DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Hope you had a good Star Wars Day on May the 4th. Unfortunately, I totally forgot about it, as otherwise it would have been a great occasion to finally watch my Star Wars Blu-rays, which I had been saving until my TV problem had been solved (which it was, last week).

You know how three of Digital Digest’s URL were removed from Google due to a bogus DMCA complaint? Nearly 6 weeks later, all three of the removed URLs have finally been reinstated. It could have happened a bit sooner, but Google messed up my first counter-notification and failed to process it, forcing me to re-submit one about 2 weeks ago, which was finally processed this week. Luckily, none of the URLs were bringing in a lot of traffic from Google to cause any major disruptions, but it could very well turned out to be an expensive problem, but not expensive enough to actually warrant getting  lawyers involved!

A pretty good news week, not that all the news was good news, but just that there were plenty of interesting news items to write about, so let’s get started.

We start with news of the blocking of The Pirate Bay in the UK, something that had been coming admittedly, but the required court order was finally handed down this week.

A good number of UK ISPs will have to start blocking access to The Pirate Bay within the next couple of weeks, with some ISPs having already activated their filters. The filtering appears to be in the form of both a DNS filter, and an IP filter. The DNS filter will make sure typing thepiratebay.org (or thepiratebay.se) will no longer resolve to the correct IP address for the website, and the IP filter will ensure that even if you knew the IP address, you won’t be able to access the website.

A VPN service is a worth investment if you value your privacy, or want to access geo-locked legal content, but there are also free (albeit limited) alternatives such as VPNReactor

Of course, this kind of filtering is easily circumvented. By changing to a un-filtered DNS server, such as the ones provided for free by OpenDNS or even Google, it will allow the TPB domains to fully resolve. But this doesn’t really help in the case where the IP address has also been filtered, and so you’ll have to rely on VPNs or proxies to get your TBP fix. Generally speaking, using VPNs for BitTorrent is a good idea these days, as even if you can access TPB and get the Magnet links needed, chances are, your BitTorrent activities (for popular torrents) are still being monitored by one or more agencies (some to involve you in a mass lawsuit, others as part of ‘graduated response’ monitoring regimes). With the right VPN service though, your BitTorrent speed shouldn’t be affected too much, while your activities should now be anonymized. But do check to make sure what the VPN service’s privacy policies are, as some openly state they will hand over server logs to third parties upon request, which kind of makes it pointless if privacy is your biggest concern. VPNs also have the added bonus of allowing you to access geo-locked content from places like Hulu and Netflix, if they offer the option to choose the country where your “fake” IP address comes from.

The news of the block made headlines around the world, and as such, actually drove more traffic to The Pirate Bay. And with plenty of articles and blogs covering the possible solutions to the block, I wonder if all this has done is to actually make more people aware of TPB. And rather than scare them into not using BitTorrent, it may have only helped to push them to make the extra effort to conceal their activities. It could end all rather badly for future anti-piracy efforts if the trend towards VPNs and other anonymizers continue.

And ISPs are also well aware that these kinds of filtering will largely be pointless, and many are now calling on the entertainment industry to find other more effective ways to combat piracy, rather than scapegoating everything on ISPs. A better way, according to ISP Virgin Media, would be to offer more “compelling legal alternatives”. They specifically named Spotify, as the lawsuit that resulted in the blocking was a music industry led one, but it applies just the same to home video. And as you’ll see later in this WNR, consumers have already started to embrace these “compelling legal alternatives” by voting with their hard earned cash.

An IP address is not a person, just like the owner of a phone account is not necessarily the person that made a specific phone call, a judge says

A very interesting legal development happened across the Atlantic too this week, as a New York judge finally took the time to write a detailed ruling on why IP address evidence by themselves are not sufficient to identify individuals. Judge Gary Brown used the same phone account analogy that I’ve used in the past, but hit the bullseye by comparing the use of this type of IP address evidence to an individual who pays the telephone bill being linked with a specific phone call. Judge Brown also raised another interesting point regarding the widespread use of Wi-Fi routers, but not in the traditional “hijacking” scenario where unauthorized use of your Wi-Fi connection may have been responsible for the infringing actions. What the popularity of Wi-Fi does mean, according to Judge Brown, is that it proves more and more authorized individuals are sharing the same Internet account, and this again makes it hard to ascertain just who actually performed the action that broke the law. The copyright groups will argue that, as the owner of the connection, they are always liable for how it’s used even if they’re not at all aware of how it is being used (say goodbye to Wi-Fi hotspots), but again, this doesn’t seem to apply to phone accounts (otherwise, payphones wouldn’t exist because the owners of the payphones would be liable for all illegal activities being conducted on these phones).

I believe the the lack of a deeper understanding of technology by the judiciary has been responsible for the misuse of IP address as evidence, something that copyright groups have been more than willing to exploit. But as the technical proficiency of judges improve, I think we’ll see a lot of these accepted notions challenged. For one, I would like a further examination of the role data transfer and usage plays in infringement, in that how much data must be downloaded (and uploaded) before infringement actually occurs, and how the data has been used. For example, if I attempted to download an infringing file , say from RapidShare, and that download stopped at 95% (thus making the file completely useless), have I committed copyright infringement? And if I make a successful download but never use the file, am I still liable (even though I’ve done no harm to anyone). For uploads, if I only uploaded a single bit of data to a BitTorrent swarm (let’s say, a single zero), am I just as guilty as someone who’s been seeding for weeks?

If Hollywood want to continue their obsession with finding a legal solution to the web piracy problem, instead of focusing on innovation, then these are the issues that need to be cleared up.

There are some encouraging signs that, despite the piracy problem, home video revenue is on the rise again, and it’s largely thanks to the Internet.

The biggest rise came in the area of subscription streaming, with an amazing 545.5% increase in revenue in just a year. Of course, a lot of it comes from disc rental subscribers transitioning to digital, and disc rental revenue was expectedly down, but all this shows, and it’s something that I alluded to earlier in this post, is that consumers are making the choice towards streaming. It could be because it’s convenient, or it’s good value considering how much content you have access to “on tap”, but probably because of both, and it shows that people are happy to use the Internet for legal videos, even if it costs money.

The only thing streaming can’t do effectively right now is to offer ubiquitous high quality HD streaming. The minimum broadband requirement for semi-decent HD that you’d want to watch on your 60″ TV seems to hover around the 10 Mbps mark, and while that’s achievable for many, it also means that a large chunk of their connection has been saturated, and by just a single video stream. Here in Australia, those with 10 Mbps or higher are probably in the minority. Until most homes are capable of receiving at least two such streams at the same time without saturating connections, I think Blu-ray will still have to carry the majority of “HD bits” being delivered to people’s homes. And accordingly, the latest sales results still shows Blu-ray sales rising. With the decline of DVD sales also slowing down, it has allowed the HD format to offset most of the revenue losses (overall, revenue was only down 1% from a year ago for disc based sales).

So to make HD streaming, and possibly even Blu-ray quality streaming, a reality, what we need now is a faster Internet network for everyone. One of the ways to deliver it is via high speed fiber (or fibre, depending on where you’re from), and Google has been building fiber towns all over the US in anticipation. Even in Australia, our government is committed to connecting 93% of homes to fiber, with speeds up to 1Gbp. Even at 100 Mbps, it is still more than enough to stream two full Blu-rays. So you’d think, given the trend towards Internet based video streaming, Big Content should be rejoicing at the advancements in network speeds that will allow for the continued evolution of web based streaming. But once again, the piracy issue turns out to be the one that movie studios are most concerned about.

Here in Australia, the government is rolling out high speed fibre broadband to 93% of households, something that has Hollywood scared (photo credits: NBN Blog)

The MPAA supported AFACT group here in Australia have already issued dire warnings in regards to the country’s fiber project, about what pirates could be doing on super fast networks. And so instead of focusing on the opportunities (the same opportunities that the likes of Google, Apple and Amazon will probably exploit to their, and the consumer’s, advantage), the focus has been on new legislation to curb piracy on the still unfinished network. This week, Google’s fiber town projects have also attracted the same kind of fear and uncertainty from Hollywood’s major studios.

Now, being afraid that a pirate might be able to download an entire Blu-ray disc every 4 minutes over a 1Gbps connection is a perfectly reasonable response. But the thing is that, however scared Hollywood is at this prospect, high speed Internet is coming to people’s homes with or without their support, and no amount of fear-mongering is going to stop it. So instead of trying to DRM the whole Internet and legislate it to death, why not take a breath, calm down, and try to see the possibilities – that instead of fretting about a pirated Blu-ray disc being downloaded in 4 minutes,  how about seeing the opportunity to offers consumers the ability to buy, stream and even download and burn their own Blu-ray discs in a nice and easy to use service that’s at a reasonable price, and beat the pirates at their own game.

But that would be too easy, wouldn’t it, so expect more pressure on the legislature to help “protect” the entertainment industry from progress, as the fiber (and next-gen 4G) rollout continues.

Well, that was the week that was. Hope you enjoyed this edition of the WNR. See you in 7.

I know what the date is, and no, I’m not going do something for it. The expectation is always too high, and I can never live up to it. Besides, all the interesting ones have been done, and the rest, I’m fairly sure, constitute libel. So nobody is making a fool out of anyone else for this year, not Digital Digest anyway.

Or maybe I’m just luring you into a false sense of security …

But before we get into any April based tomfoolery, which may or may not happen, let’s get through the news roundup first.

But before that even, a linky link to Digital Digest’s “new” Facebook page, or rather, the same page with the new Timeline thingy on it that has been forced upon all of us by all knowing Facebook. The timeline feature is definitely quite interesting, and if I have the time, I might just start adding a few of Digital Digest’s milestones into the timeline (having only added in one entry for the launch of the website back in 1999, so far). I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook’s user interface, but I must say this timeline thing does look good.

First, a follow-up to a story from last week regarding RapidShare. I mentioned last week, in a brief sentence, that RapidShare may soon be forced to filter all user uploads due to a recent court decision. Apparently, this is not actually  the case at all.

What had happened is that the groups suing RapidShare in Germany, a collection of book and music rights groups, had released a statement celebrating their “victory”, despite the court having not yet released the full written verdict. But now that the written verdict has been released, it paints a rather different picture, one that RapidShare says gives them an important victory as well.

Now I’m aware of the spin that is probably being produced by both sides, but it’s clear the the verdict wasn’t the clear victory the rights holders had hoped for. What the court did, at least according to RapidShare, was to recognise RapidShare’s overall business model as a legal one, while at the same time asking RapidShare to do more on the issues of copyright infringement. The court says that RapidShare needs to actively seek out links to infringing content (hosted on its servers) by visiting the common haunts for these types of things – popular forums, blogs, websites and such, and remove said content once it is aware of the likely legal status of the upload. This is opposed to scanning each and every download, without knowing anything about the legality of the download (which, according to the European Court of Justice, may constitute a violation of privacy rights). But RapidShare says they’re already doing exactly this, and so for them, the court’s verdict won’t actually affect them too much. Despite this, RapidShare still plan to appeal the decision on the grounds that while they think these measures are a reasonable part of their business strategy, they don’t believe the court has the right to order websites to comply.

Hotfile will soon scan all uploads for pirated content, but it may be too little, and too late, as far as the MPAA is concerned

Another file sharing host is taking a different approach to anti-piracy, although it might be too late, if not too little. A press release alerted me to the fact that Hotfile will start using Vobile’s vCloud9 scanning solution to scan uploads for infringing content. Apparently, the technology employs a database of known file “fingerprints”, and can even scan compressed archives to see if the upload contains infringing content. This comes after the company recently changed its affiliate program to no longer pay based on download volume (ie. heavily favoured towards pirated downloads), but instead, when uploads result in the downloader signing up to a premium account, and uploaders get a commission on that. With the MPAA still insistent on a summary judgement against Hotfile in its lawsuit, this may all be too late, and it’s probably too little as well when it comes to what the MPAA really wants (which is to shut down Hotfile and make an example out of them, probably).

For those that take an interest in things like DVD and Blu-ray copy protection, as well as region coding and stuff, you should be well aware that Fox are one of the “hard-asses” when it comes to these sort of things. Being pretty much the only studio that consistently makes its US Blu-rays region locked (even Sony has seen the light, and forgoes region control for catalogue releases), and having early on declared their support for Blu-ray based solely on the format’s preference for tougher copy protection methods (all of which has since been cracked, of course), you’d expect that Fox, and its parent company, to be the last one to have a copyright scandal. Which was why it was very ironical to see News Corp embroiled in its own piracy scandal this week, as claims were made by BBC’s Panorama program, and also separately by an Australian newspaper, that a (former) subsidiary of News Corp may have helped to fuel piracy of competitor’s services in order to gain an unfair market advantage. Apparently, the subsidiary, NDS, helped to crack rival pay TV networks’ encryption cards, and then helped to ensure the cracked codes got into the hands of people who sell pirated services. News Corp, and NDS, have both denied these allegations, but both the BBC and the Australian paper, the Australian Financial Review, say they have gathered a lot of evidence on this (with the AFR saying that this investigation has been four years in the making). With the Australian government already considering launching its own official investigation into this incident, this could be a story to watch out for.

And finally for this week’s copyright section, I have a story that hits pretty close to home. Actually, it hits directly at home like a guided missile, and for the fun of it, takes out a few neighbouring properties too.  This week, the home page of Digital Digest, and two PowerDVD related pages, were removed from the Google search results due to a DMCA take-down request filed by Guardlex.com. You can read the full story here, and the DMCA notice here on Chilling Effects if/when it’s ever made available, but the gist of it is that Guardlex, probably working on behalf of Cyberlink (the makers of PowerDVD) to take down results related to pirated downloads of PowerDVD, took down our pages as part of a DMCA notice that included thousands of other URLs. The thousands of URLs also included well known legitimate websites such as Cnet’s download.com, Afterdawn, Softonic.com and other clearly legal URLs, including a dozen URLs from Cyberlink’s own website (including their home page!).

The Digital Digest home page have been removed from the Google results due to the DMCA complaint that does not seem to be valid at all

The whole DMCA removal process with Google goes something like this. When Google receives a DMCA notice, and if the notice has all the proper documentations, they immediately remove the URL from their search results (and you’ll see the “In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed …“ message at the bottom of any search results page that has removed results – do a search for “PowerDVD” right now, and you’ll see 3 such messages, meaning 3 URLs were removed). Some time later, could be days or weeks, Google informs the owner of the removed page(s), assuming they have a webmaster central account with Google, of the take-down. And a few days after that, Google may send the website owner the actual DMCA notice. You then have the option to file a counter-notification, and if Google does not receive any further notice on this matter within 14 working days, the URLs get reinstated back into Google’s index.

So even in the case of a mistaken identity, as was the case here I believe, it may take weeks to get it all sorted, with financial and a reputation loss that cannot be avoided. Under the DMCA, if I’m the victim of a mistaken take-down, I can sue for damages. The problem is that this is rarely worth the time and trouble when you factor in legal fees, and so DMCA agents can get away with these innocent and sometimes not so innocent mistakes, most of the time. This is probably why 57% of all DMCA claims made to Google are by companies out to “get” their competitors, and that 37% aren’t even valid claims. It’s clear that the DMCA is currently being abused by rights holders, and that was always going to happen if you have the level of bias present in these sets of laws.

And so it scares me very much to think that rights holders still say the DMCA is not biased enough, and they want something like SOPA or PIPA to make it even easier to take down entire websites, just for a few bad pages that may not even be bad. Sure, the major backers of the bills will say it’s only for “foreign rogue” websites, and that they will promise not to abuse it, but can you really trust them? And even if you can, can you trust all the people and companies that will have access to SOPA/PIPA, to not abuse it in the same way they’re currently abusing the DMCA?

A couple of WNR’s ago, for an issue where I ran out of stuff to write, I enthused about how great streaming video-on-demand was, and how it look destined to be the future of home video.

It seems that the future is going to get here sooner than I though. The latest research via IHS Screen Digest (no relations) says that streaming has just overtaken discs as *the* way to watch movies and TV shows at home, having increased by about 140% in the last year alone. 3.4 billion viewings were made on streaming media, compared to only 2.4 billion on DVDs and Blu-ray, for 2011.

What was more interesting is that, on average, people only paid 51 cents for each streaming title, while they paid $4.72 for discs. The cost of an Internet connection and bandwidth is probably not counted for streaming, which will increase the cost, but I think the main idea is that people watch more on streaming, especially unlimited streaming offers, because they have access to more content for a far lower price than compared to “owning” content.

Is Netflix going to doom Blu-ray? Maybe not now, but you can't dent that VOD is the best way to access and maintain a huge library of titles

Of course, this story has led to people saying the end of nigh for Blu-ray, but until true Blu-ray quality 1080p can be streamed to most people’s homes, the reality is that Blu-ray is still very much needed.

But for those that don’t really care that much about seeing a few extra pixels or “owning” content, or for content that can’t benefit from the full bandwidth HD treatment, then $7.99 per month for Netflix may be a much better deal than having a collection of hundreds or even thousands of discs (just making available the shelving space is a pain, trust me).

But for me, having something physical to hold on to that won’t refuse to play simply because my Internet connection is down, is still worth the extra $4.21.

And with that, we come to the end of another WNR. See you next week.