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Weekly News Roundup (20 September 2009)

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

Welcome back to another edition of the WNR. How was your week? I spent the week doing odd things, to be honest, I can’t really remember all that much about it, except I did waste a bit of time on Monopoly City Streets, except the cheaters on there makes it annoying for the rest of the players. It’s a good distraction, but I wish they’d put more thought into the rules before launching the game. Onto the news then.

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.

High Definition

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.

Posted in Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (20 September 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (13 September 2009)

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

I managed to get the August 2009 US video games sales analysis done, based on NPD stats as usual. August was an interesting month, with the PS3 price cut and the PS3 Slim announcements, plus the Xbox 360 price cut as well. September may prove to be even more interesting, with the PS3 Slim official going on sale right at the beginning of the month and the Xbox 360 price cut in full focus as well. But August was, in most areas, as expected, but Nintendo has got to be worrying a bit because it might lose its steady hold on second place in the hardware charts, and may even slip back to as much as fourth, depending on how successful the Xbox 360 price cut is. Other than that, it was a pretty quiet week with the US Labor Day holiday meaning no news for a couple of days. This allowed me to finally complete GTA IV, to gain the 100% completion stat (don’t believe me? Go to the Rockstar Social Club’s GTA IV 100% page, and search for my nick, LastMinuteGoal, which is the 3895th global entry if you sort by “joined”). Read it and weep (you read it, I weep as I realise the amount of time I’ve wasted trying to get this stat).

Let’s start with copyright news in this very quiet week, which means I’ll have to ramp up my rant-o-gizmo to fill the space. I can also write completely meaningless sentences that occupy a lot of space, which makes this WNR look more content rich at first glance, but not too much as to make it too boring to read or too much like the ramblings of a mad men, which does nobody any favours, unless of course you’re auditioning for the TV show of the same name, which I have yet to watch a single episode of, although I’ve been meaning to. I’ve heard good things about it.

With the above 85 useless words out of the way, do you still remember the Amazon Kindle thing? Well, it was a huge PR disaster for Amazon as they deleted 1984, of all books, from people’s Kindle e-Book reader remotely without their permission. They’ve apologised, issued refunds, and lots of other things, but the latest should finally settle matters once and for all. Or at least Amazon hopes so. They’ve promised to replace copies of the deleted books, this time with authorised copies, and this should restore people’s notes that were also lost when Amazon pulled the plug. Those that no longer want the books can choose to receive $30 gift certificates instead. It’s nice of them, but it’s too little too late, and while I doubt Amazon would pull a stunt like this in the future for fear or further backlash, but the fact of the matter is that the ability to do so remains, and DRM is still evil.

Redbox: Hollywood's latest target in their crusade against innovation

Hollywood’s latest target is Redbox, the DVD rental vending machine. Universal Studios, Fox and Warner Bros. have threatened to stop the supply of movies to Redbox, so they will no longer be able to rent out movies from these studios. Redbox had earlier made deals with Paramount and Sony, but the demands of these other studios were designed to basically to put Redbox out of business, and so at the moment, no deal seems likely. Amongst the demands are that Redbox destroy all rental copies they no longer need, which previously they sold cheaply on the second hand market. I won’t mention the environmental impact of this, but since Redbox has already agreed to this demand with Paramount and Sony, this wasn’t the major point of contention. What Universal and co. wanted was 40% of all of Redbox’s profit from the rental business as royalty, which is simply ridiculous and something they do not demand from other rental businesses. Also, they want to price fix the rentals to ensure it doesn’t go below $1.00 per night. And as if these demands weren’t enough, the studios also want Redbox to only rent movies 45 days after release, so as not to hurt the straight sales business. You might wonder why the studios want Redbox to fail? It could be because Redbox’s cheap rentals means less profits for studios, or that it might really hurt their sales business (although in my experience, people who buy movies will always buy them, and people who rent will rarely buy them, regardless of how many days you delay the availability of rentals). But I think it’s because studios fear losing control, and Redbox’s business model means studios have less and less control over how their discs are sold. It doesn’t matter if it benefits consumers, or that this could lead to bigger and better things, even for studios, as Redbox expands and perhaps gets into the digital download kiosk business. Change is what the Hollywood studios fear, change to their traditional business models for which they’ve gotten very rich on over the years. And it’s not the first time Hollywood has challenged innovation, as they did with VCRs (it was also Universal Studios, back then versus Betamax), DVRs, HDTV (see last week’s story on selectable output control), digital movie storage systems (like Kaleidescape) and digital downloads.

The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, one of the musician organizations opposed to a three-strikes system

The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, organizations opposed to a three-strikes system

And it’s not just Hollywood, the music industry is even worse at dealing with change. The whole DRM’d music fiasco, which eventually forced the studios to back down, was a total waste of time and money. And now, their crusade against Internet users seems to be succeeding, at least when it comes to lobbying governments for three-strike Internet banning systems. But the studios claim they are only looking after the musicians, whose hard work does deserve to be rewarded, but do musicians really think that banning potential customers and fans from the Internet is really the solution? They do not. At least not the UK ones, as groups representing the likes of Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney have made it clear that they vehemently opposed to any such plans to ban people from the Internet. The Featured Artists Coalition, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild have all called the three-strikes system as “extraordinarily negative”. They believe there are other ways to raise profits, like through integration with video games like the Guitar Hero series, and they are right. Video gaming is a growing business, often at the expense of music sales, as interactivity is what people crave these days. There are also other solutions, such as a subscription download system, or more focus on music video digital downloads, but just like Hollywood, the music studios want to protect their old way of doing things, which has also served them well, but perhaps no longer cuts it in today’s digital world.

Movies, music – software is another product that’s experiencing growing piracy. But again, the industry fails to grasp and take advantage of the changes in people’s needs, and their latest attempt at an anti-piracy video, dubbed the worst ever, proves this. It only shows how out of touch these industries are when it comes to dealing with piracy, and how they totally fail to connect to the current generation by using a modified campaign from the 90’s (against floppy disk piracy, no less) to fight piracy. The fact that the video compares a college student sharing some DVDs with professional pirates who are arrested and sent to prison, just shows how they are not grasping at the difference between piracy for profit and personal piracy. They’re also still assuming people do it because A, they don’t think they’ll get caught, and B, that they don’t know it’s illegal. They do know it’s illegal, and maybe they do think they won’t get caught (and statistically, they’re right), but most do it because they can’t afford to do anything else if they really really need a piece of software, or music or movie (academically, or even for social reasons, as you want to keep up with friends who do use said software or have watched and listened to the movie or music). It’s not an excuse, that is true, but it’s also a fact. The legal alternative is of course for the people who cannot afford it to not use it, but does that really help the software, music or movie industry? They don’t get any extra profit from people not using their products, and they certainly lose a lot of the Internet based hype surrounding tools like Photoshop, or the latest movie, or music video. And from the loss of this, they actually lose more money as a result. Of course, they could discount things to make it affordable, so that every person who pirates it now will become a loyal customer. And I suspect for a $300 piece of software, the number of people who pirate it will greatly outnumber the people who buy it, possibly by a factor of 100 to 1 – and so the companies can reduce prices by a factor of 100 (to $3) and still make the same amount of money, but they only need to reduce prices by a much smaller factor, and they will actually come out ahead. Would you still pirate Windows 7 if you could buy a copy for $49, as opposed to $199?

High Definition

Let’s move on to high def news. Sony is the latest manufacturer to add video streaming support to their Blu-ray player. This is actually kind of a big news, for the founding father of Blu-ray to adopt support for a form of video distribution that is seen as a competitor to Blu-ray, and perhaps even eventual successor once bandwidth catches up. Sony will add Netflix, YouTube and Slacker support to the BDP-N460.

Sony's BDP-N460 will feature Netflix, YouTube and Slacker integration

In the same news post, LG also announced that they’re adding Vudu support via a firmware update to their Blu-ray player range, which already includes impressive support for Netflix, YouTube and CinemaNow, as well as Wifi capabilities and support for home network media streaming. Samsung has been equally busy adding everything from YouTube support to MKV playback and USB drive input. It seems the disc playing capabilities of these players have been relegated to almost a side feature, as these “media boxes” (for want of a better description) can do a lot of things that were once limited to a cumbersome HTPC, or games consoles. And this is good for the consumer as they get these for no added cost, and great for the video streaming companies that can forgo expensive and usually ineffective set-top-box rollouts. And it’s all thanks to BD-Live, or rather, the requirement of BD-Live to include Internet connection capabilities on players (and to a lesser extent, Bonus-View, which requires on-board storage that can be used for video streaming, as well as downloads). And BD-Live being available so quickly after Blu-ray’s introduction is, in a small part, thanks to HD DVD’s mandatory Internet connection requirement, without which the Blu-ray people might not have had the competitive urge to ad what could be seen as a entry point or a Trojan Horse for a competing distribution service.

And lastly in gaming, Sony is still feeling great after the successful launch of the PS3 Slim, and the price cut that went along with it. What they’re not feeling too great about is perhaps the reaction to the PS3 3.00 firmware, which has disappointed a lot of PS3 owners. I know I talked about this last week, but this week, even Sony admitted that some of the changes brought about by the new firmware has been a failure, like the changes to the friend list, and they’ve suggested that changes are being made. So 3.01 shouldn’t be too far away, but it’s nice to know that they do respond to feedback, which they haven’t done enough in relation to firmware updates. And whoever thought that using a major version number like 3.00 was a good idea without introducing any major new features, should be sacked. It wasn’t even as if the previous firmware had reached 2.99 and there was no way to go by to 3.00, and even then, they should have done a 2.991. Don’t raise people’s expectations, especially when it comes to fanboys that have very active imaginations when it comes to pre-emptive gloating about how great the new firmware is going to be when it comes out.

So that’s all for this week. Should be more news next week, and with GTA IV out of the way, I might even bother to search the net and find some, although that Monopoly Cities Streets thing has been interesting me enough to suggest I might have found something else to occupy myself (please don’t put hazards on my streets, pretty please!). See you then.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (13 September 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (6 September 2009)

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

Welcome to another WNR. Hope you’ve had a good week. Me? I’ve had a lousy one, and you might be able to see hints of this in my rantings below, which contains 11.4% more bile than my usual efforts. A good rant is actually a good way to finish off a bad week, I find.

Starting with the copyright news, the Canada government is currently in a consultation phase in regards to changes to copyright laws, holding a series of town hall meetings to allow for public input. But this might actually make the copyright lobby look bad, and might make the government think twice about giving away its own citizen’s rights to corporations, and so the all powerful copyright lobby had to take action.

The action includes hiring private security guards and arresting anyone with a different opinion, while changing the format of the town hall meeting as to stack it in their favor. When a Canadian member of parliament (MP), a member of the NDP party, joined students to protest the changes, by handing out flyers informing people of the possibly biased meeting, they were threatened by security guards at the event. And even after the incident, The American Federation of Musicians issued further threats towards the NDP MP, asking her party to penalize her for daring to take part in the democratic process. It also labeled the action of students and the MP, basically involving only handing out flyers, as “disgusting”. Yes, the democratic process can be a bit disgusting at times, especially if it leads to the “wrong” opinion.

DigiProtect: Candid interview gives an inside view on how the anti-piracy industry operates

But you wonder why so much time and effort is being spent fighting piracy, when the act of fighting piracy itself is quite profitable. Step forward Digiprotect, a company specializing in tracking down online pirates and suing them on behalf of copyright holders. Companies in the same business as Digiprotect has been accused of various unsavoury acts previously, such as hacking into servers and stealing information, but in an interview, Mr. Hein, the account manager of Digiprotect, revealed some very interesting tidbits on how the anti-piracy industry has matured and now employs a specific business model. Mr. Hein claims, and even I have a hard time believing this to be the case, that they actually lease copyright on certain content from copyright holders, release these content on P2P networks as honey pots to attract potential downloaders, and then catch them in the act. And then they will chose the countries that make suing easier and more profitable, and sue those users. There is even a formula to determine how much money to seek, but it’s not related to actual losses or damages – the amount is set so that it’s not too much to make the judge sympathetic to the defendant, but obviously large enough to make the whole process worthwhile. The whole interview is extremely candid and interesting, so it’s definitely worth a read, but the impression you get out of all this is that it is, in the end, all about profit for companies like Digiprotect. And if governments pass laws to allow for three strike based Internet bans, you can bet that companies like Digiprotect will set to profit, as someone will need to do doing all the hard work of tracking down who the copyright holders deem unsuitable to be connected online.

And ISPs will then have to be the one forking over the money to companies like Digiprotect, the cost of which will then be passed onto the consumer, even those who has never downloaded anything illegal. This is just one of the reasons why UK ISPs have joined forces to oppose the government’s Internet anti-piracy banning plans. In an open letter, the CEOs of some of UK’s largest ISPs have stated their joint opposition to such a plan, due to the cost issue and also due to the fact that they can see innocent customers being caught up in the system and being banned for no good reason. This is not to mention the burden to the tax payer of having a government agency to deal with the thousands upon thousands of Internet banning requests that will flood in. Per week. But the technophobic government, mostly due to their lack of understanding of the issues, will side with the lobby that has the most pull, and Hollywood and the music studios are where the money is. ISPs, and all Internet users, tax payers, will have to the ones to foot the bill so these billion dollar corporations can resist change for a few more years.

Selectable Output Control: MPAA wants it, so you should oppose it

And if you want further evidence of the fear of digital technology and the industry’s reluctance to move on, all you have to do is to look at the MPAA’s second attempt to add DRM to HDTV. They have asked the FCC again to look into the issue of selectable output for HDTV, to close the so called “analog hole”. The MPAA wants to prevent people recording 1080p TV broadcasts to VHS tape, which I wasn’t aware was such a big issue piracy wise. Do people still use VHS tape? But of course, it’s not just VHS tape, it’s the analog recording of digital content, whether it’s done so on a VCR, your computer’s analog video inputs or on your DVD recorder. But again you must ask, does analog recording from TV lead to a lot of piracy? So much that the MPAA must spend considerable resources to lobby the FCC for changes, especially after it has already failed in their previous attempt not too long ago due to opposition from, um, practically everyone including the former FCC chairman. And the proposed changes, which in essence means DRM for HDTVs, means that everyone will have to upgrade their HDTV equipment again so that they are DRM compatible. The MPAA argues that this is actually a pro-consumer move, because by adding DRM to everything, the content owners will stop being anti-consumer by holding back content for longer periods. Awesome!

High Definition

And on that note, we move effortlessly to HD news. Cnet has reviewed Oppo’s new Blu-ray player, the BDP-83, and declared it the best Blu-ray player they’ve seen so far. The superior picture quality was as expected, given Oppo’s experience with DVD upscaling and the price tag of the machine, which puts it in the middle/upper end of the price range for Blu-ray players. The fact that the player supports pretty much every format under the sun (except for HD DVD – more on that later) also helped – DVD-Audio, SACD, and all Blu-ray profiles are supported, as well as DivX, AVCHD playback.

Toshiba's first Blu-ray player available in November

But it’s also the little things that Cnet noted, including a bundling of an HDMI cable that many players neglect. The player also comes in a soft cloth bag, which is a nice touch. Cons include the lack of Wi-Fi, no support for video streaming services and the high price. The problem for people who don’t live in Blu-ray region A is that the player is pretty useless, but there’s ongoing work on region-free firmware and it already works if you don’t mind using an older firmware. That there’s no official region B or region-free version is a big shame, and once again, blame goes towards the few selected greedy studios for forcing region coding upon us.

From one special Blu-ray player, to another, perhaps even more special one. That’s right, Toshiba’s first Blu-ray player, the BDX2000, will soon be available in stores for under $250. It is special of course because this is the first and only Blu-ray player Toshiba has produced so far, and it comes 18 months after the death of their HD DVD format, the failed competitor for Blu-ray. The player itself is nothing special from the information released so far, a pretty standard affair with the only notable feature being SD card support. There’s no NetFlix or Amazon streaming services as per the LG/Samsung/Panasonic players. There’s no mention of DVD upscaling or use of the Cell chip to enhance Blu-ray/DVD playback. And it doesn’t even play HD DVDs, which the press release specifically mentions. I guess that’s forgivable for a first attempt, and we may yet hear more about the video processing features as we get closer to the release date, but one can’t help being slightly underwhelmed. A special discount for HD DVD player owners would be welcomed as well.

And in gaming, the focus is still on the PS3 Slim. Users who have got their hands on one have benchmarked it against the PS3 Fat, and found it to be both slower and faster. It was faster in game loading, but slower in other areas such as booting and Blu-ray disc loading. Those using their fat PS3s for Blu-ray only will not need to upgrade, it seems.

To go with the PS3 Slim, firmware version 3.00 was released for the PS3 (all versions) as well, replacing the 2.80 firmware released in June. So far, as with most of the PS3’s firmware releases, the response to the new firmware has been extremely mixed. The usual report of bricked PS3s (or at least the Blu-ray drives), plus problem unique to this version including controller issues, as well as the fact that with such a major version number, almost nothing major was added feature wise, has some PS3 fans fuming. The use of the major version number, possibly more to denote the introduction of the PS3 Slim than anything else, is what I think confused many people, who were expecting a “New Xbox Experience” type update, but instead got version 2.85 instead.

More Xbox 360 rumours, this time for a new 250 GB Xbox 360 with two wireless controllers. But it’s supposed to retail $100 more than the PS3, and I just can’t see it happening.

So that’s another WNR out of the way. Not as much bile as I had imagined when I first started writing, but too much anger, and you become numb as a result. Or something. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (6 September 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (30 August 2009)

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Damn, can’t believe August is nearly over already. Can’t believe it’s nearly 2010, you know the year we make contact, and only three years away from the end of the world in December 2012. And there’s still aren’t any flying cars. Meh. Oh, I did as promised and updated the blog post I wrote two weeks ago about the value of digital entertainment, but this time instead of basing it on pricing/length of the entertainment, I did it on the price per “bit” of digital data. Blu-ray, it seems, is the best value if you want to minimize the cost per byte of data you buy. Once again, digital music is the least value, costing 500 times more than Blu-ray on a bit-by-bit basis.

Let’s start with copyright news for this relatively news lite week. The Pirate Bay continues to be attacked by the MPAA, via the Swedish courts. This time, the MPAA has forced the Pirate Bay’s web host’s web host to shut off traffic to TPB, which managed to shut down the torrent listing site for an entire three hours. Millions of dollars spent in legal proceedings don’t give you much, do they?

And as a preview of what could happen if the TPB would go down forever, the temporary downtime of the TPB led to server spikes for the other torrent sites. So unless the MPAA/RIAA go and take down every single torrent website, then people will just move on to the next one. Eventually, someone will open a website in a country that won’t bow down to the MPAA, maybe Antigua or somewhere, and then the MPAA would have finally forced piracy to become fully resilient. Evidence shows this to be the trend, that the more the industry fights against piracy, the harder it becomes to prevent it. Evidence also shows that through more competitive pricing and less DRM, piracy can be reduced.

IsoHunt - the MPAA needs to prove direct infringement, Judge says

Going to another big trial going on at the moment, the judge in IsoHunt’s trial actually wants the MPAA to prove direct infringement, of which they have presented zero evidence of it so far. The MPAA are of course outraged, that they would actually have to prove direct piracy, because it might be a bit hard to prove that a text file, which is basically what a .torrent file is, can do any damage at all when it comes to piracy. The text file has to be fed to a software program, which interprets the data, connects to the right trackers, and then through the tracker, connect to users to initiate downloads and uploads. Not exactly direct, and nothing other than the original text file is hosted by torrent sites like IsoHunt – everything else is hosted or produced by someone else, and even at the end of this, you still cannot prove piracy unless a complete copy of a file has been uploaded or downloaded, not just chunks of it. A chunk of a file is just digital garbage, and is neither unique nor will it contain any artistic or commercial value, and hence, no copyright abuse. It would be almost as ridiculous as someone copying a couple of word from an AP news article, and then AP going after them for copyright abuse. Oh.

Going to yet another big trial, a Dutch court has ruled that Mininova must remove all infringing torrents within three month, as the Dutch MPAA, BREIN, has won a court case. It’s funny because Mininova was only set up after Suprnova was shutdown, and Mininova, despite the name, is not much larger and much easier to use than Suprnova. I’m looking forward to see what advances Micronova will have when Mininova goes down, if it goes down. And if you can’t stop torrent sites, then you can go after the people who download them. The UK government is planning to have their own three strikes system that will ban anyone suspected of downloading pirated material. All this will do is to put further pressure on the courts, which might need to handle a couple of thousand claims every week. Happening in the UK, this reminds me of what happened over there in the 19th century, where moral outrage ensure every other poor person were sentenced for trivial crimes, and sent to penal colonies all around the world. Just don’t send them to Australia this time please, because we’ve got enough of our own pirates already.

None of this will actually stop people pirating though. As mentioned above, people will just open new torrent sites that will become super popular instantly. And the people who download pirated material will simply switch to encryption technology, which won’t really slow down downloads that much, but will mean it would be next to impossible to monitor what files you are downloading. So the industry can spend millions on lawsuits, the government can spend millions on new legislation and put further pressure on the judicial system, ISPs can be forced to spend millions on monitoring (which will kill off the smaller ISPs), and further millions can be spent on DRM, but what will all this get you? Piracy that can’t be stopped. Well worth the money spent, if you ask me. For people pirating stuff, and people downloading pirated stuff, that is. Eventually, all of this will force piracy to be even more convenient and private, and then at that time, everyone will do it because they know they can’t get caught anymore. Good one, MPAA.

High Definition

Let’s get to HD news. Blu-ray may be gaining popularity in the home theater, but hardly anybody is using it on computers, and the situation is likely to continue well into the 2010’s, according to analysts.

There are a lot of reasons why Blu-ray hasn’t taken off on PCs, the main reason may be because other than movies, there’s nothing else that uses Blu-ray. Games could come on Blu-ray instead of 2 or 3 DVDs, but that will only work if most people have Blu-ray drives, and because games can be installed to people’s huge HDDs, the convenience only comes in at installation time. So instead of swapping out the disc once or twice during the install, Blu-ray can save you the trouble, but after this, you will still only ever need to insert one disc into the drive to play the game, whether it is the first DVD, or the single Blu-ray. It’s not like the transition from CD to DVD, because at that time, some CD games came on as many as 5 discs, and because people’s HDDs were smaller, you had to swap discs during play which was really annoying. And even then, the gaming industry successfully resisted using DVD-ROM for gaming for many years.

BD-RE: Too big for some things, too small for others, and just not as convenient

So without BD-ROM applications, then it comes down to Blu-ray recordables (BD-Rs and BD-REs) to offer huge amounts of storage on a single disc. But do people really need these 25 and 50 GB discs? They aren’t big enough to store a full backup of your PC’s content, usually several hundred GBs in size. They may be too big to store the odd file or two, most people use USB drives for that now. So there is probably a use for them for archival purposes, to store content that you don’t want someone to erase, but then again, 25 GB is a lot to store on an easily lost and damaged disc. The fact is between DVDs, USB thumb drives with ever increasing capacity, external HDD redundant arrays, there may be no place for Blu-ray recordables other than for storing HD movies. Imagine if DVDs were only good for making your own DVD movies, would it have become as popular as it is today?

Plasma TVs are dying, and that’s sad thing, because they are still the best quality, and in some cases, the best value screens on today’s market. LCDs, even the newer LED based ones, cannot hold a candle to the quality plasmas can give you. Candle is an appropriate term to use here because it’s the contrast ratio that usually separates the plasma TV with LCD equivalents. And there aren’t any viewing angle issues either with plasmas. But because plasma panels are hard to scale down, they can’t be used as PC monitors or on even smaller devices, and so the LCDs are much more cost effective to produce. And this is why plasma is dying. OLED will come along one day and replace LCDs and plasmas, both in terms of cost and quality, but for now, it remains a rich man’s toy ($2000+ for a 11″ screen? No thanks).

And finally in gaming, the reaction to the PS3 Slim is still the focal point of this week’s news. All eyes are on Microsoft to see how they respond, with analysts calling for a Xbox 360 Slim, which Microsoft needs much more than Sony. But Microsoft’s response, or perhaps it was pre-planned all along, is to drop the Pro bundle and reduce the Elite to Pro prices. Something that you would have already heard about back in July, if you read the WNR.

Sales wise, the PS3 Slim should give Sony’s console a much needed boost, particularly in the short term. Remember it won’t be just people who are buying their first PS3, due to the price drop, but there will be many who will buy their second PS3, as another Blu-ray player perhaps. Expect Sony’s console to outsell the Xbox 360 quite handsomely over the next few months, which is good timing on Sony’s part as the holiday season is so close. You won’t get the same effect with the Xbox 360 Elite price reduction, although Natal should see the Xbox 360 remain strong in 2010.

Xbox 360 Slim: Are Microsoft too scared to put out another piece of hardware, after the RRoD fiasco?

And I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks the PS3 Slim doesn’t look as good as one had hoped. Instead of calling it the PS3 Slim, it really should be the PS3 Flat, because it’s as if they’ve taken the old PS3 and basically flattened it, making it actually lengthier in size. And as Examiner.com article mentions, it may be because it’s far too early the product lifecyle to have a slim SKU, as least compared to what happened with the PS2. Sony couldn’t make the PS3 Slim any smaller without having to suffer cost issues again, and in the end, they didn’t make it as small as it should be. I don’t think this is a problem for the Xbox 360 Slim, as the Xbox 360 is a year older and the PS3, and the technology it uses was already a bit out of date at the time it came out, and while incremental improvements have occurred, there’s large scope for miniaturization, which could help to both decrease cost and improve reliability. But I guess Microsoft’s Xbox 360 hardware division are still suffering from PTSD due to the RRoD issue, and they won’t be too keen to put out another piece of hardware. But I won’t be surprised to if the Xbox 360 Slim makes its appearance right around the time Natal comes out.

WordPress tells me I’ve nearly used up this week’s word limit, so I’ll have to stop now. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next week with the same mix of news, ranting, and outright lies.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (30 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (23 August 2009)

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

There are so many sources of home entertainment these days, it’s hard to know what you spend your hard earned money on. I find that I’m now spending more and more on gaming, and less and less on movies (and a bit more on TV DVDs). Despite games costing a lot more than movies (for each game I buy, I can probably buy 4 to 6 cheapo DVD movies, or one and a half, two TV series on DVD), I still feel that games offer better value for money, just by the number of hours I spend on them (and to a lesser extent, TV series). So I wrote a blog that examines that various forms of home entertainment, the number of hours of entertainment each activity provides, and the cost of such – plot them in Excel and draw a graph, and you have the results. And I was right – gaming is the best value, followed by TV DVDs, although it only applies to good games that you want to put a lot of time into. What may be surprising (or not) is that digital music downloads turn out to be the least good value, costing nearly $20 for each hour of enjoyment (compared to just $2 for a good game, or just less than $3 for a whole season worth of TV on DVD). During the week, I plan to upgrade this blog entry to include cost per MB of data – this is a silly way to look at value, but it should put Blu-ray on top, followed closely by games and with digital music still the least value. The music industry needs to take a closer look and price music accordingly.

Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet week, and not just because I proved my own point by spending large chunks of this week playing GTA IV (so yes, I finished the story missions on the PC version, and I’m only 5% away from a 100% completion score – but I did not let it affect work, honest!). Enough chit chat, let’s get started with the WNR.

In Copyright news, Australian ISP iiNet is still frantically fighting the AFACT over allegations that it isn’t taking enough action to combat piracy. ‘Enough’ being the important term in the previous sentence, as iiNet sets out to prove that there is not much more they can do, not when faced with existing laws.

iiNet’s two new lines of defence sees them first claim that the existing Communications Act prohibits them to spy on their customers in order to monitor piracy. The second sees them arguing that since the AFACT has not demanded other ISPs to take similar action, that it is unreasonable to expect iiNet to be the only ISP that needs to take action. I’ve mentioned quite a few times what the copyright holders want ISPs to do is often in breach of privacy laws, although governments around the world are bending over backwards (and sometimes just bending over) to accommodate groups like the MPAA’s efforts to curtail piracy by removing your right to privacy. It all comes down to politicians (and some judges) not really understanding the Internet and what it all means, but the simple fact is that the Internet is now an utility like your telephone service, and is just another form of communication where privacy should be expected. I mention utility because homeowners should now be guaranteed the right to have the Internet, that there should not be any laws in which people are somehow denied essential utilities just because the utility companies don’t like what you’re doing with their services. It would be like your electricity provider shutting down your power just because you might be using electricity do to something illegal – it’s not up the provider to decide whether you should have power or not, it’s up to the judicial system to determine that and to hand out penalties. But governments and judges often see the Internet and the digital revolution as this thing that threatens the very foundations of civilization, and they overreact. In the short term future, when the current digital generation has grown up and are occupying the positions of power, I think they’ll look back at the court cases of today and see just how ridiculous and self damaging the whole thing was – just like how we view McCarthyism today (well, most of us anyway).

iTunes now account for 25% of all music sales in the US

Just to prove how the digital revolution has caught the old guard, well, off guard, news broke that 25% of all music in the US are now sold through iTunes. While the majority of music are still sold in CD form through retail stores, 25% means that iTunes is the single biggest source of music sales in the US already. Now, had the music industry being brave enough to embrace digital, they would be the ones operating the big digital music stores, as opposed to making Apple rich. And had it not been the whole DRM debacle, digital music would have gained market share even faster. While it is unfortunate that I cannot say the industry in general has learned the lessons from misuse of DRM, in that most of them still believe DRM has a place, at least some are trying to address the biggest problem that DRM provides consumers – the inability to do what they want, legally, with these files. Marlin is a new DRM scheme that actually promotes sharing amongst family (and some friends), but it does so in a controlled manner where you (and the copyright holders) know exactly who is sharing your file at all times. But Marlin is still a DRM, and while you are now “allowed” within the scope of the DRM to do all the things you could have done with DRM-free files, the framework is still there to restrict your freedoms if and when the powers that be deem time to do so. To paraphrase Wendy Seltzer of the Berkman Center, DRM is like a maze, and while the old DRM was a maze with a single path that you had to follow, Marlin presents many paths, possibly all the paths you might be able to take legally: but it’s still a maze, and one that you have to hand over your rights as a consumer to enter.

Removing copyrighted videos from YouTube could be a thing of the past

Then there are those situations where nobody gets hurt, yet everyone suffers. One of which is YouTube video uploads. How many times has an enthusiastic user uploaded a video he or she has spent hours editing, finding the right background music and clips to include in the video, upload to YouTube and then had the video removed because it violated someone somewhere’s copyright. Or in the pursuit of the next meme or viral video, someone uploads a clip of something they captured from TV or a DVD – the positive effects of a video going viral are so great that companies now spend millions to professionally produce viral videos – but the home user produced video, which costs companies nothing, gets taken down and all that positive energy is lost. Some companies are only starting to get the fact that people using their material isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it used to be the case where only copyright abuse that actually hurt the copyright holders would get prosecuted, but the fear about digital now means any potential, possibly not even real, copyright abuse gets maximum attention, forcing websites like YouTube to take drastic action to filter out all sorts of content, many of which are perfectly legal (like the time when a TV network used a clip of this guy’s home video, and then when the guy uploaded the same video to YouTube, the video got removed due to a complaint from the very same TV network). But there is money to be made in online advertising, and YouTube is now starting to share revenue with content owners, if they decide to allow the “unauthorised” videos to remain online. YouTube gets a bit of the money because they’re hosting the promoting the videos, the uploader doesn’t get his or her ass sued and gets to keep the video online, and the copyright holders make the money. Doesn’t sound like a bad compromise to me, and who knows, maybe someday the copyright holders will start to appreciate all the free promotion they get from uploaders, and give them a free hat or something for their troubles.

High Definition

Onto HD news now. Nothing much happening, expect more analysis and analysis of analysis on the Toshiba move into Blu-ray. I’m going to link to one such analyst that came up with pretty much the same conclusion I did when I first heard the news, that Toshiba is doing this merely to promote their own anti-Blu-ray strategy.

$64 GB SD cards already exceed Blu-ray's capacity, at a tiny fraction of the size$

64 GB SD cards already exceed Blu-ray's capacity, at a tiny fraction of the size

Well, not so much anti-Blu-ray, as anything-but-Blu-ray, because you can see from the statements Toshiba has made, they still believe that Blu-ray isn’t going to be the one format the rules over all in the early part of this century, and that downloads, streaming and flash memory storage are the future. SD flash cards and USB drives are getting to a point where they equal small hard-drives from just a few years ago, and certainly will beat Blu-ray rewritables in terms of capcity, cost and simplicity. Digital video and still cameras all use SD, most do not use Blu-ray recordables. HDTV PVRs do not use Blu-ray. And even the Blu-ray people don’t want people to use Blu-ray, because it might lead to people making copies of Blu-ray movies through hacking their HDMI cable or something equally absurd. Flash storage is simply more convenient, and there needs to be someway for it to be used for movie distribution before insanely fast Internet connections become the normal to allow us to download a 50GB HD movie in a few minutes. There are many situations where you will still need optical storage, but for everyday use, it is already a bit outdated. Can you imagine using CDs and DVDs in place of your USB drive? No, neither can I.

And going back to what I mentioned above about digital music downloads taking over from CDs, the movement towards pure digital distribution is gaining momentum all the time.

And finally in gaming, the big news of the week is of course the PS3 Slim and the PS3 price cut. It shall be known as the week when the collective gaming community yelled out all at the same time the words “finally”, as it heard about the PS3 price cut, and for once, the rumours turned out to be true about the PS3 Slim.

The PS3 Slim is finally here

My first impressions? That the PS3 Slim didn’t look as good as I thought it would be. I think I got ruined by those fake pics of the silver PS3 Slims that have been around forever – the actual PS3 Slim is a big flat piece of black matte plastic, that looks a bit cheap, to be honest. And while it is definitely slimmer, only about half the height of the PS3 Fat, it’s actually deeper (longer in length) than the old PS3. At the very least, they should have used a glossy finish, and perhaps offer it in some new colours, like white (Wii, Apple) or a sexy red like a sports car. Who knows, maybe they will.

As for the price cut, that’s very much welcomed relief for the ailing PS3 sales, although at this point, sales will need to increase by 100% on current numbers in order to make Microsoft of Nintendo really nervous, much more than the predicted 40 to 60% sales increase.

And what of the response from the other gaming companies? Nintendo remains silent, but Microsoft is rumoured to drop the Xbox 360 Pro package and to price the Xbox 360 Elite at the same price point of $299 ($100 off). Will that work to negate the expected surge in PS3 sales? Probably not, but as someone who is looking to upgrade his Xbox 360 to a new one, it can’t hurt. I would still love to have an Xbox 360 Slim, or at least an Xbox 360 Cool&Quiet – technology advances should allow Microsoft to do this without increasing costs (and possibly lower them as well), and if they are to stick true to their recently proclaimed 10 year strategy for the Xbox 360, then they need to this sooner rather than later to keep the nearly 4 year old platform alive and viable.

That’s all I have for you this week. More next week!

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (23 August 2009)

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Weekly News Roundup (20 September 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (13 September 2009)

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Weekly News Roundup (30 August 2009)

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