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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 (14 October 2012)

Sunday, October 14th, 2012

Welcome to the two hundred and sixty third weekly news roundup – may the news be ever in your favour. Yes, I’ve recently watched and read The Hunger Games (and the other two books in the trilogy too), stories that are right up the alley for a self confessed post-apocalyp-fanatic like myself. My favourite character in the book is Buttercup. Why does Buttercup have to be a black (and white) cat in the movie, not gonna lie, kind of ruined the movie.

It’s one of those weeks where everything appears perfectly calm, and then everything sneaks up upon you in the last minute. A couple of stories have been intentionally left to next week in case there’s a drought of stories. Let’s get started.

Sometimes you read a story and you can’t help but feel sick to your stomach at the whole copyright lobbying machine that has been created by the unholy marriage between the copyright lobby and the US government. Attorney General Eric Holder this week revealed that the DoJ has been spending tax payer money helping the music and movie industries spread their propaganda overseas, or to state it in a more neutral manner, to help “educated” thousands of foreign judges, prosecutors, investigators and even policymakers.

Attorney General Eric Holder is proud of the fact that the DoJ has been “educating” foreign judges, prosecutors and policymakers on copyright issues

In other words, the DoJ, at tax payer expense, has been peddling the often exaggerated “facts” that have no doubt been provided directly by the likes of the MPAA and RIAA, all in the name of helping to keep America’s economy strong (by helping these industries holding on to outdated business models, and denying the potential of the Internet).

What made me sick though was suddenly remembering what SOPA/PIPA would have allowed the DoJ to do – to go into these foreign jurisdictions and sue IP “thieves” (again using tax payer funds) on behalf of the likes of Sony and Fox (who obviously can’t afford to hire their own lawyers). They would be putting their case in front of foreign judges that they have already spent vast sums “educating”, judges that will rule based on laws made by policymakers that the DoJ have also been “educating”. Well it’s a shame for them though that SOPA/PIPA didn’t pass, isn’t it?

And it’s not as if the US even needs to educate other countries in how to be totally over-the-top when it comes to copyright enforcement – these other countries have their own lobbyists too, you know. Like the UK’s Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), and their attempt to stop 4G piracy before it even starts.

Despite the high cost of 4G bandwidth, FAST says that this could become a real problem sometime in the future, and therefore, it is asking the regulators to take a serious look at this and other technologies. No doubt the “other” may eventually include public Wi-Fi hotspots, regulations on which may very well kill off these ever more useful services.

So despite almost no evidence that any technological measures have worked so far, let’s all just concentrate on implementing more technological measures for technology that has barely been launched yet. And instead of thinking about what you can do with new technology, let’s first work out what you definitely shouldn’t be allowed to do first!

Spotify helping to reduce piracy? The stats seems to point that way …

It’s this kind of backwards thinking that, I think, has hampered any real effort to combat online piracy. And a new study confirms that, in most cases, fighting piracy should be done by giving the people what they want, not stopping them doing what they’re already doing. Against staying in the UK, Musicmetric’s Digital Music Index report found that music BitTorrent piracy rates were more likely to decrease in regions that has access to Spotify, than in regions that did not have the freemium based streaming service.

Out of the top 10 countries that saw the fastest decreasing music BitTorrent rates, 5 of them had Spotify. Out of the top 10 countries that saw rising music BitTorrent usage, only one of them had access to the service. Interestingly, the odd one out on this occasion was France, the country with one of the toughest anti-BitTorrent regimes in place!

But you don’t need a degree in, well, anything to know that competing with piracy does a better job of defeating it than simply trying to prevent it. Spotify does that in spades, and that’s why it’s so popular.

A screengrab of the upcoming Megabox website, highlighting “exclusive artists” including ‘The Black Keys’, ‘Rusko’, ‘Two Fingers’ and ‘will.i.am’

What may also become popular is Kim Dotcom’s next venture, Megabox. This week, Dotcom revealed that coding for the new music downloading website is 90% complete. The news that the “new Mega” might launch this year, before even the extradition proceedings have been completed for Dotcom, should rightly annoy the U.S. prosecutors handling the case. Megabox, for those that don’t know, aims to cut out the middleman, the record industry championed by the RIAA (who was probably instrumental in getting Megaupload taken down), and to connect music fans directly with artists. Artists will get 90% of all revenue earned via advertising associated with the site, as well as from direct music purchases. As for fears Megabox will face the same fate as Megaupload, Kim Dotcom assures us that this will be “impossible”.

What also isn’t possible, at least right now, is for Doctom and Megaupload to extricate themselves from the criminal case pending in the U.S. A judge this week ruled against Megaupload’s motion to dismiss, siding with prosecutors who believe that it is indeed possible to launch proceedings against a company that doesn’t actually have an U.S. office. There are still some procedural concerns though that the judge has left open for future examination of the dismissal question, including the actual handing over of the charging documents that prosecutors have failed to do so far. With extradition proceedings pending until early next year, any permanent ruling over the motion to dismiss will have to happen afterwards.

It’s that time of the month again. For 21 months in a row now, the Xbox 360 has been crowned the best selling home based console, beating the PS3 and the Wii (probably in this order) in the NPD monthly sales report. With both Sony and Nintendo tight lipped again about their sales figures, there will be no NPD analysis this month again. The September reporting period may also have included (or just missed out on) a couple of days of sales for the PS3 Super Slim, but no statement was forthcoming from Sony at the current time.

For the Xbox 360, it managed to sell 270,000 units, down some 38.4% compared to the same month a year ago. Even with the decline in sales, it managed to account for 49% of home based console sales, meaning that even when you combine the Wii and PS3 numbers, they’re only a tiny bit more than just the 360 number by themselves.

Not long to go until the Wii U, so Microsoft better make the most out of their current “victories”.

That’s that for the week. See you again in seven days.

Posted in Copyright, News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (14 October 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (23 September 2012)

Sunday, September 23rd, 2012

I know I ranted a bit about iPhone 5 last week, but I probably should have divulged the fact that I did have one on pre-order (for my mum). Having got it on launch day and helping mum to set it up, my only thought about it so far is that, well, it’s very much an iPhone. I guess that’s a compliment of sorts, but there’s nothing really terribly exciting about it really (other than mountains that appears to be “alive” on the new Map app – check out Tahiti, for example). There are also some concerns about build quality and durability, two things that Apple usually gets spot on – there was already a chip on the black iPhone out of the box (apparently common with the white version too), and there have also been reports of the black paint being scuffed off (check out #scuffgate on Twitter). A bit of a poor show from Apple really, as design problems can happen any time you add something new, but build quality issues shouldn’t exist really.

Hey, I guess that turned into another rant of sort. To be fair, Apple is an easy target, and it’s not as if other companies don’t have the same or worse problems with their new devices. But expectations have been raised by Apple themselves, and so they can’t expect consumers to shrug and not care when a problem does arise.

Onto the news roundup then …

With US ISPs gearing up to be at the frontlines of the war against net piracy, a new report questions the fairness and transparency of the “six-strikes” system that will be used.

The MPAA/RIAA (and Obama administration) sponsored deal with ISPs will see users notified of up to 6 times for their alleged copyright offences, after which time a temporary disconnection may be issued. But University of Idaho Law Professor Annemarie Bridy says in a new report that the system is flawed because it the lacks the presumption of innocence, has an reverse burden of proof, lacks verification of the evidence being used, and is inadequate in terms of transparency in the design and implementation of the system.

In other words, alleged offenders are assumed to be guilty using evidence that hasn’t been independently verified or legally tested, evidence they have little recourse to argue against made worse by the fact that the burden of proof is on the accused, all the while happening in a system that was designed in secret and will be operated in secret.

At least there will be an appeals process, Professor Bridy says as she looks for the slim slim sliver of silver lining in the big grey anti-piracy cloud. The fact that permanent internet disconnection is so far not an option, unlike the similar French Hadopi system, is also a positive.

The MPAA/RIAA will probably argue that the scale of the problem requires expediency, something that can only be achieved by ignoring due process. And the need for expediency is as debatable as the potential damage resulting from web piracy – does piracy really cost the industry a lot of money? The French experience so far has not resulted in any noticeable improvement in things like revenue, even though piracy rates have dropped significantly, so you have to question the effectiveness of these schemes when judged by real outcomes such as revenue.

A set of unfair laws is bad enough, but when they’re not even effective, then that makes them worse. But when lobbyists like the MPAA or RIAA are tasked with writing these laws, then this kind of thing will always happen. And with the MPAA/RIAA basing their entire strategy on an irrational fear of the Internet, it’s no wonder that what they come up with will also be irrational.

And what makes the argument in Washington seem even more one sided is the fact that there aren’t that many lobby groups that are making counter-arguments to those being made by the MPAA/RIAA. Groups like the EFF, Public Knowledge and even the ACLU do have a say, but without special access to politicians that experienced lobbyists have, they’re often not even invited to the conversation, let alone allowed to have any meaningful contribution. Case in point, the “six-strikes” deal mentioned above.

The Internet Association will lobby for the interests of Internet companies, some of which will align with consumer interests

But that may be about to change. Some of the world’s largest Internet companies including Amazon, Facebook and Google have now teamed up to form their own lobbying group dubbed the Internet Association. The group, whose membership also includes the likes of LinkedIn and Yahoo, will be tasked with the role of protecting the interests of these companies, including the issue of Internet censorship and freedom.

It’s still sad that lobbying is still so effective in US politics, and that it seems that monied interests always seem to win out. But at this stage, it’s more a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them”, and while principles are one things, getting the crap beaten out of your industry is the more pressing concern.

And there’s also the concern that the Internet Association’s backers are all corporations with interests that may not always align perfectly with that of the average consumer. But for now, they mostly do, and there are different enough companies as part of the group to hopefully ensure it won’t be just a mouthpiece for the big boys (like the MPAA and RIAA are).

High Definition

But there are signs that maybe Hollywood has realised that they won’t have to destroy the Internet in order to protect its own business interests. Predictably, t’s the $$$ that’s showing them the way.

The tremendous growth in subscription streaming, and the increasing competition that’s occurring in the sector, is set to give Hollywood a mini-boom in revenue. With more players on the market than simply Netflix, the content holders are finally in a good position to negotiate ever better deals, taking advantage of the desperation of the new players to be able to compete with a behemoth like Netflix.

Either Netflix ends up paying more for exclusivity deals – the company is already paying more than $2 billion a year to license their existing content – or studios are able to negotiate non-exclusive deals with a wide range of distributors including Amazon, and an upcoming streaming venture between Verizon and Redbox. Epix, the company co-owned by Paramount, MGM and Lions Gate, recently managed to get $80 million more per year from their deals with these new companies than compared to their previous exclusive deal with Netflix, for example.

The industry is apparently keen to avoid the mistakes of the music industry by not locking themselves into one major players. For the RIAA companies, it is the dominance of Apple devices and iTunes that is putting them at a severe disadvantage when it comes to negotiating licensing deals. The only solution is to make extremely favourable deals with the likes of Amazon and Google in the hope of breaking up the Apple iTunes monopoly, but this may or may not work, and revenue takes a knock as a result. Book publishers are similarly hampered by the virtual monopoly Amazon’s Kindle enjoys.

But with the movie industry the last to fully embrace the Internet, they may yet learn from the mistakes of other industries. For now, it seems that some good has come out of the Internet after all, and that all it took was some innovation. And a new business model, and not more DRM and draconian laws to protect the old one.

The streaming availability of The Hunger Games in the US will be delayed by 90 days compared to Canada, something the Netflix says could encourage piracy

But it’s also hard to break old habits, as the issue of release windows has been raised again, this time for the streaming market. Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos warns that Hollywood’s insistence on having geographical based release windows for streaming content may end up encouraging piracy. Referencing Epix’s The Hunger Games, where Canadian subscription subscribers can watch it 90 days before their US counterparts, Sarandos says that this is an entirely counter-productive way to do business in the online age. Studios are still desperately protecting their sell-through income, and they think that the best strategy to achieve this is to prolong the sell-through period as long as possible. But, ironically, they fail to take into account piracy. Whether they like it or not, piracy competes with both sell-throughs and subscription streaming, and so by limiting people’s legal choices, all you end up is pushing them towards the illegal ones.

But when a single sell-through copy can make $15 for the studio, which is almost double the entire monthly price of a Netflix subscription (which will then be split among many different content holders), you can see why studios are a bit hesitant. But then again, piracy makes $0 for them, so negating the need for piracy will mean additional income. Less money per person, from more people, may be the name of the game, and this can only happen if Hollywood stops looking for the big profits, and start looking at the small.

With most of the recent attention being on Nintendo’s Wii U, Sony obviously felt a little bit left out and, to everyone’s surprise, they’ve introduced a brand new PS3 console. It’s a bit hard to to convey irony on the interwebs, so that bit about “surprise”, as with almost all new product launches these days, was not quite true.

It looked like the earlier leaked pictures were indeed accurate, albeit in poor quality. And the rumour about a low storage capacity version of the PS3 to compete with the Xbox 360 4GB was also true, except the 16GB slower style flash memory version actually turns out to be a 12GB SSD version, and that this budget version will only be available in Europe (and a few other countries, including Australia).

Other than that, the slimmer, lighter PS3 also now uses a top loader for the disc drive, and comes in 250GB and 500GB versions, replacing the 160GB and 320GB found on the not-as-slim-but-still-quite-slim PS3s at the same price points.

The new “super slim” PS3 will be available soon, but without a price cut, analysts are wondering “why bother”.

A bit surprising that North America doesn’t get the budget version, as that’s the marketplace that really could benefit from having a cheaper PS3 to compete with the Xbox 360. But maybe Sony are just testing the waters to see if there’s demand for such a console in the first place.

The lack of a price drop has analysts questioning the point of having a new PS3 console out, and they have a good point. But if both Sony and Microsoft want to prolong the life of their respective consoles, then there’s only so much price cutting one can do before they start losing money on the hardware again (having taken so long to finally start making money on them). And if longevity is not important because a new console will be out next year (seems unlikely now, at least for Sony, given the timing of this new PS3 refresh), then a price cut won’t help much in between now and then.

Okey-dokey, that’s that for the week. Have a good one.

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (23 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (16 September 2012)

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

Welcome to another issue of the WNR. For yet another month, I waited naively in the vain hope that more figures would start leaking out for August’s NPD analysis, but alas, that wasn’t to be the case. So as usual, the gaming section is where August’s NPD will live (on life support, coming in and out of the coma).

iPhone 5: Faster, lighter, thinner, and bigger where it counts (the screen). But is it still exciting and innovative?

Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet week. I suppose I should talk about the iPhone 5 release or whatever. Was that perhaps the most anti-climatic launch event in Apple’s recent history? Through the various leaks, almost everything about the new iPhone had been fairly well known long before the Wednesday launch event – Apple seems to have given up on the almost impossible job of trying to keep things secret. And even if we somehow didn’t know about the larger (well, taller anyway) screen, LTE and the other new stuff, none of it would have been a huge surprise anyway. There’s nothing wrong with incrementally improving an already well established product, but having failed to keep up with its competitors in terms of screen size, and features such as NFC, the least Apple could have done was to inspire us with some of the ways to use newly added features. This has been their strength in the recent past, so to hear them talk more about “faster CPUs”, “better graphics”, brings back painful memories of the PC upgrade cycle and how pointless it all was talking about MHz and RAM sizes.

With all that said, the iPhone 5 is set to become the fastest selling gadget of all time, so maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about (more than probable). Vote in our poll to tell us your thoughts about the new iPhone.

Google’s self-censorship continues this week, with The Pirate Bay joining the list of blacklisted search terms that will no longer be part of Google’s Autocomplete and Instant search products. The name of the website, and its domain name, joins notorious terms such as “torrent” and “RapidShare” as part of Google’s blacklist.

I have no idea what this latest move, part of Google’s appeasement policy, will actually do to combat piracy at all. I guess people who want to search for The Pirate Bay, but don’t know how to spell the words “Pirate”, “Bay” and “The”, may just give up and buy movies and music instead, or something. Interestingly, searching for “teh pyrat bey” still brings up TPB website as the first result, as Google’s auto-correct features appears to still show love for the website.

Meanwhile, TPB co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm has arrived safe and relatively well back in Sweden to face new hacking charges, and to serve the prison sentence imposed on his for his crime of being initially part of The Pirate Bay (as well as pay the million bucks he will be unable to pay), and further jail time for not appearing for a court hearing earlier in the year.

Speaking of millions of bucks in damages, the legal merry-go-around continues for Jamie Thomas-Rasset, as the appeals court ruled this week that the damages decision from the second of her three previous trials was the one that was perfectly valid, and that the judge had no right in those trials to reduce the damages amount to something reasonable like $54,000. Instead, Thomas-Rasset will be asked to pay $222,000 for the act of sharing 24 songs. I guess that’s better than the $1.92 million from the third trial.

There’s no doubt that a large percentage of the $222,000 is punitive in its nature, as even considering the thousand songs that Thomas-Rasset is supposed to have shared (only 24 of those were included as part of the trial), there’s no way that $222,000 worth of damages could have occurred via direct damages. If we take the calculation used to come up with the $222,000 in damages, and couple it with the 11,000 copyrighted songs that the RIAA identified were being shared on LimeWire before its demise, each having being shared a thousand time (the RIAA actually claimed each were shared “thousands” of times), the resulting total damages would be worth excess of $101,750,000,000 (that’s $101 billion). Even if you take the $222,000 and divide by the 1,000 songs that Thomas-Rasset is alleged to have shared, multiply that by the LimeWire figures, then that’s still more than $2.4 billion. And this was just one music sharing method.

The real question is, given Thomas-Rasset’s intent (ie. to download songs for free), is it really fair to class her actions along with wilful pirates that make and sell counterfeit CDs, or start websites fraudulently charging people to download songs that are pirated in the first place? Her intent was to save a few thousands dollars, at best, by downloading instead of buying, so should the punitive nature of the damages be hundreds of times greater?

As controversial as the French “three-strikes” Hadopi regime has been, with the very same thing coming to the US (but twice as many strikes! Beat that Frenchies. USA! USA!), the trials and tribulations of both Thomas-Rasset and her compatriot Joel Tenenbaum would have been far more agreeable if they had fallen foul of these graduated response laws, rather than having to go through the civil court system.

Ironically, three-or-more strikes actually works out better for those that do admit to pirating stuff. At least compared to the threat of a civil lawsuit. But for one craftsman in rural France, his Kafkaesque ordeal might point to the more unfair aspects of graduated response.

Alain Prevost has the unfortunate distinction of being the first person to be fined under France’s Hadopi laws. This is despite Prevost proving he wasn’t responsible for any downloads by bringing the real perpetrator, his soon to be ex-wife, to court to testify to this fact. Prevost was still fined 150 euros for failing to secure his Internet connection.

Having received two warning emails and letters regarding illegal downloads, Prevost actually implemented his own punishment by disconnecting his Internet account, and instructed his wife’s lawyer to write to Hadopi to explain everything. But the Hadopi agency did not like the fact that Prevost stopped responding to his emails (hard to do when you don’t have an Internet connection), and wrote to Prevost to order him to travel all the way to Paris to explain himself. Prevost declined the invitation, feeling such a trivial matter should not warrant the expense of travel. This apparently made Hadopi even more angry, and it was at this point the police were involved. Prevost was summoned to the police station to explain himself, and it is here that Prevost made his biggest, and possibly only mistake, in this whole ordeal – he told the truth!

Prevost told the police that his wife was most likely the responsible party for the downloads (something that his wife would agree to testify to), and that in a show of good faith, he would hire the services of a local computer expert, at his own expense, to clean his computer of any infringing files. If Prevost thought that explaining away his responsibility and taking pre-emptive actions to remove any infringing content would lead to the end of the matter, he would be sadly mistaken.

Prevost was then summoned to appear in court over his audacity to ignore Hadopi. Prevost brought along his wife to testify to the fact that he had not done anything wrong, but having told the truth to the police earlier on, this was used against him by the court who opined that Prevost must have had prior knowledge of his wife’s illegal activities, and therefore was still responsible. Prevost was eventually fined 150 euros, a lower amount than the prosecutors had asked for due to the fact that Prevost has no criminal record.

All of this because his wife might have downloaded two Rihanna songs, and all to only result in a small fine that probably doesn’t even cover a tenth of the expense that Hadopi used to catch this criminal mastermind. And what benefit to rights holders? Who knows.

High Definition

After the demise of HD DVD, everyone (including yours truly) thought that the next battle would be between Blu-ray and DVDs, and to an extent, that has been true. But the super quick way in which services like Netflix, VUDU, Amazon and iTunes have become ubiquitous among today’s connected multimedia devices suggests that the real battle is not between the new and old disc formats, but between having a disc format and, well, having no discs at all.

Fox Digital HD will allow HD digital copies to be purchased weeks before the DVD/Blu-ray ones

So when Fox, one of the biggest and earliest supporters of Blu-ray revealed plans to release purchasable digital downloads of their movies ahead of their Blu-ray and DVD releases, a few eyebrows were definitely raise. While early release digital downloads are not new in the strictest sense, they’ve mostly been one-offs – a release here, a release there. But the Fox initiative plans to bring the strategy forward for most of their A-listers, including the upcoming releases Prometheus and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and they’re doing it across as many devices as possible (supported platforms currently include Amazon, CinemaNow, iTunes, PlayStation, VUDU and Xbox Live).

And most importantly, all of these releases as part of Fox’s “Digital HD” initiative will be available on glorious HD (well, glorious by today’s download standards), thus directly competing with Blu-ray (although HT die-hards like myself might disagree, at least when talking about the quality of HD).

The immediate risk for Fox is that the digital downloads will cannibalize their disc sales, and also increase the risk of piracy. So Fox are either super confident about the DRM systems being used by its third party partners, or they’ve realised that pirates will pirate anyway, and that the pirated version would most likely already have been available long before the DRM-laden digital download version makes its official appearance.

August’s NPD figures, well what was made available anyway, showed nothing particularly alarming or surprising. The Xbox 360 continued to be the most popular console, with 193,000 units sold, down 37% compared to the same month last year.

The 193,000 was 48% of the entire home based console market, leaving 209,000 units between the PS3 and Wii. Given the most recent known results, this probably breaks down to something like 130,000 and 79,000 for the PS3 and Wii respectively, possibly even higher for the PS3 given that the proximity to the Wii U’s introduction.

Speaking of the Wii U, Apple weren’t the only ones to have launched a product this week, with Nintendo officially launching the $299 Wii U (with a more expensive “premium” version for $349, with more storage and accessories). Surprisingly, the rumours from last week about the release date was in fact correct: November 18, for North America.

Wii U TVii: Digital download and streaming for the Wii U, but the optical drive is a no-go zone for movies

What I found most interesting was the TVii announcement, which is set to turn the Wii U into a digital media hub in the same way that the PS3 and Xbox 360 already are. Supporting the latest digital streaming services such as Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and also offering support for TiVo DVRs, the Wii U is an odd device in that it does use Blu-ray sized optical discs, but it appears the only way to play movies would be via digital streaming or downloads. The next evolution of the game console may very well see the disc drive removed, with games being distributed digitally too.

But we’d all need bigger bandwidth allowances, if not unlimited quotas, before that can become a reality. Personally speaking, I’ve used up half of my allowance last month viewing Amazon Prime streaming titles, to the point where I had to ration my usage towards the end of the cycle. An additional $30 to move up to the next bandwidth tier doesn’t seem economical to me, at the moment.

That’s it for this issue. See you in seven.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, Gaming, News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (16 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (19 August 2012)

Sunday, August 19th, 2012

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. NPD “released” its July 2012 sales stats for US video game sales, but unfortunately, only Microsoft again chose to divulge its hardware sales stats. So no July NPD analysis, which is a shame, but there wasn’t any real surprises anyway. I’ll talk a bit about it in the gaming section below.

Another pretty full news week, so let’s get started …

So much for “do no evil”. Google gave in to the demands of the MPAA and the RIAA this week by signalling it is ready to start self-censoring its own results to reduce the visibility of alleged piracy websites. Without going as far as removing suspected websites, Google will start demoting any website that receives an unspecified number of DMCA notices.

Google has started demoting websites that receive too many DMCA notices, the image on the left shows the demoted rankings, while the image on the right (for the yet unchanged Greek version of Google) shows the previous rankings

It’s own YouTube website, and “major brands” will apparently be exempt from this new rule (webmasters have long suspected there’s one rule for the web top 100, and another rule for the rest), but the rest will now have to live in fear of the system, which is already being massive abused by those seeking an unfair advantage (57% of all filed notices, according to a Google report from 2006), and made even more attractive as a “black hat” weapon of choice now that the entire domains of competitors can be demoted. Since Google started releasing DMCA stats, the number of DMCA notifications has risen from about a million per month, to now over 4!

Except none of this will work to stop piracy, because people aren’t turning into pirates just because they see some links to The Pirate Bay on Google. I don’t know if it’s naivety, a head in sand attitude, or a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters, but the idea that good, people are being fooled and misled into downloading pirated content online is, to put it simply, hogwash. People pirate and they do it willingly, and knowingly. And they spent a lot of effort learning and honing their piracy skills. They will most likely alredy have go-to places to get their piracy fix, or custom search engines that does more work separating the wheat from the chaff, so the idea that they’re all relying on Google to find the S01E08 of The Newsroom is simply a fantasy.

But despite Google’s proactive steps in reducing piracy, the MPAA/RIAA still wants more. In a joint submission to the US Copyright Czar, the MPAA and the RIAA have called on the government to do even more in the CRusade Against Piracy (CRAP™), including going all “Megaupload” on websites like The Pirate Bay. Basically a wish-list and a preview of what the copyright landscape could be like if the MPAA/RIAA get their way, the submission also talks about increasing criminal sentences for copyright offences, including making the unauthorised streaming of videos a felony.

Showing that they’ve not quite given up on SOPA/PIPA, the submission also calls for tighter control of domain names, including those outside of the jurisdiction of the US government. The groups also say that the government needs to go out and threaten private businesses like domain name registrars, search engines, and advertising agencies and get them to fall in line with the MPAA/RIAA’s vision of copyright enforcement. So it’s simply not good enough for Google to only demote websites that have yet to be proven, in a court of law at least, of doing anything wrong – no, the MPAA/RIAA says search engines like Google must “delist rogue sites”. Note the use of the term “rogue”, the same type of language that’s also being used to describes countries like North Korea and Iran, and I don’t think this is a coincidence either.

Feeding into the paranoia and hysterics that aims to paint college kids downloading movies as something much more serious, the MPAA/RIAA also strategically brings “organized crime” and “gangs” into the equation in this submission. But as far as I know, Tony Soprano purchased his copy of The Godfather, and it may be just me, but I just can’t imagine the Crips and the Bloods getting into the torrent search engine business.

High Definition

The wait is finally over. The kind people at Fox studios have finally allowed their customers to buy Avatar on Blu-ray 3D, for a price that isn’t a ridiculous 3 figure number.

Fox’s deal with Panasonic, where the electronic giant has exclusive rights to distribute the Blu-ray 3D version of Avatar with the 3D electronics, was one of the more controversial movie deals in recent times. Coming just at a time when Blu-ray 3D needed a launch title that could only come from the most acclaimed and most financially successful 3D movie of all time, the exclusivity deal meant that the format lacked a killer title available in stores that would have helped the format’s early adoption. As such, Blu-ray 3D hasn’t taken off in the way that electronic manufacturers and movie studios had hoped.

The Panasonic exclusive version of Avatar on Blu-ray 3D is still fetching 3 figures on eBay and Amazon, but the retail version will be available in October

With that said though, while people aren’t using 3D as much as studios would have liked, they’re still buying them because the price premium of 3D over 2D ranges between inconsequential and non-existent. Try and find a top of the range 2D TV that isn’t also 3D, and you’ll struggle. And when there’s only a $20 difference between a 2D Blu-ray player and its 3D equivalent, consumers don’t really have to make any hard choices.

Still, the retail release of Avatar on Blu-ray 3D should help the format break all kinds of records when the disc is released in October. The price is a bit higher than your average Blu-ray movie, $28 at Amazon, but it’s definitely better than paying $128 for it on eBay, right?

But don’t bet on this Blu-ray 3D Limited Collector’s edition to be the most definitive 3D version of the film to arrive on disc. The fact that this release might not even feature the extended cut means that Fox is already planning a quadruple dip of the film sometime in the near future.

Even for the 2D version, it’s only a matter of time before we see the 4K or whatever version of the film on possibly a new disc format, or if bandwidth issues are resolved, via streaming or download. Projects like Australia’s NBN and Google Fiber will aim to fix for the bandwidth issue once and for all with the move to fibre optics, which has almost an unlimited capacity to carry TB/s and beyond, but another solution is to increase the efficiency of the delivery codec. Which is why it was interesting to read about the news of a new format being officially approved by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), which promises to provide the same visual quality as H.264 with only half of the bandwidth needed.

H.264 is already super efficient, so it’s hard to believe that something could come along and double that efficiency, but HEVC, or H.265, aims to do just that through more computational intensive algorithms. Mobile applications would probably benefit the most from H.265/HEVC, due to their inherent bandwidth limitations, although faster (and more power hungry) devices may be needed to decode the video.

The other main beneficiary from a more efficient codec would be the web streaming industry, finally allowing the likes of Netflix to do true Blu-ray quality streams on connections less than 20 Mbps.

For other applications, 4K is an obvious candidate, but 4K only really benefits super large screens (say 80″ or above), and it’s an overkill for anything smaller. And if staying at 2K or 1080p resolution, the increased efficiency of H.265/HEVC may allow for same bitrate, but higher quality encodes, although you’ll get diminishing returns on any quality improvement for Blu-ray encodes, many of which are already visually flawless to the average viewer.

Blizzard’s Battle.net has become, perhaps, one of the most tempting targets for hackers in recent times. Not only does the company hold a heck of a lot of data for a heck of a lot of people, Blizzard also holds tons of financial information for all those subscribers to WoW, and all those buyers/sellers on Diablo III’s Auction House. And the company’s stance towards “always-on” DRM for D3 meant that anyone who pokes holes in their security will instantly receive a lot of “web cred” for their efforts.

Blizzard was hacked last week, with a ton of user information stolen in the process.

So unsurprisingly, Battle.net was hacked this week, with a heck of a lot of data being stolen in the process, including emails, (encrypted) passwords, security questions/answers, and even data related to the mobile authenticator that’s supposed to prevent hackers from getting into your account. The scale of the breach is actually quite spectacular, with the email addresses of every Battle.net account (except for those in China – probably on different servers) being leaked, and pretty much all accounts on the North American servers being compromised further.

Just the other week, Blizzard was boasting about how effective “always-on” DRM has been in preventing piracy, which has meant the company has made record amounts of money selling the hit game. It’s a shame that they didn’t invest enough of their loot (using it in the Diablo III sense) in protecting their users, but when you treat your customers as criminals by forcing draconian DRM on them, their rights were never that important to start with.

And as mentioned in the intro, the July NPD report was released, with the Xbox 360 once again riding high among the home based consoles, selling 203,000 units. But it was still 26.7% down compared to the same month last year, although the other home based consoles probably didn’t fare much better (the Wii in particular). The holiday sales period is coming up soon, and with the Wii U out around that time, it will be interesting to see if the Xbox 360 and PS3 will make a comeback, or take a further hit, when sales ramp up for this period.

But a price discount could do wonders for the two ageing consoles, especially when up against the compartively pricey Wii U.

That’s that for the week. See you in seven!

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, 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 (19 August 2012)

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Weekly News Roundup (19 August 2012)

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