DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Some weeks you couldn’t buy a news story, this week, there’s enough for two weeks. Don’t really know why, perhaps the MPAA is upping their lobbying efforts, or the courts have resumed their cases, and parliaments are reconvened to pass new legislations. Who knows. On my end, I finished the review for WinDVD 2010 as promised. A summary? Well, I’d rather you read the full review, but suffice to say there are things that I like about WinDVD, and there are some things that its competitors have done that it has not. Is it a great Blu-ray player? Yes it is. Can it be better, that’s a yes too.

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

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

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

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

The MPAA's propaganda ministry is busy these days

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Managed Copy in a Pioneer demo for the movie Bolt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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