Further evidence of me being naughty in 2011 is the fact that all I seems to be getting from the Steam “Winter” Holiday Sale’s Great Gift Pile are lumps and lumps of coal. Other people are getting free games, or really useful coupons, but all I get is coal, and coupons for games I already have. Just in case anyone asks, here’s my Steam profile, so you can check out the games I have and the ones I’ve been playing. Add me as a friend if you like, but I must admit that while I love Steam games, I’ve not been a very active member of the community (and I’ve only just figured out how to create a custom URL for my profile).

Anyhow, let’s not waste too much time, as I’d hate to be still writing come Boxing/St. Stephen’s Day. Starting with copyright news, let’s first cover the fallout from last week’s revelation that IP addresses belonging to the RIAA have been used to download pirated songs, movies and even software.

RIAA caught pirating, but they say somebody else did it

The RIAA responded to the allegations with that old excuse of “someone else did it”. Having long argued that a single IP address is evidence enough to identify web pirates, the RIAA did not like being on the other end of the pointy stick, instead coming out with some vague explanation about “third party vendors” and the like. Did these “third party vendors” also only have a single intact arm?

But I’m going to do something controversial and believe in the RIAA’s explanation. Large organisations often have IP addresses within a leased IP block that they provide to third party vendors in order to obtain some kind of service, and so the RIAA’s excuse may very well be valid. Other organisations also caught recently came up with other explanations, such as their IP being spoofed, or that they were downloading only as part of research. And you know what, in the giving mood I’m in, I’m going to believe them all. Because all of these explanations, and some are improbable, are all not impossible, and this is why IP addresses should not be used as evidence of copyright infringement, without knowing the exact intent and establishing that significant downloading (and uploading) has actually occurred. You don’t go ahead an charge a car’s owner just because their car’s plate identified during the commission of a crime – you investigate the owner, see if there’s motive/intent, and of course, see if the car or the plate was stolen.

There's something perverse about seeing a million dollars in a PayPal account - Louis better get it out of there before PayPal does something naughty

Before we get to all the SOPA stuff, which again dominated the week, let’s continue the follow-ups to last week’s stories. Louis CK’s DRM-free experiment has had an update, and after 12 days of sales, Louis has revealed that sales have reached the million dollar mark (with a screenshot of a PayPal account with the said million dollars – better get the money out of there quick Louis, you know what PayPal is like). So that’s a lot of money, despite rampant piracy, which just goes to show that piracy can never really be stopped, but you can still make decent money if you do the right things. The hype over the experiment has obviously increased the visibility of the show, which explains the high piracy rate, but for artists and performers, reaching people sometimes is just as important, if not more important, than actually making money. And through piracy, Louis CK might have just gained quite a few more fans, and that can only be good for business in the long run. And with Louis donating a large chunk of the money to charity, another large chunk to employees as a bonus, this experiment definitely has a happy ending (for Louis as well, as he’s keeping $220,000 for himself to, in his own words, to “do terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business”). If Louis wants to continue the experiment, perhaps the next time, he can use a “pay what you want” model like the Humble Bundles, as this may help to convert more pirates to payers, as $5, while not expensive, is still quite a lot for a lot of people in this economy, to spend on comedy videos.

So while Louis, his staff, and his charities are all having a merry Christmas, there’s been one naughty boy that’s not having such a nice one. Righthaven’s long, excruciating death continues this week, with news that their website’s domain name has just been seized. And not only that, it may very well be auctioned off to pay creditors. If I had money, I would buy the domain name, and put up a DHS style seizure notice on it warning others from trying to profit using the sue-for-settlement approach. Maybe even linking to a cheesy video explaining why you’re even just for thinking about getting into the sue-for-settlement business. And for Righthaven to lose their own domain name, when they’ve been (without standing) threatening to take away other people’s domain names – I don’t know if that’s justice, or irony. Probably both.

Now for the SOPA stuff. With SOPA under intense pressure, the boss of the MPAA, former US Congressman and Senator Chris Dodd gets back to what politicians (and lawyers) are best at doing to defend SOPA: lying (or at least exaggerating the truth). Dodd, who recently said that China should a model the US should refer to for Internet censorship, now says that if we don’t do something about piracy, the US could end up like Sweden, Egypt or Spain, where their local film industries are “gone”. Not just shrunk, or hurt, but “gone”. And of course, none of it is actually true. These countries still churn out tons of films, and in Sweden’s case, films that have made more than a hundred million worldwide, which is rare for non US based films. Ever heard of ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ or ‘Let the Right One In’? The original Swedish productions, which has “inspired” recent remakes, were all big hits. And both Egypt and Spain have produced more films in the last few years, not less (or at least up to 2011 for Egypt, when domestic conflict probably will have reduced film production). And this was probably the last notable defence of SOPA for the week, as the rest of the stories are all about the opposition to SOPA.

If the Internet is good at producing one thing, it’s comedic music videos. And the anti-SOPA protest movement were enriched with not one, but two new protest songs this week. One is from activist Dan Bull, while the other is from the composer of the “Obama Girl” hit. This is the kind of creativity, the kind of freedom of speech, that may very well be endangered if SOPA is passed into law, because the very sites that help to host and promote these kind of original videos, will be the ones under attack by SOPA – the same platform that allows for creativity,  can often also allow pirated content to be hosted as well (in fact, I think you can safely say that YouTube wouldn’t have a been a hit had it not been for the pirated stuff that were dominant during the website’s early days).

Also joining in the protest was Scribd, a document upload and sharing website that has become incredibly useful as a way to embed documents in the same easy manner as videos. But it too would be under attack by SOPA, as it operates on a business model not too different from “rogue” sites such as Megaupload or Rapidshare. I’m sure there are lots of copyrighted content on Scribd, but SOPA punishes an entire website for the act of a very small minority of individuals (outside of the control of the website), and Scribd has a lot to lose if SOPA becomes law. Which is why on Wednesday, Scribd chose to randomly censor words from the billions of documents they hosts, an act of protest to hopefully get people to understand the threat posed by SOPA, and its likely impact on the Internet.

Reddit may have to close if SOPA is passed, due to the compliance cost associated with the controversial legislation

Joining Scribd on the potential list of sites that will be hurt by SOPA is Reddit, one of the Internet’s largest communities. The general manager of the website says that if SOPA passes, then Reddit would probably have to close down, due to the legal requirement to make the website compliant with SOPA. With millions of new posts to go through, the team of roughly 11 staff, mostly engineers, would not be able to keep up with the moderation duties required and there would be no choice but to close the website down. This is because, under SOPA, just a single bad link out of the millions of posts would be enough to mark the entire domain for seizure, and with millions and millions of posts, no doubt containing potentially tens or even hundreds of thousands of links to infringing content, that’s probably enough to mark the site as “dedicated to piracy” under the SOPA terms. And when that happens, all that would be then needed would be a content owner to request Reddit.com be blocked, and that would be that. Multiply that by however many user-generated websites there are on the Internet, and you can start to see the full damage that SOPA could cause.

But one tech company that has been outspoken in its support for SOPA has been domain registration and hosting company, GoDaddy. And ironically with Reddit being threatened, it was a post on Reddit that has now helped to reverse the company’s stance on SOPA. A post asking for a boycott of GoDaddy quickly gained popularity, with the likes of the Cheezeburger company (as in “I can has cheezeburger”), and even Wikipedia, all threatened to move their domain registration from GoDaddy to other providers on the 29th. Facing the prospect of losing potentially thousands of customers, GoDaddy relented and dropped their support for SOPA, although they have not formally dropped their support for the equally dangerous Protect IP Act, so the protest could be still on. Update: Apparently, tens of thousands of domain names have already been moved away from GoDaddy, as people are still not convinced of GoDaddy’s position on SOPA (they’re not anti-SOPA, they’re just not supporting it “right now”).

And so GoDaddy joins the list of companies and organisations not backing SOPA, but it was company that should have never supported it anyway. But when the Heritage Foundation also expressed their disapproval of SOPA, that was my “WTF” moment of the week. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think-tank, has been as pro-copyright as anyone, and so for them to speak out against SOPA, and as influential as they are amongst conservatives (having just hosted a presidential nominee debate for the Republicans), they must have had some serious reservations about SOPA. And they did. Mainly with how the government will given the power to censor websites, and also search engine results, in effect, censoring the flow of information. Hopefully, Republicans in the House and Senate will now think twice about voting for SOPA, or face being chastised by the Heritage Foundation for being anti free speech.

And in the same news article that I wrote, there was also a bit about Ashton Kutcher coming out against SOPA, but he was never really going to support it, considering his profile on the Internet, and his involvement with start-ups.

But probably the best argument against SOPA, and one that even content holders can possible agree with, is that SOPA probably won’t even work, despite the threat of collateral damage it poses. This week, we had the news of another Firefox add-on that looks set to defeat SOPA’s DNS filtering before it’s even launched, so for anyone serious about pirating, SOPA stops nothing. Nothing except actually ensure that new DNS protocols, designed to prevent DNS spoofing, cannot be implemented. As I’ve mentioned before, if the government was as serious about defeating Internet fraud as they are about helping to prop up a dying business model, then there could be a lot more economic gain to be made by preventing Internet fraud.

Okay, the rain is really coming down now, and the thunder appears to be getting closer. That’s probably a good sign that I should end this edition of the WNR, before the power goes out.  Merry Christmas, and see you next week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting with the copyright news as has been the custom, Halloween eve or otherwise, and we have a scary thing to report, and that’s the US House of Representative’s newly produced copyright bill, dubbed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

What a typical US voter looks like, judging by what/who the politicians really listen to

First off, the title of the bill is misleading, because online piracy cannot be stopped, as history has shown us, through legislation or technical measures – people will just find a way around it as usual. But the “people’s representatives”, you know, the guy with only 9% approval these days, are trying their best to ensure the good money lobbyist have spent produce something worthy of the $$$, and so we have SOPA. SOPA is similar to the stalled PROTECT IP Act, which was stalled after one Senator with common sense (there had to be one, after all) decided that sacrificing the tenets of democracy to appease the movie industry wasn’t the right thing to do. SOPA will give the government the power to seize the assets of one industry at the behest of the most powerful members of another competing industry, namely the members represented by the RIAA and MPAA, all because of the stronger lobbying power of that industry. That’s democracy at work, folks.

And the bill extends not only to websites and domain names in the US (I think this bill will kill US jobs as webmasters and businesses mitigate the risk of domain seizures by moving their business elsewhere), it also applies to foreign websites (they might as well just write “The Pirate Bay” into the bill, if they haven’t already). And in the spirit of shifting responsibility of copyright enforcement away from the actual copyright holders towards the government, as the bill will allow the US government to lead the charge overseas and file injunctions against “bad” websites on behalf of studios like Sony and Fox. Because as you know, these small businesses don’t really have the financial resources, nor teams of lawyers, that can handle this sort of stuff, so tax payers will have to do the right thing and help out of course.

But while SOPA will make the US government the public face of copyright enforcement, the government is already doing plenty behind the scenes, specifically, in Russia. Russia’s application to join the WTO faces many hurdles, but if they are seen as friendly copyright enforcement, it will make the MPAA/RIAA happy, and then they will stop whispering bad things about Russia (which has already helped to put the country onto the “notorious piracy market” list) to the US government, which will then drop (some) opposition to Russia’s application. And so the Russia government is now making an example of two admins of the defunct BitTorrent tracker, Interfilm. The married couple now faces up to 6 years in a Russian prison, as the MPAA claims the trackers has caused as much as $1.25 billion in damages (although under Russian law, the couple may only be liable for $16,000). International diplomacy and politics in action, comrades.

This gravestone picture detailing Righthaven's possible demise is appropriate given it's Halloween-eve and all, despite having being used only last month. Plus Righthaven sort of sounds like Raven, which is very Halloween-y

But it’s not all bad news this week. With the threat of bankruptcy looming, Righthaven has somehow gotten themselves into more trouble this week, as a judge has ruled against the firm in the biggest ruling yet – $120,000 in costs that Righthaven will have to pay to Thomas DiBiase, a former prosecutor that Righthaven tried to sue for the use of an article by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Remember that Righthaven has already said they are having trouble paying just the $35,000 ruled against them, to the point where they may have to declare bankruptcy, so $120,000 is going to be a bit more difficult. At this point, and I know I shouldn’t, I almost feel sorry for Righthaven. While what they’re trying to do is despicable, in my opinion, the way they have done is, really, just stupid. And I have a soft spot for stupid people, or law firms. The key to settlement-for-profit is to find the right marks, I mean, defendants. You pick the ones that are less likely to put up a fight, and more likely to pay up. So it’s a no go suing poor people, people with knowledge of the law (like, for example, a former prosecutor), people who have the connections to mount a good defence (for example, a former prosecutor), and people or groups that are not part of a charity, non profit, or public service organisation (for example, a former prosecutor who runs a non profit websites providing details about unsolved murder cases as a public service). Other law firms have been selecting defendants carefully and wisely, so it’s no secret. But the biggest problem with Righthaven’s approach is that, copying newspaper articles is not in the same league as copying music or movies. The people who download music and movies illegally, and their motives for doing so, are very much different to people who copy/paste newspaper articles for discussion, public discourse, or information sharing, usually without any financial benefit to themselves.

Over here in Australia, opposition to our local variety of  ”copyright trolling” seems to be growing, as the boss of an ISP has signalled the company’s intention to fight the “scum” (he’s words, not mine) who are trying to profit from allegations of copyright infringement. John Linton, chief of ISP Exetel says the ISP is now taking measures and investing $200,000 in the process to do some unspecified work to make it harder for the “blackmailing scum” to target their customers. It will be interesting to see if other ISPs follow suit.

And to add to the growing movement against draconian anti-piracy measure, whether it’s legal or technical, Valve’s Gabe Newell is once again highlighting that the only way to prevent online piracy may very well mean that publishers have to compete with pirates, by doing the controversial thing of actually improving services. Once again, Newell highlighted the success Valve’s Steam platform has had in the pirate haven known as Russia, a country that publishers have said would be impossible to make money from due to rampant piracy, but is now Steam’s second largest continental European market. Apart from more reasonable pricing, the key was localisation, according to Newell, to provide Russian translated games to gamers before the pirates do, as opposed to the publisher’s tradition of waiting 6 months or more to bring out a local version. Publishers want to eliminate piracy, but they don’t really want to do the hard work of making a better (or in Russia’s case, a usuable) product. It seems you can’t have your cake and still eat it (even if the cake is a lie).

And even in the area of pricing, it seems publisher may be able to compete with pirates too. Competing with “free” isn’t impossible it seems, as Newell says their pricing experiment with the now “free-to-play” Team Fortress 2 has paid off big time, with 20% to 30% of those playing it (for free) paying for in-game stuff. Mostly hats, I guess. Just goes to show that people are willing to pay for anything if they decide, and not publishers, if there’s value in it. A variation on “free-to-play” may very well be “pay-what-you-want”, and I would love to see Steam try this one out.

In HD/3D news, there’s not much going on, although Blu-ray market share remains suitably high and above the 30% level that, a few weeks ago, would have set new records.

However, I do have a story about Zediva’s ongoing battle with the MPAA. Zediva offered a service where people rent physical DVDs, but the company streams the DVD to users via the web, as opposed to sending them the disc.  This week, a judge ruled that what Zediva is doing is not legal and has granted the MPAA a permanent injunction, as it’s just a (not so clever) way to avoid having to pay web streaming licensing fees to movie studios, as no licensing is needed for physical disc rental. This story is only HD related because of the company’s plans (former plans now, perhaps) to stream Blu-ray movies in the future too. Zediva also has to pay the MPAA $1.8 million in damages.

Hulu is not available in Australia and many other countries due to the lack of a global licensing scheme, which sucks for us Australians

Licensing is an interesting issue that I wanted to talk about for a while, but not about what Zediva was trying to do, which was a bit too obvious an attempt to avoid paying the fees, and offered users no real benefits compared to traditional web streaming at all  (with all of the benefits belong to Zediva). But licensing right now, I feel, is holding back innovation. The lack of a truly “global” licensing scheme means that companies like Netflix can’t truly call themselves global giants, and the likes of Amazon can’t offer overseas customers the same experience with their Kindles, even though they allow overseas buyers to buy the devices. The greed of copyright holders, wanting to eke out as much as possible from each market individually, is even hurting  some of their own initiatives, such as the recently rolled out UltraViolet cloud based digital copy scheme, which is yet again a geo-limited (AKA US and, maybe if you’re lucky, Canada, only) service. And here in Australia, we don’t have Netflix, barely a Kindle presence, no Hulu or Spotify, and UltraViolet won’t really help us (yet), and with most of these services actually making money for studios in the US, it’s a huge opportunity they’re missing out on, just so they can get a couple of thousands more from putting pressure on local distributors (which then forces prices up for local content, and pushes people towards grey imports, or even piracy).

And finally in gaming, it appears another jailbreak device has been released for the PS3 which circumvents Sony’s latest attempts to lock down the console.

PS3 gamers with consoles still using firmware 3.55 or older can grab the $50 Jailbreak 2 device, and play games released after firmware 3.60, which feature security fixes that prevented the use of the original jailbreak device. And so the cat and mouse game between Sony and hackers continues (although maybe Sony are the mice in this analogy).

That’s it for this week. I’m really tired after a bad night’s sleep, so most likely, I will have no recollection of ever writing any of the above by tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting as usual with the copyright news, we start with the MPAA’s win against Zediva, as the judge in the case handed down a preliminary injunction against the “innovative” video rental service.

Zediva is a great deal for consumers, but it can only do it by using loop holes that Hollywood is trying to close

A little background info. Zediva’s service works by allowing you to rent physical discs, but instead of sending the disc to you like what Netflix would do, they do what Netflix’s other service does, by offering you a streaming version of the same movie. Zediva then reserves the disc you “rented”, and removes it from circulation. Or basically as Zediva puts it, you rent the disc, and they play it for you over the Internet (imagine a DVD player with a really really long cable). Why did Zediva do this? They did this – and this is where I think Zediva’s downfall will be – to avoid having to pay licensing fees for streaming content.

You see, the problem is that Zediva’s motivations, it seems to me, are born out of trying to avoid paying these licensing fees and release restrictions, and make more money than they would otherwise. If this is Zediva’s real motivation, then good luck to them, but I don’t think they have a snowball’s chance in hell with their case. And in the judge’s summary of the ruling, it’s made quite clear that the judge sees real problems with Zediva’s argument, and that if Zediva was allowed to continue operating, it could harm the existing video-on-demand industry, Netflix included.

Now, it could be debated that what Zediva is doing actually does not hurt Hollywood if you compare it to traditional disc rental, but that it does hurt Hollywood studios when compared to what they can make from streaming deals, and even Zediva won’t deny this, as after all, their business model is to save on licencing costs. This then leads to the debate as to why streaming should cost more than traditional rentals, why Hollywood should choose to not only “tax” new innovative distribution methods, but to place artificial limits (like a 30-day embargo to help increase disc rental income), when these help to fight piracy. But that’s their business decision, and they may be right or wrong, but that’s not for Zediva to decide. So people get pissed off with Redbox waiting times for new releases, or the somewhat hysterical reaction to the Netflix price increases (best encapsulated in this video), and it might hurt Hollywood more to be too greedy when it comes to streaming licensing fees and release schedules, if people do decide to “screw it” and use BitTorrent.

Pron magazine/website Perfect 10 is making legal headlines again this week, twice actually, as they launch yet another lawsuit against yet another online company, this time Megaupload. As you may or may not know, Perfect 10 has in the past sued Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the middle of these three recorded a win against Perfect 10 this week in which the Ninth Circuit court rejected Perfect 10’s appeal over an earlier decision favouring the search giant. But while courts are reluctant to rule about top tech companies that have been Perfect 10’s target before, they may be more favourable to ruling in Perfect 10’s favour against Megaupload, especially since the MPAA’s case against similar file hosting provider, Hotfile, seems to be going okay. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be Perfect 10’s first victory, but it all depends on how frequently their content has been uploaded by users of Megaupload, and if it’s not frequent at all, why Perfect 10 didn’t file DMCA notices to get those content removed, instead of launching a lawsuit (“to make more money” is not an excuse the court would accept, I think).

Diablo III will use 'always-on' DRM, but not for anti-piracy, says Blizzard

Good will amongst gamers is something every game developer needs, and up until this week, Blizzard, the makers of the addictive World of Warcraft and Starcraft series,  probably thought that the had enough good will stored in the bank to pull a nasty surprise. But, as Blizzard will admit, they might have miscalculated. What happened was that Blizzard announced the next episode in another one of their addictive franchises, Diablo III, would have “always-on” DRM, meaning gamers won’t be able to play the game offline, even for a couple of seconds. So Blizzard decided to do a Ubi, and as I talked about last week, nobody likes Ubi DRM. The funny thing was that Blizzard probably never intended to do this as a form of anti-piracy, but only as an anti-cheating feature. This may very well be true, but Blizzard could have avoided this whole controversy (and still used “always-on” DRM) by including an offline mode, much like how Test Drive Unlimited 2 does it (offline and online progress are recoded separately). The statements made by Blizzard immediately after the backlash began didn’t help either – executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo’s statement about there being other games to play when people are offline, for example on long plane trips, was the most ill-conceived of them all (yes, “other games” that people will buy instead of your games).

So it’s a lesson for Blizzard and any other company that chooses to use draconian DRM, for whatever reason – beware of the backlash, which might ultimately hurt revenue more than a couple of extra pirated copies would have (or the cost of adding an offline play mode).

In Blu-ray/3D news, exciting news, sort of, although it’s technically neither HD nor 3D (not yet anyway).

I’ve been talking up UltraViolet for a while now, and it’s not like me really to voice my support for anything Hollywood comes up with, especially if it’s wrapped up in all sorts of DRM, which UltraViolet will no doubt be. But for me, UV is a huge shift in the way we “buy” movies, and it comes just at the right time when cloud storage is all the rage.

UV, simply puts, turns buying a movie into really buying a movie. The idea is that, instead of buying a movie on each platform, on disc, then on iTunes,  then another version for your Android device … instead of doing this, you buy the license to watch the movie, and then you get access to all the versions via the cloud, for all of your popular devices. It’s like Digital Copy, except it’s all done in the cloud. So when you buy a Blu-ray movie at Walmart, you can instantly get the movie to play on your Android phone, as long as you have a good Internet connection. And at home, instead of finding and popping the disc in or pre-ripping it to your media player, you can just fire up your TV’s UV app, and watch all your purchased movies from the cloud.

Flixster is already available on a variety of mobile devices, and so, it's the natural fit for delivering and managing UltraViolet

The big news this week in regards to UV is the first announcement of UV compatible movies, as Warner Bros. announced both Bad Bosses and Green Lantern will feature UV support. I’m not surprised at all WB is one of the first companies to announced UV support, as they’ve always been quite open to new formats, having supported VCD in Asia, and HD DVD before they decided not to. And WB’s recent acquisition of Flixster is starting to make sense as well, as it seems Flixster is the app that WB plans to use to allow users to manage and watch UV content. As Flixster is already available on a wide variety of mobile devices, it’s an easy decision for WB to use it for UV.

What was more interesting was that WB also announced that it would even be possible for users to bring in their old DVDs to retailers, and have them “enable” access to the UV version of the movie. I don’t know how this will work, or whether there might be a way to do it without having to go to the store, but it does sound interesting. And as mentioned earlier, I really hope TV and console manufacturers embrace UV as well, as this would allow me to digitally stream my movie collection without ripping (also need studios and ISPs to work out some kind of deal to offer free bandwidth for watching UV movies).

In related news, Time Warner owned HBO plans to make available console versions of the HBO Go app, which is great news for those that are actually in the regions that can access HBO Go, which sadly does not seem to include Australia (we miss out on Hulu as well … boo!). The announcement also mentioned other “connected devices”, which sounds a bit vague, but hopefully will include things like Blu-ray players and TVs, for easy peasy catch-up viewing.

And finally in gaming, Sony has, as expected really, announced a strong degree of integration between their upcoming portable console, the PlayStation Vita, and the PS3.

This will include the ability to use the Vita as a controller for the PS3 (so allowing the touch surface, gyroscope, microphone, camera … all to be used to control PS3 games), plus the PS3 can also send graphics data to the Vita to display. Sounds familiar? It should, because this is exactly how the Wii U controller would work.

PS Vita will offer Wii U like features, much earlier than Nintendo's console

With the Vita coming to the US probably early next year, and the Wii U much later than that, it’s a shot across the bow for Nintendo, if not directly at them. The only issue is the price. At the expected price of $249, and add the $299 cost of the PS3, yes, you might have a system that rivals some of the innovative parts of the Wii U, but might be more expensive, and not have as good  graphics as the Wii U (which must surely be an ironic situation for both Sony and Nintendo). But then again, the Vita can be used as a standalone gaming console far far away from the Wii U (the Wii U controller also allows independent play, but only within close proximity to the main Wii U console). So a Vita + PS3 combination could in fact replace the Wii U + DS combination, and if that’s true (and if graphics quality is discounted as a factor), then Sony becomes the better value proposition. And a PS3 price drop, or a PS3 + Vita bundle, may help.  Of course, Nintendo knows how to make fun games, and Sony struggles at times, and this could be the deciding factor.

For the Xbox 360, they’re going in a totally different direction, which could work for and against them. But Microsoft has demonstrated Windows Phone integration with Kinect and the Xbox 360, so they’re planning something similar too – and it will be even better value for those already with Windows Phones.

So we come to the end of another WNR. Hope you enjoyed this issue, and see you next week.

Let’s start with copyright news. The French have enjoyed their three-strikes system for some time now, although I’ve yet to actually hear any good news about a reduction in piracy or rise in consumer purchasing or anything like that, which is the whole point of the exercise, non?

This screenshot shows the contents of TMG's "hacked" server

Anyway, one of the private firms the government pays to spy on its own citizens, to gather IP addresses for warning notifications and all that, has had a security breach this week. Trident Media Guard had one of its test servers “hacked” into, with data and tools stolen. From what I gather, it’s not much a case of hacking, as a case of very very lax security, which allowed anyone to browse the contents of the server. A lot of stuff turned up, which ironically made its way to P2P networks in short order, and it includes things like IP addresses that the company uses to track users, plus tools to create fake peers (again, for data collection). Basically stuff that hackers can take a look at and find a way to block TMG from being able to conduct their activities successfully. But the bigger issue is that whether a company tasked with handling sensitive data should be held to higher standards when it comes to security, because while no personal data has been leaked so far, it could very well have if TMG maintains their other servers in the same manner.

But by far the biggest story of the week was a response to last week’s big story, which was the proposed PROTECT IP act, which will give the government power to shut down any website it deems “unacceptable”, including messing with the domain name system (DNS) at the very core of the Internet, as well as forcing search engines to adopt censorship. And as expected, a search engine company, the biggest in fact, has come out fighting against the proposed act. Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt, says the company will fight PROTECT IP even if it becomes law. While Schmidt was primary talking about the government messing with DNS, I’m sure Google is even more concerned about the forced search engine result filtering. But messing with DNS is extremely dangerous, because the DNS system is probably the most important Internet protocol, as it maps domain names to the IP address of the servers that hosts the website. The current system is like a huge peer-to-peer network, where an authority server shares information with the rest of the world, and data propagates to every other DNS server. But if the US starts messing with the DNS records in the US, and then Europe does the same, and every other country, then this could very well break down the very thing that is essential for visiting websites. Prominent engineers and Internet pioneer have already warned the US against this, but the RIAA/MPAA lobbying was just too great (and they could care less if the Internet breaks, and it’s probably something they’ll welcome).

And make no mistake, the push behind PROTECT IP is all RIAA and MPAA. This is why, following Google’s statements, both the RIAA and MPAA came out attacking Google, one accusing the search giant of benefiting from criminal activities, and the other saying Google is acting as if they’re above the law. Last week, I ranted about the aim of copyright, which is to protect the public’s right to have access to information, as well as to promote creativity. What the RIAA and MPAA want almost the exact opposite of what copyright is all about, and so if anyone is acting as if they’re “above the law”, it’s the movie studios and record labels. And even if they’re right about copyright and the need to censor certain websites, then why should the tax payer, search engines like Google, ISPs, pay for this? And all for something that will probably be easy to bypass anyway. The RIAA and MPAA thinks they’re entitled to their business model and large profits forever, and want everyone else to pay to ensure they keep their entitlements.

One of the lovely packaged bricks being sent to Nintendo HQ to protest the 3DS's DRM

Moving on now to gaming. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is launching a protest against the DRM regime of Nintendo’s new 3DS, which actually allows Nintendo to brick anyone’s 3DS console if it detects that it has been modified in any way. So instead of waiting for Nintendo to brick their consoles, they decided that Nintendo should be the one that’s “bricked” first. The FSF has started an  innovative protest, with people donating money to the recognized non-profit organisation, and for every $10 donated, they will send a brick to Nintendo’s CEO (presumably via mail, not via a projection through a window). For those that want better bang, or bricks, for their buck, they can donate $250, the cost of a 3Ds, and have 30 bricks delivered to Nintendo HQ. The campaign was set to end once 200 bricks had been delivered, but due to popular demand, it’s still going on at the moment, and if you want Nintendo to get the message that we are buying the hardware, not just merely licensing it (and so we should be able to do whatever we want with it), go here and donate.

Not much in HD or 3D news, but I’ll try to jam in something almost unrelated here just to take up some space. It’s not to unrelated, as Netflix does do HD, and I’m sure they’ll offer 3D sometime soon as well.

The good news is that Netflix is finally coming to Android. The slightly bad news is that it won’t be available on all phones, and Netflix are individually testing each and every phone to ensure compatibility. This is necessary because of the lack of a standardized streaming platform for Android phones, something Google really needs to look at. But I’m also pretty sure this has something, or maybe everything, to do with DRM, something the Netflix has hinted before when asked why it’s taking so long for the Android app the arrive. To try and do anything innovative on the Internet these days when it comes to entertainment, companies have to jump through hoops to meet the paranoid demands of entertainment companies, the rights holders, and in this case, Netflix has to get DRM nice and tight before the movie studios would allow Netflix to deliver content on Android phones. I guess the studios are worried that somehow people will crack the app, and capture the video stream and distribute the SD YouTube quality footage online. Yeah, I’m sure that’s likely, considering how hard it is for people to rip DVDs and Blu-ray’s. Almost as likely as people ripping movies via HDMI, now that HDCP has been cracked. Luddites. Interestingly, he original Luddite movement was borne out of fear of the Industrial revolution, with Luddites destroying machines and anything that represented progress. Sound like anyone to you? The only difference is that the RIAA and MPAA have the government on their side, which the original Luddites did not.

And finally in gaming, yep, the PSN is back baby. Well sort of. Some of the functions are still not, um, functioning, but at least gaming is back.

Of course, it’s another week, and another set of security breaches being discovered at Sony and their affiliates. The most annoying of all was that a rather stupid flaw was found in the very system that was supposed to bring security back to the PSN – the password reset function. With Sony forcing everyone to update their firmware and then change their PSN password before they’re allowed back on, you would think that Sony would at the very least ensure this process was secure. But alas, that was too much wishful thinking. The flawed password reset system would allow anyone who had your birth date, and PSN email address (which at this point, is about everyone), to reset your password, and hence gain access to your account on the “new and secure” PSN. And so while Sony went about fixing the flaw, the password reset system was down, and so people like me, who had not reset their password yet, were left without PSN for another couple of days. A lot of people would have been able to reset their passwords on the console it self, but many, who like me, that didn’t create the account on my current console had to use the web version (my original died and was replaced by Sony, more on that below), which was down. There were also other stories about Sony owned ISPs also revealing user information, but I suppose these kind of stories will be plentiful as Sony conduct a full security audit of all their systems.

Zombie killing fun in Dead Nation - one of the free games available in selected regions as part of the PSN "Welcome Back" package

Sony also detailed the goodies people will get once the PSN store, one of those non-functioning functions, comes back. People will be able to download two games from a list of five, including inFAMOUS, Wipeout HD + Fury, and Little Big Planet. Different regions will get slightly different sets of free games, and there are also PSP games that PSP gamers can download. I think I’ll get Wipeout HD + Fury for my 3D TV, and so far undecided between inFAMOUS, LittleBigPlanet, or Dead Nation (I just can’t resist Zombie games).

One slight problem, that doesn’t affect me, is that at least in the EU and here in Australia (and NZ), only those that had PSN accounts before the network went down on the 20th of April are eligible for the freebies. Which kind of sucks, because I would have thought that the people who got new PS3s after the 20th would be even more deserving of a “we’re sorry” gift, as the last thing you want after forking out a lot of money for a PS3 is for half the functions to not even work for weeks. I mean how much could it actually cost Sony to allow all PSN users, up to say today, to be eligible for the welcome back package? This is exactly why people hate Sony.

Thinking about the earlier 3DS protest thing, one lesson I hope Sony learns from this incident is that people *buy* their console, not license them, so you can’t just take away features without repercussions. And if we’re really just licensing the hardware, then the hardware should be a lot cheaper, and we should receive refunds for outages (just like anything you can license, if you can’t actually use the licensed service of feature, then you should get your money back). Without these checks and balances, what’s to stop Sony from removing a core feature, like say AVI/DivX playback or DLNA support to stop pirated files from being played on the console? I mean, if they are allowed to remove “OtherOS” for “financial reason”, then they can use the same argument to remove other features as well. Of course, it’s not in Sony’s interest to remove either of these features, but that’s now, who knows what will happen in the future.

For Xbox 360 owners, you should now be getting the “Spring” update notice, or will get it soon. There’s misleading information around that this update will brick certain Xbox 360’s, which is not true (at least not yet). What had happened was that a previous update, and not the Spring update, had caused some Xbox 360’s to fail, and Microsoft has already promised to replace all failed 360’s due to that other firmware update  (mostly older Xbox 360 60GB Pro’s) with brand new consoles. You see, that’s the right thing to do. The PS3 is actually more notorious for firmware induced bricking (or at least a drive that no longer reads any discs – something that I’ve experienced personally – luckily, my PS3 was still in warranty at that time, as otherwise I would have had to pay $AUD 250 for the repair), and the only response from Sony was to respond to the various class action lawsuits launched against the company for this alleged fault. This is also exactly why people hate Sony.

Alright, that’s it for this week. See you next week (if the world hasn’t ended by then).

Let’s start with copyright news, and I’m going to do things a bit differently this week by talking about some of the gaming related copyright news in this section, and some in the gaming section, mainly because most of the copyright related news items have to do with gaming.

Anti-piracy promotions have had almost no effect on the public's perception of piracy, which most consider socially acceptable

But we’ll start with a non gaming related copyright news, about a new Danish study which says that online piracy, despite being illegal, is socially accepted. In other words, most people know that online piracy is not legal, but most people don’t care. In fact, 70% of all respondents surveyed said that piracy was socially acceptable, whereas 20% even said that it was “totally acceptable”. So why do people, knowing full well that something is illegal, still goes out and does it? Is it because they feel they won’t get caught? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just the numbers, that so many are doing it, the law has become as respected as say the jaywalking law. And maybe people think that there’s no real harm in it. In any case, the entertainment industry would not have been happy upon hearing the results of the study, because it shows that the millions and millions they’ve spent on anti-piracy advertising has been totally ineffective, since the study’s results haven’t changed much since a similar study in 1997. And most interestingly, the study showed that people were aware of the difference between piracy for personal use, and piracy for profit, with three quarters of those surveyed saying piracy for profit was unacceptable. So this does point to the fact that people just don’t think personal piracy is harmful, and they’re right if a) piracy leads to sales, and b) if the “pirate” never intended to buy.

I think online piracy has reached a state of total ubiquitousness, that I don’t think you can find many Internet users that aren’t aware of the fact that pirated stuff can be found online. Now, some of these people may not know how to download it, that’s true, but I’m sure they will know someone who can help them download it, and most can figure out how to watch streamed TV shows and movies online because I assume that most people can figure out how to play a YouTube style video. What’s my point? It is that despite this, a lot of people are still buying a lot of movies, TV shows, games and everything else, and probably more so than compared to when the Internet didn’t exist. And I suspect a lot of the people that buy also pirate at the same time. If the entertainment industry wants to find out how to stop piracy, they have to first find out why these people, given the temptation of online piracy, still go out to buy stuff, and why some of them will buy some things, and pirate others. If a pattern can be found, then perhaps it can lead to a solution. And at the same time, question those that only pirate and ask why they don’t buy. If the answer is that buying costs money, then you know these were never the type to buy anything in the first place, but if it is another answer, then perhaps it too can be used to craft a real anti-piracy solution. To me, if the industry is serious about tackling the problem, this is what they should be doing. Not go crying to the government about how come their old business model isn’t working as well now as before the Internet, and about how people are stealing all their stuff.

Minecraft creator says piracy does not equal theft

And whether piracy of digital content should be considered stealing, that’s another contentious issues. I actually see valid points on both side of the argument, so it’s a hard one for me. This issue’s been in the news this week when, at GDC 11, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson said that piracy does not equal theft. His argument is that, in the real world, when you steal something physical, the owner of that something has a physical loss that has to be replaced at cost. With digital content, you can steal something and the original owners won’t even know about it, because what you’re doing is copying, not actually stealing. This makes sense, but it depends on who you see as the subject of the theft. If you’re copying your friend’s music, then you’re not stealing from your friend. But if the subject of the theft is the original copyright owners, who would otherwise have received royalty of some kind from a legal purchase, then perhaps that is considered theft. What copyright holders have got wrong, is that they believe every digital “theft” equates to a lost sale, when it only really at best represents a “potential” lost sale, and may only be a temporary one at that (if the “thief” then decides this game or movie is pretty good and I should buy a copy). There are lots of things that causes “potential lost sales”, such as a bad review (as “Notch” noted), and “temporary lost sales” (such as a missed shipping date, as “Notch” also noted). And what about lost sales because the item is priced too high? Copyright holders don’t have a right to claim a lost sale just because people didn’t want to buy their products. The only thing that’s changed is that people are now able to use said product that they didn’t want to buy by obtaining it illegally online, and that’s not a lost sale, that’s a gained user if said user didn’t like your product enough to ever want to pay for it.

In HD and 3D news, I actually managed to find one this week, although it’s not good news really. Panasonic seems intent to milk their Avatar 3D Blu-ray exclusivity deal to the full, and it’s now unlikely we’ll see this 3D movie available for general sale until after February 2012.

But before you go bad mouth Panasonic, it seems they’re aware of the possibly bad publicity this move has (you don’t want to get Avatar fans angry! Some of those people are nutty. And blue), and so they’ve shifted all the blame to Fox, even accusing them of trying to start a bidding war between Panasonic and Samsung, as to who gets Avatar exclusivity. None of this surprises me, because Fox has always seemed like a company forever searching for short term gains at the (usually huge) expense of the long term (Star Wars merchandising anyone? Or their insistence on region-locking every damn thing). Avatards, do what the Na’vi did in the movie (you know it’s just a movie, right?), and fight the oppression dished out to you by this mega-corporation, who wants to destroy your way of life (if your way of life consists of buying Avatar 3D Blu-ray on general release and watching it on your non Panasonic equipment). But seriously, if you don’t want studios like Fox treating film fans as some kind of collateral to negotiate big money exclusive deals, then do the only thing that will hurt them – don’t buy Avatar on 3D Blu-ray when it comes out! It’s the only way that Fox will learn their lesson.

The MPEG LA is being investigated by the US DoJ

And continuing the H.264 vs Flash vs HTML5 vs … oh I don’t know, it’s already so confusing … war coverage in this section, this week marked the first shot fired in the H.264 vs WebM wars, or rather, the MPEG LA versus Google war. And interestingly the shot was fired by the US DoJ. The DoJ is investigating the MPEG LA for anti-competitive behaviour, accusing it of trying to stifle Google’s VP8/WebM. The MPEG LA says they’ve done nothing wrong, since it’s their business model to license patents, and if Google uses patents held by MPEG LA members, then Google needs to pay up (instead of go crying to the DoJ about it). I think Google’s wish to take over the web codec standard with their royalty free WebM isn’t going to work, because from what I’ve read, it will be almost impossible for WebM to escape without having to depend on at least some patents. I suspect all will be settled in court one way or another, but I don’t think the DoJ really needs to interfere, considering the MPEG LA is only doing what it has always done and it’s up to Google to ensure WebM doesn’t use any patents held by MPEG LA members.

And I suppose it is sort of HD related, so if you want to find out what’s new with the iPad 2, go here to read all about it.

Ahh, gaming news. It used to be all about fun things like Fallout 3, Kinect and Fallout New Vegas, but now, it’s all PS3 jailbreak this, PS3 jailbreak that.

Sony’s legal setback a month ago seems to have been just a temporary one, since they have now managed to get all the subpoenas they wanted, and more. The overreaching and extremely broad subpoenas, as the EFF puts it, means Sony can now request the details of anyone who simply viewed the geohot hacking video on YouTube, followed geohot’s twitter account, or even just visited his website, and then sue, sue, sue! I’ll save Sony some time now – I’m guilty on all three counts, and I even dared to embed one of the PS3 jailbreak videos in the forum, as a companion to the news article about the massive Sony security FAIL. But I suspect journalists, or “web journalists” like myself (ie. opinionated hacks) aren’t immune from the mother of all mass lawsuits Sony wants to initiate – let’s just hope that someone talks them out of this and the total PR disaster that would ensue.

Ridiculous requests by Sony, and just when you think they couldn’t over-react more to their own PS3 security failings, they go and do something like this. Sigh.

And it seems Sony’s over litigious nature do get them into trouble, and not just in the PR front either. They tried to sue LG for patent breaches back in December, in relation to mobile phones. They didn’t expect LG to fire back, let alone actually win a counter dispute, in relation to Blu-ray patents, which has now seen tens of thousands of PS3 shipped to Europe seized by customs. The PS3 shipment will be seized for 10 days, unless LG uses the option to extend to temporary sales injunction, and if this thing drags on, you could actually see PS3s being taken off store shelves all across Europe. Karma?

And speaking of  security breaches, the Nintendo 3DS has already been cracked to allow pirated DS games to work. DS games were always easy to crack, but let’s see if Nintendo can stay strong against efforts to crack 3DS games.

That’s it for the week. Don’t forget, you still have two and a half days to enter our Facebook/Twitter competition, details here. Good luck!

In copyright news, let’s start with more bad news for isoHunt. Not only did they get sued again last week, now, even a potential ally in Google has come out blasting the BitTorrent search engine.

Now, on first glance, you might expect Google to back isoHunt, considering both are search engines. And since Google is fighting its own copyright battle against Viacom, surely this puts them on the same side as isoHunt. But that’s not really the case. Viacom’s strategy in their appeal of the YouTube verdict is to say that it’s no longer enough for websites to be DMCA compliant, that is to remove infringing content when requested. Instead, Viacom says that there is something called “red flag” infringement, which means that if it’s somewhat obvious that infringement is occurring, then Google/YouTube should take action even without any specific DMCA complaints. The problem for Google in regards to the isoHunt appeal is that the MPAA might just win the case against isoHunt on the basis of “red flag” infringement, and it would set a precedent that would disadvantage Google. So what’s Google’s legal strategy? It’s to paint isoHunt not as a search engine, but just a really really bad copyright infringer. It’s arguing that there’s no need for the MPAA to even use “red flag” infringement, because isoHunt is plainly guilty of actively and deliberately supporting piracy, something that Google/YouTube cannot be accused of. Yes, it really hurts isoHunt’s defence that they’re just a search engine, like Google, but this is Google in self-protection mode.

The so called "red flag" infringement ruling could spell an end to online innovation

Regardless, “red flag” infringement is actually quite a dangerous precedent to set, so I do support Google’s efforts in trying to fight against it, even if it means that isoHunt will be sacrificed as a result. The problem with “red flag” infringement is that it potentially could kill innovation on the Internet, because let’s admit it, a lot of even today’s most popular and mainstream web services had to tolerate or even support “red flag” infringement, to get their business up and running. Would YouTube exist today if people weren’t allowed to upload copyrighted content back when it first started out? Would Google, the search engine, have become the most popular search engine if it blocked all piracy related search results when it was first launched? Would any of the free file hosting websites even exist, allowing us to share large (legal) files that otherwise would be too big for email? “Red flag” infringement is basically the content owner’s way of stopping all innovation, even if there is a remote chance that infringement could occur at some unspecified time in the present or future, and that’s dangerous. And it also puts the onus on identifying infringing activity on the side of the website publishers, as opposed to the content owners, which doesn’t even make sense, since how would I know what content belonged to whom and whether it’s really authorized or not (case in point, Viacom’s own employees uploading copyrighted clips under fake accounts, to create fake hype and promote their shows)?

And so we move on to the next set of news, which is also about appeals. This time, it’s the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft’s (AFACT) appeal of a verdict from a year ago which found Internet Service Provider, iiNet, not guilty of authorizing copyright infringement committed by its subscribers, even though iiNet failed to act on infringement notices sent by the AFACT. The result of the appeal was announced this week, and it’s victory again for iiNet, even if it’s mostly symbolic at this point. While iiNet won the appeal, several decision has been overturned in favour of the AFACT, and it probably paves the way for AFACT stepping up its campaign to make ISPs the copyright police. iiNet’s victory apparently was more due to technical reasons, the precise design of the copyright infringement notices which the court found inadequate, and really, the decision probably gives the AFACT a very clear set of guidelines on just how to send infringement notices to ISPs. Basically, a symbolic victory for iiNet, but probably a more substantial win for the AFACT in the long run.

What frustrates me most about these types of trials, and about ISP warnings and/or three-strikes system, is that, in the end, it will be so so easy for users to bypass monitoring and escape being caught, or even cautioned. This is because anti-piracy monitoring today is basically just based on monitoring BitTorrent networks, which is only one way to obtain pirated content. Encryption, VPNs, or even just direct Internet downloads via digital lockers, can all escape the watching eyes of the piracy police, and so with millions of dollars being spent on lawsuits, and even more millions per year for monitoring and policing, the result will, as always, just push people towards using new piracy tools that will make online piracy harder and harder to track and stop. Remember in the good old days when websites simply hosted the pirated files, and how easy that was to stop compared to stopping torrents? Civil liberties are being sacrificed to give corporations a *false* sense of security, and that’s a really really bad reason to force us to give up our rights (is there even such a thing as a “good reason”?)

Again, not much happening for HD/3D news, and I’m not even going to mention the stupid “Inception to be converted to 3D” news, because if there’s one thing worse than the 3D hype, then it’s “taking a 2D movie and converting it to fake 3D so we can squeeze more money out of the fans” phenomenon. Note to studios: not everything has to be in 3D!

XviD 1.3.0 has been released this week

While not exactly HD news, exactly, but a new version of Xvid has been released, version 1.3.0, and it’s the first new version in quite a while. MPEG-4 ASP based codecs may no longer be as sexy or “cool” as the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 ones, but there’s still a place for the good old Xvid codec  for medium quality video files.

And the absence of real news means that I will have to plug my weekly US Blu-ray (and DVD) sales analysis feature, the latest analysis found here. It’s a place where Blu-ray fans can go to bask in the glory of “their” format’s sales successes, and where die hard HD DVD fans like myself can go and find any signs that show Blu-ray’s weakening stance, no matter how statistically insignificant (“OMG, Blu-ray sales fell 20% compared to last week – it’s doooomed!!”).

And as part of compiling the stats, I also regularly update a series of related graphs, that are never actually posted anywhere (other than on our on-and-off “Blu-ray: The State of Play” feature). So instead, I’ll post some of the graphs here right now, for your enjoyment.

Every week, there are stats to show how Blu-ray revenue as a percentage of combined disc (Blu-ray + DVD) revenue, and here’s the stats plotted that compare the most recent weeks (in red) to the same week a year ago (blue):

Blu-ray Sales Percentage: Currents vs a Year Ago (as of 2011-02-12)

The graph below shows the same stat as above, except plotted in a linear time fashion, with a trend line showing Blu-ray’s growth.

Blu-ray Market Share Trend: As of 2011-02-12

And finally, this graph shows the Blu-ray growth rate (so if Blu-ray’s market share was 5% a year ago, and now it’s 10%, the the growth rate is 100%, or doubled), again with a trend line.

Blu-ray growth rate trend: As of 2011-02-12

And finally in gaming, which these days, should probably be renamed to the “PS3 Jailbreak” section instead. Last week ended with Sony banning a bunch of users from PSN for using hacked firmware, and now the hackers have fought back by hacking PSN to un-ban themselves, as well as make it possible to ban anyone they want.

Note to Sony: don’t try to out-hack hackers.

geohot's takes the battle with Sony to rap form

Then we had the news of Sony attempting to bring out a new PS3 SKU that would be hack proof (famous last words). geohot and others have already said that the only way for Sony to really combat the PS3 hack is to release a new hardware, and it seems Sony has taken their advice. At the same time, Sony is beefing up their own legal team as they seek to sue their way out of this mess (what could possibly go wrong?). Sony have also got the German police to raid the home of PS3 Linux hacker graf_chokolo, which will please the Linux/hacking community. You can read more on these stories here.

For those that think I’ve been too hard on Sony, perhaps you’re right. Personal history with the company aside, the main reason I and a lot of people detest Sony is solely based on their recent actions, best described in this Make article/rant. I started Digital Digest talking about how to play DVDs in Windows, back when commercial solutions were few and far in between, and with Pentium 4’s still an expensive early-adopter thing, you just needed to hack your way to  play DVDs on PCs smoothly, from tweaking drivers to using custom decoders and more. And from then on, it’s always been about using products and software beyond the purposes intended by manufacturers and publishers. Sony’s hatred towards anyone that wants to do things outside of Sony’s own limited imagination, and their arrogance of forcing people to use Sony products in Sony’s own prescribed manner (and it’s not just end users, it’s also developers too, having to adapt themselves to Sony’s way of doing things, as opposed to the other way around – a philosophy that Microsoft, for example, do not share, which is why the Xbox 360 is a much more developer friendly platform). And it’s also the arrogance in their response, which is almost always an overreaction (eg. CD root-kit fiasco), because it’s as if they believe that using, developing for or even selling a Sony product is a privilege, and so if you make Sony angry, expect retribution. Point out a flaw in their security design? Sony will get you. Make their products do more than advertised? Sony will get you. Sell products to help Sony users in a way Sony doesn’t like? Sony will double get you (as geohot wisely raps in his video, “I shed a tear everytime I think of Lik Sang”).

Speaking of Microsoft as a “good guy” when it comes to consumer right seems quite wrong to me, but compared to Sony, there are a lot of “good guys”. But Microsoft’s response to the Kinect hacks (not the first response, which was similar to Sony’s, but the subsequent responses by openly welcoming the hacks) is to be commended, and really, it’s the best business decision as well (Sony’s actions have often hurt themselves more than anyone else, to be fair). And now Microsoft is following up by releasing an official PC developer kit for Kinect, available for free to non commercial users and researchers. Of course, opening up the development of an console accessory is different to the reaction of seeing your product hacked into oblivion, but still, it’s hard to imagine Sony reacting to the hack in the same manner (as the Make article mentioned, the Aibo hacking incident kind of shows what a typical Sony response might have been).

Also, Kinect will work with Windows Phone sometime in the future (not this year though), which given the recent Nokia announcement regarding moving to the Windows Phone platform, can only be a good thing for Kinect. Still, Kinect needs some better, more varied games, because frankly, I’m a bit tired (in both sense of the word) from playing Kinect Sports soccer and winning 4-3 all the time (I’m not that good at goalkeeping, which for me, consists of flapping my arms wildly).

Alright, enough ranting for this week. Have a good one.

The promised Facebook/Twitter competition should be launched in the next day or two. There’s nothing you actually need to do, if you’re already liked our Facebook page and/or followed us on Twitter, you’ll automatically be entered into the draw to win some Amazon gift certificates (those that signed up before early will receive a better chance to win). Full details to be posted when I make it up. Before then, we have this week’s news to go through, so let’s get started.

In copyright news, the big headline of the week, at least according to the MPAA, was that almost a quarter of the world’s web traffic was piracy related.

To be honest, I had expected a lot more than that, considering that out of the big files you can download, Linux ISOs aside, I can’t really think of a lot of legal content that’s 8GB or 12GB in size, whereas many pirated games are. Without iTunes HD movie downloads, and Steam, the quoted 23.8% of global traffic being pirated related, could have been a lot higher. The study was commissioned by NBC Universal, but it was the MPAA that screamed the loudest at the findings. Except, as usual, they missed some really important points in the report. One interesting note was that the US actually had a lower piracy rate than the rest of the world, which is strange because most of the pirated  stuff comes from the US (movies, TV shows, games), and what with the poor economy and relatively cheap Internet, you just expected the US to be the lead in terms of piracy. Another interesting result was that only 2.9% of downloads on the BitTorrent networks that the study monitored were for music, with films and TV accounting for nearly half of the downloads (and 35.8% being pornography).

Music torrent downloads only count for a very small percentage of downloads, according to the Envisional report (graph credits: Envisional report)

The theory is that the US has greater access to legal content, and so there’s less reason for many to get content via illegal sources. This is definitely true with TV shows, since Hulu and the other streaming networks, which block access from outside the US, means that there’s almost no reason to download torrents of the latest episodes. The low number of music downloads could be because that torrents have never been the best way to download music, not when LimeWire was around anyway. But it could also be because music availability is greater in the US, and that music, unlike movies and especially TV shows, don’t suffer from the same sort of delay releases and release windows, that actively prevents people from purchasing in order to maximize profits for publishers from different channels. In this day and age, having to wait a whole week before you have access to the latest episode of say The Office or even months before you can buy Boardwalk Empire on DVD/Blu-ray, just doesn’t work. When your friends or co-workers are downloading/streaming illegally and then discussing the latest episodes, you almost have to download/stream it yourself. And porn? Well, nobody wants to have to pay for porn, or to have something less than innocent show up on their credit card statement, so that’s another reason why it’s so popular.

So the fact that “it’s free”, while I do agree has a lot to do with why pirated content is so attractive, but there are clearly other factors in play that should not be ignored, if one is really intent on reducing online piracy. Unfortunately, groups like the MPAA and RIAA’s goal is to eventually get legislation that guarantees their revenue stream, and online piracy just happens to be a convenient excuse at the moment. It’s an easy argument to convince ignorant politicians, unaware of just what the Internet is all about. With all the studies being done, none has even tried to find out the real financial cost of piracy, not the billions upon billions imagined by the MPAA/RIAA. Not in the US anyway. But a Japanese government backed think-tank has looked at the problem, and has found some interesting answers. In regards to Anime and online streaming and P2P downloads via the popular (in Japan) Winny software tool, the study found that these kinds of piracy not only did not hurt DVD sales, it actually helped. YouTube uploads of Anime episodes actually helped to generate more sales, while P2P downloads did not hurt sales at all, only rentals. The promotional effects of YouTube uploads, even of full episodes, has been known for a while now, and you’d be hard pressed to find one publisher that doesn’t utilize YouTube for promotional purposes. And as for P2P downloads, with DVDs so cheap and online piracy so easily accessible for so long, people who still buy DVDs will always buy DVDs (or Blu-rays), in my opinions, because if free and easy hasn’t convinced you do break the law, nothing will (and for people who like to collect things, like me, buying and downloading are two totally separate things).

Reasonable demands, or blackmail?

And the findings of these reports don’t really contradict a study by Warner Bros. back in December, where the conclusion there seem to be that a lot of people downloading pirated TV shows and movies are downloading the foreign dubbed version, which would otherwise not be available via legal means. And that by not fulfilling the needs of the market, that legitimate consumers are being pushed into pursuing content via other means, including illegal means. Which brings us to this week’s most interesting copyright related news story – the Don’t Make Me Steal manifesto. What is it? Well, it’s basically a list of demands, that if met, the people who signed the manifesto would all promise not to download pirated movie of TV content. It sounds a bit like a threat, which is why it’s controversial (and I don’t think the “Don’t Make Me Steal” title is a good one, because in the end, nobody “makes” you steal, it’s still a choice, even if it is sometimes the most sensible one).  But these are not really unreasonable demands. They’re not demanding everything be free, and actually, a lot of demands match up perfectly to what the recent studies have concluded, that a lot of people are being under-served. Removing release windows, reasonable pricing (buying DVD/Blu-rays should not cost more than a movie ticket, and rentals should not cost more than a third of the same ticket), greater access to dubs and subtitles, no DRM, and a lot of others things I suspect that the movie/TV industry will eventually figure out on their own and implement. So if this manifesto can change the debate from one of “how should we punish those that pirate stuff” to “how do we encourage people not to pirating stuff”, then it has served its purpose. It shows there are plenty of things movie and TV studios can do to reduce piracy, and they should at least give these suggestions some serious thought before trying to shift the blame and responsibility to everyone else.

All of this comes as the number of individuals sued by mass piracy lawsuits reached 100,000 in the US alone. Both piracy and anti-piracy, in my opinion, has gotten out of control, and the only real solution is to examine the real causes behind piracy. Or it will end up becoming a futile fight, where the process becomes a daily grind of trying to put out millions of fires with no positive effect towards actually solving the problem, something that was addressed well by the TV show The Wire (in relation to the war on drugs, but the idea is the same). How many websites do you have to get Homeland Security to shut down before the war on piracy can be won? How many civil rights do we have to sacrifice in order for the entertainment industry to keep their dying business model? How many people must be sued for illegal downloads before people stop downloading? And how long would all of these actions take before the problem is solve. Years? Decades? Never?

And not wanting to enjoy schadenfreude, Intel’s problems with Sandy Bridge seems like karma biting back for putting in hardware DRM into the new chip, and then for not even admitting it was DRM, even though it clearly was. The actual problem appears not to be that serious, it’s a flaw on the motherboard chipset that Sandy Bridge CPUs rely on, and it has to do with the SATA2 controller part which will fail over time for a small percentage of chips. Disabling the rogue transistor, or simply use the provided SATA3 ports instead, would be a simple workaround, at least until Intel can provide details on how they plan to fix the problem. Still, had Intel spent more time testing Cougar Point, instead of getting all giddy at the prospect of adding hardware DRM, maybe they could have avoided the potential billion dollar problem.

Onto HD/3D news, not a whole lot happening really in the world of Blu-ray or 3D. But for general HD, and I know I’m stretching a bit here, then the news that Microsoft plans to solve Google’s H.264 problem may be somewhat interesting.

Google dropping HTML5 H.264 support for Chrome may be an attempt to hurt Apple

Google dropped support for H.264 as part of its HTML5 implementation, and this means that HTML5 videos that use H.264 would not actually work on Google’s Chrome browser, which is a shame. Google quotes wanting to support “open software” as the reason, despite the fact that they’re the biggest supporters of the closed Adobe Flash software, being the only browser to bundle Flash with the default download. But Microsoft has been actively trying to get people to use H.264 for HTML5, no doubt because they own lots of patents on the format, and so they’ve released a Chrome extension that brings back H.264 support, for those with Windows 7 anyway (which has H.264 decoding built natively into the OS). They did the same thing for Firefox a couple of months ago, so this move wasn’t unexpected. And Google can hardly complain, considering their stance towards Flash.

You may ask what is Google’s motive behind dropping H.264, if it wasn’t for the sake of “openness”? Some would say it’s because they want people to use their own WebM format, for which Google owns the patents on (but has decided, for now, not to charge royalty). Maybe. But Google’s real target, in my opinion, is Apple. Apple loves H.264, they also only support HTML5 (not Flash) on their iDevices, and being a fairly closed system in which Apple has control over everything, it’s unlikely WebM support will be implemented without Apple’s permission for these devices and Safari in general. So Google’s move alienates Apple, while their own Android platform still manages to support H.264, Flash and WebM, with hardware acceleration too even. To me, this is a calculated move against Apple, forcing Apple to either accept WebM and implement hardware support for it, or to live with an YouTube app that runs poorly on iDevices. And Google’s alliance with Flash, and Apple’s anti-Flash stance, just further confirms what I and many others think.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that WebM will be adopted, not even by YouTube. In fact, this move most likely benefits Adobe and Flash, since it then becomes the only way to tie everything together, and get everything working, especially since Adobe has already announced they will add WebM support to Flash. And H.264 will be here to stay, as long as Flash is here to stay, and as long as Blu-ray and iTunes still exists.

Another week, and the cat and mouse game between Sony and PS3 hackers continue. Sony brought out the 3.56 firmware to counter the hacked 3.55 firmware, but the process of hacking 3.56 has already begun and it’s a matter of when, not if, it will get hacked (because once the master key and the method it can be obtained became public, it’s really game over for that security platform).

The unfortunate message that PS3 owners with upgraded HDDs are experiencing

And as expected, Sony’s war against hackers has caused its first piece of collateral damage, with PS3 owners that have upgraded their hard-drives being the first set of victim. Sony active encourages people to upgrade the PS3’s hard-drive, and even provides instructions on how to do it online (and it doesn’t void warranty either). They did this to counter the over-priced Xbox 360 hard-drive add-ons. But people who installed 3.56 found that their upgraded HDDs would no longer work, with a “The data is corrupted” error, even after reformatting. Apparently, Sony re-released 3.56 just now and it might have fixed the problem, but you need the original HDD to first upgrade to the new 3.56 (Sony didn’t call it 3.57 because they didn’t want to admit to their mistake? It’s not the first time either …), and then upgrade your HDD. Those without the original HDD (which has to still retains the original formatting) are still stuck with a bricked console, unfortunately. 3.57 will hopefully be here next week, but who knows.

So once again the advice is don’t upgrade your PS3’s firmware until at least a week after release. Yes, it’s a week that you may not be able to play online (or even certain games offline, which prevents play without an active PSN connection, which of course requires the latest firmware). I think if Sony is intent on releasing firmware updates so frequently, the least they should offer is a window in which both old and new firmware versions can be used, although I suppose there are huge technical issues related to supporting two firmware versions at the same time on PSN.

So that’s it for another week. Hope you’ve enjoyed this issue of the WNR. Have a good one and see you at the same time next week.

This Android game I made may look crudely drawn, it's gameplay is only slightly better

The current set up means every news article posted on the Digital Digest website, plus every blog and posts in the deals & freebies section, will all be added to the feeds, allowing for an easy way to get notified of updates on the websites. And occasionally, I will post a few things that aren’t really big enough to make the news, but are nonetheless interesting. One thing I did post about was my first attempt at an Android app, a game based on a paper based game based on video games based a movie. Paper (Star) Wars is my take on a paper based Star Wars game that I used to play with friends in middle school. It’s my first app, so please be kind and tolerant of the numerous bugs within the game. There’s a free “Not Very Special Edition” and a paid for version for around a buck, depending on exchange rates.

Self promotion finished, time for this week’s news, and there’s plenty to go through so let’s get started.

Let’s start the copyright news, the UK may have seen a change of government, the non violent kind, but its anti-piracy policies remains unchanged it seems. Their proposed three-strikes system, which will first start with a warning-but-no-action system, is set to be introduced, and UK ISPs will have to pay 25% of the cost of enforcing this law which will see private subscriber data being given to copyright holders.

In other words, the UK government thinks that ISPs are at least 25% responsible for anti-piracy policing on the net, even though they don’t receive any benefits from it at all if this thing works (and the UK government optimistically thinks that it will reduce online piracy by 50% – amazing!). So it seems ISPs have been cast as a guilty party. But ISPs will no doubt pass on the cost to subscribers. So it seems, we’re all being cast as the guilty party. And with higher ISP costs, and so less money to spend online, and when people start getting booted off the Internet, all of these actions which will no doubt affect the Internet economy, most likely the legitimate kind. Pirates will be pirates, and they will find (and have found) ways around being monitored, so I would really like to see how the UK government comes up with the figure of £200m as the amount of benefits that will result from this. They would be lucky to get away with less than £200m of damages to the economy. But this whole thing has become an ideological crusade, so common sense went out the window ages ago.

ACS:Law may have quit the mass lawsuit game

The new UK law should come into affect as anti-piracy law firms in the UK might be starting to wrap up their profit seeking mass lawsuit enterprises, when the head of one of the most notorious anti-piracy law firms, ACS:Law, said in court that his firm was no longer involved in anti-piracy stuff due to “death threats and bomb threats”, amongst other things (no longer profitable?). Not to condone threats of this kind, which is totally unacceptable despite the number of people ACS:Law has pissed off in recent times, but that’s the side effect of the kind of business ACS:Law is involved in, just as its predecessor Davenport Lyons realised when they also quit the game. And they were in court because the judge found their lawsuit somewhat dubious and wanted to examine it further, despite ACS:Law’s attempt to drop the lawsuits against the downloaders in question, in a last ditch attempt to avoid having any kind of court ruling on the matter (because it could go either way, and it looks like it’s going the wrong way for ACS:Law). The best way to go after these law firms is to take a leaf out of the entertainment lobby’s latest doctrine on online anti-piracy: go after their revenue source. If no profit can be made via mass lawsuits, because perhaps it’s difficult to ascertain jurisdiction or that people are fighting back by tying up these law firms in paper work, then these kinds of law suits will stop.

Google is the net's new piracy cop

But these lawsuits are still gaining popularity in the US, where this week, hundreds more were sued for download the Paris Hilton sex tapes. I wonder if Paris Hilton gets a percentage of the settlement fees, and if she does, then that’s one more reason to fight these lawsuits as tenaciously as possible. And people seeking to download this “movie” illegally be warned – the publishers, XPAYS, is still monitoring download networks for potential targets. But finding a torrent of this film may have just gotten about 1.5% harder, thanks to Google’s new filtering scheme which became active this week, something they warned us would happen back in December. It’s no doubt Google’s way to try and appease the entertainment industry, not that they would be pleased much by this, since only the suggested search phrases as part of auto-complete and instant search have been filtered – the results are still the same as before. And the way Google has did it was full of inconsistencies, like why a BitTorrent client software like uTorrent needs to be filtered at all (and yet, other popular clients like BitComet or Vuze are not filtered), or why RapidShare is filtered, but not MediaFire. In any case, this latest move by Google sets a very dangerous precedent, and goes completely against the Mountain View company’s principles on the open web. And as mentioned before, it will do little to appease the entertainment industry and instead, it will just make them ask the question “if you can filter recommended search phrases, why can’t you also filter out the results”. An appeasement of groups backed by a Fascist launched organization, yeah that doesn’t sound familiar at all. Maybe it’s just me, but has Google abandoned their “do no evil” policy, since they’re very much acting like just any other corporation these days. Even their recent withdrawal of support for H.264 in Chrome was very much an exercise in protecting self-interests (dropping H.264 so people will have to adopt their own WebM, for example), as opposed to their stated goal of supporting open software – this is the very same company that bundles Adobe Flash with the same browser in question, so it’s a bit rich for them to lecture other on support of open platforms.

For all of the entertainment industry’s pomp and bluster, they still haven’t even managed to close down The Pirate Bay. They talk big about closing down a lot of websites, another 50 this week apparently, but they don’t dare mention how many new websites spring up the second they close down one, fairly obscure, torrent indexer. And if The Pirate Bay people are to be believed, the RIAA are in for a rude awakening when TPB launches its music sharing service in a few months time. No details as yet, or even confirmation as to whether this thing is real or not, but a TPB insider has promised that this thing will scare the pants off the RIAA. It’s set to be launched around the 78th birthday of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, and I thought it was interesting that this organization was launched by none other than Mussolini in 1933 (yes, that Mussolini).  So when old Benito said that “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power,” he wasn’t that far off the mark it seems (ignoring the fact that he was talking about a totally different kind of “corporate” to today’s corporations).

And in potential silly DRM news of the week, how about DRM’d web images? Not quite, but it only takes a little bit of effort to turn this thing into the online newspaper’s favourite new toy, as expiring image links is quite effective at cutting down hot linking. Of course, those that really do want to steal your pics will just do so via a print-screen, while you make your legitimate visitors download and install plug-in after plug-in just to view the damn image. A totally ineffective DRM which only makes the life of legitimate users that much more painful. So definitely happening, then.

Onto HD/3D news, price of Blu-ray players are tipped to drop below $40 in 2011. Not that surprising when you consider that it’s been available for around $50 already.

But this does mean one thing: if you don’t have a Blu-ray player now, you may just not want or need one. They’re so cheap now, when they’re not being given away freely with TV purchases, that there really aren’t any other excuses left for people not to have one. And with retailers often discounting Blu-ray/combo versions of movies below the price of DVD sets, it’s a no brainer. And so much for the higher premiums manufacturers had hoped that Blu-ray hardware (and movies) would bring on a more permanent basis.

Not everyone can enjoy 3D without wanting to throw up

So if plain old Blu-ray isn’t  helping to bring in higher premiums, perhaps the 3D kind will. And when manufacturers and studios are not trying to kill the format by signing excruciatingly long exclusivity deals (I’m looking at you, Panasonic and Fox) on titles that will launch the format, there’s also the issue that many people just can’t stand watching 3D. I think I’m one of these people, since watching 3D for more than half an hour makes me uncomfortable, and watching something like Avatar all the way through would probably kill me (or at least make me very very sick). But I did still buy a 3D TV, and I’ve definitely paid more money for even less interesting gimmicks before. Expect all TVs to have 3D support by the end of the year though, and competition will ensure the higher premiums will be gone by then too.

And going back to the Chrome/H.264 decision I referred to above, there’s a new service that aims to end the problem of cross-browser compatibility for uploaded web videos. Vid.ly takes in your videos and then transcode them millions of times (or just a dozen times, I don’t know) so that it will work on any browser, regardless of whether it took the very corporate decision to back one of its own, albeit open, video standards, or whether it’s backing a video standard that it owns a lot of patent on. And the same for mobile videos, iOS, Android, Blackberry. I fed the service my recently uploaded Transformers: Dark of the Moon HD 1080p Trailer. Vid.ly ate it up, and spat out a link half an hour later, and I’ve put the sample embed video and mobile video links in this forum thread. For no other reason, it’s a great way to compare the various qualities of web video standards, H.264 vs WebM vs Theora, as the same embed code automatically detects what software you’re using and gives you the compatible stream (it looks by far the worst on Firefox at the moment, as it uses Ogg Theora). Anyway, an interesting service that may bypass the whole very confusing, and annoying, HTML5 format wars.

And last but not least, in gaming, Sony has reacted to the hacked 3.55 firmware by releasing the 3.65 firmware. And it was hacked within hours. Stable. Doors. Horse. Bolted.

Sony did have better success in the courts, with the judge granting a temporary injunction against, I don’t know what, geohot’s firmware or something. Because a temporary injunction on fail0verflow’s research into pointing out the security flaw on the PS3, doesn’t seem to make much sense, as it’s now common knowledge that Sony doesn’t know the difference between a constant and a randomly generated number.

Sony's Next Generation Portable is packed full of the latest tech, but at what price?

But Sony are at their best when they show off cool stuff, as opposed to trying all sorts of anti-piracy measures, and they did impress a lot of people and refocus people’s thoughts away from the PS3 security disaster, by revealing the NGP – the Next Generation Portable – the successor to the ailing (some would argue, dead and buried) PSP. It does seem pretty cool, all the best features from phones (Wi-Fi, GPS, multiple cameras, multi-touch), a kick-ass processor that can run PS3 games, albeit at the reduced resolution of the still kick-ass OLED screen (960×544). Still, it faces stiff competition from smartphones, the 3DS and tablets, all vying for a share of the portable gaming market these days (although Sony has promised a common development platform for its Android phones and the NGP, so we know at least Angry Birds will be on the NGP). Nobody knows what the price of the NGP will be, but with so much tech inside, it can’t be cheap, or can’t be cheaper than the 3DS, right?

Speaking of the 3DS, yes, it will have region-control, and downloaded games won’t be transferable to another console, at least not at first.

And so that’s it for another week. Have a good one and see you at the same time, same place, in 7 days.