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Weekly News Roundup (30 August 2009)

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Damn, can’t believe August is nearly over already. Can’t believe it’s nearly 2010, you know the year we make contact, and only three years away from the end of the world in December 2012. And there’s still aren’t any flying cars. Meh. Oh, I did as promised and updated the blog post I wrote two weeks ago about the value of digital entertainment, but this time instead of basing it on pricing/length of the entertainment, I did it on the price per “bit” of digital data. Blu-ray, it seems, is the best value if you want to minimize the cost per byte of data you buy. Once again, digital music is the least value, costing 500 times more than Blu-ray on a bit-by-bit basis.

Let’s start with copyright news for this relatively news lite week. The Pirate Bay continues to be attacked by the MPAA, via the Swedish courts. This time, the MPAA has forced the Pirate Bay’s web host’s web host to shut off traffic to TPB, which managed to shut down the torrent listing site for an entire three hours. Millions of dollars spent in legal proceedings don’t give you much, do they?

And as a preview of what could happen if the TPB would go down forever, the temporary downtime of the TPB led to server spikes for the other torrent sites. So unless the MPAA/RIAA go and take down every single torrent website, then people will just move on to the next one. Eventually, someone will open a website in a country that won’t bow down to the MPAA, maybe Antigua or somewhere, and then the MPAA would have finally forced piracy to become fully resilient. Evidence shows this to be the trend, that the more the industry fights against piracy, the harder it becomes to prevent it. Evidence also shows that through more competitive pricing and less DRM, piracy can be reduced.

IsoHunt - the MPAA needs to prove direct infringement, Judge says

Going to another big trial going on at the moment, the judge in IsoHunt’s trial actually wants the MPAA to prove direct infringement, of which they have presented zero evidence of it so far. The MPAA are of course outraged, that they would actually have to prove direct piracy, because it might be a bit hard to prove that a text file, which is basically what a .torrent file is, can do any damage at all when it comes to piracy. The text file has to be fed to a software program, which interprets the data, connects to the right trackers, and then through the tracker, connect to users to initiate downloads and uploads. Not exactly direct, and nothing other than the original text file is hosted by torrent sites like IsoHunt – everything else is hosted or produced by someone else, and even at the end of this, you still cannot prove piracy unless a complete copy of a file has been uploaded or downloaded, not just chunks of it. A chunk of a file is just digital garbage, and is neither unique nor will it contain any artistic or commercial value, and hence, no copyright abuse. It would be almost as ridiculous as someone copying a couple of word from an AP news article, and then AP going after them for copyright abuse. Oh.

Going to yet another big trial, a Dutch court has ruled that Mininova must remove all infringing torrents within three month, as the Dutch MPAA, BREIN, has won a court case. It’s funny because Mininova was only set up after Suprnova was shutdown, and Mininova, despite the name, is not much larger and much easier to use than Suprnova. I’m looking forward to see what advances Micronova will have when Mininova goes down, if it goes down. And if you can’t stop torrent sites, then you can go after the people who download them. The UK government is planning to have their own three strikes system that will ban anyone suspected of downloading pirated material. All this will do is to put further pressure on the courts, which might need to handle a couple of thousand claims every week. Happening in the UK, this reminds me of what happened over there in the 19th century, where moral outrage ensure every other poor person were sentenced for trivial crimes, and sent to penal colonies all around the world. Just don’t send them to Australia this time please, because we’ve got enough of our own pirates already.

None of this will actually stop people pirating though. As mentioned above, people will just open new torrent sites that will become super popular instantly. And the people who download pirated material will simply switch to encryption technology, which won’t really slow down downloads that much, but will mean it would be next to impossible to monitor what files you are downloading. So the industry can spend millions on lawsuits, the government can spend millions on new legislation and put further pressure on the judicial system, ISPs can be forced to spend millions on monitoring (which will kill off the smaller ISPs), and further millions can be spent on DRM, but what will all this get you? Piracy that can’t be stopped. Well worth the money spent, if you ask me. For people pirating stuff, and people downloading pirated stuff, that is. Eventually, all of this will force piracy to be even more convenient and private, and then at that time, everyone will do it because they know they can’t get caught anymore. Good one, MPAA.

High Definition

Let’s get to HD news. Blu-ray may be gaining popularity in the home theater, but hardly anybody is using it on computers, and the situation is likely to continue well into the 2010’s, according to analysts.

There are a lot of reasons why Blu-ray hasn’t taken off on PCs, the main reason may be because other than movies, there’s nothing else that uses Blu-ray. Games could come on Blu-ray instead of 2 or 3 DVDs, but that will only work if most people have Blu-ray drives, and because games can be installed to people’s huge HDDs, the convenience only comes in at installation time. So instead of swapping out the disc once or twice during the install, Blu-ray can save you the trouble, but after this, you will still only ever need to insert one disc into the drive to play the game, whether it is the first DVD, or the single Blu-ray. It’s not like the transition from CD to DVD, because at that time, some CD games came on as many as 5 discs, and because people’s HDDs were smaller, you had to swap discs during play which was really annoying. And even then, the gaming industry successfully resisted using DVD-ROM for gaming for many years.

BD-RE: Too big for some things, too small for others, and just not as convenient

So without BD-ROM applications, then it comes down to Blu-ray recordables (BD-Rs and BD-REs) to offer huge amounts of storage on a single disc. But do people really need these 25 and 50 GB discs? They aren’t big enough to store a full backup of your PC’s content, usually several hundred GBs in size. They may be too big to store the odd file or two, most people use USB drives for that now. So there is probably a use for them for archival purposes, to store content that you don’t want someone to erase, but then again, 25 GB is a lot to store on an easily lost and damaged disc. The fact is between DVDs, USB thumb drives with ever increasing capacity, external HDD redundant arrays, there may be no place for Blu-ray recordables other than for storing HD movies. Imagine if DVDs were only good for making your own DVD movies, would it have become as popular as it is today?

Plasma TVs are dying, and that’s sad thing, because they are still the best quality, and in some cases, the best value screens on today’s market. LCDs, even the newer LED based ones, cannot hold a candle to the quality plasmas can give you. Candle is an appropriate term to use here because it’s the contrast ratio that usually separates the plasma TV with LCD equivalents. And there aren’t any viewing angle issues either with plasmas. But because plasma panels are hard to scale down, they can’t be used as PC monitors or on even smaller devices, and so the LCDs are much more cost effective to produce. And this is why plasma is dying. OLED will come along one day and replace LCDs and plasmas, both in terms of cost and quality, but for now, it remains a rich man’s toy ($2000+ for a 11″ screen? No thanks).

And finally in gaming, the reaction to the PS3 Slim is still the focal point of this week’s news. All eyes are on Microsoft to see how they respond, with analysts calling for a Xbox 360 Slim, which Microsoft needs much more than Sony. But Microsoft’s response, or perhaps it was pre-planned all along, is to drop the Pro bundle and reduce the Elite to Pro prices. Something that you would have already heard about back in July, if you read the WNR.

Sales wise, the PS3 Slim should give Sony’s console a much needed boost, particularly in the short term. Remember it won’t be just people who are buying their first PS3, due to the price drop, but there will be many who will buy their second PS3, as another Blu-ray player perhaps. Expect Sony’s console to outsell the Xbox 360 quite handsomely over the next few months, which is good timing on Sony’s part as the holiday season is so close. You won’t get the same effect with the Xbox 360 Elite price reduction, although Natal should see the Xbox 360 remain strong in 2010.

Xbox 360 Slim: Are Microsoft too scared to put out another piece of hardware, after the RRoD fiasco?

And I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks the PS3 Slim doesn’t look as good as one had hoped. Instead of calling it the PS3 Slim, it really should be the PS3 Flat, because it’s as if they’ve taken the old PS3 and basically flattened it, making it actually lengthier in size. And as Examiner.com article mentions, it may be because it’s far too early the product lifecyle to have a slim SKU, as least compared to what happened with the PS2. Sony couldn’t make the PS3 Slim any smaller without having to suffer cost issues again, and in the end, they didn’t make it as small as it should be. I don’t think this is a problem for the Xbox 360 Slim, as the Xbox 360 is a year older and the PS3, and the technology it uses was already a bit out of date at the time it came out, and while incremental improvements have occurred, there’s large scope for miniaturization, which could help to both decrease cost and improve reliability. But I guess Microsoft’s Xbox 360 hardware division are still suffering from PTSD due to the RRoD issue, and they won’t be too keen to put out another piece of hardware. But I won’t be surprised to if the Xbox 360 Slim makes its appearance right around the time Natal comes out.

WordPress tells me I’ve nearly used up this week’s word limit, so I’ll have to stop now. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next week with the same mix of news, ranting, and outright lies.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (30 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (23 August 2009)

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

There are so many sources of home entertainment these days, it’s hard to know what you spend your hard earned money on. I find that I’m now spending more and more on gaming, and less and less on movies (and a bit more on TV DVDs). Despite games costing a lot more than movies (for each game I buy, I can probably buy 4 to 6 cheapo DVD movies, or one and a half, two TV series on DVD), I still feel that games offer better value for money, just by the number of hours I spend on them (and to a lesser extent, TV series). So I wrote a blog that examines that various forms of home entertainment, the number of hours of entertainment each activity provides, and the cost of such – plot them in Excel and draw a graph, and you have the results. And I was right – gaming is the best value, followed by TV DVDs, although it only applies to good games that you want to put a lot of time into. What may be surprising (or not) is that digital music downloads turn out to be the least good value, costing nearly $20 for each hour of enjoyment (compared to just $2 for a good game, or just less than $3 for a whole season worth of TV on DVD). During the week, I plan to upgrade this blog entry to include cost per MB of data – this is a silly way to look at value, but it should put Blu-ray on top, followed closely by games and with digital music still the least value. The music industry needs to take a closer look and price music accordingly.

Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet week, and not just because I proved my own point by spending large chunks of this week playing GTA IV (so yes, I finished the story missions on the PC version, and I’m only 5% away from a 100% completion score – but I did not let it affect work, honest!). Enough chit chat, let’s get started with the WNR.

In Copyright news, Australian ISP iiNet is still frantically fighting the AFACT over allegations that it isn’t taking enough action to combat piracy. ‘Enough’ being the important term in the previous sentence, as iiNet sets out to prove that there is not much more they can do, not when faced with existing laws.

iiNet’s two new lines of defence sees them first claim that the existing Communications Act prohibits them to spy on their customers in order to monitor piracy. The second sees them arguing that since the AFACT has not demanded other ISPs to take similar action, that it is unreasonable to expect iiNet to be the only ISP that needs to take action. I’ve mentioned quite a few times what the copyright holders want ISPs to do is often in breach of privacy laws, although governments around the world are bending over backwards (and sometimes just bending over) to accommodate groups like the MPAA’s efforts to curtail piracy by removing your right to privacy. It all comes down to politicians (and some judges) not really understanding the Internet and what it all means, but the simple fact is that the Internet is now an utility like your telephone service, and is just another form of communication where privacy should be expected. I mention utility because homeowners should now be guaranteed the right to have the Internet, that there should not be any laws in which people are somehow denied essential utilities just because the utility companies don’t like what you’re doing with their services. It would be like your electricity provider shutting down your power just because you might be using electricity do to something illegal – it’s not up the provider to decide whether you should have power or not, it’s up to the judicial system to determine that and to hand out penalties. But governments and judges often see the Internet and the digital revolution as this thing that threatens the very foundations of civilization, and they overreact. In the short term future, when the current digital generation has grown up and are occupying the positions of power, I think they’ll look back at the court cases of today and see just how ridiculous and self damaging the whole thing was – just like how we view McCarthyism today (well, most of us anyway).

iTunes now account for 25% of all music sales in the US

Just to prove how the digital revolution has caught the old guard, well, off guard, news broke that 25% of all music in the US are now sold through iTunes. While the majority of music are still sold in CD form through retail stores, 25% means that iTunes is the single biggest source of music sales in the US already. Now, had the music industry being brave enough to embrace digital, they would be the ones operating the big digital music stores, as opposed to making Apple rich. And had it not been the whole DRM debacle, digital music would have gained market share even faster. While it is unfortunate that I cannot say the industry in general has learned the lessons from misuse of DRM, in that most of them still believe DRM has a place, at least some are trying to address the biggest problem that DRM provides consumers – the inability to do what they want, legally, with these files. Marlin is a new DRM scheme that actually promotes sharing amongst family (and some friends), but it does so in a controlled manner where you (and the copyright holders) know exactly who is sharing your file at all times. But Marlin is still a DRM, and while you are now “allowed” within the scope of the DRM to do all the things you could have done with DRM-free files, the framework is still there to restrict your freedoms if and when the powers that be deem time to do so. To paraphrase Wendy Seltzer of the Berkman Center, DRM is like a maze, and while the old DRM was a maze with a single path that you had to follow, Marlin presents many paths, possibly all the paths you might be able to take legally: but it’s still a maze, and one that you have to hand over your rights as a consumer to enter.

Removing copyrighted videos from YouTube could be a thing of the past

Then there are those situations where nobody gets hurt, yet everyone suffers. One of which is YouTube video uploads. How many times has an enthusiastic user uploaded a video he or she has spent hours editing, finding the right background music and clips to include in the video, upload to YouTube and then had the video removed because it violated someone somewhere’s copyright. Or in the pursuit of the next meme or viral video, someone uploads a clip of something they captured from TV or a DVD – the positive effects of a video going viral are so great that companies now spend millions to professionally produce viral videos – but the home user produced video, which costs companies nothing, gets taken down and all that positive energy is lost. Some companies are only starting to get the fact that people using their material isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it used to be the case where only copyright abuse that actually hurt the copyright holders would get prosecuted, but the fear about digital now means any potential, possibly not even real, copyright abuse gets maximum attention, forcing websites like YouTube to take drastic action to filter out all sorts of content, many of which are perfectly legal (like the time when a TV network used a clip of this guy’s home video, and then when the guy uploaded the same video to YouTube, the video got removed due to a complaint from the very same TV network). But there is money to be made in online advertising, and YouTube is now starting to share revenue with content owners, if they decide to allow the “unauthorised” videos to remain online. YouTube gets a bit of the money because they’re hosting the promoting the videos, the uploader doesn’t get his or her ass sued and gets to keep the video online, and the copyright holders make the money. Doesn’t sound like a bad compromise to me, and who knows, maybe someday the copyright holders will start to appreciate all the free promotion they get from uploaders, and give them a free hat or something for their troubles.

High Definition

Onto HD news now. Nothing much happening, expect more analysis and analysis of analysis on the Toshiba move into Blu-ray. I’m going to link to one such analyst that came up with pretty much the same conclusion I did when I first heard the news, that Toshiba is doing this merely to promote their own anti-Blu-ray strategy.

$64 GB SD cards already exceed Blu-ray's capacity, at a tiny fraction of the size$

64 GB SD cards already exceed Blu-ray's capacity, at a tiny fraction of the size

Well, not so much anti-Blu-ray, as anything-but-Blu-ray, because you can see from the statements Toshiba has made, they still believe that Blu-ray isn’t going to be the one format the rules over all in the early part of this century, and that downloads, streaming and flash memory storage are the future. SD flash cards and USB drives are getting to a point where they equal small hard-drives from just a few years ago, and certainly will beat Blu-ray rewritables in terms of capcity, cost and simplicity. Digital video and still cameras all use SD, most do not use Blu-ray recordables. HDTV PVRs do not use Blu-ray. And even the Blu-ray people don’t want people to use Blu-ray, because it might lead to people making copies of Blu-ray movies through hacking their HDMI cable or something equally absurd. Flash storage is simply more convenient, and there needs to be someway for it to be used for movie distribution before insanely fast Internet connections become the normal to allow us to download a 50GB HD movie in a few minutes. There are many situations where you will still need optical storage, but for everyday use, it is already a bit outdated. Can you imagine using CDs and DVDs in place of your USB drive? No, neither can I.

And going back to what I mentioned above about digital music downloads taking over from CDs, the movement towards pure digital distribution is gaining momentum all the time.

And finally in gaming, the big news of the week is of course the PS3 Slim and the PS3 price cut. It shall be known as the week when the collective gaming community yelled out all at the same time the words “finally”, as it heard about the PS3 price cut, and for once, the rumours turned out to be true about the PS3 Slim.

The PS3 Slim is finally here

My first impressions? That the PS3 Slim didn’t look as good as I thought it would be. I think I got ruined by those fake pics of the silver PS3 Slims that have been around forever – the actual PS3 Slim is a big flat piece of black matte plastic, that looks a bit cheap, to be honest. And while it is definitely slimmer, only about half the height of the PS3 Fat, it’s actually deeper (longer in length) than the old PS3. At the very least, they should have used a glossy finish, and perhaps offer it in some new colours, like white (Wii, Apple) or a sexy red like a sports car. Who knows, maybe they will.

As for the price cut, that’s very much welcomed relief for the ailing PS3 sales, although at this point, sales will need to increase by 100% on current numbers in order to make Microsoft of Nintendo really nervous, much more than the predicted 40 to 60% sales increase.

And what of the response from the other gaming companies? Nintendo remains silent, but Microsoft is rumoured to drop the Xbox 360 Pro package and to price the Xbox 360 Elite at the same price point of $299 ($100 off). Will that work to negate the expected surge in PS3 sales? Probably not, but as someone who is looking to upgrade his Xbox 360 to a new one, it can’t hurt. I would still love to have an Xbox 360 Slim, or at least an Xbox 360 Cool&Quiet – technology advances should allow Microsoft to do this without increasing costs (and possibly lower them as well), and if they are to stick true to their recently proclaimed 10 year strategy for the Xbox 360, then they need to this sooner rather than later to keep the nearly 4 year old platform alive and viable.

That’s all I have for you this week. More next week!

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (23 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (16 August 2009)

Sunday, August 16th, 2009

I was going to apologise for this incredibly late WNR, but it turned out that I managed to get it done in time. Combinations of factors led me to believe that I wouldn’t be able to get this issue out in time, mostly due to my throat infection. 2009 hasn’t been a good year for me health wise, has it? The other reason is the odd bouts of electricity blackout that’s been happening around here due to the high winds overnight. Luckily, I have an UPS, and thanks to WordPress’s auto-save feature, at least I haven’t had to re-write passages of this WNR lost during the blackouts.

Some site related bit and pieces before we get to the WNR proper. In cooperation with Womble, I’ve launched a new Womble software sub-forum, in an effort to offer more support for their software. To go along with the new forum, I’ve also written a new guide on how to use Womble MPEG Video Wizard to make basic MPEG video edits. Having using MVW for a while, it’s a very handy piece of software and unlike many other pieces of software I’ve tried, it’s actually pretty quick, no bloat, and very stable.

The July 2009 US video games sales NPD analysis has been posted as well. And in case you’re wondering why being sick allowed me to write a guide *and* a blog post all in one week (I know, this sounds like way too much work compared to what I normally produce in a week), I only became violently ill several hours after posting the analysis. And no, the poor video game sales figures wasn’t the reason why I became sick. Anyway, onto the WNR.

Copyright news first. The New Zealand wing of the MPAA has urged the government to side step due process and hand down Internet bans as quickly as they can print out the banning order pre-made using MS Word templates or something even faster. Just another day in our bizzaro world where expediency in protecting billion dollar companies comes before justice and liberty. But then again justice and liberty don’t make monetary contributions to politicians.

The Pirate Party UK is launched, just as the UK government plans to crackdown on piracy

Not too far away here in Australia, the government, possibly also acting under orders, I mean suggestions, from the music and movie lobby is trying to introduce a bill that will allow ISPs to spy on customers for copyright holders. The government says that’s not what the bill is intended for (it’s for terrorism, just like every law made since 2001), but that makes things even worse because that’s the government basically saying they’re coming up with a law in which they don’t know the full consequences of (or just don’t care). The bill, if passed in December, will make the US DMCA and the French three-strikes system seem restrained, almost anti-copyright, by comparison. The UK government is also planning on it’s own piracy crackdown, to label up to 7 million of it’s own citizens are criminals because they’ve downloaded some pirated stuff (or at least the copyright owners say so, but an IP address is hardly unique nor tamper proof). But at least the UK is getting it’s own Pirate Party, which if the government crackdown continues, could gain popularity very quickly.

Onto this week’s court actions. And there’s been lots happening, all bad news of course. Real Networks, defending it’s RealDVD software which adds more DRM to existing DVDs (but you do get to play it back on your computer without the disc), has suffered the first setback as the judge extended or continued the injuction currently placed on sale of the software. It just means that a full jury verdict will have to be handed down before the future of RealDVD is settled, and that the judge saw that the MPAA had enough evidence to proceed to trial. In the same week, there was another victory in court again innovation to protect the hardly working DVD DRM, known as CSS. The company at the center of the trial, Kaleidescape, originally won a trial that declared it’s hard-disk based DVD playback system completely legal (the system also plays DVDs without the original disc, and also adds more DRM to prevent unauthorised copying), has now lost an appeal that the DVD CCA bought forth against the original verdict. So that’s basically two products, one software and one hardware, neither of which defeats or circumvents the DVD CSS system, and I would be willing to bet that no one in their right mind has ever used to illegally copy DVDs (because RealDVD is not what people use to rip DVDs on computers, and people who can afford the multi-thousand dollar Kaleidescape system usually buy their movies) – but both may be deemed illegal just because the copyright holders don’t like innovation (or may even be coming up with their own products like managed copy, and these competitors are standing in their way).

And of course, piracy goes on, gains more popularity, while the lawyers, like the ones suing 10,000 South Koreans for sharing pirated porn, get richer. The US DOJ has also made a statement on the obscene $1.92 million damages handed down against a single mother Jammie Thomas-Rasset, saying that in their opinion, it’s perfectly constitutional. This is the same DOJ whose associate deputy attorney general was one of the lawyers representing the RIAA in Thomas-Rasset case, and loaded with many other ex-RIAA lawyers. You would at least understand the music and movie industry’s actions if they were working, but they are not, and may in fact be encouraging more people to pirates music and movies. I’ve always said the best way to combat piracy is to provide legitimate alternatives, and a recent study of UK youngsters seem to back up this opinion. The survey found that people want to pay for music, but only if it doesn’t have DRM, and is based on a subscription based “all you can eat” model, with a monthly fee and unlimited downloads (or some reasonable limits). 85% of those surveyed were willing to pay for this service, and 40% said that they would stop pirating altogether if such a service existed. And yet all we see are more lawsuits aimed at the very same people who are willing to pay, all because copyright holders are afraid of change.

High Definition

In HD news, Toshiba has finally confirmed what has been rumoured for a while, that they will get into the Blu-ray business. It was also unlikely that Toshiba would not produce a Blu-ray player when their target is to gain a foothold in the home electronics market, as well as their active participation in the laptop arena. However, they also (perhaps bitterly) referred to Blu-ray as only a small part of their HD strategy, one that also covers SD (flash memory) distribution and downloads. Toshiba’s first Blu-ray players might be here this year (probably next year though), and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it have both SD playback and streaming capabilities (as well as outstanding DVD upscaling thanks to the Cell powered machines).

Not much happening in gaming, except that Sony will probably officially announce a price cut and the new PS3 Slim anytime now. Or not. But if this turns out to be a hoax, then it’s one of the best staged ones I can remember, so I’m putting my money on the rumours being real.

The PS3 Slim could be confirmed by Sony by the time you read this

If you’ve read my July 2009 NPD analysis, you’ll know how badly Sony is struggling at the moment, with the PS3 barely outselling the PS2, which itself has dropped massively in sales over the last year. While the Wii hasn’t done much better in July either, the Xbox 360 continued strong sales (or rather, not-as-weak-as-the-others sales). So a price cut, and a new SKU, may be exactly what Sony needs and while I don’t really think a new SKU is necessary considering how much more “cooler” the PS3 already is compared to the Xbox 360, the price cut if key here (and if the slim model was the only reason the price cut was possible, then you do wonder why there isn’t a Xbox 360 Slim, as Microsoft needs a cooler console, in more than one sense of the word, than Sony).

The fall in Wii sales may suggest either saturation has been reached, or that a price cut may also be needed for it to remain competitive (it is still the only console to not have had a price cut or more added features since launch).

That’s it for this week. Back to bed rest for me until I recover from this nasty infection. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (16 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (9 August 2009)

Sunday, August 9th, 2009

Another relatively quiet week. There are actually lots of news stories, but most of them say the same things, are followups to (or just really really late versions of) previous week’s news stories, and some are nothing more than PR fluff pieces. I try to filter out these kinds stories, and only report on the important, interesting ones. When I’m not busy playing games that is. Or rather than playing, let’s say “fixing” instead, because that’s what playing GTA IV feels like. Rockstar’s PC efforts have always been poorer cousins of the console versions, but GTA IV in its current state takes the bugginess to a whole new other level. Read my blog post to find out more about how to fix or work around some of the more annoying bugs, but nothing I wrote really helps to make the problems go away, only to make them slightly more manageable.

In Copyright news, the owner of Filesoup, one of the oldest torrent sites around, has been arrested. His home was raided, things left in a complete mess, he was denied a phone call or access to legal council for 7 hours, and the Filesoup website is still up and running.

The owner's may have been arrested, his home raided, but the Filesoup.com remains online

Since when did these sorts of copyright infringements, something that at worst only does monetary damage to billion dollar corporations, become such a serious offence that the police need to get involved? Are there no terrorist left to capture? No murderers to apprehend? The copyright lobby has been telling governments around the world scary bed time stories in an effort to scare them into doing things against the very principles of democracy, against the constitutions of their respective countries, and against normal legal procedure, and it’s all working. And that’s just the ones that get to court – governments at the behest of copyright agencies are still trying to bring in a 3 strike system where they can get rid of this little thing called due process entirely. But the ones that do get to court, are even more notorious, just like the recent two cases with the 6 and 7 figure damages being rewarded against defendants that probably don’t even have 6 or 7 thousand dollars in their names.

The rewards were so outrageous, that even copyright lawyers representing the content owners are not too happy at the damages being rewarded, fearing it may backfire. Content owners want to use these damage rewards to deter future infringements, but too much money and it may force the courts and the government to step in a put a limit on things, due to the public backlash. But does anyone really thing this will stop piracy? Every copyright warning message, yes including those annoying ones you can’t skip on DVDs, point out the possible consequences of piracy – a large fine and even prison time, but why do people still pirate stuff? Is it because they have no alternative, as they can’t afford it, like the cost of filling up your average iPod with purchased music? Is it because illegal downloads are easier and more user friendly, not having to go to shops to buy DVDs, and no DRM? Or as in some cases, you aren’t being allowed to purchase something until the content owners have maximised their profits through rental agreements, TV licensing, tiered releasing, and that the only alternative becomes downloads?

This is an example of an Xbox 360 mod kit. Some mod kits are the first step towards making Xbox 360's play backup games

But the law is on the side of content owners, ever since they pushed the DMCA through the US congress, on the back of fears that the digital revolution was going to bring about the end of capitalism as we know it. And the politicians believed them, even easier to do so when you have large contributions to smooth your doubts. The latest case is that of an Xbox 360 modder has been arrested and could face 10 years in prison, thanks to the DMCA. See under the DMCA, you don’t have to actually do damage to anyone to break this law. All you have to do is to circumvent copyright protection, regardless of how badly implemented the copy protection may be, or what you intend to do after copy protection has been broken. I could mod my Xbox 360, and then smash it up so that it won’t work anymore, and yet, I’ve still broken the DMCA (if I was an American, of course). Or take a more common situation, where I mod my Xbox 360 so I can play backups of my legally purchased games that the Xbox 360 keeps on scratching (through the well known design fault, or just through daily abuse). Now if I do this, then who am I hurting exactly? Not Microsoft or the game publishers, because I’m still buying games from them. In fact, the only one I may have hurt is myself as I might have just voided my warranty. And I’m actually helping Microsoft by not bringing in the console to repair the disc scratching problem. But I’ve still broken the DMCA and I could face big fines and time in prison. Some countries have laws where you’re guilty until proven innocent – the DMCA simply assumes you’re guilty in all situations.

Speaking of game consoles, Nintendo’s DS is one of the most pirate friendly consoles around, thanks to flash carts. Nintendo still makes big money from the DS though, and the DS’s popularity is probably directly linked to the ease in which you can play backup or pirated games on it. The DSi, Nintendo’s update for the DS, was supposed to address this by introducing frequently firmware updates that disables flash carts from being used. The latest version, 1.4, managed to do to almost all known flash carts, but it only took a week for the flash cart manufacturers to bring out their own firmware update that made piracy possible again. If you can play it, you can copy it (and play the copy) – that’s that conclusion I’ve come up with after many years of observing various copy protection methods. Again, it goes back to the point of how one stops piracy, and perhaps some of the things I listed above like looking at prices, release schedules, and making purchases easier, are way more effective than firmware updates. Or even putting your hands up and admitting, okay our system is pirate friendly, but that’s why it’s so popular and it’s something we have to live with.

The Australia ISP, iiNet, is still engaged in legal battle with Australia’s own MPAA/RIAA, the AFACT. iiNet is now seeking help from industry bodies to testify on its behalf that ISP in general are helpless to stop the torrent of copyright abuses that its customers are guilty of. If one takes a view that things like human rights, privacy, are important, then ISPs shouldn’t be spying on their customers on anyone’s behalf, just like phone companies shouldn’t be recording and listening in on your phone calls just to see if you’ve been saying naughty things. Now the police, through a court order, may be able to perform eavesdropping (and I see monitoring Internet usage the same as phone tapping, actually even more effective because you get a much more complete picture of a person’s activities) – private companies cannot, and no court would grant a private company the right to spy on an individual, no matter how serious the offence is (because if it is the private company petitioning the court, then it is only a civil matter, not a criminal one). So if McDonald’s can’t tap my phone to find out why I’ve stopped eating Big Macs, why should Warner Bros. get the right to monitor my downloads to see if I’ve stopped buying their movies?

High Definition

Copyright rant over (is it me, or is the Copyright section getting longer and longer, and rantier and rantier?). On to HD news. Not much this week, but just some continuing trends that may concern the Blu-ray people.

On the surface, Blu-ray has a great week thanks to Watchmen. According to the sales stats, Blu-ray has its best week since The Dark Knight, again thanks to a Warner release. Part of the reasons for the good numbers may be because the PS3 special edition of the Watchmen game, which came with the Blu-ray version of the movie – I have no idea if sales of these packs were included in the stats though (the game itself did rather average business, so it may not matter). There are a couple of even bigger releases this year, including Star Trek, Transformers 2, Terminator Salvation – movies that will definitely do well on Blu-ray, not only because they were big movies at the box office, but these are exactly the types of movies to attract early adopters, HT enthusiasts, and the PS3 demography.

The Panasonic DMP-BD80K is one of the Blu-ray players getting Amazon VOD streaming

So what’s the bad news? Panasonic is going to include Amazon video-on-demand in its Blu-ray players, as part of the VieraCast service which already streams YouTube videos. Why is that somehow bad news? Well, it’s not bad news. It’s news to be concerned about, because that’s the third major Blu-ray manufacturer to include video streaming, after LG and Samsung chose to support Netflix. It’s good news for Blu-ray because players are now more fully featured and attractive to buyers. It may be bad news in the future if this video streaming thing takes off and Blu-ray becomes nothing more than a sideshow in the home theater arena. I doubt this will happen because you’ll get tons of people like me who like discs. But I also like things on demand, and a subscription service for unlimited access to a huge movie library works out to be cheaper than buying each movie individually eventually. But that’s for something to worry about in the future, because Blu-ray quality HD streaming is years away from becoming available in every home. But the movement towards video streaming is gathering pace, you cannot deny this.

While not HD specifically, Google has purchased On2, which makes several video codecs including the VP6, VP8. This is all part of the browser video wars that I brought up a few weeks ago. Nothing to concern your average net user, but developers and video enthusiasts will be interested to see if an open source video codec, like Ogg Theora, can take center stage, or will a commercially effort like H.264 win out. Google likes Ogg, and it can now use the expertise and technology purchased through the On2 deal to help out Ogg to improve quality, where H.264 is still a better choice than Ogg. I love open source, but I also like H.264 for its quality and wide acceptance, but I don’t see how the consumer can be hurt by having a couple of alternatives, including an open source one.

Not much happening in gaming. We’re still waiting for the Sony PS3 Slim announcement, and maybe something will happen next week, or the week after, in this front.

PS2 owned the original Xbox and it was expected that the PS3 would do the same to the Xbox 360 (stats from Wikipedia)

Now when fanboys argue, they use stats. One of the stats is that Sony’s PS3, while only doing half the sale of the Xbox 360 in the US, is actually only slightly behind the 360 in worldwide numbers, thanks to strong sales in Japan and stronger sales in Europe (compared to the US). And this is all despite the PS3 being released a year later than the 360. Now this seems to suggest that the PS3 isn’t doing as badly as the media portrays (including this blog, if you can call it part of the “media”), and it will lead fans of the PS3 to say that there’s a media bias in play here. The figures are not wrong, and neither is the conclusion that the PS3 is on level terms when it comes to worldwide sales, but for this to be “good news” for Sony, it assumes one thing: that the Xbox 360 was supposed to sell on even terms with the PS3. The actual fact was that the PS3 was expected to outsell the Xbox 360 handsomely, even with the delayed release – if the PS2 versus Xbox is any indication, an 8 to 1 sales ratio wouldn’t have been a surprise. The Wii kind of made a mess of the scene, since nobody figured Nintendo was going to be in it, let alone win it, but ignore the Wii and the PS3 was still supposed to sell a lot better than the Xbox 360, with US and worldwide numbers more in line with what we are currently seeing in Japan, where the Xbox 360 struggles badly.

But this hasn’t happened. And Microsoft’s gamble of launching a faulty, less sophisticated console a year earlier seems to have paid off. If at the end of this console generation, Microsoft can claim a 1 to 2 sales ratio (that’s one Xbox 360 for every PS3 sold), then they’ve done tremendously well and made huge strides into the gaming industry, of which Sony has much more experienced with. If the Xbox 360 can sell on level terms with the PS3, then that’s something even the most optimistic Microsoft projections wouldn’t have dared to proclaim just 3 years ago. But of course, the Wii will outsell both combined.

Okie dokie. That’s the news/rant for the week. More next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (9 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (2 August 2009)

Sunday, August 2nd, 2009

Another bad week health wise for me, as I think I’ve caught a cold or flu or whatever has been floating around recently. 2009 hasn’t been a good year for me so far in terms of my health, starting the year right away with shingles, possibly had the swine flu last month, and now a cold when the last time I was this sick was ages ago. I have back pain too, just to add to discomfort. But as they say, ‘the blog must go on’. Or something like that. Good thing this week’s a bit quiet in terms of news, although still a couple of big stories to go through. And oh, the winners of Digital Digest’s 10th Anniversary competition has been drawn, and if you’re a winner, you should have gotten an email already – the full list of winners will be published here.

Let’s start with the copyright news for the week. There seems to be a lot of confusion as to the status of The Pirate Bay. They have lost a lawsuit and the site has been sold, but nothing has changed on the site, and the status of the sale itself is now unclear.

Which direction is the Pirate Bay ship sailing in, and who's at the helm, nobody knows

The lack of response to losing the lawsuit has the MPAA angry, and they have asked the court to address this. It was the co-founders of The Pirate Bay that was sued and prison term handed out, but the co-founders deny that have involvement with the company that actually owns The Pirate Bay, Reservella, which operates out of the Seychelles. The MPAA claims that Reservella is operated by the co-founders, and I don’t know how the sale of the site fits into all this, or even if the sale is still on. The allegation is that GGF, the company that purchased TPB, doesn’t have the money ready, but other sources suggest the sale will go through on the 27th of August (thanks to Cynthia for the news). In any case, the Italians also want a piece of The Pirate Bay lawsuit pie, and Italian anti-piracy agency FPM are planning to launch a $1.4 million dollar lawsuit against TPB. FPM were mentioned in last week’s WNR as they claim to have forced Mininova to remove 10,000 torrents.

And the story that keeps on giving. Amazon’s 1984 Kindle screw-up is now going to the courts, as a student who wrote his book reports notes lost his work too when Amazon remotely erased all traces of the unauthorised ‘1984’ Kindle e-book. See, this is what happens when you remotely delete stuff without people’s permissions – had some warning been given, I’m sure the kid could have salvaged at least part of his notes.

And it’s almost as if the RIAA and MPAA saw DRM in trouble, and wanted to step in to help defend it. In any case, a lawyer representing both the RIAA and MPAA has said that DRM’d content was never meant to be forever usable, and that consumers shouldn’t expect to be able to use what they paid for. In other words, the content owners are happy to take your money for overpriced digital downloads, infested with layers upon layers of DRM that makes compatibility a nightmare, and then they tell you that you shouldn’t have any expectations on having any access to the files in say 10 years time. See in the world that the RIAA and MPAA inhabits, this makes total sense and it’s not unfair to anyone at all. In the real world, I can still play audio and video tapes I bought back in the 80’s, people are still playing records bought in the 50’s and all your DRM-free MP3 files will still work in 20 years time, I’m willing to bet. And they wonder why people choose to pirate music.

Downloading a song costs $22,500 according to the RIAA, so no wonder Joel Tenenbaum pirated them instead

Although some will end up paying a lot more than having to deal with a music library that won’t work in 10 years time. The RIAA’s second trial against a music file sharer has resulted in another win, after the Judge in the case threw out defendant Joel Tenenbaum’s only line of defence, that what he was engaged in should be considered fair use (read the link to see what the Judge thought fair use might be). That’s not a defence I would have gone with, not if the RIAA already has evidence of file sharing and that total denial has been ruled out as a defence. Instead, I would question just how much money was lost to the RIAA and ask them to prove so (x number of copies shared times the revenue lost for every Y copies as not all people who download would have otherwise purchased). This would at least avoid the totally disproportionate damages being rewarded, in this case $22,500 per song for 30 songs, or $675,000 in total. And this is actually the more reasonable judgement of the two recent cases, compared to the $1.92 million in damages rewarded against Jammie Thomas-Rasset for only 24 songs. Doing a little math in my head, $1.92 million for 24 songs work out to be $80,000 per song. Now assuming each song costs $1 to buy on iTunes or whatever, then that means the RIAA claims that 80,000 copies of each song has been shared illegally. Assuming on average each song is about 3 MB in size, that means 240 GB of uploads. Now on my upload link (30 KB/s), which is fairly standard here in Australia, this task would take 2276 hours, or 94 days of continuous uploads while not using my connection for anything else. Now times that by 24 songs, and it would take 6 years of continuous uploads for Jammie Thomas-Rasset to rack up the amount of awarded damages (assuming she has the same connection as I do, so it may be “only” 3 years, or up to 12 years for her to do the same), and that’s not even taking into account that the content owners do not make $1 per song, as that’s the retail price.

Well at least they didn’t end up at Gitmo (or wherever the suspected terrorists will be moved to when it closes). Apple says that breaking the iPhone’s Apps DRM, to jailbreak the phones, could lead to hackers attacking cellular networks. This could then lead to possible use by terrorist, and the end of civilization as we know it. Either that, or Apple could lose the monopoly it has on iPhone apps, which could be just as devastating.

PC piracy is a serious problem. So is DS piracy. Game publisher Ubisoft says both are so serious that they have hatched plans to tackle both. What’s interesting is the two different approaches they have taken to tackle what appears to be the same problem. They are trying the carrot approach on the DS, by offering figurines and exclusive content on the DS versions of games. On the PC, while they haven’t spelled out their plans exactly, but it looks like they’re going to go with some kind of DRM system. Now why can’t they do the same on the PC as they are trying to do on the DS? I’m not talking about figurines, but add in some collectibles, some exclusive online content (even if it means online authentication), and make better use of the PC’s multi-purpose nature, by offering online community involvement, multimedia content and all sorts of goodies to make the stripped down pirated version seem inadequate (or so bloated in size when all the extras are included that it’s not worth downloading). In other words, make a better product or package. Making the games better themselves might also help.

High Definition

On to HD news, Paramount is trying a new thing that many studios in the past have tried and found little success: tiered releasing.

Rental version DVDs died around 2003 here in Australia, but Paramount wants to bring it back

What this means is that instead of releasing all home video versions of the movie at the same time, they’re going to release only the rental DVD and for sale Blu-ray version of the movies first, with the for sale DVD version coming at up to 8 weeks later. Now the theory behind this is to promote both video rental and Blu-ray, both of which are growing markets for the studios, as opposed to DVD which is quickly dropping in sales. Studios have tried this in the past, with rental versions of DVDs that contained no extra features, followed by retail versions with the lot (usually a second disc). This kind of thing died quickly here in Australia, as people wanted to rent the retail version with all the special features and were willing to wait. Having the Blu-ray version in stores will help Blu-ray certainly, but it will also task the sales people with explaining to customers why they can’t buy the DVD version until 8 weeks later, which I’m sure will please the retailers who rely on DVD for 90% of their home video revenue. And with people unable to buy the version they want, how many will seek alternative sources, such as pirated versions (of the rental only DVD), and feel justified in doing so because they have been denied the opportunity to purchase the content. Guilt is probably the most effective deterrent to piracy, and Paramount’s move might effectively destroy this last barrier. It’s good thing then that Paramount aren’t doing this with all releases, possibly just the lower profile titles that people will only ever want to rent, not buy.

LG HDTVs will now support the VUDU digital rental system. Not a very important piece of news, but one that continues the trend of integrating home electronics with digital distribution services.

And in gaming, the smoke intensifies around the possible PS3 Slim fire. The latest news is that Sony has ordered so many PS3 parts that it seems they are anticipating a huge surge in demand for the PS3, which might mean the PS3 Slim. There was also some news about an Amazon Germany listing for the PS3 Slim.

My thoughts are that Sony might have announced this at E3 if this was real, and that the additional parts orders may be because prices have dropped recently as demand drops due to the economy. But as I said last week, there’s too much smoke without fire, although it is a well known fact that video gaming fanboys, source of many of the rumours, are quite capable of producing mass amounts of smoke out of their a..

On that refreshing note, thus ends this week’s WNR. Congrats to those who won in our 10th anniversary competition, and better luck next time to those who didn’t. Don’t worry, there’s only 9 years and 336 days to go until the next decennial. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | 1 Comment »

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Archive for the ‘High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K)’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (30 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (23 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (16 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (9 August 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (2 August 2009)

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