News Roundup DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for the ‘News Roundup’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (18 March 2012)

Sunday, March 18th, 2012

Welcome to another issue of the WNR. As promised, I put up the February US video game sales analysis earlier in the week. Nothing too surprising, just your usual “everything is doomed” set of stats. Is this a case of having a new normal, with the previous normal having been exaggerated by the success of the Wii, or something more sinister? With Microsoft saying this week they won’t be showing a new Xbox at E3 this year, and Sony in a similar state of mind, it will be up to the Wii U to save the coming holiday season it seems.

Work meant that my Skyrim adventures had to take a back seat this week, although I still had time to kill a vampire or two, a couple of giants (now much more easily dispatched via my legendary enchanted Daedric weapons), and the odd chicken via collateral damage.

Oh, it was also my birthday last week. I wonder at what age do you stop looking forward to your birthdays, and start dreading them because you’re getting older? For me, this happened on my 7th birthday.

Let’s get started with this WNR.

Big news for US web users this week, as from July onwards, your ISP will officially start spying on your net activities for big content (ie. the RIAA and MPAA).

With very little evidence showing “graduated response” actually works to increase revenue, remembering that this, and not reducing piracy, is the ultimate goal, it will be interesting to see what the American version can amount to. It will be different to the French version though, in that each ISPs can decide to take whatever action it deems necessary, including no specific action and just a continuing series of warnings – with permanent account suspension not being considered so far.

It marks an important milestone in the war against piracy, and along with the RIAA’s victory over LimeWire a couple of years ago, the closing of Megaupload (and others) this year, you’d expect that piracy rates would start dropping, if it hasn’t already. Yet, all you continue to hear is how the industry is still losing billions of dollars every year, and how the problem is getting worse. With the RIAA and MPAA getting what they wanted this time, yet again, would it then be safe to conclude that, if a year from now and with revenue still not up significantly, that enforcing copyright may not actually lead to increased revenue? I’ve always found the idea of people hoarding tons of money saved from piracy, instead of simply spending the money on something else, quite funny. As is the idea of people spending more money than they actually have, when their supply of pirated content is cut off (which is an impossibility in itself).

But according to the likes of the RIAA and MPAA, piracy is a $58 billion dollar a year problem, and that if the piracy problem is magically solved somehow, creative industries would suddenly gain most of that back in revenue. But with the RIAA and MPAA already equating every single instance of copyright infringement to be worth at least $150,000, via their much publicized lawsuits against students and single mothers, $58 billion may even seem a conservative figure. This “Copyright Maths” is the topic of a new TED speech by Rhapsody founder Rob Reid, a short must-watch video that shows how crazy the figures being thrown around really are. That an iPod classic can hold $8 billion worth of pirated songs based on the $150,000 calculation show how ridiculous it all it (a figure almost as ridiculous as the $40,000+ people are required to pay to fill up the same iPod with legal purchase).

And after the speech, Reid was asked what would be the best way to combat piracy. The answer was basically “give the people what they want”, by building legal services that people wanted to use, that makes piracy seem not worth the trouble. Do that, and the piracy problem will solve it self. Why go to the trouble of finding and downloading each song, when you have Spotify and millions of songs for instant gratification, for example. The same is probably even more true for movies, which are harder to download due to their larger file size (which also limits the amount of archived content that’s made available).

A full Kaleidescape set-up is for serious movie lovers, people unlikely to pirate movies (and more likely to overpay for them)

The problem is though that instead of giving people what they want, the movie and music industries are actually pursuing the opposite agenda. It cannot be better demonstrated than by the legal decision this week which banned Kaleidescape from selling its DVD and Blu-ray media servers. Piracy was just a convenient excuse for the body responsible for DVD copy protection, the DVD CCA, to legally pursue Kaleidescape, despite the core audience of Kaleidescape’s servers not being pirates at all. In fact, Kaleidescape demonstrated the amazing fact that, on average, each of their customers had a legal movie library of 500 titles or more. Considering the cost of these server set ups, it’s not hard to understand why this is the case, because their product is one for serious movie lovers with the required expendable income – and these people are not movie pirates. In fact, they’re probably the movie industry’s most hard-core customers.

So what does the industry have to gain by denying their biggest fans what they want? The answer is of course “control”. They’re perfectly happy to let you “convert” your DVDs to a purely digital format, with Wal-Mart this week offering a “DVD to Ultraviolet” service for $2 (or $4 to “upconvert” your DVDs to a HD digital version). But as always, it comes with a catch. You’ll have to use the movie studio’s preferred platform, live with their DRM system, which then controls how you’ll be able to use your digital copy (which may even expire in time). It will invariably mean a worse user experience than something for enthusiasts like Kaleidescape, but a better experience may mean a loss of control, and that’s just not acceptable. And if all of this means they can charge you again and again for the same thing, then that’s just a sweet, sweet bonus.

High Definition

With the new iPad still making headlines, I thought I would jump on the bandwagon and write something about what could be considered Apple’s first HD tablet (1024×768 is not HD, as if it was, then it meant that I had HD on my first 486 computer).

With the new iPad resolution coming in at 2K, or 2048×1536, that’s a resolution higher than your average HDTV. Of course, a true enthusiasts won’t just see the fact that the screen would perfectly render a 1920×1080 resolution video with a couple of pixels to spare, they will of course wonder if you could expand the resolution of the video from 1920 to 2048 and use up all of the available pixels for a 2048×1152 video.

iTunes 1080p compares well to Blu-ray, according to tests done by Ars Technica

But what may be more interesting is how Apple plans to distribute 1080p movies to the new iPad, as streaming of 25GB+ movies is not ideal, even with 4G. Ars Technica took the time to test several of iTunes’ new 1080p encodes, and compared it to the Blu-ray equivalent, and what they found was rather surprising – that somehow, a 5GB iTunes file isn’t 5 times worse in quality than a 25GB Blu-ray. By supporting the “High” H.264 profile, as well as increasing the “Level” support to 4.1, all now possible on the faster hardware of the new iPad (and iPhone 4S, as well as the updated Apple TV), the decoder can now be made to do more work, and the result is a more efficient encode. VUDU’s HDX does something similar to allow 1080p streaming on your average 10Mbps connection (Blu-ray, on the other hand, may require 30Mbps just for the video). Sure, you’ll lose a lot of fine detail, there will be banding and other aberrations, but that’s all moot on a 9.7″ screen. On a large screen TV connected via Apple TV, this may be an issue, but only for those serious about their movie watching, in which case, they would probably never consider Apple TV or iTunes 1080p anyway. For the rest, it’s “good enough”, and the convenience of it all makes up for everything else.

Mac Observer did similar tests but found wildly different results, so either Ars Technica did their test wrong, or Mac Observer did (or maybe video quality varies too much from movie to movie).

And with that, we come to the end of another WNR. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, DVD, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (18 March 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (11 March 2012)

Sunday, March 11th, 2012

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. I hope you’ve had a good week. Me? I’ve been busy with a secret project for Digital Digest, something I hope I can unveil in a week or two. Well, it’s not really a secret, but it’s not ready for public consumption just yet. It will be a relatively small change on the scale of things, but hopefully one that will make navigating the website a little bit easier.

As such, I haven’t really been playing much Skyrim this week. I might also be playing the game the wrong way, because I now have quite a backlog of major and minor quests that’s going to be a pain to clear (and I keep on picking up new ones). Sometimes having too much to do in a game can be a frustrating experience too.

It's better, but what I want to know is what are the new things I'm able to do with the new hardware, that I couldn't do on the iPad 2

I suppose I should also mention the iPad 3, oops, I mean the “new iPad”. It seems I’m not the only one that’s under-whelmed by Apple’s new tablet offering (and not the only one to cringe at the “resolutionary” pun either). There’s really nothing wrong at all with the new iPad – it’s faster, it’s a little bit heavier than the iPad 2 but does not affect usability, the screen is a beauty and the price is right too. So why am I under-whelmed? For me, it’s the lack of “the new things you can do with it” that’s under-whelming – a sharper screen is better, but how does that translate into a new way to use the iPad?

Apple’s strength has always been in selling what you can do with its hardware, rather than the hardware itself (which traditionally hasn’t been state-of-the-art – see Mac vs PC debate). For example, Apple didn’t sell the fact that the iPad 2 had a front facing camera, it sold the concept of FaceTime. The iPod also wasn’t the first digital music player, but Apple sold it, alone with iTunes, as a new way to buy music. I won’t even need to mention what the iPhone meant, but even the incremental 4S upgrade introduced Siri, a new way to use your smart device that unexpected failed to make the transition to the new iPad (not yet, anyway). Imagine if Apple had launched the iPhone 4S without Siri – that, to me, is what the new iPad feels like.

With that said though, the new iPad still looks like a no brainer for people who want an easy to use tablet, so it will sell in droves regardless. But I just think Apple could have marketed it a bit better, to at least give us a glimpse of what the faster processor, better screen is capable of, that makes the iPad 2 obsolete. But maybe that’s not the strategy this time, as perhaps the major change this time is the introduction of a new budget iPad model – the old iPad 2. Good enough for most people, and at $399, it will offer serious competition to budget Android tablets.

Anyway, let’s get started on the news roundup.

The impact of the Megaupload seizure continues to reverberate this week, as the MPAA now wants to use the seizure as proof of guilt in its own court case.

Back when the Mega-seizure happened, I mentioned the MPAA’s civil lawsuit against Hotfile, and how Hotfile and Megaupload’s business models were very similar. I suggested that if no criminal case had been brought up against Hotfile, and that the matter was largely proceeding on civil grounds, then what makes Megaupload so different that the FBI needs to get involved. This week though, the MPAA made the same argument, but the one on the other side of the coin, that because Hotfile and Megaupload were so similar, Hotfile is just as guilty, and so the court should hand down a summary judgement on the matter. The MPAA is using the fact that because a court has granted federal prosecutors the right to take such drastic actions against Megaupload, that there is already enough evidence to suggest that their business model would not stand up to scrutiny in a court of law. There’s is some merit to the argument, but the government has yet to prove its case against Megaupload in a court of law, no matter how convincing their (one sided, it has to be said) arguments have been so far.

The curious thing is that if the MPAA is granted a summary judgement against Hotfile, then this decision could be used in the Megaupload trial as some sort of precedent, even though the summary judgement may have only occurred due to the Megaupload case. It’s a kind of circular logic that could very well have been orchestrated by the MPAA (since the MPAA are one of the key instigators of the Megaupload takedown), to kill two birds with one stone.

The scale of the Mega-takedown has also had consequences for other governments and law enforcement agencies not wanting to look weak on copyright (I’m sure the likes of the RIAA and MPAA have been pressuring them to match the efforts shown by the US government). The Swedish government has no doubt been under a lot of pressure to take action against “Swedish” website The Pirate Bay, particular now that the website has switched to using a Swedish .se domain name. What the Swedish government wasn’t aware of was that investigative notes were being leaked to the operators of The Pirate Bay. And from those leaks, it appears a new series of raids and arrests might be occurring soon. Having already been raided once, which took the website down for a whole three days, the new Pirate Bay seems to be designed to be much more resilient, much harder to take down (and easier to get back up again). The cat and mouse games between the authorities and TPB has only managed to create a stronger mouse – the cat simply hasn’t been able to keep up.

French "three-strikes" has been working for two years now, but where's the evidence it's actually "saving" the music and movie industry?

Staying in Europe, last week, the UK High Court handed down a ruling that paves the way for ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. This week, another ruling against ISPs paves the way for the UK’s own version of “three-strikes” to go ahead, as the Court of Appeal upheld the legality of such a system. Not that there’s any evidence to suggest that graduated response, the technical term for “three-strikes”, actually works. I recently read that the French version of three-strikes, nicknamed Hadopi (after the government agency responsible for it) is costing as much as $90 million per year to run. Whereas the only evidence of the program’s success so far, that has been presented by rights holder, is a measly 5% increase in revenue for iTunes over a 2 year period. Considering that iTunes sales worldwide (and with most countries not having a three-strikes regime) went up 36% year-on-year based on Q3 2011 results, the measly 5%, over a 2 year period, seems quite insignificant, and might even point to the opposite conclusion if we’re being cavalier with our statistical analysis. To me, graduated response simply isn’t worth it from a financial point of view, and it’s definitely not worth it when you factor in loss of privacy and other rights.

Losses due to piracy has always been a debatable subject. Whether someone who pirated software ever intended to buy the same thing is almost impossible to predict, as it’s really hard to know what people are wiling and unwilling to pay for. Take Warner Bros. latest idea, their “Disc to Digital” program. The program asks DVD owners to drive to a retail store, hand their original disc to a clerk, who runs the disc through a special machine that eventually produces a purely digital version of the disc, for use on iPads and whatnot (complete with DRM, of course). WB thinks people are willing to not only go to the trouble of doing this, as opposed to simply ripping it at home, but that they’re also willing to pay for the same movie twice. And so if people are not doing it WB’s way, and they’re not making this extra profit, then WB will simply count this as “lost” revenue, and blame it all on home DVD ripping.

Public Knowledge - "Legal DVD Ripping" alternative

Warner Bros. "Disc to Digital" program vs traditional DVD ripping, compared

If you think WB’s legal DVD ripping solution is convoluted, then you’re not alone, because public interest group Public Knowledge also think it’s ridiculous to suggest that consumers would embrace this “alternative”. PK is currently petitioning the US Copyright Office to legalize DVD ripping, and one of the arguments put forward by movie studios, against the idea, is that legal alternatives exist – WB’s “Disc to Digital” being one of the examples referenced by the MPAA. There’s obviously a demand for DVD ripping, even the movie industry accepts this is the case, as otherwise, they wouldn’t be offering their own solution to the problem. But if this is the industry’s idea of adapting to consumer demand, then it really just highlights again how out of touch they have become, and how we really shouldn’t trust their idea of “lost revenue”.

And finally in copyright, a story about our good friends Righthaven, and possible one of the last ever stories on the infamous copyright firm. This week, a judge granted the request to auction off most of Righthaven’s existing copyrights, including the very rights they obtained for sue-for-settlement purposes. Without having any rights to the content they’re pursuing bloggers and non-profits for copying, it really puts an end to all of their pending lawsuits (and appeals), and this, more than anything, is a mortal blow for the firm. Unless Righthaven can manage a revival of Lazarushian proportions, I suspect the next story I write on the firm will be its obituary.

In gaming news, the NPD stats for February 2012 are out, and it looks like I *will* be able to write an analysis for it thanks to there being enough data.

The Xbox 360 won the month again, although both the PS3 and Wii recovered from the January lows. All are down compared to the same month last year though. The lack of any really good releases, and the fact that we may be getting towards the end of the current generation’s sales cycle (or at least well past the midway point), suggests that sales won’t be picking up until the next-gen comes out.

Speaking of next-gen, the latest rumour says the Xbox 720 or whatever may in fact be disc-less. So definitely no Blu-ray playback if that’s the case, although I think physical media are still very much needed to distribute multi Gigabyte games to millions of gamers given the current state of high speed (ie. 40Mbps or faster) broadband saturation. The same argument exists for HD movies, which is why Blu-ray discs will still be around for a while yet.

I think that covers everything for this week, so have a nice one and see you in seven.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (11 March 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (4 March 2012)

Sunday, March 4th, 2012

As promised, the WinDVD 11 is up. WinDVD and PowerDVD have long been competitors, but with Cyberlink deciding to make PowerDVD into more than just a multimedia player, it seems Corel has gone the opposite direction and has decided to focus on the core features, and compensate by reducing the price. It’s not a bad strategy, since while the new version of PowerDVD does do a lot more, especially as a media hub, there are better, more dedicated software available. That’s not to say PowerDVD’s core features are being ignored – it’s more of a case of them being very good already and having little room for improvement and Cyberlink having to seek other ways to improve their software and justify the price of the upgrade. WinDVD, on the other hand, still has room to improve everywhere, and they’ve made some good progress in the latest version (which only took me 5 month to review).

If I seem a bit obsessed with the PowerDVD/WinDVD rivalry, it’s because I am, having done the reviews for both many many times over the last decade. You know you have to be obsessed over something when your other, more current obsession, had to take a back seat to it. Which brings us to …

Skyrim Update: Having mastered Alchemy, Smithing and Enchanting, I made myself some awesome Daedric armor and weapons. Am now able to slice and dice my way through almost any levelled enemy. Yes, even giants!

As for news, it’s been pretty quiet, with a lot of the focus on stories already covered previously (like The Pirate Bay’s transition to Magnet Links on the day that Leap Day William visits), or more incremental updates on the whole Megaupload prosecution (with just the right dash of character assassination against Mr. Dotcom, although he does make it easy).

Again, it’s a week where we only have a couple of copyright related news items, we start with a real world example of why Internet censorship can be very hard to get right, and very easy to get very very wrong.

Apparently, users of at least one ISP in Denmark were denied access to 8,000 legitimate websites, including Facebook and Google due to a SNAFU with the country’s voluntary Internet filtering scheme. Apparently, the legitimate 8,000 strong list of “good” websites was uploaded in place of a list of “bad” websites, due to operator error and poor operating procedures. The problem wasn’t corrected until 3 hours, and many complaints later. Now, it has to be said that the filter is predominantly used to block access to websites containing indecent images of children, a noble intent and something that’s worth doing (although my understanding is that these filters are often easily bypassed anyway). But if the rationale behind the filter changes to be about protecting the business interests of the likes of Sony and Universal, then not only would it detract from the more serious work of preventing access to child pornography, there’s also more room for error, as the sheer number of websites that needs to be blocked will increase incrementally from day one. And the biggest fear is not that 8,000 legitimate websites get blocked, but rather, just the odd couple of less than popular websites getting incorrectly blocked – a small enough error that’s hard to notice and even harder for the affected websites to rectify, without any sort of due process.

Germany's music performance royalty collection organisation, GEMA's disagreement with YouTube means legal, official music content on YouTube are often inaccessible

There are two more SNAFUs to go through this week, one intentional, and one not so much. We start with the intentional one in Germany, in which (and I’ve only been made recently aware of) the country’s performance royalty collection organisation, GEMA, has apparently been waging a bitter way against YouTube (that’s *so* 2007). The repercussion from the dispute means that people in Germany have been missing out on access to a lot of legal YouTube music content. Not that any of this is that new, but it was brought up again this week by a Twitter post, in which one user complained about having to use Chinese web proxies to access Sting’s new official music video, a situation the user describes as “f*cked up”. The irony here of course is the use of Chinese web proxies, not exactly a country well known for its Internet freedoms.

The short term greed and irrational fear of the Internet by some content holders (and those seeking to profit from content) is exactly why, in my opinion, web piracy is such a big problem today. For every user that resorted to a Chinese web proxy, more will have probably went onto their favourite BitTorrent network and downloaded the music video. And as a result, YouTube is denied profit, Sting is denied the ability to connect to fans via official channels, and nobody really benefits. It’s such a problem that even some of the music labels have started complaining about GEMA’s actions, because revenues are starting to be affected.

Trying to watch "Game of Thrones" online, without resorting to illegal means, is almost as hard as trying to rule the Seven Kingdoms without getting your head chopped off

As many smarter than me have already said, access is the key problem, and it’s a key driver behind the web piracy. It might have been possible in the past to deny access to content in order to reap better financial rewards, but that’s when people didn’t have the tools at their disposal to seek alternative, and illegal, access to the same content. The same strategy doesn’t work any more, basically. This web comic (note: rude words present), which explains the process of trying to watch Game of Thrones online, tells the whole story about access problems better than I ever could with words. And it’s even worse in places outside of the US, as the “Game of Thrones” situation is repeated for pretty much every TV show, and without access to cable and network TV options either. There are huge financial opportunities being missed right now due to content being made unavailable due to short term greed – instead, money is being wasted on anti-piracy, and our rights are being trampled in order to fight the ultimate futile fight. Make content available, and at for a reasonable price (not $40 for a season pass, when the Blu-ray set can be had for the same price), then the piracy problem will solve itself!

From the absurd to the, um, even more absurd – how about getting your YouTube video flagged for using copyrighted music, when the only “songs” on your video’s soundtrack is that of birds? That’s exactly what happened to one YouTube users, whose video about collecting wild vegetation for making a vegan salad turned out to be a controversial one. Music licensing firm Rumblefish made not one, but two claims on the video’s soundtrack, first after YouTube’s automated system flagged the video, and second when the user’s appeal (something along the lines of “it’s just birds singing”, most likely) was turned down. And I bet it’s not an isolated incident either, and it probably wouldn’t have been resolved to the original user’s satisfaction without the attention it garnered online (and unfortunately, not all incidents gets reported or gets the attention it needs). With the copyright claimed, Rumblefish were free to make money off a video that they had no rights to, so isn’t that the very definition of copyright infringement? And isn’t it a lot worse than what many YouTube “pirates” are doing, considering many of them are not doing it for money?

The silly DRM news of the week goes to Microsoft, Google and Netflix’s attempt to add DRM to HTML5 videos. HTML5 videos have been designed to allow browsers to offer native support for streaming videos without the need for a separate plug-in like Flash. But Flash supports DRM, and so the likes of Microsoft, Google and Netflix would like to see some form of DRM added to the HTML5 standard. It’s unworkable though, as one Google engineer points out, because this would mean open source browser makers would have to use proprietary, closed sourced code for the DRM component, or fail to fully support HTML5. The cynical side of me can see why Microsoft and Google, who make competing browsers to the open source Opera and Firefox, would want to see this happen. But I can forgive them because I know deep down, they don’t want DRM either – they have to implement them in order to satisfy the wishes of paranoid content holder though.

And we really get back to the core problem – paranoid content holders.

Nothing else to cover this week, so it’s time to say goodbye for now (and hello again to the world of Skyrim). See you next week.

Posted in News Roundup | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (4 March 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (26 February 2012)

Sunday, February 26th, 2012

Welcome to another edition of the Weekly News Roundup. I’ve just finished writing the PowerDVD 12 review, and it only took me a month! Writing the obligatory PowerDVD review has become a sort of ritual for me, as I’ve been doing it since pretty much version 1.0 of the software (it’s now version 12, not quite 12 years, but close to a decade at least). Over that time, the review has morphed slightly into a “how to” guide, or at the very least, an overview of the major functions. For this particular review though, I’ve completely restructured the review sections so that it’s a bit easier to read. Now all I have to do is to write the review for the comparable WinDVD 11, which is only overdue by 5 month!

Skyrim update: Just managed to get my Alchemy and Smithing levels up to 100, now to get Enchanting up to 100, and to get the relevant perks so I can start making awesome, unstoppable armor and weapons. Had to purchase another house so I could more easily manage my hoarding.

We start the week with two stories that I briefly touched upon in the last WNR. First up, federal prosecutors have expanded the case against Megaupload, and revealed that over $50 million in “Mega assets” have been seized so far.

The newly added charges relate to the allegation that when content holders requested a file to be taken down, Megaupload merely removed the specified link to the file, without removing the actual file in question. This is problematic as the same file can be linked multiple times based on the way the Megaupload’s server works, and so Megaupload was doing “just the minimum” (or not even that) when it came to file removal, even though they could (and should) have done more. It’s a lesson to other file sharing/user generated websites: take removal requests seriously if you want DMCA safe harbor to apply, otherwise, you might as well just ignore the take down request, since you’re not fooling anyone. Pro-active content removal will help to make the case that you do care about copyright infringement, but the law does not require such actions, other than for really obvious cases of infringement. Had Megaupload done what was needed, then the criminal case against them might have been impossible to establish. On an unrelated note, Kim DotCom, the owner of Megaupload, was released on bail this week.

The Pirate Bay sails on as domain changes from .org to .se, to avoid unwanted US intervention

The Pirate Bay has had a busy February as well. Not only are they planning to remove all .torrent files, replacing them with Magnet Links instead, they’ve also changed domain names, from their original .org domain to .se. The reason for the change is fairly apparent – .org domain names comes under the authority of the United States, and so it could easily be seized by the US government (and I’m surprised they haven’t done so). The fact that a Swedish website wants to avoid falling under the jurisdiction of the United States is perfectly understandable to everyone. Everyone except for the RIAA, of course, who came on attacking TPB for blatantly trying to “escape U.S. laws”, the very same laws that doesn’t apply to a Swedish website anyway. The RIAA appealed again to xenophobics, using phrases such as “foreign rogue sites” and blabbing on about “American jobs”, despite music being a global industry, and piracy being a global problem. It’s something ‘Winston’ from The Pirate Bay spoke of when he wrote a response to the RIAA’s latest attacks, that the America-centric view coming from the likes of the RIAA and MPAA, that somehow only US interests are important. Via SOPA/PIPA, the RIAA and MPAA have also started pointing the finger at the rest of the world, blame “foreigners” for all their copyright woes, despite research showing their own short-sighted greediness (ie. release windows) is at the heart of the problem.

Another thing that Winston touched upon is the disingenuous use of the phrase “creative community” by these trade groups that often only represent a small number of major labels and studios. The truth is that not only are they not the creative community (or any kind of community, as Winston points out), but they’re the ones that are most aggressive at exploiting and profiting from the same community, often at its expense (and that of real artists and real creativity).

And in order to keep exploiting and profiting, the major rights holders have shown they’re willing and capable of doing anything in order to keep the money rolling in. For them, little things like censorship, privacy and the right to innovate, if counter to their own interests, can all be sacrificed. Which is why despite various EU rulings on the possible illegality of web censorship, the music industry is still pursuing, and winning, their case against The Pirate Bay in the UK, and it’s looking increasingly likely that UK ISPs will soon be forced to block access to the website. Not that it would actually stop people visiting, since earlier blocked sites such as Newzbin2 are still being frequented by UK visitors using tools that were quickly developed to bypass the blocking filters – the operators of Newzbin2 says that 93% of their former UK visitors have continued to visit the website thanks to these new tools. There are also all sorts of jurisdictional issues involved, such as whether an UK ISP has the right to block access to a Swedish website to protect the interest of US companies.

And with the web now an integral part of most people’s lives, nobody wants to see it irrevocably damaged. But even so, I was really surprised to see so many people protesting the controversial ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) treaty in the streets of Europe. And it’s working, with the EU suspending ratification of ACTA until the legal positions are studied in further detail, which should have been the case all along, as opposed to cowardly caving to corporate interests. The usual critics will demean these protests as “freeloaders wanting to keep the free stuff coming”, but people who say that are also devaluing the importance of critical issues of censorship and privacy, issues at the heart of any democracy. I guess in some ways this is a delayed response to the sacrifices that have been made in the last decade to these core issues, due to fears of terrorism. I strongly agree that people who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither, but at the very least, that response is an understandable human one (even if it is the wrong one). But sacrificing freedom for the benefit of a select few mega-corporations is just not acceptable, and I’m glad others feel the same way too. Freedom and democracy is worth protecting at the expense of everything else, in my opinion.

High Definition

With this WNR coming in a little bit short, I have a bit more room to share a few recent thoughts about where things are headed in terms of home entertainment.

VOD is the future of TV, as once viewers get a taste of the power of choice, they won't want to go back

While I’ve long been a supporter of Internet based streaming, and the benefits of video-on-demand, I’ve not really had much experience using it, since we’re pretty behind the rest of the world here in Australia when it comes to these sort of things. Having got a Kindle Fire to do a bit of development work, I soon became absolutely hooked to Amazon Prime SVOD. It’s really my first taste at what Americans have been enjoying for a while now (and with better services than Amazon Prime, and not having to route it through a VPN), and it completely confirms for me what, up until that point, had largely been a theory – that we’re on the verge of a major revolution in how we watch TV and movies. It’s not so much what we watch, as what we have access to. It feels incredibly powerful and freeing to know that you have access to, for example, every episode of Star Trek ever made (which is available for unlimited streaming on Amazon Prime, as long as you pay the $79 per year membership fee), and the phrase “there’s nothing on” could very well become extinct if the technology continues to advance, and if content holders continue to support innovation in this area. And once you go VOD, you don’t really want to go back to a time where executive in suits determine what you should watch, and when.

And it’s a huge financial opportunity as well for all involved. From an advertising point of view, ads can be targeted, interactive and non repetitive, and the tiered subscription model provides value, as well as ensuring stability revenue wise (compared to a model based purely on ads). That nearly 1 in 3 American households now regularly enjoy streaming content on their TV (so not just something you do on a tablet, or a computer, but in the living room) shows that people want it. It’s now up to the tech companies and the rights holders to knock out a deal that would make the ability to access everything an affordable reality, and I look forward to the day this is all available in Australia.

On that bright note, it’s time to say goodbye to this issue of the WNR. Have a good one, and see you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Movies, News Roundup, Video Technology | 1 Comment »

Weekly News Roundup (19 February 2012)

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

Welcome to the latest edition of the WNR. It’s a shame that the leap day doesn’t fall on a Sunday this year, as it would make an awesome collector’s edition of the WNR – as such, it’s on possibly the most boring day of the week: Wednesday.

I know I promised the NPD analysis last week, but it turns out there just wasn’t enough data to compile one, thanks to both Nintendo and Sony keeping mum on hardware figures (no doubt because they have crap numbers). Only Microsoft released figures for its Xbox 360 console (the least worst of the bunch). So it seems January 2012’s NPD analysis will have to be replaced with a much shortened version, which you’ll find in the “Gaming” section below.

In terms of news, there were only a couple of interesting ones, and a few late breaking ones that I will cover briefly in this edition, but in more detail in the next. So don’t be surprised at the brevity of this WNR (and it totally didn’t have anything to do with the fact that I’ve now put in 50+ hours in Skyrim).

The likes of the MPAA and RIAA have compared web piracy to a lot of things, but I’ve always wondered why they haven’t compared it to some kind of infectious disease, as I think The Piracy Pandemic^® has a certain ring to it.

It’s a great comparison not just because the content holder set their hyperbole engine into overdrive by comparing web piracy to something deadly and scary, but also on two other major points. One, just like an infectious disease, piracy spreads quickly, and it does so in poorer countries with greater virulence. And also just like viruses, piracy adapts to any measures you employ to try and stop it, whether it’s a technical measure, or a legal one. The more you try to fight it, the more likely it will mutate into something that’s more resistant.

The latter of these two points was demonstrated, twice, this week. Decentralisation has been a continuing trend in piracy (Megaupload and sites of similar ilk are actually quite a throwback to the early days of piracy, where everything was hosted on centralised HTTP websites), but despite decentralisation being the major driving force behind the creation of BitTorrent, two major centralised components still hold it back from truly being decentralised. The inherent weakness in BitTorrent file sharing is the existence, and the necessity, for centralised trackers and a centralised “indexer” website that catalogues the available downloads, like The Pirate Bay. This website would also host .torrent files, and while these files are small by any standard, the sheer number of them ensures that the total size of the website and database can be quite large. Taking down a tracker can cause downloads to cease to work, as peers would not be able to find each other, and taking down websites like The Pirate Bay would mean that you won’t even able able to find the torrents to get you started. These two weaknesses have often been exploited by content holders, with past lawsuits able to bring down popular trackers, and BitTorrent indexers such as Mininova.

The Pirate Bay will remove .torrent files by the end of this month, encouraging users to use Magnet Links (show above with the little magnet icon) instead

This week, The Pirate Bay announced steps which will mitigate these two risks, although the actual technical measures used to solve these two problems have existed for some time already. The Pirate Bay, at the end of this month, will remove .torrent files for any torrents that has over 10 peers and will use Magnet Links instead. A Magnet Link is simply a web URL, a string of text that once loaded into your BitTorrent Client of choice, will give the client just enough information to be able to download the actual .torrent file from users that are already sharing the torrent. And using the DHT (Distributed Hash Table) technique, Magnet Links don’t need trackers in order to download the .torrent files (and the actual download most likely won’t need trackers as well, thanks also to DHT). But for The Pirate Bay, the best thing about switching to a Magnet Link based website is the fact that they no longer need to host .torrent files (well, not as many as before, anyway), and this allows the hosting, and bandwidth, requirements of The Pirate Bay to be reduced to the point where the entire website can probably fit onto a small USB thumb drive (removing all .torrent files, a user has already demonstrated the ability to reduce The Pirate Bay’s Magnet Link database to only 90MB). This will help more TPB mirrors to be set up, and to allow the website to be moved from host to host more easily, thus making the website more resilient to take-downs. There’s also something quite perverse about being able to “download” the entire Pirate Bay to your hard-drive.

And even in the event of The Pirate Bay finally being taken down, there’s now a plan B. A new BitTorrent client, Tribler, aims to remove the any need for websites like The Pirate Bay, and remove the one last centralised component of the largely decentralised BitTorrent download process. Tribler does this by moving the torrent indexing component into the BitTorrent swarm itself, and allow you can search for torrents right within the client. Even things like reviews, comments, and the obligatory removal of fake torrents, can all be done within the client. Tribler, developed by researchers at Delft University, is also open source, and that makes it more resilient, as if one variant of the client is taken down by authorities, others will pop up almost instantly (and probably with more features). What this essentially means is that BitTorrent, via Tribler, is now unstoppable. Or to put it even more succinctly, and to quote the head of the Tribler project, “The only way to take it down is to take The Internet down.”

Tribler - the new BitTorrent client that claims to be unstoppable

Now, just because BitTorrent downloads cannot be stopped, it does not mean that you can’t be forced to stop using BitTorrent, as the major flaw in Tribler is that it still allows authorities, and those seeking to profit from (anti) piracy, to track your IP address. So the next evolution of BitTorrent, in my mind, will be one that allows peers to communicate anonymously – that is, to allow sharing without making the IP addresses public at any point in the process. The external pressure heaped towards downloaders, from law firms such as US Copyright Group, and also the rights holder’s push for graduated response, will no doubt have already pushed clever developers into tackling this very problem, and I don’t expect we’ll have to wait too long for this next evolution. And once it arrives, BitTorrent will be anonymous, unstoppable, and it will spell “game over” for both technical and legal methods to stop the downloading.

This scenario both scares me, and excites me. It scares me because, with no way to stop downloaders, things could get out of hand very quickly. But it also excites me because, without any technical or legal recourse, content holders might finally have admit to the need to compete with piracy, and we may finally see the entire industry put everything behind innovating their way out of the problem. Consumers will be the main beneficiary, and I look forward to new and brilliant ways to consume content, legally. Of course, this should have been the way forward since the first torrent was uploaded, and it would have been easier to compete back then, compared to a time when BitTorrent may have become truly unstoppable.

Going back to the point I made earlier about Megaupload being an outdated way of hosting pirated downloads, the closure of R&B/hip hop blog RnBXclusive this week shows why centralisation is dangerous. But what’s more dangerous is the pattern that’s emerging with law enforcement actions against websites suspected of copyright infringement – the fact that law enforcement agencies appear to be acting as the private police force for the entertainment industry without questioning the one-sided evidence presented to them – evidence that has often not stacked up in court. Time and time again, websites were taken down with the full force of the law, but still managed to be difficult to prosecute, or in the case of the similarly themed DaJaz1 (taken down by US Homeland Security as part of Operation In Our Sites), the case might not even end up in court. This is why due process exists and why it’s needed, for the evidence to be tested in a court of law before guilt is determined, and action is taken.

And to add insult to injury, visitors to rnbxclusive.com were initially threatened with messages that mentioned “an unlimited fine” and “a maximum penalty of up to 10 years” in prison for anyone who simply downloaded some songs from the website. A Big Brother style warning of the “capability to monitor and investigate you” was given an extra dimension of fear, by displaying the visitor’s IP address on the home page (a simple enough thing to do in php, but still scary enough for the less technical minded). These threats have since been removed from the website, no doubt due to complaints about the potentially misleading statements which could get SOCA (UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency), the organisation that took charge of seizing the website, into trouble. But it’s the kind of hyperbole we’re used to seeing from the entertainment industry, the most likely ghost writers behind the now removed messages.

One of the entertainment industry’s tactic is to portray everyone who does something against their interest as criminals, even if it’s something as simple as ripping your own legally purchased DVD. I reported a couple of months ago on the efforts by public interest group Public Knowledge to make DVD ripping legal. They argued that due to the increasing number of devices that don’t play DVDs, such as tablets and smartphones, consumers need to be given the right to rip their own legally purchased movie discs. The fact that everyone who wants to do it is already doing it, means that making DVD ripping illegal under the DMCA is pointless at best, and at worse, criminalizes an activity that falls under fair use. With PK having made their submission to the US Copyright Office, which reviews submissions for exemptions to existing copyright laws every three years, the MPAA has just responded with quite an absurd argument *for* keeping DVD ripping illegal: it gives consumer more choice!

If Public Knowledge manages to get a DVD ripping exemption from the US Copyright Office, then it's still too late to save innovative software like RealDVD, which was sued into oblivion by the MPAA

What the MPAA is saying is that since consumers don’t have the legal option to rip their own DVDs, then the legal option to get the movie you already paid for, on other devices, is to simply re-purchase the movie again. And again and again. Consumers can “choose” to pay for the same movie on their iPhone, “choose” to pay for the same movie again on Android, and then “choose” to pay for the same movie once more on their PS3, for example.

Far from being a convincing argument, this is precisely PK’s argument for making DVD ripping legal, that consumers shouldn’t be made to fork out money for the same content over and over again, due to a legal measure designed to do something else. This is a perfect example of piracy laws being misused by content holders, for their own financial benefit, to take away a consumer’s rights. The fact that many movies are not even available on legal platforms further destroys the MPAA’s false arguments about “choice”.

I sincerely hope the US Copyright Office does the right thing and extends the exemption for CD ripping to cover DVDs and Blu-rays too. The reason that The US Copyright Office even asks for submission of exemptions is to prevent exactly this sort of thing – short sighted copyright laws that harm fair use and innovation.

The Megaupload case has also had some new developments in the last few days, although nothing that bodes well for Mr DotCom. More charges have been laid, and $50 million in Mega assets have been seized so far. Without insider knowledge, it’s hard to tell if this is an attempt to shore up the fed’s case before going to court, or if it’s some kind of tactic designed to force a favourable settlement. Copyright cases are not always easy to prove, see Viacom vs YouTube, and given the theatrics that has transpired so far, losing the case is not an option for federal prosecutors.

Meanwhile, the Pirate Bay and RIAA have been engaged in verbal warfare, with The Pirate Bay responding to an article by the RIAA that called it “one of the worst of the worst”. More on both of these late breaking stories next week.

As mentioned earlier, due to Sony and Nintendo withholding hardware figures for the PS3 and Wii, I don’t have enough data to write up a full NPD analysis, so you’ll have to put up with a simplified version here.

NPD January 2008 to 2012 Compared - things are bad across the board, it seems (January 2012 figures for PS3/Wii estimate only)

Microsoft was the only one brave enough to release data, with the Xbox 360 selling 270,000 units, down 29% from a year ago. Microsoft also mentioned that it held 49% of the current-gen console market. A little maths then tells us that the PS3 and Wii sold a *combined* 281,000 units. With the PS3 and Wii selling in similar numbers usually, that’s around 140,000 units for each, which is way down compared to the previous January’s 319,000 (Wii) and 267,000 (PS3).

These companies can only hope that January was a fluke, and that sales will pick up again.

Game sales were just as bad, with the number one selling title, Modern Warfare 3, only shipping 386,000 units – at the same stage of sales, Black Ops managed 750,000 (although MW3 sold more copies in the preceding months, it’s now flat in terms of sales to Black Ops), and Modern Warfare 2 managed 658,000 during its January period. And considering MW3 was the top seller, it means the other titles in the top 10 were much worse.

Overall, it’s the worst January since 2004.

The results are so bad that analysts are still debating the whys of it, with Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter even questioning the validity of the data.

Maybe people are playing too much Skyrim to have time to buy any new games, just a thought!

And on that sour note, we come to the end of another WNR. Hope you enjoyed it, and see you next week.

Posted in Copyright, DVD, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 3 Comments »

DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for the ‘News Roundup’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (18 March 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (11 March 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (4 March 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (26 February 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (19 February 2012)

Pages

Links

Categories