Copyright DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for the ‘Copyright’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (27 January 2013)

Sunday, January 27th, 2013

So for the first time in five years (may not be factually accurate), I missed sending out an issue of the WNR. Not only that, the entire website went down for a couple of days. Coming on the eve of the SOPA protests a year ago, you can be forgiven for thinking that this was something sinister (or a repeat of the protest), but in the end, it was just a series of unfortunate events really. You can read about what actually happened here.

So with two week’s worth of WNR to go though, you might be forgiven again to think that this will be a choc-a-bloc special edition, but actually, news-wise, it has been pretty quiet (although I may have been too busy kicking myself to have noticed all the going-ons). So let’s get started before I or someone else accidentally borks the website again.

R.I.P. Aaron Swartz

But before we start, I want to say a few things about the untimely death of Aaron Swartz, things that I had wanted to say last week but didn’t get the chance to. My first emotion upon hearing the news was obviously anger. Anger at the way prosecutors hounded a young and talented man, who has already contributed so much, and had so much more to contribute, to his death over such a petty things as copyright. Especially when those on Wall Street that were responsible for nearly destroying the world economy for their own petty gains never got the kind of prosecutorial attention that Aaron was subject to.

But instead of focusing on these negative emotions, something that young Aaron might have been doing too before his final act, perhaps it’s best to simply remember Aaron for all of this contributions, from RSS to Reddit, to Creative Commons to Demand Progress. If we can all, in our small way, continue to carry the torch for Aaron and continue the great work he started, then that’s how we will win!

American Assembly have finally released the full copy of their eagerly awaited Copy Culture Survey, after a sneak preview last October seems to hint that pirates are also the best buyers of music.

The survey, conducted in the US and Germany, attempts to paint a fuller picture of the piracy scene, one that’s a bit more complex than the “they’re all nasty little thieves that have stolen our precious” picture that the content industries often paint. Some interesting results were obtained, definitely, including that fact that almost half of the Americans surveyed have engaged in one form of copyright infringement or another, with 70% of 18-29 year-olds admitting to copying or downloading content.

An astonishing 80% of those surveyed also felt that it was perfectly acceptable to share copyright media with family members, the kind of casual piracy rate that Hollywood and the music industry absolutely loath, but are afraid to do much about because everyone’s doing it (brings to mind the infamous ineffective “home taping is killing the music industry” campaign).

The good news is that hard-core piracy remains in the domain of a very small minority, with only 3% admitting that most if not all of their media collection consists of pirated stuff.

Still, it’s probably a good time for the industry to take a good look at these numbers and find out just why so many people feel it is acceptable to commit acts of copyright infringement (or feel that it’s unacceptable, but still do it anyway), and what is the best way to stop it without alienating all your potential customers – an absolute majority of those surveyed were against the industry-led and government supported censorship plans, as well as ISP based snooping on an individual’s activities. Maybe then they will find a solution that benefits all.

Not holding my breath though.

Antigua: Sun, surf and legal “pirated” downloads. Photo Credit: margory.june @ Flickr, CC

And piracy may become just a bit more acceptable soon if the government of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda follow through on their plans to offer unlicensed content legally. Due to the US’s illegal blockade of the islands’ internet gambling services, the WTO, of all places, authorized the islands to take matters into their own hands and legally “suspend” $21 million worth of U.S. owned copyright every year.

With the U.S. still refusing to lift the blockade, the Antiguan government has finally had enough, and will proceed with plans to launch perhaps the world’s fully authorized, and legal, piracy website. Piracy is probably the wrong word though, since according to the WTO ruling, Antigua now owns $21 million worth of U.S. copyright per annum, so there’s nothing pirat-ey about it at all.

The U.S., as expected, aren’t entirely pleased with Antigua’s plans, calling it a “theft of intellectual property”. I guess it is “theft” in the same way that repo men are thieves, and if the U.S. government has a problem with this, I suggest they take it up with the WTO, who are the ones authorizing this “theft”.

I for one will look forward to getting my legal $15 boxset of The Walking Dead Season 3 burned onto recordable BDs that are labeled with black markers. A real collector’s item!

——

A year after helicopters, police dogs and SWAT teams swooped down on Kim DotCom’s New Zealand compound, DotCom is back in the headlines (is it me or does raids like this never actually happens outside of movies, not to to drug lords, organised crime heads, or corrupt Wall Street bankers. Do a search on Google for “police helicopter mansion”, and the DotCom raid ranks 9 out of the top 10 links for me, which says a lot about what the government deems “a serious offence” these days – I guess DotCom wasn’t too big enough to fail – not a fat joke).

Mega’s launch, complete with re-enactment of the FBI’s raid on the DotCom mansion a year ago

This time, he’s launching his new and improved Megaupload website, now simply called Mega. It might seem like an odd move to make what with the Megaupload matter still unresolved, and with the new site likely to be a huge lawsuit magnet, but I would hope that DotCom has consulted his legal team before making the move.

The improvement of Mega over Megaupload can be summed up in one word: encryption. Mega now allows users to publicly share files that they don’t necessarily want the public to be able to use. So instead of uploading a password protected ZIP archive, files can be encrypted, downloaded in its encrypted fashion and remain a useless jumble of zeros and ones until one receives the decryption key (privately, and hopefully through some more secure channel than email). This way, the download link can be made public to allow for easy downloading, but security can be maintained. Mega also works the traditional way if the encryption key is attached to the link itself, as the person downloading the file will then get access to the decrypted version straight away.

What seems like a simple enough improvement actually does a greater deal more in terms of protecting the operators of Mega from lawsuits. With all uploads being encrpyted, Mega can reasonably argue that there’s no easy way for them to identify just what’s actually in the uploaded files. And without this monitoring capability, they can argue that they are simply not aware of any shenanigans happening on their network.

And if you examine the design of the encryption feature more closely, this latter aim (of protecting themselves from lawsuits) may be a bigger motivator behind the use of encryption. Security experts have found that there are chinks in the armor when it comes to the encryption methodology used by Mega, the result of the website’s aim to be as “thin” as possible (ie. no plug-ins or add-ons required for normal usage, other than support for Javascript, which almost all browsers support natively). So for mission critical, top secret stuff, relying on Mega could be less than ideal (although I guess that’s a given considering you’re still uploading something to a third party site, over a public link).

In any case, it’s an interesting approach to cyberlocker storage, if not entirely new. It might help make the case that these kind of websites shouldn’t be responsible for its user’s activities (considering Mega now makes it impossible to fully monitor that), but it might also make the argument that DotCom and co are only taking a “see no evil, hear no evil” approach when they are fully aware that “evil” is going on.

And in scary news of the week, the MPAA is lobbying the US government harder than usual to obtain the right to operate a fleet of UAVs, or more commonly referred to as ‘drones’. No, it’s not some wacky and potentially lethal new way to fight pirates, and it’s not even in retaliation to The Pirate Bay’s own planned fleet of drone servers – Hollywood’s interest is far less sinister, and less interesting: using drones to film aerial shots that otherwise would have been done via helicopters and expensive cranes. So nothing to worry about. For now!

High Definition

With the 4K Ultra HD hype reaching deafening levels, the big question still remains how people can actually get their hands on 4K content. While Sony is investing heavily in online digital distribution, consumers are wondering if Sony’s other major format, Blu-ray, can play a role too.

The huge interest in 4K has led the Blu-ray Disc Association to launch a task force to study if it is in fact possible to shoehorn 4K onto a Blu-ray disc. The current Blu-ray specs only allow for 1080p content, and with the increased processing requirements of 4K, as well as the increases capacity requirement, on paper, it looks like 4K on Blu-ray is a lame duck.

4 times as many information as Blu-ray, 4K, or Ultra HD, will require more storage space, and processing power, than what today’s Blu-ray discs and players can offer

Even if one manages to squeeze a poor quality 4K resolution video onto a 50GB Blu-ray disc using one of the existing optimized for 1080p codecs, players that are not versatile enough simply won’t understand the four times larger resolution of a 4K movie. But a PS3, with the right software update, may just be able to decode and output such a Blu-ray disc, although this also largely depends on whether the HDMI output of the PS3 is capable of carrying the signal (the HDMI 1.4 specs do allow for resolutions up to 4096×2160).

If backwards compatibility isn’t a primary concern, then a BDXL 128GB disc, combined with the more efficient HEVC video codec, may just do 4K quite well. People will need new players of course, but given the price of Blu-ray players these days, I don’t think people would mind replacing their players in the next couple of years again, especially if 4K TVs start becoming affordable.

My money is still on OLED making a bigger impact than 4K before this happens though.

That’s it for this bumper (not really) edition of the WNR. See you next week. Hopefully.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (27 January 2013)

Weekly News Roundup (13 January 2013)

Sunday, January 13th, 2013

It’s back to work for most people, which sucks, but at least there does seem to be news again. Yeah, that’s just what you need after your first week back at work, a long and ranty WNR to read!

I’ll try to keep this as painless as possible, so let’s not waste more time.

A new study has proved what most of us suspected anyway, that DMCA take-downs, and even closing down the likes of Megapload won’t really do much in terms of reducing the availability of pirated downloads from cyberlocker sites.

The problem, according to the study, is that the moment you remove one upload, many others pop up in its place. And even removing entire file hosting websites, either through censorship, domain seizures or a well coordinated international law enforcement action like with the Megaupload shutdown, won’t work because new sites will just pop up the next day. In fact, the closure of Megaupload may have had a detrimental effect on efforts to curb cyberlocker piracy, because it has fragmented the upload scene to the point where uploaders are uploading to multiple cyberlocker sites to avoid any one being taken down. It’s like blowing up a big asteroid headed for earth, only for it to fragment into thousands of smaller and still dangerous pieces still coming at you.

In other words, the cat-and-mouse game between pirates and those seeking to reduce pirated uploads is being truly, fundamentally and comprehensively won by the mice. Not surprising when the ratio is probably something like 17,374 mice to every cat, mind you.

RapidShare is forcing its users to go legit with transfer caps, which has only managed to force some of its users to transfer to competing services

So what’s the solution? RapidShare’s solution to keep pirated content off its network is to implement a transfer cap system that went into effect in late November. Since then, RapidShare’s pageview traffic appears to have dropped by more than a third, although it has no doubt led to probably an even greater reduction in the amount of pirated content on the network. But all this means is that piracy was shifted to other sites.

For those file hosting providers that are not self-policing, the study suggests that perhaps going after payment providers that some of the more blatantly pro-piracy cyberlockers may be more effective, but the best way the study concludes, as it always has been, is to innovate. Instead of trying to reduce piracy, reduce the demand for piracy by introducing good value, innovative services that people actually want to use. An obvious solution that the content industry seems totally oblivious to.

Innovation can be expensive and prone to disaster though. But part of the reason why the content industries don’t seem to innovate as much as, say, the IT industry, in my opinion, is that the content industries (especially the music and movie mobs) seem to enjoy special protection through copyright legislation. This means they have very little incentive to do anything new when there’s already legislation there to protect your ageing business model, and plenty of opportunity to pay for new legislation. This is the kind of thing borne out of the initial desire to “protect” capitalism by some misguided notion that this means giving corporations whatever they want, the kind of thing which actually leads away from the free market capitalism model that the politicians creating these kind of laws actually believe in.

This was something raised by Republican Study Committee (RSC) staffer Derek Khanna in his copyright memo, now simply referred to as that “sensible” one. You know the one that was canned almost instantly after it was published by the RSC, and possibly the catalyst behind the firing of Derek. This week, Derek, now out of a job, was able to speak for the first time about the entire ordeal.

Derek Khanna, the RSC staffer fired after writing a sensible memo on copyright, speaks out on his ordeal

The RSC canned the memo because it claimed that insufficient review had gone into the memo before it was published, but according to Derek, there was nothing out of the ordinary for the process that went into getting his memo published. If anything, it received more feedback than what is deemed necessary.

What was surprising to Derek, but hopefully not to readers of the WNR, was the backlash the memo received from the content industries. All Derek had wanted was to start a debate, but it seems that’s the last thing movie studios and record labels, long since a protected species under the guardianship of the political structure in Washington, wanted.

As for the firing, Derek was unable to speak candidly about it for obvious reasons, but according to the The Washington Examiner, Tennessee congresswoman Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who has close ties to the record industry due to her district’s geographical location in the suburbs of Nashville, was somewhat instrumental in kicking Derek out of the RSC. So for now, the record industry (and the movie industry) remains a protected species, but one that has had its instincts dulled to the point where it isn’t able to live unassisted in the wild, not with competing species the likes of Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Spotify all flourishing on their own abilities. This is not a sustainable situation, in my opinion.

High Definition

If you had to sum up this year’s CES using using 5 unique letters and a single number, then OLED and 4K is all you need. The 4K hype seems to be gathering pace especially quickly.

Almost all of the major TV manufactures announced both OLED TVs and 4K TVs (or TVs with both), even though in my opinion, OLED is going to be the one that makes the most immediate impact. Boring old 1080p OLED TVs can tap into the vast amount of existing HD content and improve them immediately, but the lack of native 4K content should keep 4K away from the mainstream for a while yet.

OLED might make the more immediate impact between it and 4K, as exhibitors at this year’s CES show off their OLED TVs, including this curved one

Sony has seen the content problem, and devised their own solutions of sorts – “Mastered in 4K” Blu-ray movies. Soon, Sony will release movies mastered from pristine 4K transfers (which isn’t actually something that hasn’t been done before, by many other studios, eg. Jaws) with extra focus on quality through the use of extra bitrate (those old enough will remember Sony’s similar attempt with Superbit DVDs). These Blu-ray titles, when upscaled and displayed on 4K TVs, is said to present a “near 4K” picture, which is actually kind of cynical when you think about it. That you can fluff around with a, no doubt super looking, 1080p stream and make people believe it’s “near 4K” probably says more about the lack of perceivable difference 4K TV is going to make, especially if one isn’t sitting within touching distance of the screen, or aren’t in possession of a 85″ monster. It’s also questionable whether simply throwing bits at an AVC/VC-1 encoding will actually dramatically improve the picture, diminished returns and all that.

Well at the very least it’s better than Sony’s current solution to the lack of 4K content problem, notably “loaning” 4K TV owners with hard-drives pre-loaded with selected 4K content. Their upcoming online 4K video distribution service does sound a bit more promising though.

The truth of the matter is, due to the limited nature of the human perception system in relation to small details, 4K TVs aren’t going to be the game changer that HDTV was, not unless you go above a certain size (at which point the pixel spacing problem may rear its ugly head). OLED’s superb and vibrant colours and deep deep blacks will give you a much bigger “wow factor”, even with existing 1080p content of which there’s a plentiful supply of. Now combine OLED and 4K, and you may have something that’s really really tempting, as long as you can stomach the astronomical price tag, that is.

The December US NPD numbers are out, and once again, the Xbox 360 was on top. This is despite the global situation being reversed, with Sony’s PS3 just having managed to outsell the Xbox 360 in the worldwide race, despite the Xbox 360 having had a year’s head start. But the situation in the US is actually getting worse for the PS3, with Microsoft happily promoting the fact that its Xbox 360, which sold 1.4 million units in December, sold more than twice as many units as the unnamed next best non-portable console, which had to be the PS3 because the Wii and Wii U sold nowhere near 700,000 units (475,000 and 460,000 units respectively for the Wiis).

The Xbox 360’s 1.4 million units, while impressive, still represented a 17% decline compared to December from a year ago. Still, the decline was smaller than in recent months.

Overall, 2012 was a disappointing year for the gaming industry revenue wise, at least compared to 2011. The age of the current generation of consoles is a major factor, but the lack of new game releases, 29% less than 2011, also contributed to a very lackluster year. On average though, each SKU generated 8% more unit sales and 11% more revenue, so there’s definitely some silver lining in this cloud.

Well, that’s that for the first real news week of 2013. See you next week.

R.I.P Aaron Swartz

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (13 January 2013)

Weekly News Roundup (6 January 2013)

Sunday, January 6th, 2013

Welcome to 2013. So another week without much going on, which is nice actually. Nice to be able to get a break and recharge the proverbial batteries ahead of a busy 2013. Let’s get started!

A new report from the University of Southern California (USC) says that Google and, to a lesser extent, Yahoo, are aiding and even profiting from web piracy by providing ads to the top piracy websites. In a study that collected information on which ad networks the top piracy websites used (top websites based, ironically, on data that Google releases as part of its anti-piracy transparency efforts), the study found that Google was the second most popular ad network being used by these websites. Yahoo came 6th.

Just because a webpage has a Google adcode, it does not mean the displayed ad is served by Google or that Google profits from it

Google came out immediately to criticize the study for over-simplifying how web advertising works. The report was apparently compiled by scraping ad-code from piracy websites, and Google rightly points out that the presence of an ad network’s ad-code on a page does not necessarily mean that the network’s own ads are being served via the ad-code. The data apparently also includes Google’s DoubleClick ad-codes, but DoubleClick’s role in providing advertising differs significantly from Google’s main publisher advertising platform, AdSense. DoubleClick For Publishers (DFP) merely provides the tools for website publishers to place ads on their websites – the actual ads could be served from any ad network (including Google’s own AdSense). Even AdSense delivers ads from third-party ad networks. So while the USC report may have counted all AdSense and DFP ad-codes as being “Google ads”, the actual money making ads that is delivered via AdSense and DFP could have come from any other ad network.

Similarly, Yahoo’s Right Media platform offers similar functionalities as DFP, and have also been counted as part of Yahoo’s ad network for the report.

From my own experience, both Google and Yahoo have fairly tough anti-piracy policies. They will often reject sites right away if they suspect something is not right, and they have been known the suspend and seize funds from publisher accounts, sometimes over-zealously.

And unlike a lot of other ad networks that have a more hands-on role in sourcing and placing ads, Google at the very least leaves much of the decision to advertisers. So targeting the likes of Google and Yahoo seems slightly unfair given that advertisers, some of them being Hollywood studios, can choose to have full control over what gets placed where. Perhaps a list of top 10 advertisers on pirates sites may be much more informative, than simply blaming the tools that is used to show these ads. What’s next? Name and shame the web browsers used to visit piracy websites?

——

The first DRM story of 2013, and who would have guessed that it involves Sony! Ever the pioneers, not so much in terms of consumer technology (unlike the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nintendo, Netflix …), but ever the innovator in DRM technology, Sony has come up with a new way to annoy gamers with a new DRM that uses RFID tags to prevent the usage of used games.

One of these RFID tags could be embedded into a Blu-ray disc, so that Sony can use it as a new form of anti used games DRM. Photo credit: JuditK @ Flickr, Creative Commons License

The RFID tag, embedded deep inside the game disc itself, would wirelessly interact with the console and store the unique information contained within the console onto the disc. And then when you try to play the disc on another console, the console would read the RFID tag, find that it’s been used on another console before, and prevent the use of the disc (unless perhaps you pay $$$ to Sony or the game publisher to get it unlocked again).

The same thing could be done via an Internet connection, but it seems Sony is thinking of offline ways to get its DRM into everything as well.

But this being a patent application means that it is just as likely to never see the light of day as an actual application, but you do have to give Sony credit in finding new and more annoying DRM.

Not that I want to give Sony ideas on how to make more money or anything, but if the real concern is that the second-hand games market is unregulated (ie. Sony and other game publishers don’t make $$$ every time a second hand game is sold), then why not create your own, regulated second-hand game trading environment? Preventing gamers from selling their old games is only going to reduce the budget of these gamers in terms of buying new games (and that won’t help anyone), so if the concern is that Sony and others aren’t getting a cut of the action, why not, you know, do something about it so you *can* get a cut of the action?

But this solution probably makes too much sense, is far too consumer friendly, and does not contain enough DRM goodness for Sony to ever consider something like it, probably.

That’s all for the week, the first of 2013. I suspect more will be forthcoming next week, what with the CES and all. So until then, have a great one!

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (6 January 2013)

Weekly News Roundup (23 December 2012)

Sunday, December 23rd, 2012

The fact that you’re still reading this means that the world did not end. I for one feel disappointed. All that hype for nothing. Or maybe I was just disappointed that I actually had to write this WNR, although I guess between doing this and post-apocalyptic scrounging for canned goods all the while on the lookout for cannibals, this wins out. Slightly.

Maybe because people were too busy stockpiling supplies of toilet paper, long life milk and batteries, news was a bit light this week. So we should get through this pretty quickly, so you can get back to last minute frantic holiday shopping, or back to ignoring your relatives.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has finally released their annual “notorious markets” list, listing all the best places where you can get your piracy fix, or something like that. Actually, it’s a list of copyright do-no-gooders, which is supposed to shame them into doing something or another. Or rather, it shames the governments of the countries that these websites or physical markets are located in.

No surprises really, with The Pirate Bay and isoHunt leading the BitTorrent indexer category. Also unsurprisingly, Megaupload and Demonoid does not grace this year’s list – other cyberlocker websites, including Rapidgator, Putlocker and the Ukraine based Ex.ua, are still listed.

Netflix has done more to fight video piracy than the closure of Megaupload

I like how the document goes into great detail about the successes during year, most notably the Megaupload thing, but there’s hardly a mention of any positive effects in terms of trade and revenue, which is the whole point behind anti-piracy and counterfeiting, isn’t it? It’s been nearly a year since Megaupload was shuttered and the whole file hosting industry was shaken to its core, yet has anything really changed?

Spotify and Netflix seems to have far more effective at reducing piracy and increasing revenue than the closures of LimeWire and Megaupload respectively.

——

It took a while, and after a lot of threatening letters and whatnot, Warner Bros. and Intel (well, Intel’s daughter company Digital Content Protection) have finally launched a full scale lawsuit against a company that makes a HDCP circumvention device.

Some backgrounder on HDCP – it is the copy protection used in HDMI cables. Without a successful “handshake” between two HDCP compliant devices, video and audio functions via the cable will cease to function. If you’ve ever had a problem with a HDMI input not showing anything, and a problem that was fixed by restarting one or both of the devices involved, then HDCP was the culprit.

Is Hollywood really worried about people copying movies via HDMI cables?

Early DVI inputs did not support HDCP, and so many legacy devices (such as monitors, TVs, projectors) could not be made to work with newer devices that mandated the use of HDCP. HDCP is also responsible for preventing HDMI to component/VGA conversion. That is unless you manage to circumvent HDCP, which isn’t as hard as it sounds since it was successfully cracked back in 2010. And so a range of devices went on the market that finally allowed those still with HDCP-less DVI or component only devices to work with newer HDMI only ones, or to record things like PS3 gaming footgage for review or walkthroughs. I specifically won’t mentioned using HDCP-less HDMI to copy Blu-ray or DVD movies, because nobody in their right mind would do this when there are far simpler solutions around.

Anyway, Warner and Intel have threatened to sue on many occasions, but if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time they’ve decided to actually take the next step. The company being sued is Freedom USA, an Ohio based company that manufacturers several such devices under the brands SIIG, SABRENT and CE Labs.

Of course, the fair use argument is strong in this case, in that an argument can be made that the primary use of these devices isn’t for copyright infringement (again, there are far easier ways to copy Blu-ray or DVD without having to record via a hacked HDMI stream), but to allow the use of legacy devices. How Warner Bros. and Intel can prove that Freedom USA’s devices were used to infringe the copyrights owned by Warner Bros., I just don’t know. Just because a device could be used in that way, doesn’t mean it is commonly used that way, or is the reason why people buy it. I suppose the argument could be made that cable shows are being recorded this way, but even with HDCP uncracked, analog copies can still be made easily by anyone with a semi-decent PC capture card.

High Definition

Remember when Walmart debuted their “disc to digital” program, and you had to bring your DVDs or Blu-ray to the store so you get the “privilege” to pay $2 to $5 for the SD or HD version of the film on VUDU? The service even stamps on some kind of ink on your disc as to ensure you don’t try to cheat them and try to use the same disc to buy multiple version of the digital copies.

Others simply ripped their DVD and Blu-ray with free software, with no need for fees or invisible ink, or even a car trip to the store.

Seeing the gap between these two consumer friendly/unfriendly extremes, Best Buy has started beta testing a way for consumers to do the disc to digital conversion at home. Users can pay a similar amount to get a UltraViolet version of their existing DVD film, or pay a little bit more to “upgrade” to the HD version, with 3,500 titles currently supported. Blu-ray discs are currently not supported though.

Convert your DVDs to UltraViolet digital copies using CinemaNow Disc to DIgital

So no car trip, and no need for invisible ink (are they really worried people are gonna pass around the same disc just to trick the store into accepting their $2 or $5, for a SD version that’s probably not even worth that much anyway). Still not as easy as ripping your own discs, but at least you do get a cloud hosted downloadable or streaming version that some may find more convenient than having to lug an external HDD around all the time.

I would never pay just so I can get a digital copy of a film I already own. I might buy the Blu-ray edition that comes with a UltraViolet copy, but I still prefer discs for the movies/shows that I like, and for the rest, I can probably rely on one of the subscription VOD services. I end up spending less on movies every year, and still end up watching more this way. Which is the way it should be.

And that’s it for the week. Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, or just a nice, relaxing (yeah right) few days off. See you next week, unless nothing happens during the week (a high probability).

Posted in Copyright, DVD, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (23 December 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (16 December 2012)

Sunday, December 16th, 2012

Welcome to the third last WNR for 2012, or if you’re a believer in the Mayan calendar termination theory, THE LAST WNR EVER! The 22nd of December is going to be a disappointing day for a lot of people no matter what happens, but I’ll be out there celebrating “The World Didn’t End” day, if in fact the world did not end.

Very light news wise this week, but I do have a legitimate and medical excuse this time. For about half of the week, I was suffering from a pretty bad case of migraines, which still hasn’t fully recovered. I’ve had it maybe once or twice before, but it was usually cured by a good night’s sleep, but this one has been really persistent. The headache I can stand, but it’s the nausea that gets you. It does make you realise all the things you’ve previously taken for granted, like being able to scroll a webpage without wanting to hurl into a bucket. Having had to work with a pounding headache, light sensitivity and nausea, I will never complain about working in normal health ever again … well until the next time I get bored of work, at least.

Starting with copyright news, not that we have much of anything else anyway, those keeping tabs on Google’s publicly available DMCA stats will have noticed the exponential rise in the number of takedown requests over the last couple of months, something that Google has noticed too.

The number of DMCA takedown requests that Google receives has increased by tenfold in the last 6 month

In fact, DMCA requests are up tenfold from just six months ago, from 1.2 million per month back in July, to 12 million in just the last 30 days. The dramatic rise in request has Google worried. Not just that it takes an enormous effort to process 12 million requests and counting, but also of the effect this has on the free flow of information, especially when relating to false positives. Google for the most part tries to identify URLs that shouldn’t really be removed, but as Digital Digest found out earlier in the year, the system is by no means fool proof. That a company hired by Warner Bros. to recently locate and submit DMCA requests tried to remove an IMDb entry for one of the studio’s movies, along with many legitimate trailer and promotional links, shows that even content creators have something to lose when it comes to the way DMCA request work at the moment.

For once though, the MPAA agrees with Google that the current regime isn’t working. The only problem is that the MPAA thinks the collateral damage the current DMCA processing method should be made more deadly by introducing domain-level bans. Instead of banning each page individually, the MPAA would love nothing more than to be able to ban an entire domain name. And I’m sure I know which domains the MPAA already has in mind.

The obvious problems with this aside (I just hope they don’t ban IMDb.com, because it’s actually quite a useful little website for all involved), the real problem is that this kind of corporate controlled censorship doesn’t actually work to stop people from visiting these websites, let alone stop piracy, let alone help movie studios to make more money. Most of these websites don’t even rely on search engines for the majority of their traffic, so it’s all a bit pointless.

But since when has big content’s anti-piracy methods been anything but pointless?

Which is probably why the most successful anti-piracy initiative devised for the music industry has been something that the music industry fought hard against: Spotify. This week, the founder of Spotify Daniel Ek revealed his main motivation in coming up with Spotify, and it in fact was related to piracy. Ek wanted to create something that would defeat piracy by being better than it, and in the end, it took a lot of convincing for the music industry to actually sign up.

With Spotify now having 5 million paying subscribers worldwide, and more than half a billion dollars in revenue being generated for the music industry where previously there was none, it has to be considered a great success. I’m actually listening to Spotify while I’m writing this WNR, so even if my free ad-supported account doesn’t generate a lot of revenue for artists and labels, it’s more revenue than what would be generated by piracy.

NPD this week released November’s US video game sales figures, the first set that includes the newly released Wii U. With Nintendo a little bit more forthcoming with their hardware sales stats, it was almost enough to grant us a full set of hardware sales figures (but Sony’s Scroogeness when it comes to PS3 sales data prevented this, sadly). So much so that I thought about doing a full NPD analysis just like in the good old days, but I ended up settling for a news article and a little bit more of an analysis right here.

The Wii U’s launch, at least in the US, looks like a success, but can also be classified as a failure, depending on where you stand. While raw sales figures (425,000 sold in the first week) were down compared to the Wii launch (475,000 sold), the pricier Wii U meant that Nintendo made more money from slightly fewer unit sales as a result. So in this respect, it was a good launch.

The Nintendo Wii U should try and emulate the Xbox 360’s success in combining casual and hardcore gaming, with a good price, multimedia capabilities, and a great online community

But if you consider the fact that the Wii was coming off a largely unsuccessful Gamecube, the Wii U is coming off the ubiquitous Wii. With backward compatibility support, both in software and hardware, the natural upgrade path from the Wii to the Wii U is natural, but the sales figure so far suggests that perhaps it isn’t a natural choice for most to upgrade. On the other hand, the Wii was, by standards back then, a much more innovative console with a bigger “wow factor” than the Wii U , so perhaps it’s not a fair comparison to compare the two consoles after all.

I think this holiday period has come a little too early for the console in order for us to be able to tell whether it will be a gift-giver’s favourite just like the Wii was (or still is). Next year’s holiday period will be crucial for the console, so Nintendo has a lot of work to do between now and then to “sell” their console to the perhaps more skeptical public.

This year’s gift-giver’s favourite is the Xbox 360 though, having sold 1.26 million consoles, almost twice as popular as the next most popular console. The Xbox 360 currently has a great mix of good gaming, pricing, multimedia and online support, and it’s a formula that Nintendo will want to emulate with the Wii U.

You can tell us what you think of the Wii U by voting in this poll.

On that note, thus ends this latest installment of the WNR. See you in a week. Hopefully.

Posted in Copyright, News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (16 December 2012)

DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for the ‘Copyright’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (27 January 2013)

Weekly News Roundup (13 January 2013)

Weekly News Roundup (6 January 2013)

Weekly News Roundup (23 December 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (16 December 2012)

Pages

Links

Categories