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Weekly News Roundup (11 October 2009)

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

How was your week then? Mine? Pretty much more of the same really, kind of boring, but at the same time still feel like there just isn’t enough time to do everything I wanted to do. Must also get more sleep. But before I can do that, I’ll have to churn out this week’s WNR, and there’s quite a bit to go through.

Let’s start with copyright news, as if I have to say this since every issue of WNR has started with copyright news, and the graphics to the left of this sentence sort of hints at it a bit.

This week is the week that the high profile “movie studios versus ISP” trial started in Australia, with the MPAA backed AFACT and Australian ISP iiNet going head to head in court over allegations that iiNet “allows” its users to pirate stuff. There’s all sorts of arguments and statements being thrown around in court over the week, too much to go through all of them here in great detail (check out the link for more details). The AFACT doesn’t think iiNet is doing all it can to stop piracy, and iiNet claims that this whole thing has been a set up by the AFACT to get its day in court. The AFACT claims over 90,000 acts of infringements occured on iiNet’s network over the period of time they monitored activities, while iiNet believes this number is exaggerated and inaccurate due to the way the AFACT counted them (they counted partial downloads, even by the same person downloading the same file over time, as separate infringements). iiNet also revealed they were sent thousands of infringement notices by the AFACT over the course of a week, far too many for iiNet to be able to verify and process and they believe this “infringement spam” was a deliberate ploy by the AFACT to ensure iiNet would fail to remove users from its network and hence, “allow” piracy to occur.

I’m obviously a biased individual, but everything that iiNet has said so far makes sense. The plain facts, and the AFACT will agree, is that there’s a lot of piracy going on. A lot! But to get ISPs to police the thousand of infringement notices per week is just really unfeasible, even if the ISP in question does not verify any of the notices and simply ban users at the first sign of trouble, which could then lead the ISP into legal trouble as the innocent users that got kicked of can sue for compensation. It’s easy for groups like the AFACT to produce a list of IP addresses of offending users, since they can just monitor the IP addresses on torrents, but the ISP will have to go through the data, match the IP address and the timestamp with user information, and then take action. But as IP addresses can be spoofed, and that just because an user’s IP address was on a torrent, it does not mean they downloaded it successfully or even intended to download it in the first place, or gave authorization to the person to started the download. Only the police have the resources and authority to get to the bottom of such allegations, and I doubt they will have time to investigate potentially tens of thousands of cases per week. Which is why going after the downloaders is such a stupid idea in the first place. Anyway, I’ll be posting more updates on the iiNet trial every week, but a decision in the case is unlikely to be had this year. Obviously, the AFACT would love a win here, but even if they lose, it may give them just enough to push the government into adopting some kind of three-strikes legislation to ensure this “travesty” doesn’t go on for much longer.

Sarkozy gives a big thumb up to piracy ... when it suits him

And the chance of such a legislation becoming a reality in Australia is quite high given what has happened with France adopting similar laws (pending appeal in their Constitutional Council). A big supporter of the laws, is French President Sarkozy. But a French paper has revealed this week that Sarkozy is in fact a big supporter of piracy as well, but when it benefits himself. He allowed his staff to make 400 pirated copies of a movie about himself so he can give it out to diplomats to promote how great he is or something. His staff even went as far as making photoshoped jackets for the DVDs that removed the logo of the official distributor, so obviously they knew what they were doing was wrong, yet still did it. If downloading a pirated movie three times gets you thrown off the Internet and possibly into jail for 2 years, under the law that Sarkozy supports, then how many years will distributing 400 copies, which is way worse than downloading, get? By my calculations, it should be about 500 years.

The Pirate Bay has just been chased out of the Netherlands, after their version of the MPAA, BREIN, successfully sued TPB’s web host, a tactic that seems to be working. TPB was chased out of Sweden using similar tactics. And last week, even Google did their bit to kill of TPB, by removing the home page listing for the website from its index due to a DMCA complaint – luckily, the listing was quickly restored, possibly due to the public backlash. The Pirate Bay website seems to have relocated to the Ukraine, in a bunker style hosting center that claims to be able to withstand a nuclear attack. The question is, can it withstand a MPAA attack? Let’s wait and see how the Ukrainian courts deal with this issue. As for the proposed Pirate Bay sale, there’s a lot of confusion as to what’s happening, because the handover was supposed to have occurred already.

Viacom is still after YouTube, but may have the "smoking gun" evidence they need to win the case

Still continuing with the theme of lawsuits, Viacom claims to have the “smoking gun” in their legal battle with Google/YouTube. Viacom got hold of some internal emails which suggested that YouTube managers were aware of the unauthorized content issue, but refused to take action. There were also claims that YouTube employees may have also uploaded unauthorized content themselves. Google/YouTube want to attack this case on the basis that Viacom employees had uploaded content for promotional purposes, and as such, it was impossible for them to know which clips were authorized and which were not. What interested me was that Viacom obviously knew the positive effects of YouTube, and thus were employing people to upload promotional clips. You can argue that they also benefit from unauthorized clips as well. I wonder would they be happier or angrier if YouTube banned all Viacom clips from their website, which would definitely solve the piracy problem for Viacom, but is this what they really want? It seems that these media companies want to exploit YouTube’s user base, but only if they have full control over what happens, which is not how YouTube or similar websites work – it’s the lack of control, the total freedom and spontaneity of the content and the users who upload them that makes or breaks sites like YouTube. If the content owners don’t realise this fundamental shift in the relationship between content owners and content users, then they’re in for a rough ride.

Still more lawsuit news, this time it’s the MPAA versus Real Network’s RealDVD case. An injunction was granted against the sale of RealDVD earlier in the year, but Real Networks is appealing the decision. It’s unlikely to be successful, since an injunction is the “safe” thing to do pending the verdict, but it’s also a “nothing to lose” situation for Real, which has already spent a bundle in legal costs, an appeal won’t make much of a difference now.

And from the “another way to solve the piracy problem without rooms full of lawyers” section, here’s Spotify’s solution – music renting. By paying a small monthly fee, customers gets to download up to 3,333 different ad-free songs at any given time to their PCs, iPhones or Android phones for offline enjoyment, but they lose access once they stop paying the subscription fee. It’s not an ideal solution, especially since DRM is involved, but it’s certainly cheaper than buying 3,333 songs, and less likely to involve you going to court.

High Definition

Onto high def news, Blu-ray is probably not coming to the Macs anytime soon. The well sourced blogger who first broke the news that Blu-ray may be coming, then later posted that, well, it’s probably not.

Either move would have been understandable. Adding Blu-ray make sense, since Blu-ray is not that popular in the computing arena, but every PC has the ability to support it, unlike Macs. Apple is also on the board of the Blu-ray group, and has done a lot of work to promote high definition video. On the other hand, Apple’s iTunes and Apple TV strategy means that they prefer online distribution over disc based distribution, so Blu-ray may be seen as a competitor.

Consumers only want 3DTV and 3D Blu-ray if it is cheap or at no extra cost

People may still be getting use to HD being standard, but already the next “big thing” in home entertainment is being hyped: 3D. Unfortunately, consumers don’t seem to be buying the hype, at least now right now, because a study has shown that there’s very little interest in 3DTV or 3D Blu-ray, not unless it comes at little or no cost to the consumer, which defeats the whole purpose of having something new. It is a bit gimmicky, but I personally like these kind of gimmicks, and I think 3D has a place in the home, even if it doesn’t exactly reach mainstream popularity.

Toshiba's Cell Regza TV: Records 8 HD channels at the same time!

What may be popular with consumers is the new generation of TVs. No, I’m not talking about higher than 1080p resolution sets, but rather, TVs that allow you to do more than just watch TV. Panasonic and Samsung went with Internet capable TVs that allows you to watch YouTube videos, check out the weather, and all sorts of other things without leaving the comfort of your couch. Toshiba is doing something different, mainly because it can. Toshiba owns the Cell processor that the PS3 uses, and they’ve been talking about it for a while, but they’ve finally managed to find a good use for it on their TVs. Their new Cell Regza range can record up to 8 channels of HDTVs at once to the internal 3TB HDD, for up to 26 hours. This means that if you missed on anything in the last day and a bit, on up to 8 channels, you can go back and watch it without having to torrent it. The powerful Cell processor also allows the TV to show 8 different channels at once. We don’t even have 8 HD channels here in Australia, but this would be extremely handy to have in lieu of a dedicated TiVo like set top box.

And finally in gaming, I posted about firmware induced problems for the PS3 last week, and it turns out I’m not the only one who wants answers, because a class action lawsuit has been launched against Sony regarding the problematic 3.00 (and 3.01) firmware.

I think people sue too much over in the US, and I think this is certainly something that probably shouldn’t waste the court’s time, but if it gets Sony to be a bit more careful about their firmware releases, or to come clean on why the drive freezing and no more disc reading problem seems to only come after firmware updates, then the effort would have been worth it.

The lawsuit is certainly going to divide the PS3 owners, some of which like me have personally experienced the problem first hand, while others don’t believe it’s actually real. It is certainly rare enough, but not so rare as to never happen, to have caused this divide. What I don’t like is the PS3 fans, that haven’t yet experienced this problem, claiming it’s all made up to make Sony look bad or it’s caused by people not knowing how to use their PS3s. I take these quotes from postings on the official PS3 board to illustrate this phenomenon:

The “you’re all Sony haters making this up, or you’re too stupid to own a PS3” brigade:

I still think many failures are cases of what’s called “future shock”. You have a rather sophisticated piece of electronics and users really don’t know how to operate it properly.

The “I’ve had this happen to me” group’s response:

And I think that’s a pretty ridiculous thing to assume. What’s to “operate”?, it’s a closed system! That’s more like a lot of the unsubstantiated claims and misinformation I’ve been reading…on this board in particular. For some reason. Especially from people who think because there’s nothing wrong with their unit, everbody who’s does is either lying or too incompetent to know how to plug it in.

It’s real. It’s rare. It may already be a non existent issue in the new redesigned PS3 Slim. But it’s not right for Sony to charge people to repair something that I can think is almost certainly a manufacturing or design defect (either in hardware, or in the firmware), and it’s certainly not the owner’s fault.

Alright, that’s it for the week. More news next week, definitely more iiNet stuff, possibly NPD stats for game console which may see the PS3 become the number one seller, beating the Wii for the first time. See you then.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (11 October 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (4 October 2009)

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

Welcome to another, slightly later than usual, WNR. Time to do a PSA, or public service announcement. With Microsoft revealing its new free anti-virus software, there’s now now reason, none at all, why you should not have security software on your PC (that’s firewall, anti-virus and anti-malware). Just with free anti-virus software, there are now at least 6 well known free software to choose from. With malware, at least passive protection, then you can’t really do worse than scanning your computer monthly using the full scan function of Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, another free software. And as for firewall, then ZoneAlarm Basic will offer you basic protection that’s better than the built in Windows Firewall. And with a little bit of discipline in terms of updating your operating system/browser with the latest patches, and not clicking on every link you find in emails and on website, then there’s a decent chance that your computer will remain malware free. Decent, but not guaranteed of course, which is why if you have the money, then investing in a security suite like Norton or Kaspersky Internet Security is a good idea, especially considering licenses often now come in 3’s and so you can protect all the computers in your home for a low yearly subscription fee.

Next week’s PSA: backups – do you have a system and if not, why not? Let’s move onto the news.

In copyright news, The Pirate Bay appeal is about to begin, but there has been some shuffling of the judges in the case. Judges, or just clerks, I’m not quite sure – the Swedish legal system is a bit different to that of the US or Australia. But a judge, or a clerk, has been removed due to bias, but the request for removal came from the people suing TPB, not from TPB.

This leads me to believe that this might not be done to ensure the result cannot be challenged, as the RIAA/MPAA claims, but rather that the person’s removal may in fact hurt the TPB. The bias in question was related to this person owning shares in Spotify, which has content distribution deals with the RIAA. Does this mean the person would benefit from TPB not existing? Possibly, as Spotify aims to offer what TPB offers illegally. However, it also might mean this person has the required technical knowledge to understand the major issues behind the case, and that in turn might hurt the copyright holder’s case more. I was once told that this type of case is often won or lost on the ability of the judge(s) to understand the technical implications of their decisions, and that judges that do not come from a technical background (that is, most of them) will usually rule in favour of the industry group. It’s understandable, as if the first thing you think of when someone says “torrent” is rain, then you would also be more likely side with major Hollywood studios as opposed to a bunch of kids who set up this website about pirate ships.

Pirate Party Australia: Ready to fight in the next election in Australia

Which is precisely why there should be more education and more public lobbying of the issues, which has generally been one sided in favour of the copyright holders. The Swedish Pirate Party’s fantastic results in the European Parliament elections shows that this is an issue that people care about and politicians and judges should realise that there are two sides to this issue, and is not a case good versus evil as portrayed by the copyright lobby. Which is good news then that Pirate Party Australia has managed to sign up enough members to contest the next Federal election, and I suspect they will do rather well in the polls, since there has been a lot of Internet related issues that have become major issues, such as the government’s ridiculous pursuit of a national censorship system, or the much needed national broadband network. And the piracy issue, particular with the current high profile copyright court cases, and the government’s hints at moving towards a three-strikes system, should ensure a lot of protest votes go the way of the PPA.

iiNet will defend itself in court next week over claims that it allows and promotes piracy

Speaking of high profile Australian copyright court cases, it will start next week but the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has dropped another key part of their case against iiNet. Previously, they had dropped the “conversion” charge, as they could not prove that iiNet was the main copyright infringer. Now, they’ve dropped the part of the case which say that iiNet engaged in primary acts of infringement, based on the fact that iiNet caches content for its subscribers. Of course, all ISPs cache content, that’s how ISPs work, and if an ISP can be found guilty this way, then all of them need to be shutdown immediately as they’ve all helped to plan terrorist attacks, share child pornography, commit acts of fraud and every other bad thing that has gone through their cache. The fact that charges are being dropped this late into the preparation phase, suggest that the original charges were far too ambitious, and lacked understanding of even some basic facts like how ISPs work. Were they perhaps too ambitious deliberately to scare iiNet into submission, into a settlement, not expecting iiNet to be so determined to fight the charges out in court? Who know.

Free All Music: Free MP3s, if you watch an ad ... too good to be true?

Now, whenever there’s a clever new way to fight piracy, no matter whether it will work or not, I’ll report it here. The latest is interesting, and it’s actually good for consumers, as if the plan works, you’ll be able to download legal MP3s for free, and all it will take is a moment of your time. The new idea, well not exactly new, is ad-supported MP3s. The plans is that after the user views a short video ad, they will then be able to download the DRM-free MP3s to keep. Sounds pretty good to me, although it’s a US only thing apparently so I can’t take advantage of it. But if it sounds too good to be true, then it might just be that. The major problem I can see immediately is, well, how will the video ads actually manage to pay for the MP3s, each of them costing at least $0.50 each – a single view of a video ad, unless the user clicks on it, is going to generate a lot less than 50 cents, probably a lot less than 5 cents. But if the ads do manage to pay for the music, then it becomes a good business model and will go a long way towards killing piracy, much more than a new DRM scheme or more lawsuits. Let’s hope my math is wrong and that the system does work, because I don’t people will mind sitting through an ad or two if it means free stuff.

High Definition

Let’s move onto high definition news, the latest rumour is that Apple will finally add Blu-ray support to its iMac range, despite Steve Jobs calling Blu-ray ‘a bag of hurt’, referring to the messy and expensive licensing process and the lack of user penetration. Both problems have been greatly reduced thanks to lower and simpler licensing schemes, and with current market share double that of when Mr Jobs spoke.

But as it is, it’s just a rumour for now, and I haven’t really heard enough from the right sources to think that this is a certainty, not like with the PS3 Slim and Xbox 360 price cut rumours. Will Apple’s support help Blu-ray? Of course it will. Will it be a major help, probably not. Why? Well, Blu-ray has been available on Windows systems from day one, and despite there being a lot more Windows systems than Macs, it has been of almost no help to the format, and penetration of Blu-ray on PCs remain quite low. Still, with Apple’s well known and respected ability for working with HD video, having Blu-ray support is almost a necessity these days, rather than a luxury, although it remains to be seen whether hardware acceleration will be enabled in software (the Nvidia GPUs that iMacs use should support at least H.264 acceleration for Blu-ray playback).

One rumour about Apple’s reluctance towards Blu-ray is that its current Apple TV devices would be hurt by Blu-ray’s success, since Apple would prefer everyone to be buying movies through iTunes, as opposed to on disc. I don’t know if I believe this, as I think Apple’s reluctance is more to do with how people use Macs, and whether Apple thinks people will use it as a Blu-ray player, when they take into account the number of people who currently use it as a DVD player.

Foxtel Download: Free downloads for subscribers

But it is true that technologies like iTunes are in some ways competing with Blu-ray for the home video market share. But even within downloads, there’s great competition from the way it is being offered. The latest thing here in Australia is that our major cable/satellite subscription TV provider, Foxtel, has just announced that they will offer 400 hours of downloadable content for free per month for all subscribers. It’s technically just allowing subscribers to download for free the content they’ve already paid for and with subscribers using the IQ set-top-box, content that they already have the ability to record and keep. But with a billing system already in place, and an user base that is already willing to fork out cash for TV shows and movies, it will be interesting to see if Foxtel extends this download service to premium content like the latest episodes available straight after their showing in the US – with the payment being handled through the monthly bill. Foxtel already does this with on-demand HD movies through their set-top-box, so it’s not a huge step to extend this to TV and movie downloads on the PC.

Everyone knows about the infamous Xbox 360 RRoD problem, but I wonder if the PS3’s “no disc reading” problem might also get some unwanted spotlight in the near future. The problem I describe is one that I have personally experienced and posted about on this blog, and it seems to be still happening with the latest firmware updates.

I have no doubt that this problem is far less widespread than the RRoD problem, but there are still a large group of people who have suffered from it, and it seems to occur after every firmware update. I would guess that less than 1% of PS3s are affected, possibly much less than this, so it’s no surprise that some people feel the problem doesn’t exist because it has never happened to them. But it has happened, I can confirm from personal experience, with the people who posted comments on the blog, from users posting about their problem on the official PS3 forum and elsewhere, and so the problem is not imaginary. The worst part is that Sony charges $150 per repair of this problem out of warranty (mine was in warranty at the time), and if it is the firmware update process that somehow causes this to occur (and the PS3 firmwares themselves are not really known for their bug free nature), then I wonder if charging users this large amount is the right thing to do. And this problem pretty much only started showing up after the 2.40 firmware update, so something must have changed then that causes this problem to appear, but it’s all just speculation as Sony has refused to release any information in regards to this issue. And with the wholesale hardware changes in the PS3 Slim, I don’t think this will be an issue for the Slim, so that’s one reason to upgrade your old PS3s to the new one, even if the styling isn’t to my taste (I still like the old one better, hmmm, glossy).

Okie dokie, that’s itie for this weekie. More next week, so until then …

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

Weekly News Roundup (27 September 2009)

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

With Windows 7 coming in less than a month’s time, it certainly seems like it’s the operating system that Vista should have been, and I think Microsoft are on their way to a very successful launch, despite their horrible marketing campaign. And for those upgrading – and I hope you’re opting for a clean install because that’s the only way to get the best out of Windows 7, performance wise – then this is the perfect opportunity to go to a 64-bit OS if you’re not already using one. The reason is that to go from 32-bit to 64-bit, even within the same OS version, you’ll need a clean install, so you might as well bite the bullet when doing the XP/Vista to 7 upgrade. If you’re already using a 64-bit OS, then please ignore the blog I’ve just written, otherwise it’s well worth a read to find out if 64-bit is for you, or if 32-bit is good enough for now.

Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet week, with a few stories occupying the headlines to still make it a very interesting week, although most of it was yet again about the issue of copyright.

Let’s start with the copyright news. There was only really one news item that really caught the attention of people this week. And not even Sir Elton John could push the news out of the headlines, much of it thanks to the reactions to the story on the Internet.

A screencap of the Google cache of Lily Allen's anti-piracy blog, which has now been closed

Earlier in the week, musician Lily Allen decided to take a stand on the issue of online music piracy. But unlike many others who have come out against the proposed three-strike Internet banning policy, Ms Allen has come out for it, even launching a blog called “It’s Not Alright” to voice her views on piracy. Now there is nothing wrong with someone expressing their views, in fact, that’s what the Internet is for. However, if you do come out with some opinion, especially a controversial one, then make sure you are untouchable when it comes to arguing the facts. Unfortunately, Ms Allen made the mistake of not doing enough vetting into her personal history in regards to piracy, and in netspeak, she has been truly and thoroughly pwned. It turns out that, in publishing her anti-piracy views, that she might have pirated the article of high tech news and discussion website, Techdirt. And not only that, a few days later, it was revealed that Ms Allen was a distributor of pirated music herself, with some self-made mixtape MP3s that was available for download from her website, that featured songs that she (and her record company) did not have the distribution rights to. Oops.

Some dude said nearly 2000 years ago that “let he who is without sin, cast the first stone”. And if one is to take the moral stance that anyone who has downloaded or shared an illegal MP3 (and that’s a lot of people) is a thief and should be punished harshly, than he, or she, should at the very least ensure that they have not committed the same “crime”. Because the truth is that it’s very easy to commit this crime, it may be because you think you’re not doing anything wrong by not paying for something you never had the intention to pay for in the first place, or perhaps you think sharing songs is a great way to promote the song and the artist and it may lead to you, or the people you shared the song with, to become a fan and start buying. There are legitimate arguments for and against a heavy crackdown on piracy, but as the Lily Allen incident showed us, it’s far too easy to be labeled a pirate just because, earlier in your music career, your appreciation of other artists led you to make a mixtape that somehow ended up online. And as Ms Allen posted on her blog about the mixtapes, “I made those mixtapes 5 years ago, I didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then”. But Ms Allen, under the very legislation that you support, you would be punished for what you claim you did out of ignorance 5 years ago, and guess how many other people might get punished for similar acts if what you support becomes law? And the article you stole from Techdirt, well, that’s copyright protected as well, even if it were just some text on some website you’ve never seen before. So I’m glad Ms Allen spoke out, because she has successfully demonstrated the worst aspect of the three-strikes system, something nobody else could do until it was actually made into law. Ms Allen has since then decided to quit the music business, which could be to her genuine loss of hope in the future of the music business due to continuing losses to piracy, a publicity stunt, a bit of sulky sulk sulk over the whole affair, or a bit of everything.

Oh, and Sir Elton John made similar statements but nobody really cared, not when the Lily Allen Show was so interesting.

UK ISP BT says that policing Internet usage could cost more than simply ignoring the problem

In all of this, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the whole point of the anti-piracy drive, and the three-strikes system, is all just about increasing profits for the music industry (and other industries). Not that there’s anything wrong with this of course, they have the right to take actions to increase their profits. But will the three-strikes actually stop piracy, and what about the cost to implement and maintain such a system. One of UK’s leading ISPs, BT, has came up with some estimates as to the cost of spying on Internet users, and they put the cost at £24 per person, or roughly £365 million per year in the UK. The UK music industry actually only claims £200 million in lost profits due to piracy per year, and as with their estimates, the actual loss is probably less than a quarter of this amount, if that much. The extra cost, the full amount of which will no doubt be passed onto the consumer, will hurt the Internet as access plans become less affordable and some are priced out of being able to connect altogether. This will in turn hurt legal online music sales and promotional efforts. I would be surprised if the music industry actually comes out ahead at all, but for them it’s of little risk since they scream so loudly about the seriousness of online piracy, yet are unwilling to fork out a single cent for a solution that they came up with. Probably the most effective way to actually kill off the three-strikes system is to actually force the music, movie (and other) industries to come up with the cash to implement such a system.

But the movie studios (or at least movie theaters) are spending on implementing systems that try and stop camcorder pirates. The latest such system uses infrared pulsing lights situated behind the screen that the human eye cannot see, but will be recorded onto camcorder images. This is supposed to deter pirates and purchasers of said pirated content, but they’ve obviously never bothered to download and examine a cam recording of a movie, what with part of the picture being blocked by somebody’s head, and the sound of popcorn chewing louder than the explosions in the movie. I don’t think quality is what people care about when it comes to cam recordings, and so feel free to spend millions upgrading cinemas with this technology, and in the end, some guy who works at the cinema for $10 an hour will still manage to get their hands on the original reel and hand it over to the right people to make a perfect rip.

So what would drive the copyright holders to spend so much fighting against online piracy, when by reasonable estimations, the loss to online piracy isn’t anywhere near as bad as the copyright holders make out, and that the benefits of the Internet will probably eventually outweigh any effect that piracy has. Many people can see that Internet and digital distribution provides a lot of new opportunities, but why does the industry treat it as a disease that must be eradicated? Well, William Patry, the senior copyright counsel at Google might have found the reason in his new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. He explains that this isn’t, nor will it be the last, time that copyright holders show mass panic in the face of a new distribution medium, to identify it as the enemy and do all in their powers to stop it, and then only to find out later on that it actually benefits them the most in the long run. It happened with the introduction of radio, television, VCRs, and now, it’s the Internet that’s public enemy number one where copyright is concerned. I guess it is understandable to a degree. To have something so valuable, you will want to protect it, against new things that you don’t fully understand and sometimes that means going too far. I keep on thinking back to the Susan Boyle episode, and wonder if her performance, and the show she performed on, would have been as popular if somebody hadn’t illegally uploaded the clip of the show onto YouTube. Had the copyright holders got to the video before the general public, how much of an adverse effect would that have had on the finances of said copyright holders, I wonder. Not to mention the financial fortunes of one Susan Boyle (although the publicity has had an adverse effect on her personal life, but that’s a whole other problem).

High Definition

Onto high def news now. Still not much happening, and that’s true on the release front as well, as the last few weeks (after the Watchmen bump had subsided) has been fairly quiet ones. However, one thing is for certain, and that’s the price drops for Blu-ray happening all over the place, for both hardware and software.

Blu-ray prices have come down, for example, Crash on Blu-ray is now under $10 on Amazon

I’ve noticed this trend from analyzing the NPD stats, and NPD themselves have also been monitoring the situation and found that average prices have indeed dropped and are getting closer to the pricing of the DVD versions, even compared to just a few months ago. And from looking at the price history info on our own Amazon Blu-ray Price Index section, you can see the trend quite clearly. New releases, which used to be priced at just below $28 on Amazon, are now almost always under $24, with older releases previously hardly ever discounted, sometimes now falling to under $10. And whenever there has been a discount for older titles, it will usually shoot to the top of the charts. It’s good new for consumers and good news for the Blu-ray format, but probably not great news for the backers of the format, who have envisaged a premium format to combat ever lowering DVD prices. It hasn’t totally failed in this respect, as DVD prices are falling faster and so Blu-ray has at least slow downed the bleeding, but I think it’s time studios start to think about ways to sell more copies of the movies, rather than to make more money per copy.

Not much happening in gaming as it’s still a couple of weeks away from official sales figures for September, which should tell us how well the PS3 Slim is doing, and whether the discount to the Xbox 360 Elite has worked or not. The Wii price drop has been confirmed as well, but it comes too late in September to really have an effect on the month’s sales figures. But the fact that Nintendo is doing it may suggest they’ve had a look at the September sales figures and weren’t really happy with what they saw. And there is also news of a further $50 rebate offer for the Xbox 360 Elite, which suggests that Microsoft weren’t that happy with what they saw as well.

That’s it for now, have a great week, and see you in about 168 hours time.

Posted in Computing, Copyright, 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 (27 September 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (20 September 2009)

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

Welcome back to another edition of the WNR. How was your week? I spent the week doing odd things, to be honest, I can’t really remember all that much about it, except I did waste a bit of time on Monopoly City Streets, except the cheaters on there makes it annoying for the rest of the players. It’s a good distraction, but I wish they’d put more thought into the rules before launching the game. Onto the news then.

In Copyright news, subtitle download sites are now under the spotlight in Israel, or rather, the people who upload subtitles to these sites are the ones being targeted. Three individuals have been sued for uploading subtitles to the site Qsubs, and have been ordered to pay $240,000 in damages each, and to further humiliate them, made to publicly apologise for uploading them.

Subtitle files are really just text files, but they are protected by copyright. But unlike things like film scripts (which a few places offer downloads for) which have legitimate use, subtitle files are mostly for use with pirated video files. For the files you make from your own DVDs, well, you can rip your own subtitles in most cases (technically breaking the DMCA or similar legislation), although legitimate use does exist when certain editions of the DVD do not have the subtitles you need, and since region control prohibits you from buying the other editions, using downloaded subtitles are the only way (although you may have to perform additional processing on said subtitle files because it all syncs up). Then there’s the issue that some US DVDs only have closed caption, which is not available in many other countries, and so if you have such a DVD, and you have convert it to XviD, you’ll need to source subtitle files for it from other editions. But these are pretty rare uses for downloaded subtitles, and in any case, copyright still exists for the ripped files. But suing individuals, while leaving the upload site alone, seems like a bit of a strange move.

Veoh wins their legal battle with Universal Music, which should make YouTube happy

And unexpected as it may be, there was a win in court for Veoh in their legal battle again Universal Music. Universal had sued Veoh for copyright abuse, due to music videos being uploaded by users of the video sharing website. YouTube came under a similar suit from Viacom. But the decision, which Universal will seek an appeal on, means that Veoh cannot be held fully responsible for the actions of its users, as long as it takes appropriate action in trying to combat copyright theft. Just like YouTube, Veoh has the ability for copyright holders to seek removal of content, and they have removed content deemed unauthorized on a regular basis, and this was enough for the judge to declare that Veoh has done enough not be to held responsible for those other uploads that it has failed to remove. After all, the responsibility of stopping copyright theft should be shared between copyright owners and websites like Veoh and YouTube, the copyright holders cannot simply demand that these websites, which deals with thousands of videos per day, to do all the work to protect their own content. And it certainly shouldn’t be considered “reasonable” for these websites to censor each and every piece of user generate content, as if this is true, then websites like Twitter and Facebook would have to be. As long as websites show they are making a genuine effort, I think, that should be enough. In any case, the legal boffins at YouTube should be delighted at the ruling, although Universal’s appeal may reverse the decision in due time.

Speaking of appeals, the service provider that was forced to disconnect The Pirate Bay via legal action initiated by the MPAA is appealing the decision. They had to disconnect TPB because the judge ruled that the service provider, which provided network services to the web host of The Pirate Bay, is liable for the content being made available using its services. This is a big ruling, and a very messy one, as these service providers may service an entire city or even country, and for them to be made liable for everything that is being hosted, essentially puts them out of business, and an end to the Internet. I keep on going back to this analogy, but again, this is like the phone company being made liable for the actions of criminals that are using their phone services. Except, this time, it’s not even the phone company we’re talking about, it’s the company that helped to lay the undersea cables that the phone company uses, being sued for someone using the phone to scam people. In real life, neither the phone company nor the cable layers would get sued (and if they do, they’ll win without question), but when it comes to the Internet, the largely clueless legal establishment are handing out rulings left and right that have huge repercussions that they are not close to being aware of. If the government should be taking any action on Internet piracy, it should be to establish clear guidelines as to jurisdiction, responsibility, and all those other legal definitions that make the legal system work, not to do the MPAA’s dirty work and denying it’s own citizens their right to communicate by kicking them off the Internet.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy, friend of the RIAA/MPAA

And it’s a shame, because the French government has just successfully licked clean the bottom of the RIAA/MPAA’s shoes by passing their version of the three-strikes rule, although not exactly what the music and movie studios wanted (they didn’t want that pesky thing called due process), it is still a extremely harsh piece of legislation which hopefully will be appealed. The legislation will even fine or ban anyone who lets other use their connection to download pirated content, and jail time could even be handed out for serious offenders. So if you pirated 3 songs, worth a total of $2.97, you might have to spend a year or two in prison for daring to do something so nasty to those poor poor billionaires at the music and movie studios. Jean Valjean would be rolling in his grave if he were in fact a real person and not a fictionalized character, so Victor Hugo will have to be doing the rolling.

Across the Channel, a group is seeking to add DRM to DTV by adding a piece of encrypted data to broadcasts, which can only be unlocked if you pay them money to buy the license to the decoder. It’s all in the name of stopping piracy of course, and the millions they are set to make in licensing fees is just a nice side effect, honest! Using the piracy bogeyman to scare the bejesus out of the government to force them to put in measures which allows you (or your lawyers) to make a bundle, while inconveniencing legitimate users and not stopping piracy at all – yep, that sounds about right as the MPAA is doing exactly this with the FCC at the moment. If only the rest of the world behaved in the same way as the Japanese, then groups like the MPAA won’t even have to make this effort. They can just bring out the DRM in force and make people use it, which is why all new Japanese phones will now have DRM to prevent playback of anything that it may detect as illegal, including songs and movies you’ve ripped from your own collections. This would also mean that anytime you want to play a song, you’ll have to connect to the Internet to have it checked by the powers that be to ensure you are not in fact a dirty pirate. Japan must be like some kind of utopia for the likes of the RIAA/MPAA, if phone companies can get away with doing something like this without a huge public backlash or government interference.

High Definition

In high def news, well, there wasn’t anything of real note to be honest. I could talk about Blu-ray sales numbers, but I’ve already covered them in this thread on a weekly basis. Or maybe talk about how all the studios are talking about bringing 3D movies to the home via Blu-ray, but I’ve talked about that before. Some websites are still talking about the Toshiba Blu-ray thing, which suggest there really isn’t that much happening right now. Things will certainly pick up as we get closer to the holiday period, and there are some big releases lined up for Blu-ray this season. So let’s skip high def news for this week and hope that there’s some news of substance soon.

And in gaming, as predicted, firmware 3.01 for the PS3 has been released as a hotfix for many of the issues introduced by the disappointing 3.00 firmware. Sony needs to reduce the number of firmware updates and make each update more substantial (and bug free), because things are getting more ridiculous with each new firmware release. And despite having released tons of firmware updates, none of them have been as substantial or welcomed (relatively) as the New Xbox Experience update from Microsoft last year, which proves that quality, not quantity, is what people want.

Proof of the $50 Wii price drop?

And as for the Wii price drop, you can pretty much notch it up as “fact”, following more leaked catalogues (this time from Best Buy) showing the $50 price drop to come in this month. Is it enough to combat the resurgent PS3, and the Xbox 360 price drop? Price, I don’t think, is the Wii’s major problem. I think the novelty factor is wearing off a bit, and it’s going to be even less unique when Sony and Microsoft introduce their own motion systems, especially Microsoft’s controller-free Natal. Time for the Wii to concentrate on it’s core gamers, so a new Zelda game, a new Mario game or some new devices like Wii Fit, might be what’s needed. Wii Sports Resort helped, but more is needed.

That’s all the news I bothered to “report” on this week. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, 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 (20 September 2009)

Weekly News Roundup (13 September 2009)

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

I managed to get the August 2009 US video games sales analysis done, based on NPD stats as usual. August was an interesting month, with the PS3 price cut and the PS3 Slim announcements, plus the Xbox 360 price cut as well. September may prove to be even more interesting, with the PS3 Slim official going on sale right at the beginning of the month and the Xbox 360 price cut in full focus as well. But August was, in most areas, as expected, but Nintendo has got to be worrying a bit because it might lose its steady hold on second place in the hardware charts, and may even slip back to as much as fourth, depending on how successful the Xbox 360 price cut is. Other than that, it was a pretty quiet week with the US Labor Day holiday meaning no news for a couple of days. This allowed me to finally complete GTA IV, to gain the 100% completion stat (don’t believe me? Go to the Rockstar Social Club’s GTA IV 100% page, and search for my nick, LastMinuteGoal, which is the 3895th global entry if you sort by “joined”). Read it and weep (you read it, I weep as I realise the amount of time I’ve wasted trying to get this stat).

Let’s start with copyright news in this very quiet week, which means I’ll have to ramp up my rant-o-gizmo to fill the space. I can also write completely meaningless sentences that occupy a lot of space, which makes this WNR look more content rich at first glance, but not too much as to make it too boring to read or too much like the ramblings of a mad men, which does nobody any favours, unless of course you’re auditioning for the TV show of the same name, which I have yet to watch a single episode of, although I’ve been meaning to. I’ve heard good things about it.

With the above 85 useless words out of the way, do you still remember the Amazon Kindle thing? Well, it was a huge PR disaster for Amazon as they deleted 1984, of all books, from people’s Kindle e-Book reader remotely without their permission. They’ve apologised, issued refunds, and lots of other things, but the latest should finally settle matters once and for all. Or at least Amazon hopes so. They’ve promised to replace copies of the deleted books, this time with authorised copies, and this should restore people’s notes that were also lost when Amazon pulled the plug. Those that no longer want the books can choose to receive $30 gift certificates instead. It’s nice of them, but it’s too little too late, and while I doubt Amazon would pull a stunt like this in the future for fear or further backlash, but the fact of the matter is that the ability to do so remains, and DRM is still evil.

Redbox: Hollywood's latest target in their crusade against innovation

Hollywood’s latest target is Redbox, the DVD rental vending machine. Universal Studios, Fox and Warner Bros. have threatened to stop the supply of movies to Redbox, so they will no longer be able to rent out movies from these studios. Redbox had earlier made deals with Paramount and Sony, but the demands of these other studios were designed to basically to put Redbox out of business, and so at the moment, no deal seems likely. Amongst the demands are that Redbox destroy all rental copies they no longer need, which previously they sold cheaply on the second hand market. I won’t mention the environmental impact of this, but since Redbox has already agreed to this demand with Paramount and Sony, this wasn’t the major point of contention. What Universal and co. wanted was 40% of all of Redbox’s profit from the rental business as royalty, which is simply ridiculous and something they do not demand from other rental businesses. Also, they want to price fix the rentals to ensure it doesn’t go below $1.00 per night. And as if these demands weren’t enough, the studios also want Redbox to only rent movies 45 days after release, so as not to hurt the straight sales business. You might wonder why the studios want Redbox to fail? It could be because Redbox’s cheap rentals means less profits for studios, or that it might really hurt their sales business (although in my experience, people who buy movies will always buy them, and people who rent will rarely buy them, regardless of how many days you delay the availability of rentals). But I think it’s because studios fear losing control, and Redbox’s business model means studios have less and less control over how their discs are sold. It doesn’t matter if it benefits consumers, or that this could lead to bigger and better things, even for studios, as Redbox expands and perhaps gets into the digital download kiosk business. Change is what the Hollywood studios fear, change to their traditional business models for which they’ve gotten very rich on over the years. And it’s not the first time Hollywood has challenged innovation, as they did with VCRs (it was also Universal Studios, back then versus Betamax), DVRs, HDTV (see last week’s story on selectable output control), digital movie storage systems (like Kaleidescape) and digital downloads.

The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, one of the musician organizations opposed to a three-strikes system

The British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, organizations opposed to a three-strikes system

And it’s not just Hollywood, the music industry is even worse at dealing with change. The whole DRM’d music fiasco, which eventually forced the studios to back down, was a total waste of time and money. And now, their crusade against Internet users seems to be succeeding, at least when it comes to lobbying governments for three-strike Internet banning systems. But the studios claim they are only looking after the musicians, whose hard work does deserve to be rewarded, but do musicians really think that banning potential customers and fans from the Internet is really the solution? They do not. At least not the UK ones, as groups representing the likes of Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney have made it clear that they vehemently opposed to any such plans to ban people from the Internet. The Featured Artists Coalition, the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild have all called the three-strikes system as “extraordinarily negative”. They believe there are other ways to raise profits, like through integration with video games like the Guitar Hero series, and they are right. Video gaming is a growing business, often at the expense of music sales, as interactivity is what people crave these days. There are also other solutions, such as a subscription download system, or more focus on music video digital downloads, but just like Hollywood, the music studios want to protect their old way of doing things, which has also served them well, but perhaps no longer cuts it in today’s digital world.

Movies, music – software is another product that’s experiencing growing piracy. But again, the industry fails to grasp and take advantage of the changes in people’s needs, and their latest attempt at an anti-piracy video, dubbed the worst ever, proves this. It only shows how out of touch these industries are when it comes to dealing with piracy, and how they totally fail to connect to the current generation by using a modified campaign from the 90’s (against floppy disk piracy, no less) to fight piracy. The fact that the video compares a college student sharing some DVDs with professional pirates who are arrested and sent to prison, just shows how they are not grasping at the difference between piracy for profit and personal piracy. They’re also still assuming people do it because A, they don’t think they’ll get caught, and B, that they don’t know it’s illegal. They do know it’s illegal, and maybe they do think they won’t get caught (and statistically, they’re right), but most do it because they can’t afford to do anything else if they really really need a piece of software, or music or movie (academically, or even for social reasons, as you want to keep up with friends who do use said software or have watched and listened to the movie or music). It’s not an excuse, that is true, but it’s also a fact. The legal alternative is of course for the people who cannot afford it to not use it, but does that really help the software, music or movie industry? They don’t get any extra profit from people not using their products, and they certainly lose a lot of the Internet based hype surrounding tools like Photoshop, or the latest movie, or music video. And from the loss of this, they actually lose more money as a result. Of course, they could discount things to make it affordable, so that every person who pirates it now will become a loyal customer. And I suspect for a $300 piece of software, the number of people who pirate it will greatly outnumber the people who buy it, possibly by a factor of 100 to 1 – and so the companies can reduce prices by a factor of 100 (to $3) and still make the same amount of money, but they only need to reduce prices by a much smaller factor, and they will actually come out ahead. Would you still pirate Windows 7 if you could buy a copy for $49, as opposed to $199?

High Definition

Let’s move on to high def news. Sony is the latest manufacturer to add video streaming support to their Blu-ray player. This is actually kind of a big news, for the founding father of Blu-ray to adopt support for a form of video distribution that is seen as a competitor to Blu-ray, and perhaps even eventual successor once bandwidth catches up. Sony will add Netflix, YouTube and Slacker support to the BDP-N460.

Sony's BDP-N460 will feature Netflix, YouTube and Slacker integration

In the same news post, LG also announced that they’re adding Vudu support via a firmware update to their Blu-ray player range, which already includes impressive support for Netflix, YouTube and CinemaNow, as well as Wifi capabilities and support for home network media streaming. Samsung has been equally busy adding everything from YouTube support to MKV playback and USB drive input. It seems the disc playing capabilities of these players have been relegated to almost a side feature, as these “media boxes” (for want of a better description) can do a lot of things that were once limited to a cumbersome HTPC, or games consoles. And this is good for the consumer as they get these for no added cost, and great for the video streaming companies that can forgo expensive and usually ineffective set-top-box rollouts. And it’s all thanks to BD-Live, or rather, the requirement of BD-Live to include Internet connection capabilities on players (and to a lesser extent, Bonus-View, which requires on-board storage that can be used for video streaming, as well as downloads). And BD-Live being available so quickly after Blu-ray’s introduction is, in a small part, thanks to HD DVD’s mandatory Internet connection requirement, without which the Blu-ray people might not have had the competitive urge to ad what could be seen as a entry point or a Trojan Horse for a competing distribution service.

And lastly in gaming, Sony is still feeling great after the successful launch of the PS3 Slim, and the price cut that went along with it. What they’re not feeling too great about is perhaps the reaction to the PS3 3.00 firmware, which has disappointed a lot of PS3 owners. I know I talked about this last week, but this week, even Sony admitted that some of the changes brought about by the new firmware has been a failure, like the changes to the friend list, and they’ve suggested that changes are being made. So 3.01 shouldn’t be too far away, but it’s nice to know that they do respond to feedback, which they haven’t done enough in relation to firmware updates. And whoever thought that using a major version number like 3.00 was a good idea without introducing any major new features, should be sacked. It wasn’t even as if the previous firmware had reached 2.99 and there was no way to go by to 3.00, and even then, they should have done a 2.991. Don’t raise people’s expectations, especially when it comes to fanboys that have very active imaginations when it comes to pre-emptive gloating about how great the new firmware is going to be when it comes out.

So that’s all for this week. Should be more news next week, and with GTA IV out of the way, I might even bother to search the net and find some, although that Monopoly Cities Streets thing has been interesting me enough to suggest I might have found something else to occupy myself (please don’t put hazards on my streets, pretty please!). See you then.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (13 September 2009)

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Weekly News Roundup (11 October 2009)

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