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Weekly News Roundup (2012 Roundup Edition)

Sunday, December 30th, 2012

So as expected, it was a very quiet week. I took time out to do, well, basically as little as possible. And it was good. With the New Year just around the corner, I think I may try and do the same next week too, (lack of) news permitting.

Seeing this is the last WNR for 2012, I suppose it is also customary to have an end of year review of some sort, but I’m not sure I can remember all that’s happened to do it justice.

The Megaupload seizure in January helped set the tone for the rest of the year

I guess the two biggest events of the year actually happened right at the start of the year. First, SOPA (and PIPA) was stopped, and then almost in retaliation, Megaupload was also stopped by the powers that be. The rest of the year sort of pivoted around the events in January, but we also saw the usual stuff. The Pirate Bay was targeted again and again, and again, it remains fully operational, probably more resilient than ever. Censorship regimes propped up all over the place, most of them, if we’re being totally honest, were all attempt to shut down TPB (again, none of them really did much).

But for all the efforts to stop sites like TPB, either through litigation, legislation or technology, the emergence of new legal online services might finally be turning the tide against piracy. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, and yes, even the industry’s much maligned UltraViolet service, all played a role in giving people a viable alternative to piracy. And Hollywood is just starting to get a taste of the fruits of embracing the Internet, something that perhaps will bring more common sense to the copyright debate in the coming year.

Netflix remains dominant, but other players are entering the market and are catching up

I believe in this because I have seen the industry’s fear abate as the year went on. The emergence of digital streaming and download services has had a huge effect on DVD revenue, but far from the hysteria that I might have once expected, it was all quite calm and optimistic from the industry. Blu-ray’s ongoing success may have partially allayed fears, as was the slight “recovery” (or at least a slow down of the decline) for DVD, but I believe it was the mega million dollar deals being made in the subscription streaming sector that was helping to more than offset any losses in DVD revenue, that helped the industry see the light. Whether the exorbitant amounts being asked of companies like Netflix and Amazon, and the new Redbox Instant, is sustainable, I don’t know. There is definitely some “loss leading” going on, and Hollywood studios are definitely taking advantage, but there’s also a huge untapped market out there unaware or unable to use these services right now. Improvement in infrastructure, with the help of ISPs, and just more education, more support from the industry (in terms of getting content out there), will hopefully see the next boom in home entertainment.

The release of the Wii U capped off a largely disappointing 2012 for gaming revenue, but things may start to pick up again in 2013

For gaming, the boom that was the last few years pretty much ended in 2012. The Xbox 360, which had enjoyed months of year-on-year growth, was now on the decline. The PS3 followed suit, in second place to the Xbox 360, as it had been throughout most of this generation in the US. The Wii’s decline had started much earlier, and did not get better. There was not a single month in 2012 that was overly positive, in terms of hardware and game sales, and even the release of the Wii U could not generate the kind of optimism that had been prevalent in the last couple of years. I think 2013 is when the optimism will come back, when the next Xbox and the next PlayStation is unveiled, if not released. The Wii U has started the next gen rolling, but it’s always until most of the other players get involved that things start to heat up, and I think this will happen in 2013.

If not, then perhaps we’ve just been really spoilt with a couple of really great years for gaming, both in terms of the games produced, and also the record sales, which were far above the “normal” that even the most optimistic industry estimates had imagined. The new normal may not be as sexy, but as long as companies continue to produce great games, gamers like myself should consider ourselves lucky.

And this brings us to the only news item this week, and a sort of sad one, to some.

The end of the year, and the end of an era. The first steps towards discontinuing the PS2 has started, with Sony stopping the shipment of the console in Japan once the current stock runs out, according to reports.

It’s been a glorious run for the nearly 13 year old console, having sold more than 150 million units and hosted a library of more than 10,000 games. It has survived through three console generations, ended the fortunes of Sega as a hardware maker, saw through the decline and the rise again of Nintendo, and the emergence of Microsoft as a key player in the industry. Even as late as 2008, it was still the most played console that year, according to Nielsen.

The PS2 has had its time, but it will always be remembered as a gaming icon

But for all the successes of the PS2, Sony was unable to replicate it with its successor, the PS3. This was largely due to the advent of the casual gaming phenomenon largely led, in the home at least, by Nintendo’s Wii and largely misunderstood by Sony, and also the coming of age of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming platform via the Xbox 360. Sony also underestimated the demand for online gaming, something that had existed as an option on the PS2 but not fully embraced or centrally organized until some four years after Microsoft’s launch of their Xbox Live platform.

And while the emergence of DVD home video, of which the PS2 was one of the most affordable players during the early days of the format, helped the PS2 greatly in terms of penetration, the same could not be achieved to the same degree with the PS3 and Blu-ray. The expense of including Blu-ray playback also made the PS3 noncompetitive against the likes of the much cheaper (but inferior, technologically speaking) Wii or the one year older (and thus cheaper) Xbox 360. It was a pricing battle that Sony never managed to win until it was too late (when Blu-ray players were a dime a dozen, and the Xbox 360 had established a dominant lead, sans Blu-ray, in the US).

As for the PS2, we bid thee farewell. You had a great run, and you shall live on in our memories as a true gaming icon, alongside the likes of the Atari 2600, the NES, the Super NES and the Sega Genesis. Honorable mentions to the cult classic Dreamcast too.

So that’s it for 2012. Hope you’ve had a good year, and hope that 2013 will be better. See you next year.

Posted in Gaming, News Roundup | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (2012 Roundup Edition)

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)

Weekly News Roundup (25 November 2012)

Monday, November 26th, 2012

So despite saying that I’ve no interest in the Black Friday Blu-ray sales over at Amazon US and UK, some $400 later, I think I might have been wrong. I still maintain that the actual “lightning deals” put out by Amazon US this year has been fairly tame, with most of my buys coming via normal discounting. The Amazon UK sales were better, with some proper lightning discount (picked up the Prometheus to Alien evolution boxset, currently listed for $190 for pre-order on Amazon US, for only $43), and the Men In Black Trilogy. Plenty of stuff to tie me over well into the new year.

I didn’t just waste all of my time shopping for Blu-ray bargains. I actually did find some news this week!

Should we really be surprised that the target of the latest anti-piracy police raid happens to be a 9-year-old Finnish girl? I don’t think so, because time and time again, anti-piracy agencies have shown that nothing is sacred in their pursuit of nasty, horrible web pirates.

The nerve center of a major piracy operation, according to the Finnish anti-piracy agency CIAPC

For the trouble of downloading a music album that did not work anyway, and for doing the right thing the very next day by buying the album in question, the reward is a police raid early in the morning, and the Winnie the Pooh laptop of the 9-year-old girl being confiscated for evidence. All because the father refused to pay a 600 euro “fine” and sign a non-disclosure agreement so the money grabbing remains a secret.

Normally, parents cannot be held liable for the actions of their children, but the shortcuts being taken by Finland’s copyright laws means that the Internet connection account holder, the father, would be liable for all authorized and unauthorized uses of the connection. Another shortcut? No need to prove anything, beyond a flimsy IP address, before police can search and seize (just what they expect to find on the laptop, a year after the fact, who knows). And that a legal copy of the album has already been purchased does not seem to matter, despite a loss of a sale being the most damaging thing a download can do (without considering the upload component, which may have been mere kBs in size, assuming the original download was even real or completed).

The worst part is that these anti-piracy agencies are so entrenched in their zealous believes (that what they’re doing is right and just), that they simply walk into controversies like this time and time again, with no shame at all.

The Department of Justice and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) war on Internet piracy, through “Operation In Our Sites”, has also been controversial to say the least. Not only has it not had any real effect on the web piracy problem, it did manage to seize domain names that is really shouldn’t have seized, mistakes that were magnified by the total lack of due process (which meant that the illegally taken domain names weren’t returned to its rightful owner until a full year after the seizure).

Unfortunately, there’s broad political support for this course of action, thanks to the liberal spraying of lobbying cash around in Congress and the Senate. But broad support does not equal unanimous support, and one congresswoman is trying to give website owners some extra protection against what she calls a new form of censorship (when domain seizures are accompanied by a total lack of due process). Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) is seeking help from reddit in writing a new bill to allow website owners advanced warning and the ability to mount a defence before any seizures occurs.

It’s exactly this kind of common sense bill that will no doubt be blocked by the usual suspects.

Derek Khanna, the RSC staffer thrown under the bus for having a sensible view on copyright

Across the isle, some Republicans haven’t been resting on their laurels either, although others may wish that they had. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), a caucus for conservative republicans, released an extremely sensible memo questioning the three major myths of copyright. One that copyright was created to help content creators monetize their works (actually, it was created for the greater public good, to encourage innovation and productivity), that copyright equals free-market capitalism (when it’s actually a government mandated entitlement system), and that the current copyright regime is working well to encourage productivity and innovation (when the reality is that copyright law is often used to smother innovation, and by legislating the protection of not only the right to earn revenue but the amount of revenue itself, this may lead to “rent-seeking” behaviour).

But just as the Internet woke up to probably the most sensible copyright statement made by any major party in who knows how long, the memo was unceremoniously pulled from the RSC website, and completely disavowed. Apparently, it had not been properly “reviewed” prior to publishing, and did not represent all opinions present within the RSC. Rumours of lobbyists (ie. the RIAA/MPAA) interfering persists, and really, would you be surprised?

Some have commented that this may be the Republican’s revenge for Hollywood’s pro Obama views, but while Hollywood stars, with the odd chair yelling exception, are all very much progressive-leaning, the industry itself has its money fairly evenly spread between the major parties, taking a leaf from the Wall Street playbook (or vice versa). But revenge or otherwise, what the memo represented was good, sound conservative principles, which in the light of day, doesn’t veer far away from the progressive view on the issue, even if the rationale may be very different. And this symbolizes exactly why US politics is so f***ed up at the moment, that both sides of politics can embrace the same point of view, and that it still can be easily dismissed because special interest has money invested.

High Definition

In Blu-ray news, Warner Archive Collection’s 2,000+ strong library of made to order titles will now start featuring Blu-ray titles, starting with just two this week. The collection features fairly rare and low demand titles that are made on demand, using recordable DVDs (and now Blu-ray discs) to fulfill each order. Discs are reasonably priced, usually under $20, with the two new Blu-ray movies (Gypsy and Deathtrap) being currently priced at $19.95.

To be honest, I had not been aware of Warner’s manufactured-on-demand store before, and it’s certainly an interesting take on the “video-on-demand” model. I do wonder whether the cost of producing new HD transfers for the Blu-ray films will be made back by sales, which I assume won’t be in huge numbers.

With the Wii U release out of the way, time to shift the focus back on the Xbox 720 and the PS4. The latest Xbox 720 rumours still continue to re-iterate the same ones that have been making the rounds, including the obligatory Blu-ray drive, Kinect 2.0 and more CPU cores that you can shake a stick at.

The January 2013 issue of Xbox World has the latest Xbox 720 rumours, including a mock-up of what it could look like

The augmented reality glasses rumour isn’t new either, but they’ve been repeated again in this Xbox World magazine article, which is said to have been compiled by interviewing many “industry experts”. Somewhat new is the introduction of a toushscreen controller à la the Wii U controller, although with Microsoft actually having a tablet device of their own, perhaps integration is the wiser route to take.

Almost as quick as the Xbox 720 gets a Blu-ray drive, it’s set to lose it, and with it all support for optical media, when a “slim” version of the console is released 2 years into its life-cycle (which begins Christmas 2013, by the way). The “slim” will rely solely on streamed and downloaded games, the streaming perhaps coming from Microsoft’s own OnLive-like service, after the company had showed earlier interest in acquiring the gaming-on-demand service.

For CPU fans, the Xbox 720 may have a 4 hardware core CPU, each with 4 logical cores, for some serious 16-score gaming action.

Take what you read with a pinch, perhaps even a tbsp, of salt.

That’s it for the week. Time for me to take a rest and find a way to pay for the $400 worth of new Blu-rays that I really shouldn’t have bought. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (25 November 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (11 November 2012)

Sunday, November 11th, 2012

Another very quiet week, no doubt due to the focus on the election and the recriminations afterwards. I didn’t do too badly with my predictions though, 48 out of 50. Technically 49 out of 50, since I changed my mind just before the election and (literally) put my money on Colorado staying blue – so I only managed to get Florida wrong (mainly because I overestimated the Cuban vote for Republicans). I’m no Nate Silver, but considering I was mainly going with gut and educated guessing, I certainly did a lot better than most pundits out there.

Towards the end of the week, the October NPD results came in for video game sales in the US. Once again, not enough data to actually write a full analysis, so I’ll briefly cover it in this WNR. I’m hoping that the Wii U is successfully launched and Nintendo find it reasonable again to provide sales data, which assuming Microsoft continues to do the same, means we might have enough data for a full analysis again. I miss writing the NPD updates 🙁

Onto the news …

Having started demoting websites that receive “too many” DMCA notices, you’d think that Google has finally gotten into rights holders’ good books. But as expected, they’re still not happy.

Their protest this time does seem to have some merit though, as a quick browse of some Google search results still show the “majors” (The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, KickassTorrents) still ranking relatively well, at least for certain terms, despite Google having promised that the major piracy sites (the ones receiving the most DMCA notices) would be demoted. Rights holders naturally sounded the alarm, and the first to their rescue has been the UK government, which has launched a review into Google’s latest anti-piracy attempt.

KickassTorrents may have received more than half a million DMCA takedown requests, but it only represents less than 1% of their total indexed pages, which may or may not be enough to affect search results

Almost all webmasters will be familiar with the frustration of trying to work out how Google actually ranks search results, and how strange some of the results are, especially when it comes to websites that are clearly breaking Google’s rules and yet still rank highly. Google’s algorithm is so complicated, I doubt any single person working for the Mountain View company actually knows just how it all works. In the article I’ve linked above, I’ve tried to offer a brief overview of how a ranking for a webpage is derived, based on “good” and “bad” quality signals. I would guess that “DMCA notices” would fall into the “bad” quality signal, but it’s only one of possibly thousands of weighted signals, and just because a website has over 1 million DMCA notices, it doesn’t automatically mean that pages on the site will never rank. One of the most important “good quality” signals is user satisfaction, and people searching for pirated movies will be very satisfied by the “majors”, and these websites would also have a lot of relevant back-links, which is also another very important good quality signal. At the moment, it does look like Google may very well need to adjust just how important the DMCA signal is, to avoid torrent sites from still dominating certain search results. In fact, just doing a quick search today seems to reveal a totally new set of results for the same keywords, with the majors nowhere in the top 10 – maybe Google has responded already!

But even if Google does the impossible and removes every single piracy related torrent or streaming site from its index (note that is has never promised to remove sites, only demote them), I doubt rights holders would be fully satisfied. Because deep down they know that, as much as they want to make Google a scapegoat in all of this, Google and other search engines have never been a big contributor to the web piracy problem. Most traffic (probably upwards of 80-90%) to the majors are not search related traffic at all, but from people who already know of the site (called direct referrals).

Rights holders may be hoping that Google can do more to combat torrent sites, but for direct download sites like RapidShare, these site’s own policy of “self-harm” appears to be enough for now. This “self-harm” policy, implemented by many file hosting websites appears to be exactly what the rights holders had hoped would happen when it lobbied the US government to take action against Megaupload. RapidShare this week took the most drastic action yet, by implementing a daily download limit for shared files. For uploaders using free RS accounts, their uploads now have a daily download limit of 1GB, but even those on paid accounts cannot share more than 30GB of files in any given day. Private file sharing remains unlimited.

These changes comes after last week’s removal of the download speed cap, which has been in place since Megaupload’s demise as a way for RS to drive away the piracy related traffic that was looking for a new home. What this change effectively means is that RapidShare has now moved towards (or back to?) being more of a personal file sharing tool, rather than a public one, regardless of whether the content in question is pirated or not. If you need to share a largish PDF file, one that does not contain confidential information with a few people, then RapidShare still works great. But if you’re a software developer and you were using RapidShare to distribute your files, then you need to think again, even if you use a paid account. 1GB may sound like a lot, but for a typical 5MB download (which is actually the average size of downloads on Digital Digest), that’s only 200 downloads per day. If you’re an indie filmmaker distributing your own film … then forget about it!

Of course, RapidShare will argue that their service was never meant to replace proper file/download hosting, which can be quite expensive as the GBs really do add up. But the fact is that many indie content producers have relied on them in the past, and they will no longer be able to do so.

Disregarding the collateral damage, while the anti-piracy effect of this move may be exactly what rights holders wants, but this will only drive indie content developers towards BitTorrent, something that’s already happening. And the “mainstreaming” of BitTorrent is probably not what rights holders want at all.

——

Will Microsoft use the Kinect camera as a new form of insidious DRM?

An interesting/disturbing patent application emerged this week, one made by Microsoft, in which the company plans to use Kinect to enforce a new sinister form of DRM. The DRM would enforce a new kind of rights management under which users pay not just for a time limited usage of video content (ie. a rental), but would also have to pay for each additional user that watches the video. The patent suggest a way for Kinect to detect how many people are watching, and limit playback or charge the users more when a certain number is reached.

Now, patent applications are a dime a dozen, and most are for ideas that will never become reality, so it’s not really worth getting all worked up about this at all. But you just know that some suit somewhere in Hollywood actually thinks this is a great idea. As consumers, we have to be vigilant and we have to let rights holders know what is and isn’t acceptable – pay-per-viewer is definitely not an acceptable trend.

If anything, the trends has moved away from transaction based rental and purchasing, and towards the all-you-can-eat variety. Adding “viewer based transactions” will be a serious step backwards.

As mentioned earlier, NPD has released October’s US video game sales report, and the Xbox 360 yet again was the most dominant console, having managed to grab 56% of the home based console market share.

Can the Wii U’s more “hardcore gamer” focus win back gamers from the Xbox 360 and PS3?

The Xbox 360 sales figures still represent a 31% decline compared to the same month last year. With the holiday period coming up, Microsoft will hope sales will start to pick up, because declines like this point to the need of a new console. I’m still hoping a good set of Wii U results, when it’s released in mid November, will prompt the company to start releasing hardware sales results again (I think they may do it if sales exceed that of the Xbox 360, but then perhaps if that happens, Microsoft will become less forthcoming with their own results).

But don’t discount the Xbox 360 just yet – the launch of Halo 4 might be at just the right time going into the holiday period, and none of the previews so far indicate that the Wii U is, graphically at least, that much more powerful than the 360 and PS3. So for the Wii U, it all depends on whether the tablet controller can be used to full effect, and whether that’s enough of a differentiator to make it stand out. Well at the very least, Nintendo’s flagship console will no longer be considered a technological throwback (not until the PS4 and Xbox 720 comes out anyway).

That’s all for this week. Have a good one, and see you in seven.

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

Weekly News Roundup (28 October 2012)

Sunday, October 28th, 2012

So Windows 8 has been released. Having used the OS for a whole of zero minutes, I can offer my expert opinion that it is indeed a new version of Windows that offers some differences to the previous version, but also that some things remains the same. There are apparently quite a few good things in it, as well as some bad, and that if you really want it, you can get it by paying money for it. So that’s my 15 second review, hope it was very helpful!

If that wasn’t so helpful, then perhaps I can be a little bit more helpful with what you’re actually here for – the weekly news review. Let’s get started.

The Finnish arm of Netflix managed to get itself into a little bit of a copyright trouble this week as subscribers found that the subtitles used for one particular TV series came from a fan-subtitle site. Netflix might have used pirated subtitles for the sci-fi TV series, Andromeda.

Netflix Finland makes a boo boo by using pirated subtitles

Nobody knows how Netflix, who pays a lot of money to license official subtitles, ended up using subtitles created by DivX Finland (and you knew it was their sub because the subtitles displayed their website’s URL as part of the credits). Netflix have promised to launch an official investigation, and have temporarily removed the entire series from their system, but the folks at DivX Finland (probably no stranger to copyright issues) found the situation extremely ironic no doubt.

Copyright law I believe treats translations (and transcriptions) as derivative work, and that would still require the owner’s permission for distribution. The translation itself, as it does involve creativity, is also protected by copyright, copyright that Netflix infringed when it used DivX Finland’s subs without permission.

I have an extra interest in subtitle and subtitle download sites because I believe that my website was one of the first, if not *the* first website to host the download of DivX subtitles files (this would be June 2000, when DivX Digest was launched and user submitted/ripped subtitles were made available for download for a few dozen different TV shows and movies). The section only lasted about 3 month and at its peak, it contained about 500 different subtitle files – I discontinued the service due to potential copyright issues, and as I was doing all the updates manually at that time, it was also becoming too much work. Better organized websites had started to appear at that time as well, so I let them do their thing.

By the quirks of the copyright law, jailbreaking an iPhone is okay, but jailbreaking a tablet is a no no

Some might argue that fan made subtitles should be considered fair use, especially if it’s the kind of thing that improve accessibility. It’s a shame nobody put the case forward to the US Copyright Office for their once-every-3-years copyright review, but given the results of the latest review, it was unlikely they would have been accommodating. The latest review sees the jailbreaking of smartphones continue to be exempted from copyright laws, but the arbitrary nature of these exemptions meant that “tablets”, despite sharing the same operating system as smartphones in most cases, are not part of the exemption.

The reasoning the Library of Congress gives for this oversight is that they found the definition of “tablet” too broad, as it could encompass things like laptop computers (more of a problem now that Windows 8 is out) or even e-book readers. For e-books though, DRM ripping remains legal, and now even in the case where DRM-free versions of the same books are already available.

But movie lovers mostly miss out. While DVD (and Blu-ray) ripping received a few more exemptions in the cases of educational use, non commercial use, and criticism and analysis, ripping for “space-shifting” (for example, to convert a DVD to a format playable on an iPad) remains illegal. This is despite the fact that everyone does it with little or no harm to anyone concerned, a fact made clear by Public Knowledge, one of the consumer rights groups that argued for an exemption for ripping.

The EFF also petitioned for video game console hacking to be exempted, but their appeal also failed to convince the US Copyright Office. In another blow, unlocking of phones purchased after January 2013 will also no longer be exempted.

In my opinion, these complicated and often arbitrary exemptions can be made a lot simpler if one simply followed the rule that any act that has no serious commercial implications (eg. DVD ripping for home use) should be considered fair use, as is everything in which the social benefits outweigh any commercial concerns. And all fair use should be legal, with specific exemptions being made for really popular acts in order not to criminalize a huge percentage of the population. How hard is that?

High Definition

With Mozilla all but signalling defeat in the battle to keep H.264 out of the HTML 5 specs back in March, the inevitable is happening as Mozilla announced that the desktop version of Firefox will be getting OS-level native H.264 support soon. The mobile version of Firefox has already made this move, but with Flash still being a viable option on desktops, there was less urgency in adding in “native” H.264 support.

Mozilla’s beef with H.264 is that it doesn’t fit in with the open-source, royalty free nature of Firefox. But H.264 has become an industry standard as you’ll be hard pressed to find a modern device that doesn’t support H.264 these days (just as you would be hard pressed to find one that supports Mozilla’s favoured alternative, WebM).

Having OS based native support ultimately means that Flash won’t be needed. So in the end, it was really the choice between two evils. Flash and H.264, with H.264 winning in the end – not the worst result, if you ask me.

And I suppose I should talk about the iPad mini, at least from the point of view of HD video. There’s no doubt that 7-8″ tablets are the perfect consumption platform for video, which is why Amazon has the Kindle Fire, and why Google has the Nexus 7. I keep on getting the feeling that Apple will soon drop a bombshell that will completely shakes up the digital video rental and subscription streaming markets.

Ubisoft has been making a concerted effort to distance the company from their past anti-piracy controversies, at least that’s what they said a couple of weeks ago. So you would expect the company to be extra careful to avoid any more anti-piracy related mishaps, at least for a short while. Well, the calm lasted about 6 weeks, as this week, Ubisoft enraged paying customers yet again by forgetting to include the CD key in retailed boxed PC versions of their new game, Rocksmith.

It took about a week for Ubisoft to respond, and even then, some customers were still left without a playable game for an extended period of time after going through the process. For those affected, they would need to provide proof of purchase to Ubisoft via their tech support website, which can be problematic for some if they’ve already discarded their receipt before realising Ubisoft’s mistake. Ubisoft has promised to compensate affected users with a free DLC (worth a whole $2.99), but it might very well be a case of too little too late for a company that couldn’t afford any more anti-piracy related scandals.

The “LV0” master keys leaked for the PS3 may prove the most costly to Sony yet, and make all future attempts to secure the console a very difficult proposition

Another gaming company that’s been trying to distance themselves from past issues is Sony, and their attempt to dig their way out from the various hacking scandals. But Sony does not appear to have any more luck than Ubisoft, with the news this week that a new set of master keys have been leaked for the PS3, keys that may make all future attempts to secure the console futile.

The new leaked keys, dubbed the “LV0” keys, could potentially prevent Sony from being able to secure the console again via a new firmware patch, which has been the go to solutions since the initial hack of the console, and when Sony managed to at least partially re-secure the console via the 3.56 firmware release.

While it’s disingenuous to blame these hacking attempts on Sony’s decision to pull support for Other OS, a popular PS3 feature (for the hacking community) that allowed Linux to run on the console – it’s very likely that the PS3 would still have been hacked due to the poor programming choices made by the security programmers – but it seems Sony’s decision to turn their backs on the hacking and modding community, having earlier promoted the console’s versatility and specifically the Other OS feature, does seem to have cost them. It certainly engergised the hacking community, and what we’re seeing now is the result.

Alrighty then, that’s it for the week. Back in seven with more news you can miss and it still won’t make a difference to anything in your life at all!

Posted in Copyright, DVD, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (28 October 2012)

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