of course, the encryption means that the anti-piracy operation will also fail. So the government has a choice to make, to either protect the country from real criminals or to go after kids who download three MP3s. The government, unfortunately, seems to have chosen the latter, and they plan to have the banning system up and running by 2011. I guess the anti-terrorism and crime lobby just doesn’t have the pull of the pro-copyright one.

The immediate plan is to introduce a warning system in the UK, where ISPs spend huge amounts of money spying on its own customers and send those suspect of piracy warning letters. If this plan doesn’t reduce piracy by 70% by April 2011, an impossible target (and possibly a deliberately chosen impossible one), then the banning penalty will be introduced. For those in the UK that plan on passively protesting this, might I suggest that you increase your piracy activities so that by April 2011, piracy will not only have not reduced, but have actually increased thanks to the warnings. Of course, I would never condone piracy, so delete those illegal files after you download them please, but this again highlights another flaw in the proposed system. Even if you do as I suggest and delete the pirated file immediately after download, you will have been recorded as having downloaded the illegal file, yet you did not use it and did not even intend to use it. Under the proposed system, intent appears to not matter, nor does actual usage of the pirated materials – the fact that you downloaded it is enough. Except it isn’t, not under any fair legal system. Further reason to protest, so Britains, download away (and delete right afterwards, of course).

If piracy means less movies like All About Steve, then that's just a bonus

The charm offensive, if you can call it that (although I do call it “offensive”), has already started from the movie studios. This week, it’s Sony Picture’s CEO writing a blog about just how bad piracy is and how it hurts the poor multi-billion dollar corporations. Hurts them so much that, they might even make less movies. And they have made less movies, apparently. Yet they have still made record profits, even in an economic downturn, so what exactly is going on here? Perhaps they’re making less crappy movies because the power of the Internet, a system designed for word of mouth type communications, has meant that crappy movies are spotted as such and flounder at the box office much faster than previously (see Bruno, and the tweets that might have savaged its box office earnings). There’s much less room, and much less tolerance for crappy movies these days. And the alternative source for releasing them is straight to DVD/Blu-ray, which I’m not sure if the movie studio CEO counts as a produced movie. Then there’s also the rising budget for movies, which leaves less for others to be made. And the credit crisis has meant that movie funding hasn’t been as free flowing as in the past. Yeah, but let’s blame it all on piracy shall we?

Of the various trials, many of them are on a break at the moment. The Pirate Bay trial, or appeals trial, has been delayed until next year as reported recently, but the movie studios aren’t happy that The Pirate Bay will still be operational until then. So they have asked the Swedish court to fine the founders of the website if they do not close it. The only problem is that the founders have consistently denied any further involvement in the running of the website, and so the website will probably remain open, if the founders get fined.

Enough copyright stuff, let’s move onto HD. If you don’t have a Blu-ray player, but want one, then the upcoming holiday sales may be just what you need. Rumours suggest that Blu-ray players will be available for as low as $49 for this year’s Black Friday sales.

Now I wouldn’t recommend you buy these players. They’re mostly superseded Profile 1.0 and 1.1 players – Profile 1.1 is still okay if you don’t need the Internet features, or video streaming service support, but 1.0 players really shouldn’t even exist on the market anymore.

But even the fully featured Profile 2.0 players can be had for less than $100, although those wanting to make their own Blu-ray movies or AVCHD/custom discs, might need to do a bit more research on just which cheap player is for them.

Netflix is coming to the PS3, first via a Blu-ray disc

But if you have a bit more cash lying around, then you might consider a PS3, because Netflix will soon be available on the console. At first, it would be a (free) Blu-ray disc with a BD-Live connection to Netflix to drive the service, but eventually, a built-in service will be available. With the recent price drops, the PS3 still represents good value as a Blu-ray player and media center, especially compared to name brand players with comparable features. This is good news for supporters of the next generation of home video (the one after Blu-ray), which many believe to be digital distribution.

This move, obviously a way to play catch up on the digital distribution front that has been spearheaded by the Xbox 360 in terms of game consoles, may also signal Sony’s reluctant move towards digital distribution. Sony will always prefer their own in house solution, using proprietary formats, and Netflix has made huge strides in the area, thanks to Blu-ray players and the Xbox 360, and Sony may not have any other choice other than to embrace a third party service. And while this won’t really hurt Blu-ray, it has the potential to do so in the future. Netflix has already said so themselves that their streaming service is gaining at the expense of the disc rental side, and once HD streaming becomes a reality (mainly waiting on bandwidth, at the moment), then the good old optical disc (and the mechanical drives that read them) might then seem quite quaint.

There’s not much gaming news that I found interesting, so I’ll keep on going with this Netflix on PS3 thing. Many have come out to say that this is a huge blow to the Xbox 360, since Netflix has been exclusive on it up until now. And since the PS3 is a better media center, which I agree thanks to its low noise, this means that the Xbox 360 will lose or something. The only problem with this argument is that Netflix isn’t exclusive to the Xbox 360, and has never been. Blu-ray players have it, your PC obviously supports it, and there were many ways to get Netflix streaming without having to use the Xbox 360. And just how many people have actually bought Xbox 360’s because it had Netflix? This isn’t a victory for the PS3 or a defeat for the Xbox 360, it’s just simply a victory for Netflix and for digital distribution. And to further drive the point, the world’s most popular home video game console doesn’t even play DVDs, let alone have any sort of media center ambitions.

And the other interesting line I heard over the week is that the recent PS3 successes is good news for PS3 owners. I think it’s good for Sony, but I’m not sure how well the PS3’s success translates to being good news for PS3 owners, especially those who shelled out full price for the console a few months before the price drop. I guess in the short terms, there will be more users for the multiplayer games. And more buyers may mean cheaper games, but that’s a highly questionable assumption. Will there be more games for the PS3? Or rather, would the PS3 have gotten less games if it had been less successful? Probably not, as the PS3 was never in danger of dying in the same way as the Sega Dreamcast. Will PS3 games be of higher quality? Possibly, but that’s more to do with developers still learning to get the best out of the PS3, as opposed to not bothering to put in the effort. But it is good news for those invested in the phony console war, to have their decisions justified, even though they can justify it everyday themselves by using it and  having fun on it. Just like those who purchased and thoroughly enjoyed their Dreamcasts.

So on that note, have a great week, enjoy and appreciate every minute, because 2012 isn’t that far away (not talking about the movie).

In copyright news, The Pirate Bay appeals trial should now be delayed until next year. This is because of the bias allegations that the TPB defence team has filed against two of the judges that were supposed to sit on the case. TPB had earlier requested a delay which was rejected, so they get what they want now anyway.

And believe it or not, this was pretty much all the news I managed to find. Sure, there were lots about MPAA’s boss saying he will quit next year when his contract runs out, but that was sort of covered in last week’s WNR in regards to the MPAA restructuring due to the studios’ assertion that the MPAA has been too soft. A few others have already left as a result.

You can tell it’s a quiet week piracy wise because when you search for piracy on Google News, most of the news stories were about the maritime kind. And maybe that’s the way it is supposed to be. Copyright holders like to make a big fuss about online piracy, but compared to what’s going on over in Somalia, I mean, it’s pretty non consequential. When I think of the Somalian pirates, I think of the “you wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy ads – heck, not only would they steal the car, they’ll steal the cargo ship the car was being transported on as well, get the crew’s DVD library, rip them, and upload them onto The Pirate Bay just for fun. Now that’s piracy!

Disney's "Keychest" sells you viewing rights, not just the movie files

And then there’s this story about Disney’s new Keychest initiative. Upon the first read, it seems just like another pointless DRM exercise, but this one might lead to something interesting, maybe even revolutionary. When you buy a movie today, you are not actually buying anything other than the movie in a particular format. And unless you get a digital copy with it, it’s pretty much locked to that format. Some argue you should be able to rip it and then convert it into another format, but if you read the license stuff and observe the US DMCA (or your country’s equivalent), then ripping it would be very much illegal. So if the digital copy was not present or isn’t iPod compatible, then to get an iPod version, you’ll have to buy it through iTunes, despite the fact that you may already have purchased the movie on Blu-ray and DVD (very likely if you’re buying a Disney Blu-ray, which usually comes with the DVD version now).

The idea behind Keychest is that instead of you buying a movie locked to a format, you simply buy a license to watch the movie, regardless of the format. Using this license, which can come in the form of a digital key or certificate, you can then download various versions of the movie for various formats. The key might come bundled with the Blu-ray/DVD version of the movie, allowing you to download the iPod version from the Internet. And, from what I’ve read, you can have multiple copies and each can be played simultaneously (obviously there would be some limit, as you don’t want one key to be able to supply the entire world with access to the movie).

Why is this a good idea? I’ve always thought that buying a movie means you’re buying the viewing rights anyway, and that you should be able to transcode it to another format. This holds true for CD to MP3 ripping, for example, but does not hold true for Blu-ray and DVD simply because there is copy protection mechanisms in the way. But buying a license technically means that regardless of where you sourced the movie, you have the right to view it since you’ve paid for it, even if the source may be of a less than legal kind. Of course, the license could limit you to downloading the movie from approved sources, for legal or commercial reasons, but you are again locked into buying formats, the only difference being that you have more choice over which format to get it on. But for a true revolution, it should mean that as long as you have a license, you can download it from anywhere, or perhaps even offer an exception that allows you to break the copy protection on discs to get the movie into the format you want. And it would all remain legal. Of course, the license may cost more than the cost of your average DVD, but such a license would also mean that you can supply your various devices and your immediate family’s various devices with copies of the movie, a “home license” if you will, and that would be very convenient indeed. And to extend things further, how about a yearly license subscriptions that allows you to enjoy all Disney movies being released for the home video market for the year?

Buy why is it also a bad idea? In one word? Control. With Keychest, you may end up giving more control over to the studios as to how you watch movies. Because while a “home license” is a good thing, the opposite means that for those without this kind of license, or those who simply purchased the DVD version and not the Keychest license, then trying to do anything other than to watch the DVD in your DVD player could be illegal. Right now, you can argue that since there’s no legal alternative, you have to rip the DVD and make a version for your portable media player. With Keychest being the legal alternative, you won’t have this argument anymore. But that’s not really a huge problem since ripping a DVD is already illegal anyway. The bigger problem is that Keychest is still another form of DRM, and that means while you may be given a huge amount of freedom with this new kind of licensing scheme, that freedom is still being “given” to you by the studios, and something given can be taken away. If Disney one day finds that Keychest is losing them a lot of money, then they can simply pull the authentication servers, and those with Keychest licenses will find them useless. This is the pitfall of all DRM schemes.

DRM free, monthly subscription, all you can download, unlimited viewing and access to all back catalogues through your set top box, game console, PC or iPod/iPhone. Now that’s what I call real freedom.

Let’s move onto high def news. I did the Blu-ray sales analysis last week, and Blu-ray sales were way up as expected. I deliberately chose not to look at the DVD sales numbers since I wanted to concentrate on how Blu-ray was doing, but when one does take into account the DVD numbers, the news isn’t as rosy.

While Blu-ray sales are up 66% compared to a year ago, Blu-ray and DVD sales combined are actually down 13.9%. What has been observed is that the drop in DVD sales has been way faster than any growth on Blu-ray, and that the industry is still hemorrhaging. I theorized before that Blu-ray might actually be partially causing the decline in DVD sales, as people upgrade their equipment and buy more expensive movies leaves then with less cash to buy movies that are not what you would call “must have’s”, especially during these economic times. I for one have cut down my movie buying to a minimum, still buying Blu-ray’s and the occasional $5 DVD movies, but I can’t justify buying “meh” movies just because they’re on sale anymore, not when I’ve just paid full price for a copy of Taken on Blu-ray. So even just looking at my own buying habits, Blu-ray sales (buys) are way up, and DVD sales are way down, and I probably end up spending less on movies as a result. Which is good, because I’d rather spend the money on video games anyway. And there in lies the problem.

DeadLands 2: The last movie to be released on HD DVD?

And then there was the whole HD DVD disaster, which wasted the time, effort and money of a lot of people, although for simple movie viewing, it was a great time and it still is if you can grab some HD DVD movies for as low as $1. Some who supported HD DVD from the get go will have lost confidence in the home video industry that allowed this sort of thing to happen (again). Those who got into HD DVD after its fall to take advantage of the fire sales, like myself, are still somewhat satisfied, but certainly won’t bother to re-buy those movies on Blu-ray again, especially when most of these movies were hardly the “must-have” variety. Either way, the whole thing a negative effect on Blu-ray and on DVD at time when it could least afford to lose more ground to video games and new forms of entertainment. But I bring up HD DVD again as it’s near to Halloween, and it has risen from the grave, sort of, for one more time at least. A new movie is being released on the dead format, and suitably, it is a zombie movie. It’s a limited collector’s edition as well, numbered and comes with a certificate and everything. The movie, DeadLands 2, is not available on Blu-ray.

And speaking of rising from death, that old “Xbox 360’s gonna have a Blu-ray drive, OGM LOL” rumour has surfaced again. This time after a misquote from Steve Ballmer, possibly taken out of context, where he was supposed to have said “you’ll be able to get Blu-ray drives as accessories”. But he was referring to the PC (in relation to Windows 7’s launch), and not the Xbox 360, but it didn’t take long for the Net to be filled with headlines of “Microsoft CEO: Xbox 360 definitely getting Blu-ray drive”. Definitely!

Ballmer said in the same interview that “the future of movies is on-demand, actually, as opposed to distribution via physical media”, which I think tells you all you need to know about Microsoft’s strategy on movies. Downloads Yes. Discs, Blu-ray in particular, No. But Windows 7 supports Blu-ray burning out of the box (although you’ll still need a software Blu-ray player to play Blu-ray movies, perhaps taking advantage of the 70% Off WinDVD Pro 2010 deal that’s available right now – a deal that was leaked, but linked to the launch of Windows 7), so Microsoft is not abandoning the format in any way. It just doesn’t see the Xbox 360 needing it.

I don’t know why this rumour gets thrown about every couple of months. There’s almost no demand from Xbox 360 users for a Blu-ray drive accessory, especially considering how cheap a standalone Blu-ray player is these days, not to mention how much better even a cheap standalone would be compared to playing movies on a game console (Sony PS3 is only acceptable with the remote add-on, but “serious” HT people still scoff at it’s lack of bitstreaming of the original PS3, its looks and the lack of an LCD display). It seems there are certain segments of the public that would view having Blu-ray on the Xbox 360 as the ultimate concession of defeat by the HD DVD group (which no longer even exists, btw), and by Microsoft for supporting the ill fated format. Toshiba’s indirect issue of a “mea culpa”, by releasing their first Blu-ray player, wasn’t enough apparently. And it’s not just admitting defeat on the HD DVD front, but if Microsoft does go Blu, then it vindicates Sony’s decision to include the Blu-ray drive in the PS3 at the cost of delays, huge losses, and slowed market penetration. Microsoft will point to their 2:1 sales lead (albeit a diminishing lead if September’s video games sales results become a norm) as vindication that not giving a crap about a built-in HD movie disc player was the right decision. The funny thing is that nobody accosts Nintendo for not even including a DVD player in the Wii, despite it having a DVD drive. Where are the rumours that the Wii is getting a software update or a Wii Shop purchase that enables DVD playback, as that would be much more believable in my opinion.

And moving on finally to gaming, despite having moved into this area about two paragraphs ago, the PS3 firmware kills the Blu-ray drive story continues, not just in court, but also with some independent PS3 fans and developers/hackers wanting people’s dead PS3s so they can do their stuff and determine just why they brick after a new firmware update.

A group is taking the PS3 apart to find out why firmware updates brick it (possibly not literally though)

They have already narrowed their suspicions down to a file that is part of the firmware package, which updates the Blu-ray drive’s firmware. Firmware updates are dangerous. The frequency in which Sony releases firmware updates has always been a cause for concern, as is their strategy of “adding value to the PS3 through software”. It’s good in theory, but you better make damn sure you do enough beta testing, on all SKUs, and to put in safeguards to prevent a bad firmware update bricking the machine. But with the frequency of updates, and the jumble of hardware (even under the same SKU), I can’t see a way for Sony to be able to ensure their firmware is 100% safe. And despite so many updates, none of them were even as big in sale (in terms of changes) as the New Xbox Experience update. The PS3 interface still looks pretty much the same as the one that came with the launch machine, except now some of these PS3s won’t play any discs at all anymore. And it’s also important to differentiate between a firmware update and a software update. With game consoles, the lines more blurred than compared to say Windows, since the hardware is much more specialised and linked with the software (hence the need for firmware). Software updates can be frequent, but firmware updates should be kept to a minimum.

It would be really interesting to know what the repair process is for this kind of problem at Sony tech support. If they’re simply ripping out the drive and replacing it with a new one, then it’s probably a hardware issue with the drive. And I’ve theorized before that the firmware simply detects faulty drives and turn them off to prevent further damage, so it’s not a case where the firmware causes the drive to fail – the drives were already failing to begin with. Another theory is that the firmware update process is buggy on certain drive models, not the actual firmware itself. But if the repair process is simply some kind of low level hardware reset, and if they’re charging people $150 (or $250 here in Australia) for that, then well, that’s not very nice. Maybe this is the sort of thing that will be revealed in the court case, if it proceeds.

And that’s it for the week. Thanks for reading, but no need for burning afterwards though. It’s bad the for environment!

Starting with copyright news, anti-piracy has become a real business, that’s not too surprising. But has the business of fighting piracy become more profitable than actually stopping piracy?

That’s what one anti-piracy firm thinks, and it even made a presentation showing just how more profitable it can be, for them and content owners alike, to allow piracy to continue and to make money off it by suing people, or threatening to sue them, for copyright infringement. They estimate that a quarter of all people they scare pay the penalty that they’ve arbitrarily set, and each successful claim is worth hundreds of legitimate downloads in terms of profit. This follows a rather candid interview that was given by a similar anti-piracy outfit not too long ago, where they revealed that they’ve put out content on P2P networks to lure people in, and they’ll only go after the people who they can make a good profit from. Stopping piracy, seems to be a distant second objective to making a bundle of cash by exploiting people’s fears about going to court, people’s lack of knowledge of the law, and the anti-piracy crusade that content owners are hell bent on pursuing. And your government is not only allowing it, but probably helping and profiting from it as well. Is this really acceptable?

Speaking of governments and unacceptable practices, have you heard about the proposed anti-counterfeiting/piracy treaty, that will be discussed in South Korea next month by several leading countries. The plans that could cause your iPod or laptop to be searched at the airport for suspect pirated content, or make file sharing illegal, or use legislation to turn ISPs into copyright cops? You haven’t heard of it? Well, that’s no surprising, because the US government is making sure nobody knows about the proposals until they’ve been passed, citing “national security” reasons. Only a handful of selected individuals were privy to what’s on the agenda, and even they had to sign non-disclosure agreements beforehand. Has counterfeiting and piracy, and not even the kind that takes place on the seas, become such a major issue that it’s being treated in the way as the war against terrorism or the war against drugs, and no public discussion is even allowed on the subject? Incidentally both of the wars I’ve mentioned just now seems to be the never ending types of which winning is all but a distant dream at the moment – a glimpse into the future of the war against downloads perhaps.

Ringtones are a public performance, just one of the many zany things that the ASCAP claims

But before the governments can agree on how long to lock people up in Gitmo for downloading the latest Miley Cyrus album or a screener of Zombieland, the RIAA and MPAA have to do things the hard way. One method they’ve tried before is to attack BitTorrent networks, using techniques such as “piece attack” and “connection attack”, both of which designed to frustrate the downloading experience for other users. However, a study has shown that despite the millions of dollars given to anti-piracy firms to implement these methods, they do not work, and at best, they are a minor annoyance to downloads for only a couple of minutes. More millions down the drain, millions that could have been used to give people what they want, which is cheap, accessible music and movies. Instead, they’re doing things like trying to get royalties from ringtones, or to charge people to listen to the 30 second previews on iTunes. This, and many other claims, are being rejected even by the copyright friendly courts, as the ASCAP found out this week. The content owners, and the people who have been profiting from royalties, are doing everything they can to hold on, even asking Congress to make it a law so that they never lose their cash cow. Instead of embracing change, they’re fighting it, and you wonder how long they can go on doing the same thing. The longer that legitimate and comparable alternatives to illegal downloads are not implemented, the more likely that illegal downloads will be accepted as acceptable practice by the general public.

And many things that have been adopted as common practice, such as recording TV shows to your VCR/DVR or ripping your CDs to MP3, are now considered legal. But they won’t be legal if the Canadian group Access Copyright have anything to do with it, and they propose that any of these acts should carry a fee that goes toward the content owners, or at least the people who profit from giving out licenses, such as Access Copyright. It seems that the copyright debate has gone all the way back to pre Universal vs Betamax times, and the content owners are still trying to fight innovation, even if that particular innovation (the ability to record stuff) is a couple of decades old already.

Nobody likes the MPAA, not even the studios that it represents

This anti innovation drive has a lot of people angry, and has given agencies such as the MPAA quite a bit of bad PR. So what do they do about it? Instead of calling it “anti-piracy”, anti-piracy is now called “content protection“. Protecting the content from those pesky and annoying people called customers, perhaps, and also protecting profits again innovation. The studios are also unhappy at the MPAA’s approach, calling it not aggressive enough. The shift in strategy will mean that the MPAA will now go after ISPs and network operators, to clamp down on the spread of information from a higher level. Yes, this should make them more popular. And this brings us quite nicely into the iiNet trial, the landmark “studio versus ISP” case that could determine the future of the Internet. It’s the second week of the trial, and you can read the summary in the linked post. Suffice to say, if ISPs are to become copyright cops with the power to kick people off the Internet, then you have to wonder, due to the ever increasing importance of the Internet to people’s way of life (and work), whether this infringes on people’s rights in a democratic society. Finland has just made 1 Mb broadband a basic legal right for anyone who lives in the country, and they will up the speed to 100 Mb by 2015. This seems to be the direction many countries are going towards, making Internet a basic utility just like power or water. But if the Internet is a basic utility, then how does the three-strikes system (or as in the iiNet case the “one-strike” system) affect this basic legal right. Can you be denied water or electricity because you’re a suspected criminal? Can the government deny anyone the ability to make a phone call, and even so, is it something they can enforce at all unless that person is in prison, or under house arrest. And in the end, will any of this actually protect the profits of billion dollar movie and music studios, or will kicking people off this brand new global distribution platform actually hurt profits in the long term. And why is the government doing anything to protect profits of private companies anyway, especially at the tax payer’s expense?

But let’s end this section on a slightly happier, and sane, note. Danny Boyle, director of Slumdog Millionaire and 28 Days Later says that perhaps the best way to fight piracy is to cut movie prices, because the cinema still has something unique to offer in terms of the viewing experience, compared to a poor quality screener. It’s a crazy suggestion, so it might just work. Or we can just ban the cinema, so nobody can bring a camera into the cinema and record it. Problem solved!

In high definition news, the CEO of Netflix says that DVDs may be on the way out. But instead of Blu-ray replacing the format, it will actually be streaming. Of course, he’s referring to movie rental, not sale-through, and his director of corporate communications had to soften the statement by saying that growth is positive on all the formats.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings based his opinions on the fact that more and more people are opting for the cheapest DVD rental plan, while still keeping the most fully featured streaming option. I think the convenience of streaming, instant access, no need to wait for the disc in the mail and post it back, might be the reason for this shift. But until HD streaming becomes an affordable reality for everyone, which means bandwidth speed and allowance will have to increase, Blu-ray is still the only show in town if you want the best quality HD movies.

TDK's 100 GB Blu-ray Disc: May not work on current Blu-ray players

What may be not so good for Blu-ray, or actually Blu-ray owners, is the news that 50+ GB discs may not be compatible with current players. So if the movie studios ever decide to use 100 GB discs, say for TV series box sets, then Blu-ray owners will have to upgrade their Blu-ray players again. And I say again because many have already had to upgrade their profile 1.0 players to 1.1 or 2.0, to access features like PiP and Internet content. Chances are, this won’t ever happen, because it will just hurt the format too much if people are yet again forced to adopt new hardware with new disc drives, which further highlights just how out of date the idea of using discs is in the age of digital distribution. And I don’t think people mind having a bunch of discs in a box set, as I think it actually makes it look like more value.

China Blue HD, which is HD DVD for China, is being imported into Europe, along with cheap movies. Can’t see the studios being happy about it, since they licensed movies to CBHD for sale in China only, and the cheap player that comes with a dozen free movies may confuse buyers when they’re out there shopping for Blu-ray.

And for Trekkies or Trekkers, and those who don’t mind a bit of DRM, then this might be for you: A Starfleet badge shaped USB thumb drive with a copy of the latest Star Trek movie on it? How can one resist!

Not much going on in gaming, as everyone is waiting for the delayed NPD stats (due on Thursday, but has been delayed until Monday). It is expected that the Sony PS3 will jump to first place, from third, for the first time since its launch in 2006. Most expect the Wii to be second, with the Xbox 360 third. Microsoft has already came out with a pre-emptive attack on the numbers, calling it a temporary bump and saying that the 360 will still be the number one selling console for 2009.

2010 is looking like a decisive year for this generation. Sony has it’s Wii like motion system, but Natal may trump it as the must have casual gaming gadget. Nintendo has been quiet, which makes me suspect they’ve got something up their sleeves.

The NPD analysis for September 2009 should be posted sometime during the week, so until the next edition of the WNR, I hope you’ve had a good time reading this, have a good week and don’t forget to tip the waiter.

Let’s start with copyright news, as if I have to say this since every issue of WNR has started with copyright news, and the graphics to the left of this sentence sort of hints at it a bit.

This week is the week that the high profile “movie studios versus ISP” trial started in Australia, with the MPAA backed AFACT and Australian ISP iiNet going head to head in court over allegations that iiNet “allows” its users to pirate stuff. There’s all sorts of arguments and statements being thrown around in court over the week, too much to go through all of them here in great detail (check out the link for more details). The AFACT doesn’t think iiNet is doing all it can to stop piracy, and iiNet claims that this whole thing has been a set up by the AFACT to get its day in court. The AFACT claims over 90,000 acts of infringements occured on iiNet’s network over the period of time they monitored activities, while iiNet believes this number is exaggerated and inaccurate due to the way the AFACT counted them (they counted partial downloads, even by the same person downloading the same file over time, as separate infringements). iiNet also revealed they were sent thousands of infringement notices by the AFACT over the course of a week, far too many for iiNet to be able to verify and process and they believe this “infringement spam” was a deliberate ploy by the AFACT to ensure iiNet would fail to remove users from its network and hence, “allow” piracy to occur.

I’m obviously a biased individual, but everything that iiNet has said so far makes sense. The plain facts, and the AFACT will agree, is that there’s a lot of piracy going on. A lot! But to get ISPs to police the thousand of infringement notices per week  is just really unfeasible, even if the ISP in question does not verify any of the notices and simply ban users at the first sign of trouble, which could then lead the ISP into legal trouble as the innocent users that got kicked of can sue for compensation. It’s easy for groups like the AFACT to produce a list of IP addresses of offending users, since they can just monitor the IP addresses on torrents, but the ISP will have to go through the data, match the IP address and the timestamp with user information, and then take action. But as IP addresses can be spoofed, and that just because an user’s IP address was on a torrent, it does not mean they downloaded it successfully or even intended to download it in the first place, or gave authorization to the person to started the download. Only the police have the resources and authority to get to the bottom of such allegations, and I doubt they will have time to investigate potentially tens of thousands of cases per week. Which is why going after the downloaders is such a stupid idea in the first place. Anyway, I’ll be posting more updates on the iiNet trial every week, but a decision in the case is unlikely to be had this year. Obviously, the AFACT would love a win here, but even if they lose, it may give them just enough to push the government into adopting some kind of three-strikes legislation to ensure this “travesty” doesn’t go on for much longer.

Sarkozy gives a big thumb up to piracy ... when it suits him

And the chance of such a legislation becoming a reality in Australia is quite high given what has happened with France adopting similar laws (pending appeal in their Constitutional Council). A big supporter of the laws,  is French President Sarkozy. But a French paper has revealed this week that Sarkozy is in fact a big supporter of piracy as well, but when it benefits himself. He allowed his staff to make 400 pirated copies of a movie about himself so he can give it out to diplomats to promote how great he is or something. His staff even went as far as making photoshoped jackets for the DVDs that removed the logo of the official distributor, so obviously they knew what they were doing was wrong, yet still did it. If downloading a pirated movie three times gets you thrown off the Internet and possibly into jail for 2 years, under the law that Sarkozy supports, then how many years will distributing 400 copies, which is way worse than downloading, get? By my calculations, it should be about 500 years.

The Pirate Bay has just been chased out of the Netherlands, after their version of the MPAA, BREIN, successfully sued TPB’s web host, a tactic that seems to be working. TPB was chased out of Sweden using similar tactics. And last week, even Google did their bit to kill of TPB, by removing the home page listing for the website from its index due to a DMCA complaint – luckily, the listing was quickly restored, possibly due to the public backlash.  The Pirate Bay website seems to have relocated to the Ukraine, in a bunker style hosting center that claims to be able to withstand a nuclear attack. The question is, can it withstand a MPAA attack? Let’s wait and see how the Ukrainian courts deal with this issue. As for the proposed Pirate Bay sale, there’s a lot of confusion as to what’s happening, because the handover was supposed to have occurred already.

Viacom is still after YouTube, but may have the "smoking gun" evidence they need to win the case

Still continuing with the theme of lawsuits, Viacom claims to have the “smoking gun” in their legal battle with Google/YouTube. Viacom got hold of some internal emails which suggested that YouTube managers were aware of the unauthorized content issue, but refused to take action. There were also claims that YouTube employees may have also uploaded unauthorized content themselves. Google/YouTube want to attack this case on the basis that Viacom employees had uploaded content for promotional purposes, and as such, it was impossible for them to know which clips were authorized and which were not. What interested me was that Viacom obviously knew the positive effects of YouTube, and thus were employing people to upload promotional clips. You can argue that they also benefit from unauthorized clips as well. I wonder would they be happier or angrier if YouTube banned all Viacom clips from their website, which would definitely solve the piracy problem for Viacom, but is this what they really want? It seems that these media companies want to exploit YouTube’s user base, but only if they have full control over what happens, which is not how YouTube or similar websites work – it’s the lack of control, the total freedom and spontaneity of the content and the users who upload them that makes or breaks sites like YouTube. If the content owners don’t realise this fundamental shift in the relationship between content owners and content users, then they’re in for a rough ride.

Still more lawsuit news, this time it’s the MPAA versus Real Network’s RealDVD case. An injunction was granted against the sale of RealDVD earlier in the year, but Real Networks is appealing the decision. It’s unlikely to be successful, since an injunction is the “safe” thing to do pending the verdict, but it’s also a “nothing to lose” situation for Real, which has already spent a bundle in legal costs, an appeal won’t make much of a difference now.

And from the “another way to solve the piracy problem without rooms full of lawyers” section, here’s Spotify’s solution – music renting. By paying a small monthly fee, customers gets to download up to 3,333 different ad-free songs at any given time to their PCs, iPhones or Android phones for offline enjoyment, but they lose access once they stop paying the subscription fee. It’s not an ideal solution, especially since DRM is involved, but it’s certainly cheaper than buying 3,333 songs, and less likely to involve you going to court.

Onto high def news, Blu-ray is probably not coming to the Macs anytime soon. The well sourced blogger who first broke the news that Blu-ray may be coming, then later posted that, well, it’s probably not.

Either move would have been understandable. Adding Blu-ray make sense, since Blu-ray is not that popular in the computing arena, but every PC has the ability to support it, unlike Macs.  Apple is also on the board of the Blu-ray group, and has done a lot of work to promote high definition video. On the other hand, Apple’s iTunes and Apple TV strategy means that they prefer online distribution over disc based distribution, so Blu-ray may be seen as a competitor.

Consumers only want 3DTV and 3D Blu-ray if it is cheap or at no extra cost

People may still be getting use to HD being standard, but already the next “big thing” in home entertainment is being hyped: 3D. Unfortunately, consumers don’t seem to be buying the hype, at least now right now, because a study has shown that there’s very little interest in 3DTV or 3D Blu-ray, not unless it comes at little or no cost to the consumer, which defeats the whole purpose of having something new. It is a bit gimmicky, but I personally like these kind of gimmicks, and I think 3D has a place in the home, even if it doesn’t exactly reach mainstream popularity.

Toshiba's Cell Regza TV: Records 8 HD channels at the same time!

What may be popular with consumers is the new generation of TVs. No, I’m not talking about higher than 1080p resolution sets, but rather, TVs that allow you to do more than just watch TV. Panasonic and Samsung went with Internet capable TVs that allows you to watch YouTube videos, check out the weather, and all sorts of other things without leaving the comfort of your couch. Toshiba is doing something different, mainly because it can. Toshiba owns the Cell processor that the PS3 uses, and they’ve been talking about it for a while, but they’ve finally managed to find a good use for it on their TVs. Their new Cell Regza range can record up to 8 channels of HDTVs at once to the internal 3TB HDD, for up to 26 hours. This means that if you missed on anything in the last day and a bit, on up to 8 channels, you can go back and watch it without having to torrent it. The powerful Cell processor also allows the TV to show 8 different channels at once. We don’t even have 8 HD channels here in Australia, but this would be extremely handy to have in lieu of a dedicated TiVo like set top box.

And finally in gaming, I posted about firmware induced problems for the PS3 last week, and it turns out I’m not the only one who wants answers, because a class action lawsuit has been launched against Sony regarding the problematic 3.00 (and 3.01) firmware.

I think people sue too much over in the US, and I think this is certainly something that probably shouldn’t waste the court’s time, but if it gets Sony to be a bit more careful about their firmware releases, or to come clean on why the drive freezing and no more disc reading problem seems to only come after firmware updates, then the effort would have been worth it.

The lawsuit is certainly going to divide the PS3 owners, some of which like me have personally experienced the problem first hand, while others don’t believe it’s actually real. It is certainly rare enough, but not so rare as to never happen, to have caused this divide. What I don’t like is the PS3 fans, that haven’t yet experienced this problem, claiming it’s all made up to make Sony look bad or it’s caused by people not knowing how to use their PS3s. I take these quotes from postings on the official PS3 board to illustrate this phenomenon:

The “you’re all Sony haters making this up, or you’re too stupid to own a PS3″ brigade:

I still think many failures are cases of what’s called “future shock”. You have a rather sophisticated piece of electronics and users really don’t know how to operate it properly.

The “I’ve had this happen to me” group’s response:

And I think that’s a pretty ridiculous thing to assume. What’s to “operate”?, it’s a closed system!  That’s more like a lot of the unsubstantiated claims and misinformation I’ve been reading…on this board in particular. For some reason. Especially from people who think because there’s nothing wrong with their unit, everbody who’s does is either lying or too incompetent to know how to plug it in.

It’s real. It’s rare. It may already be a non existent issue in the new redesigned PS3 Slim. But it’s not right for Sony to charge people to repair something that I can think is almost certainly a manufacturing or design defect (either in hardware, or in the firmware), and it’s certainly not the owner’s fault.

Alright, that’s it for the week. More news next week, definitely more iiNet stuff, possibly NPD stats for game console which may see the PS3 become the number one seller, beating the Wii for the first time. See you then.

Next week’s PSA: backups – do you have a system and if not, why not? Let’s move onto the news.

In copyright news, The Pirate Bay appeal is about to begin, but there has been some shuffling of the judges in the case. Judges, or just clerks, I’m not quite sure – the Swedish legal system is a bit different to that of the US or Australia. But a judge, or a clerk, has been removed due to bias, but the request for removal came from the people suing TPB, not from TPB.

This leads me to believe that this might not be done to ensure the result cannot be challenged, as the RIAA/MPAA claims, but rather that the person’s removal may in fact hurt the TPB. The bias in question was related to this person owning shares in Spotify, which has content distribution deals with the RIAA. Does this mean the person would benefit from TPB not existing? Possibly, as Spotify aims to offer what TPB offers illegally. However, it also might mean this person has the required technical knowledge to understand the major issues behind the case, and that in turn might hurt the copyright holder’s case more. I was once told that this type of case is often won or lost on the ability of the judge(s) to understand the technical implications of their decisions, and that judges that do not come from a technical background (that is, most of them) will usually rule in favour of the industry group. It’s understandable, as if the first thing you think of when someone says “torrent” is rain, then you would also be more likely side with major Hollywood studios as opposed to a bunch of kids who set up this website about pirate ships.

Pirate Party Australia: Ready to fight in the next election in Australia

Which is precisely why there should be more education and more public lobbying of the issues, which has generally been one sided in favour of the copyright holders. The Swedish Pirate Party’s fantastic results in the European Parliament elections shows that this is an issue that people care about and politicians and judges should realise that there are two sides to this issue, and is not a case good versus evil as portrayed by the copyright lobby. Which is good news then that Pirate Party Australia has managed to sign up enough members to contest the next Federal election, and I suspect they will do rather well in the polls, since there has been a lot of Internet related issues that have become major issues, such as the government’s ridiculous pursuit of a national censorship system, or the much needed national broadband network. And the piracy issue, particular with the current high profile copyright court cases, and the government’s hints at moving towards a three-strikes system, should ensure a lot of protest votes go the way of the PPA.

iiNet will defend itself in court next week over claims that it allows and promotes piracy

Speaking of high profile Australian copyright court cases, it will start next week but the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has dropped another key part of their case against iiNet. Previously, they had dropped the “conversion” charge, as they could not prove that iiNet was the main copyright infringer. Now, they’ve dropped the part of the case which say that iiNet engaged in primary acts of infringement, based on the fact that iiNet caches content for its subscribers. Of course, all ISPs cache content, that’s how ISPs work, and if an ISP can be found guilty this way, then all of them need to be shutdown immediately as they’ve all helped to plan terrorist attacks, share child pornography, commit acts of fraud and every other bad thing that has gone through their cache. The fact that charges are being dropped this late into the preparation phase, suggest that the original charges were far too ambitious, and lacked understanding of even some basic facts like how ISPs work. Were they perhaps too ambitious deliberately to scare iiNet into submission, into a settlement, not expecting iiNet to be so determined to fight the charges out in court? Who know.

Free All Music: Free MP3s, if you watch an ad ... too good to be true?

Now, whenever there’s a clever new way to fight piracy, no matter whether it will work or not, I’ll report it here. The latest is interesting, and it’s actually good for consumers, as if the plan works, you’ll be able to download legal MP3s for free, and all it will take is a moment of your time. The new idea, well not exactly new, is ad-supported MP3s. The plans is that after the user views  a short video ad, they will then be able to download the DRM-free MP3s to keep. Sounds pretty good to me, although it’s a US only thing apparently so I can’t take advantage of it. But if it sounds too good to be true, then it might just be that. The major problem I can see immediately is, well, how will the video ads actually manage to pay for the MP3s, each of them costing at least $0.50 each – a single view of a video ad, unless the user clicks on it, is going to generate a lot less than 50 cents, probably a lot less than 5 cents. But if the ads do manage to pay for the music, then it becomes a good business model and will go a long way towards killing piracy, much more than a new DRM scheme or more lawsuits. Let’s hope my math is wrong and that the system does work, because I don’t people will mind sitting through an ad or two if it means free stuff.

Let’s move onto high definition news, the latest rumour is that Apple will finally add Blu-ray support to its iMac range, despite Steve Jobs calling Blu-ray ‘a bag of hurt’, referring to the messy and expensive licensing process and the lack of user penetration. Both problems have been greatly reduced thanks to lower and simpler licensing schemes, and with current  market share double that of when Mr Jobs spoke.

But as it is, it’s just a rumour for now, and I haven’t really heard enough from the right sources to think that this is a certainty, not like with the PS3 Slim and Xbox 360 price cut rumours. Will Apple’s support help Blu-ray? Of course it will. Will it be a major help, probably not. Why? Well, Blu-ray has been available on Windows systems from day one, and despite there being a lot more Windows systems than Macs, it has been of almost no help to the format, and penetration of Blu-ray on PCs remain quite low. Still, with Apple’s well known and respected ability for working with HD video, having Blu-ray support is almost a necessity these days, rather than a luxury, although it remains to be seen whether hardware acceleration will be enabled in software (the Nvidia GPUs that iMacs use should support at least H.264 acceleration for Blu-ray playback).

One rumour about Apple’s reluctance towards Blu-ray is that its current Apple TV devices would be hurt by Blu-ray’s success, since Apple would prefer everyone to be buying movies through iTunes, as opposed to on disc. I don’t know if I believe this, as I think Apple’s reluctance is more to do with how people use Macs, and whether Apple thinks people will use it as a Blu-ray player, when they take into account the number of people who currently use it as a DVD player.

Foxtel Download: Free downloads for subscribers

But it is true that technologies like iTunes are in some ways competing with Blu-ray for the home video market share. But even within downloads, there’s great competition from the way it is being offered. The latest thing here in Australia is that our major cable/satellite subscription TV provider, Foxtel, has just announced that they will offer 400 hours of downloadable content for free per month for all subscribers. It’s technically just allowing subscribers to download for free the content they’ve already paid for and with subscribers using the IQ set-top-box, content that they already have the ability to record and keep. But with a billing system already in place, and an user base that is already willing to fork out cash for TV shows and movies, it will be interesting to see if Foxtel extends this download service to premium content like the latest episodes available straight after their showing in the US – with the payment being handled through the monthly bill. Foxtel already does this with on-demand HD movies through their set-top-box, so it’s not a huge step to extend this to TV and movie downloads on the PC.

Everyone knows about the infamous Xbox 360 RRoD problem, but I wonder if the PS3’s “no disc reading” problem might also get some unwanted spotlight in the near future. The problem I describe is one that I have personally experienced and posted about on this blog, and it seems to be still happening with the latest firmware updates.

I have no doubt that this problem is far less widespread than the RRoD problem, but there are still a large group of people who have suffered from it, and it seems to occur after every firmware update. I would guess that less than 1% of PS3s are affected, possibly much less than this, so it’s no surprise that some people feel the problem doesn’t exist because it has never happened to them. But it has happened, I can confirm from personal experience, with the people who posted comments on the blog, from users posting about their problem on the official PS3 forum and elsewhere, and so the problem is not imaginary. The worst part is that Sony charges $150 per repair of this problem out of warranty (mine was in warranty at the time), and if it is the firmware update process that somehow causes this to occur (and the PS3 firmwares themselves are not really known for their bug free nature), then I wonder if charging users this large amount is the right thing to do. And this problem pretty much only started showing up after the 2.40 firmware update, so something must have changed then that causes this problem to appear, but it’s all just speculation as Sony has refused to release any information in regards to this issue. And with the wholesale hardware changes in the PS3 Slim, I don’t think this will be an issue for the Slim, so that’s one reason to upgrade your old PS3s to the new one, even if the styling isn’t to my taste (I still like the old one better, hmmm, glossy).

Okie dokie, that’s itie for this weekie. More next week, so until then …

Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet week, with a few stories occupying the headlines to still make it a very interesting week, although most of it was yet again about the issue of copyright.

Let’s start with the copyright news. There was only really one news item that really caught the attention of people this week. And not even Sir Elton John could push the news out of the headlines, much of it thanks to the reactions to the story on the Internet.

A screencap of the Google cache of Lily Allen's anti-piracy blog, which has now been closed

Earlier in the week, musician Lily Allen decided to take a stand on the issue of online music piracy. But unlike many others who have come out against the proposed three-strike Internet banning policy, Ms Allen has come out for it, even launching a blog called “It’s Not Alright” to voice her views on piracy. Now there is nothing wrong with someone expressing their views, in fact, that’s what the Internet is for. However, if you do come out with some opinion, especially a controversial one, then make sure you are untouchable when it comes to arguing the facts. Unfortunately, Ms Allen made the mistake of not doing enough vetting into her personal history in regards to piracy, and in netspeak, she has been truly and thoroughly pwned. It turns out that, in publishing her anti-piracy views, that she might have pirated the article of high tech news and discussion website, Techdirt. And not only that, a few days later, it was revealed that Ms Allen was a distributor of pirated music herself, with some self-made mixtape MP3s that was available for download from her website, that featured songs that she (and her record company) did not have the distribution rights to. Oops.

Some dude said nearly 2000 years ago that “let he who is without sin, cast the first stone”. And if one is to take the moral stance that anyone who has downloaded or shared an illegal MP3 (and that’s a lot of people) is a thief and should be punished harshly, than he, or she, should at the very least ensure that they have not committed the same “crime”. Because the truth is that it’s very easy to commit this crime, it may be because you think you’re not doing anything wrong by not paying for something you never had the intention to pay for in the first place, or perhaps you think sharing songs is a great way to promote the song and the artist and it may lead to you, or the people you shared the song with, to become a fan and start buying. There are legitimate arguments for and against a heavy crackdown on piracy, but as the Lily Allen incident showed us, it’s far too easy to be labeled a pirate just because, earlier in your music career, your appreciation of other artists led you to make a mixtape that somehow ended up online. And as Ms Allen posted on her blog about the mixtapes, “I made those mixtapes 5 years ago, I didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then”. But Ms Allen, under the very legislation that you support, you would be punished for what you claim you did out of ignorance 5 years ago, and guess how many other people might get punished for similar acts if what you support becomes law? And the article you stole from Techdirt, well, that’s copyright protected as well, even if it were just some text on some website you’ve never seen before. So I’m glad Ms Allen spoke out, because she has successfully demonstrated the worst aspect of the three-strikes system, something nobody else could do until it was actually made into law. Ms Allen has since then decided to quit the music business, which could be to her genuine loss of hope in the future of the music business due to continuing losses to piracy, a publicity stunt, a bit of sulky sulk sulk over the whole affair,  or a bit of everything.

Oh, and Sir Elton John made similar statements but nobody really cared, not when the Lily Allen Show was so interesting.

UK ISP BT says that policing Internet usage could cost more than simply ignoring the problem

In all of this, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the whole point of the anti-piracy drive, and the three-strikes system, is all just about increasing profits for the music industry (and other industries). Not that there’s anything wrong with this of course, they have the right to take actions to increase their profits. But will the three-strikes actually stop piracy, and what about the cost to implement and maintain such a system. One of UK’s leading ISPs, BT, has came up with some estimates as to the cost of spying on Internet users, and they put the cost at £24 per person, or roughly £365 million per year in the UK. The UK music industry actually only claims £200 million in lost profits due to piracy per year, and as with their estimates, the actual loss is probably less than a quarter of this amount, if that much. The extra cost, the full amount of which will no doubt be passed onto the consumer, will hurt the Internet as access plans become less affordable and some are priced out of being able to connect altogether. This will in turn hurt legal online music sales and promotional efforts. I would be surprised if the music industry actually comes out ahead at all, but for them it’s of little risk since they scream so loudly about the seriousness of online piracy, yet are unwilling to fork out a single cent for a solution that they came up with. Probably the most effective way to actually kill off the three-strikes system is to actually force the music, movie (and other) industries to come up with the cash to implement such a system.

But the movie studios (or at least movie theaters) are spending on implementing systems that try and stop camcorder pirates. The latest such system uses infrared pulsing lights situated behind the screen that the human eye cannot see, but will be recorded onto camcorder images. This is supposed to deter pirates and purchasers of said pirated content, but they’ve obviously never bothered to download and examine a cam recording of a movie, what with part of the picture being blocked by somebody’s head, and the sound of popcorn chewing louder than the explosions in the movie. I don’t think quality is what people care about when it comes to cam recordings, and so feel free to spend millions upgrading cinemas with this technology, and in the end, some guy who works at the cinema for $10 an hour will still manage to get their hands on the original reel and hand it over to the right people to make a perfect rip.

So what would drive the copyright holders to spend so much fighting against online piracy, when by reasonable estimations, the loss to online piracy isn’t anywhere near as bad as the copyright holders make out, and that the benefits of the Internet will probably eventually outweigh any effect that piracy has. Many people can see that Internet and digital distribution provides a lot of new opportunities, but why does the industry treat it as a disease that must be eradicated? Well, William Patry, the senior copyright counsel at Google might have found the reason in his new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. He explains that this isn’t, nor will it be the last, time that copyright holders show mass panic in the face of a new distribution medium, to identify it as the enemy and do all in their powers to stop it, and then only to find out later on that it actually benefits them the most in the long run. It happened with the introduction of radio, television, VCRs, and now, it’s the Internet that’s public enemy number one where copyright is concerned. I guess it is understandable to a degree. To have something so valuable, you will want to protect it, against new things that you don’t fully understand and sometimes that means going too far. I keep on thinking back to the Susan Boyle episode, and wonder if her performance, and the show she performed on, would have been as popular if somebody hadn’t illegally uploaded the clip of the show onto YouTube. Had the copyright holders got to the video before the general public, how much of an adverse effect would that have had on the finances of said copyright holders, I wonder. Not to mention the financial fortunes of one Susan Boyle (although the publicity has had an adverse effect on her personal life, but that’s a whole other problem).

Onto high def news now. Still not much happening, and that’s true on the release front as well, as the last few weeks (after the Watchmen bump had subsided) has been fairly quiet ones. However, one thing is for certain, and that’s the price drops for Blu-ray happening all over the place, for both hardware and software.

Blu-ray prices have come down, for example, Crash on Blu-ray is now under $10 on Amazon

I’ve noticed this trend from analyzing the NPD stats, and NPD themselves have also been monitoring the situation and found that average prices have indeed dropped and are getting closer to the pricing of the DVD versions, even compared to just a few months ago. And from looking at the price history info on our own Amazon Blu-ray Price Index section, you can see the trend quite clearly. New releases, which used to be priced at just below $28 on Amazon, are now almost always under $24, with older releases previously hardly ever discounted, sometimes now falling to under $10. And whenever there has been a discount for older titles, it will usually shoot to the top of the charts. It’s good new for consumers and good news for the Blu-ray format, but probably not great news for the backers of the format, who have envisaged a premium format to combat ever lowering DVD prices. It hasn’t totally failed in this respect, as DVD prices are falling faster and so Blu-ray has at least slow downed the bleeding, but I think it’s time studios start to think about ways to sell more copies of the movies, rather than to make more money per copy.

Not much happening in gaming as it’s still a couple of weeks away from official sales figures for September, which should tell us how well the PS3 Slim is doing, and whether the discount to the Xbox 360 Elite has worked or not. The Wii price drop has been confirmed as well, but it comes too late in September to really have an effect on the month’s sales figures. But the fact that Nintendo is doing it may suggest they’ve had a look at the September sales figures and weren’t really happy with what they saw. And there is also news of a further $50 rebate offer for the Xbox 360 Elite, which suggests that Microsoft weren’t that happy with what they saw as well.

That’s it for now, have a great week, and see you in about 168 hours time.

In Copyright news, subtitle download sites are now under the spotlight in Israel, or rather, the people who upload subtitles to these sites are the ones being targeted. Three individuals have been sued for uploading subtitles to the site Qsubs, and have been ordered to pay $240,000 in damages each, and to further humiliate them, made to publicly apologise for uploading them.

Subtitle files are really just text files, but they are protected by copyright. But unlike things like film scripts (which a few places offer downloads for) which have legitimate use, subtitle files are mostly for use with pirated video files. For the files you make from your own DVDs, well, you can rip your own subtitles in most cases (technically breaking the DMCA or similar legislation), although legitimate use does exist when certain editions of the DVD do not have the subtitles you need, and since region control prohibits you from buying the other editions, using downloaded subtitles are the only way (although you may have to perform additional processing on said subtitle files because it all syncs up). Then there’s the issue that some US DVDs only have closed caption, which is not available in many other countries, and so if you have such a DVD, and you have convert it to XviD, you’ll need to source subtitle files for it from other editions. But these are pretty rare uses for downloaded subtitles, and in any case, copyright still exists for the ripped files. But suing individuals, while leaving the upload site alone, seems like a bit of a strange move.

Veoh wins their legal battle with Universal Music, which should make YouTube happy

And unexpected as it may be, there was a win in court for Veoh in their legal battle again Universal Music. Universal had sued Veoh for copyright abuse, due to music videos being uploaded by users of the video sharing website. YouTube came under a similar suit from Viacom. But the decision, which Universal will seek an appeal on, means that Veoh cannot be held fully responsible for the actions of its users, as long as it takes appropriate action in trying to combat copyright theft. Just like YouTube, Veoh has the ability for copyright holders to seek removal of content, and they have removed content deemed unauthorized on a regular basis, and this was enough for the judge to declare that Veoh has done enough not be to held responsible for those other uploads that it has failed to remove. After all, the responsibility of stopping copyright theft should be shared between copyright owners and websites like Veoh and YouTube, the copyright holders cannot simply demand that these websites, which deals with thousands of videos per day, to do all the work to protect their own content. And it certainly shouldn’t be considered “reasonable” for these websites to censor each and every piece of user generate content, as if this is true, then websites like Twitter and Facebook would have to be. As long as websites show they are making a genuine effort, I think, that should be enough. In any case, the legal boffins at YouTube should be delighted at the ruling, although Universal’s appeal may reverse the decision in due time.

Speaking of appeals, the service provider that was forced to disconnect The Pirate Bay via legal action initiated by the MPAA is appealing the decision. They had to disconnect TPB because the judge ruled that the service provider, which provided network services to the web host of The Pirate Bay, is liable for the content being made available using its services. This is a big ruling, and a very messy one, as these service providers may service an entire city or even country, and for them to be made liable for everything that is being hosted, essentially puts them out of business, and an end to the Internet. I keep on going back to this analogy, but again, this is like the phone company being made liable for the actions of criminals that are using their phone services. Except, this time, it’s not even the phone company we’re talking about, it’s the company that helped to lay the undersea cables that the phone company uses, being sued for someone using the phone to scam people. In real life, neither the phone company nor the cable layers would get sued (and if they do, they’ll win without question), but when it comes to the Internet, the largely clueless legal establishment are handing out rulings left and right that have huge repercussions that they are not close to being aware of. If the government should be taking any action on Internet piracy, it should be to establish clear guidelines as to jurisdiction, responsibility, and all those other legal definitions that make the legal system work, not to do the MPAA’s dirty work and denying it’s own citizens their right to communicate by kicking them off the Internet.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, friend of the RIAA/MPAA

And it’s a shame, because the French government has just successfully licked clean the bottom of the RIAA/MPAA’s shoes by passing their version of the three-strikes rule, although not exactly what the music and movie studios wanted (they didn’t want that pesky thing called due process), it is still a extremely harsh piece of legislation which hopefully will be appealed. The legislation will even fine or ban anyone who lets other use their connection to download pirated content, and jail time could even be handed out for serious offenders. So if you pirated 3 songs, worth a total of $2.97, you might have to spend a year or two in prison for daring to do something so nasty to those poor poor billionaires at the music and movie studios. Jean Valjean would be rolling in his grave if he were in fact a real person and not a fictionalized character, so Victor Hugo will have to be doing the rolling.

Across the Channel, a group is seeking to add DRM to DTV by adding a piece of encrypted data to broadcasts, which can only be unlocked if you pay them money to buy the license to the decoder. It’s all in the name of stopping piracy of course, and the millions they are set to make in licensing fees is just a nice side effect, honest! Using the piracy bogeyman to scare the bejesus out of the government to force them to put in measures which allows you (or your lawyers) to make a bundle, while inconveniencing legitimate users and not stopping piracy at all – yep, that sounds about right as the MPAA is doing exactly this with the FCC at the moment. If only the rest of the world behaved in the same way as the Japanese, then groups like the MPAA won’t even have to make this effort. They can just bring out the DRM in force and make people use it, which is why all new Japanese phones will now have DRM to prevent playback of anything that it may detect as illegal, including songs and movies you’ve ripped from your own collections. This would also mean that anytime you want to play a song, you’ll have to connect to the Internet to have it checked by the powers that be to ensure you are not in fact a dirty pirate. Japan must be like some kind of utopia for the likes of the RIAA/MPAA, if phone companies can get away with doing something like this without a huge public backlash or government interference.

In high def news, well, there wasn’t anything of real note to be honest. I could talk about Blu-ray sales numbers, but I’ve already covered them in this thread on a weekly basis. Or maybe talk about how all the studios are talking about bringing 3D movies to the home via Blu-ray, but I’ve talked about that before. Some websites are still talking about the Toshiba Blu-ray thing, which suggest there really isn’t that much happening right now. Things will certainly pick up as we get closer to the holiday period, and there are some big releases lined up for Blu-ray this season. So let’s skip high def news for this week and hope that there’s some news of substance soon.

And in gaming, as predicted, firmware 3.01 for the PS3 has been released as a hotfix for many of the issues introduced by the disappointing 3.00 firmware. Sony needs to reduce the number of firmware updates and make each update more substantial (and bug free), because things are getting more ridiculous with each new firmware release. And despite having released tons of firmware updates, none of them have been as substantial or welcomed (relatively) as the New Xbox Experience update from Microsoft last year, which proves that quality, not quantity, is what people want.

Proof of the $50 Wii price drop?

And as for the Wii price drop, you can pretty much notch it up as “fact”, following more leaked catalogues (this time from Best Buy) showing the $50 price drop to come in this month. Is it enough to combat the resurgent PS3, and the Xbox 360 price drop? Price, I don’t think, is the Wii’s major problem. I think the novelty factor is wearing off a bit, and it’s going to be even less unique when Sony and Microsoft introduce their own motion systems, especially Microsoft’s controller-free Natal. Time for the Wii to concentrate on it’s core gamers, so a new Zelda game, a new Mario game or some new devices like Wii Fit, might be what’s needed. Wii Sports Resort helped, but more is needed.

That’s all the news I bothered to “report” on this week. See you next week.