DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

A week after the start of my combined Netflix and Hulu Plus experience, it has already changed the way I consume media. So much so that I actually rang up my cable provider this week and reduced my subscription to a cheaper package, since it turns out that apart from live sports, I’ve not watched a single thing on cable since I started my week’s trial. I also realised that there were tons of DVDs and Blu-rays that I probably would have never bought if I had Netflix all this time. Not to say that Netflix has all of the movies I want, far from it, but there were definitely discs that were impulse buys for me, including ones I purchased more than two years ago and have yet to watch, that could have been better enjoyed via Netflix.

Interestingly enough, there are a couple of Netflix related news this week as well. Let’s get started.

If there’s one thing that really confuses Hollywood, it’s the distinction between BitTorrent, the transfer protocol, BitTorrent, the company, and the BitTorrent that people refer to when they’re downloading tons of pirated movies and TV shows. To Hollywood, the three are synonymous.

Which is why by following the same reasoning, Hollywood should also declare HTTP to be illegal and “evil”. Because equating the three separate entities/acts above would be like equating HTTP, the transfer protocol, with Mozilla, the company that makes a popular software for the protocol, and the act of downloading pirated movies using HTTP from the web.

Release the hounds: Hollywood attacks indie studio for making a deal with the “devil”, BitTorrent Inc

So no surprise then when that the Hollywood attack hounds were released the instant indie film studio Cinedigm struck up a marketing deal with BitTorrent Inc to promote its new movie Arthur Newman. Calling the deal “a deal with the devil” and accusing Cinedigm of selling out for a bit of attention for its new Emily Blunt, Colin Firth flick, a studio exec who spoke to The Wrap anonymously also accused BitTorrent Inc for being “in it for themselves” as “they’re not in it for the health of the industry”.

So if a tech company doesn’t do everything for the health of the film industry, then they’re the bad guys? Well, that does explain why Hollywood has declared war on tech companies and the Internet in general.

Hollywood can either continue their war against a file transfer protocol, as silly as that sounds, or they can wake up and realise that, um, they’re IN A WAR WITH A FILE TRANSFER PROTOCOL!!

If people weren’t using BitTorrent to share files quickly and efficiently, they’d be using some other protocol to do it. And if legal content was available via this or other transfer methods, and at a price and package that’s reasonable, people will use it too.

Just like how it’s far easier to find something classic or obscure to watch on Netflix than to scour BitTorrent indexes for hardly seeded torrents. And that’s exactly why Netflix is doing more every second to stop illegal BitTorrent downloads than anonymous Hollywood execs bitching about a bloody transfer protocol.

According to Netflix’s Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos, whenever Netflix moves into a new territory and its popularity increases, BitTorrent traffic in the same region goes down too. It just goes to show that “good value and legal” can indeed compete with the “free and illegal”, especially if you can improve upon convenience. Whatever you say about the decreasing quality and quantify of Netflix content, for $8 a month, it still represents terrific value, and from a convenience point of view, it is hard to beat (compared to finding an active torrent, waiting for the download, maybe further processing to get it to work on the playback device, and then needing the storage capacity to permanently keep a library of downloads, most of which you’ll probably only ever watch once).

You can reduce the size of your disc collection by replacing ‘meh’ movies in your collection with a Netflix subscription

As for the argument between “ownership” and the rental/subscription model of Netflix, as we’ve found out recently, we don’t really own the digital stuff we buy anyway. For most content you will consume, you do it once and then never again. The only reason we “buy” is to ensure that if we want to access it in the future, we have that option. And these needs can be much better served by subscription streaming, especially if your library starts to get awfully big.

The stumbling blocks to the success of streaming at the moment are things like expiring content, content being removed, and the “Balkanisation” of streamable content. The latter means that with increasing competition in the sector, and Hollywood studios starting to see the dollar signs and getting pissed off that Netflix is benefiting too much, starts to pull content from Netflix; or offer different content exclusively to different services to maximize income; or add more time delays and geographical licensing restrictions to content, or even launch their own streaming services. Instead of one place where you can get almost everything, you may then need to have several subscriptions to achieve the same. That’s the unfortunate and greed driven direction we seemed to be headed towards.

On one of these issues at least, Sarandos is working hard to change the status quo. What he wants is “ubiquitous global licencing”, where a single license allows Netflix the right to distribute all around the world. It is what Netflix is doing with its own original content, making it available everywhere, and it’s their attempt to start a new trend that they hope Hollywood will warm to, even if it may take years. I won’t be holding my breath.

In further Netflix news, a new NPD study has revealed that within a year, there will be more streaming player in the US than Blu-ray players. Of all the streaming services, Netflix remains the leader, with 40% of all connected TV users using Netflix, compared to only 17% that use YouTube and 11% that use Hulu Plus.

An interesting new trend also appears to be developing, with dedicated streaming media players like Apple TV or Roku becoming more popular. NPD puts it down to these devices being optimized for streaming content delivery, as opposed to the streaming functions of connected devices like Blu-ray players and TVs, whose implementations are often best described as an “afterthought”.

In a different study, it was found that gamers in the US are spending a quarter of the time streaming videos on their consoles. Devices like game consoles, Blu-ray players and connected TVs are the gateway devices for streaming, and their prevalence in people’s home can explain why streaming is going from strength to strength.

——

The meta moment of the week goes to the developers of business simulation game ‘Game Dev Tycoon’, for adding a novel anti-piracy feature into their game: pirate the game, and you get piracy inside the game!

Pirate the game Game Dev Tycoon, and you get piracy inside the game!

The game tasks the player to create and run their own game development company. Trying to highlight the problem of piracy, one of the makers of the game, Patrick Klug, posted a special “cracked” version of the game on a popular BitTorrent website. Within a day, nearly 94% of all those playing the game were using the pirated version.

But gamers of the pirated version soon started noticing that they would be getting an unfair amount of piracy for the virtual games produced by their virtual game companies, to the point where their companies would go bankrupt. It appears they have just been punked by Klug. Klug says his deliberate release of a crippled “pirated” version of  his game was an attempt to educated pirates, to hold “a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers”.

A novel approach to anti-piracy, but perhaps an even more novel approach to promoting the game. Had Klug not uploaded the “sabotaged” pirated version, it’s unlikely Game Dev Tycoon would be making the news headlines as it did this week, and even more unlikely for the game to have so many players (even if 94% didn’t pay for it). This is actually more akin to a demo disguised as a pirated version, and there may be something to this approach if Game Dev Tycoon’s sales increase because of this little stunt.

Most funny was the way some pirates reported the problem. One even asked if there was a way to research “DRM” in the game so that the piracy plague could be stopped, while another lamented the fact that far too many people were pirating his virtual creations, not aware of the delicious irony contained within the statement.

I don’t know if Game Dev Tycoon features an option to research DRM in the game or not, but if it does, I hope the game doesn’t actually reward the player for doing it. Doing so would perpetuate the myth that DRM actually stops or reduces piracy, as in most cases, it does not.

What is does is to punish paying customers, while doing very little to hinder the efforts of hardcore pirates and crackers. It may also help publishers and device makers to lock up market share, which just piles on more pain for the paying customer.

So when sci-fi publisher Tor decided to make all of its ebooks DRM free about a year ago, it was a breath of fresh air that the ebook industry needed. Here was an imprint that belongs to publishing behemoth Macmillan ditching the accepted notion that you have to have DRM. The move itself was bold and risky, but made more palatable by the fact that authors and readers, not to mention bloggers and commentators such as myself, were all in full support of the move.

The only doubt left was whether the move would lead to an avalanche of piracy for Tor ebooks, now that they’ve become so easily to share and copy online.

DRM doesn’t work, and ebook publisher Tor has the stats to prove it

The resulting piracy wave? Nothing. Nada. Or in Tor’s own words, “no discernible increase in piracy”. The only response have been hugely positive ones from readers and authors, praising Tor for having the guts to do the right thing.

But is anybody really surprised though at the results of this DRM-free experiment? You take something that doesn’t work, and everybody hates, and you just sort of, ah, chuck it away. Chop it off. Smash it to bits. And guess what? You end up with a better product!

People who pirate will still pirate, and the source may now be a DRM-free Tor ebook, but all that’s changed from before was perhaps the trivial step of somebody removing the DRM before sharing. It has perhaps made the life of one pirate distributor easier by a tiny bit, but it would have made no difference to people downloading. Hence “no discernible increase in piracy”.

The only other argument that people could have made against Tor’s move was one of moral hazard. That even if DRM was ineffective, it was a message to people out there that piracy is not being tolerated. The problem with this argument is that people don’t care, and by the time somebody downloads a pirated copy, the DRM would have been long gone and they may never have been aware of its existence in the first place. It’s like those “don’t pirate this movie” messages you only see at the start of legally purchased DVDs, but never on pirated ones (which made the pirated ones a better product for not making you sit through the un-skippable nonsense).

That’s it for the week. Hope you enjoyed this issue of the WNR. I’ll go back to finishing watching Hotel Rwanda and then a couple of episodes of The Shield – all with no discs loading involved. See you next week.

As part of a new project I’m working on for our Australian readers, I’ve been testing out the various US based video streaming services. Man, you guys are really really spoiled in terms of content and price. Take Netflix for example – if it had been launched here first in Australia, the price would never have been $7.99 per month. More like $79 per month, probably with less content and more restrictions as well. And it’s not just content and price, it’s also quality. To put it into perspective, Netflix Super HD’s maximum quality is probably better than anything we see in broadcast here in Australia, and that includes the $100+ per month HD cable I’m paying for.

I just hope I have enough bandwidth. I thought 300GB per month would be more than enough when I switched a month ago, but having used 15GB per day for 3 out of the last 5 days, I’m not so sure now.

Despite the Netflix (and Hulu Plus) bingeing, I did manage to get some work done (plus the bingeing was part of work, um, yes), so here’s the WNR.

Microsoft, maybe. But Google, the BBC and Netflix as bad guys? Most people won’t think that. But when it comes to adding DRM to HTML5, all of them are indeed on the wrong side of the issue.

The reason these companies all want to ditch Flash or even Microsoft’s own Silverlight is that with HTML5 and native support by modern browsers, it makes writing video applications for PCs (and tablets and smartphones) that much easier. Instead of maintaining a dozen different apps for different platforms, you can build a HTML5 based one and customize that for each platform.

It’s still not too late to stop DRM being added to HTML5

But in order for the switch to HTML5 to happen, DRM must happen too. To be fair, the requirement for DRM doesn’t come from these tech companies, but from the media companies that supply them with content. So once again, the story becomes “Hollywood wants DRM”, which isn’t really isn’t news is it?

Still, adding DRM to HTML5, the first HTML standard to have it if Netflix and co get their wish, is bad news. Not only does it mean an expanded proliferation of DRM, it also endangers the free nature of the web itself.

But since everyone loves Netflix, and hates Silverlight and Flash, it’s gonna be hard to get people worked up about WWW DRM. This petition is probably the closest we’ll get to an Internet protest.

I don’t really get it though. Netflix’s $7.99 per month makes pirating anything that’s already on Netflix quite pointless. And releasers usually takes the paths of least resistance, which for movies would be via DVD/Blu-ray rips, and HDTV recordings for TV shows. The only time people will bother ripping a Netflix stream would be for exclusive shows like House of Cards (and only when another source isn’t available). But then again, for $7.99 per month, the only people who end up pirating would be those that you really can’t squeeze any money out of, so where’s the loss in profit?

——

If a government mandated filtering solution isn’t going to happen, and I hope it won’t, then the next best thing for Big Content may be a commercial solution. Up steps McAfee, as a new patent application filed by the company aims to add an anti-piracy filter to the company’s existing SiteAdvisor service.

SiteAdvisor is right now mainly used to blocks access to search engine result links for malicious or adult content, but this new patent seeks to expand the tool’s functionality to include copyright infringing content. So even if Google doesn’t filter out links to sites like The Pirate Bay, SiteAdvisor will step in and do it for them, although the system administrator will have to option to still allow visits to these sites (after the user is forced to read a warning message).

And if the companies behind the major security software tools can all be convinced to implement something like this, patent permitting, it would be like Christmas come early for the likes of the MPAA and RIAA. It won’t stop what I would like to call “persistent pirates” (they would have turned off SiteAdvisor or the equivalent feature in their security software from day one I suspect), but for the “casual pirates” that Hollywood and the music industry insists are prevalent, those that are unaware of their “seriousness” of their activities or lack the technical know-how to bypass these kind of filters, it might just be enough.

Watching Game of Thrones can be harder than actually winning the Game of Thrones

But I think most pirates know exactly what they’re doing, and why. Just like Australians who download Game of Thrones know the exact rationale behind their actions. Which is why it was fairly undiplomatic for US ambassador to Australia Jeffery Bleich to post a long-ish rant on Facebook calling Aussies that download GoT no good thieves, making Ambassador Jeffery just as popular as King Joffery in the process.

Once again the tired, and plainly wrong, analogy of theft was used, admittedly a very clumsy one involving stealing a book from your neighbour’s home that I’ve not seen before. Apparently, downloading a *copy* of a Game of Thrones episode is just the same as breaking in to your neighbour’s home and stealing a book. This analogy would only be true if Australians were actually going into other people’s homes and stealing hard-drives full of pirated GoT episodes, which ironically would actually make people think twice about piracy for fear of an unwanted home invasion. Or if Aussies broke into HBO headquarters and stole the original and only copy of GoT episodes.

The correct analogy of course is one that involves your neighbour taking the time and effort to photocopy all of his books and then leaving copies on the street for anyone to take. By taking a copy, you’ve committed copyright infringement. If the right (or wrong) people took copies, it may lead to lost sales and hurt the rights owners. It may even hurt them so much as to bankrupt them. But it’s not exactly home invasion and burglary, is it?

And what if one of the people who picked up a photocopied copy, a person that never intended to buy the book in the first place, love it so much that he went to the bookstore immediately and purchased a copy? Doesn’t this count as a gained sale? Hasn’t the publishers, only in this one isolated incident to be fair, benefited from piracy?

As for the rationale behind taking and not buying, what if the bookstore was located really far away, like in another country? Or that for no particularly good reason, you had to wait months in order to buy the book locally compared to other countries, and that when it does arrive, it’s only available in an expensive, leather-bound, big print edition that weighs a ton, instead of an edition that you might actually want? That photocopied copy might then start to look like the much better deal, even without considering the pricing differences.

But no, it’s much simpler to just trot out the tired out analogies about stealing, shoplifting, and burglary apparently, and the equally tired and frankly dishonest lines about job losses and billions being lost every year.

——

The Pirate Bay has moved home again this week. That’s twice (or three times, if you count the temporary move back to the .se domain) in two weeks. This time it’s Iceland that becomes The Pirate Bay’s new port, with the new .is domain name. Unlike the Greenland domain name authority’s self-censorship of The Pirate Bay, the Iceland equivalent says that a court would have to decide on the fate of the new .is domain name before they would be willing to take any action. And quite rightly so, because it’s not the place for a domain authority to be judge, jury and executioner.

I said last week that I wanted to wait another week to comment on the March NPD results, to see if more hardware numbers roll in. They haven’t, unfortunately. So analysis turns to a game of educated guessing. Thanks a lot, NPD!

But if I had to guess, I’d have to say that the Wii U probably didn’t sell very well in March. If you asked me to tell you why the Wii U is struggling, then I’d probably have to say that it was down to several factors.

Wii U sales remain sluggish because it isn’t a huge improvement on the 360/PS3, nor is it cheaper or a better media device

One, the Wii U’s hardware, while an improvement on the Wii, is barely an improvement on the more than half-a-decade old PS3 and Xbox 360. If Nintendo wanted to go after the hardcore gamers, the Wii U isn’t going to do it.

Two, casual gaming has moved on from the days of the Wii. Now, it’s all smartphones and tablets and really really cheap games. The Wii U has a tablet, but can it really do things, in a standalone fashion, that the iPad cannot? Plus, Wii U games are still expensive.

Three, the cost. With the PS3 and Xbox 360 getting to the end of their release cycles, the Wii U is just too expensive by comparison. It’s just not good value, as it doesn’t play Blu-ray like the PS3, and its media streaming capabilities aren’t better than the Xbox 360’s. The lack of game titles surely can’t help, even with the presence of first-party exclusives.

So while more first-party games will help the Wii U, but by holiday 2013, the much more impressive PS4 and Xbox 720 will be out and I suspect the the Wii U will look even more outdated by then. Which is a shame, because had the Wii U been here just a year earlier, it might have been a completely different story.

Speaking of stories, I must get back to mine on Netflix. So many things to watch, so little time. See you next week.

Plenty to go through in this downer of a week, so let’s not waste any time …

Is it still going on? Apparently, yes. Viacom is still suing Google’s YouTube for copyright infringement, despite a 2010 court ruling throwing out the case via a summary judgement in favor of Google/YouTube. That decision was appealed, partially successfully, and the case was directed back to the lower courts. But once again, Judge Louis Stanton has ruled in favor of Google, arguing that YouTube was under the protection of the DMCA’s Safe Harbor provision. And guess what? Viacom is going to appeal this decision too.

It’s all getting quite boring now, to be honest. The two companies are actually working side by side these days, so only Viacom knows what the point of the lawsuit is at the moment. That Viacom is still not letting go is probably more face saving than an actual sense of feeling wronged, and whatever YouTube has done in the past, what it does now (in terms of what users do with the service, and what YouTube does for content holders) is so far removed from what went on before, it’s practically like suing a different website.

Just move on Viacom. Everybody’s bored already, including  the judges, and probably your shareholders as well. Concentrate on actually making content that people want to pay for, instead of blaming everyone else for your woes.

Speaking of things that people actually want to pay for, Netflix’s plan to fight off its old and new subscription-VOD competitors appears to be working, as its original programming has helped the company to gain new subscribers. But it’s Netflix’s old business, the DVD (and Blu-ray) rental one, that is now becoming a risk for the company, an analyst has warned.

Netflix’s growth is dependent on revenue from its disc based business, but with that shrinking, Netflix may be at risk says analyst

While Netflix has over 29 million streaming subscribers, 64% of the company’s 2013 revenue is still expected to come from disc based subscribers. In other words, disc rentals are funding Netflix’s streaming expansion plans, and with disc revenue expected to continue to fall, it could endanger Netflix’s plan to expand to more locations around the world, as well as fund new original programs.

If anything, it seems Netflix’s current problem stem from the fact that it’s too good for its price of $7.99 per month. Compare to say HBO, who can get away with $15 per month for only a few hit shows, Netflix, now with original programming, offers much more (and an essential babysitting tool for any parent or guardian). The increasing cost of securing rights to shows and movies, and increasing competition from the likes of Amazon and Redbox, all means that Netflix is still over-reliant on its declining disc based business to keep the company profitable and in expansion mode.

Subscription VOD is currently stuck with the low cost model first pioneered by Netflix, but I suspect going forward, there will need to be tweaks to the pricing model. Perhaps we’ll see an introduction to a “premium” subscription tier that includes more fresh and original content than the “basic” $7.99 package, and that may be needed to offset the billions Netflix currently spends on licensing and production.

And who wouldn’t pay another $5 or even $10 per month if it meant they could watch new seasons of shows like House of Cards and Arrested Development?

——

It didn’t incite as much hatred as SOPA, but CISPA may be just as bad, and unfortunately, the US House of Reps passed it with an overwhelming majority on Thursday. The CISPA cybersecurity bill will enable private business to share all your most private information with any government agency that requests it, and allows warrant-less database searches. Emails, photos and even passwords could all be shared with government agencies against your will, and there’s nothing you can do about it – CISPA ensure this.

Typically, supporters of this overreaching bill says that it’s targeting terrorists not ordinary citizens, and Rep. McCaul of Texas drove home this point even more clearly by actually using the terrible events in Boston as justification for CISPA.

But unlike SOPA, there isn’t the united front against CISPA that can work together to kill it off before it becomes law. For one, the likes of Apple, Google and Yahoo are cautiously supporting CISPA, despite opposition from the likes of the EFF and the ACLU. At least this time, the White House seems to be on our side, with President Obama threatening to veto the bill in its current form, and the Senate, having already turned away a previous version of CISPA once before, may have something to say about it too.

Sony says they’re not going to make the same mistakes they made with their PS3 launch, and will launch the PS4 at a good price.

Could a cheaper Xbox 360 keep the console alive when the Xbox 720 and PS4 (also to be cheaper at launch) arrives?

The PS3 was launched at a price that was a lot higher than that of rival consoles at the time (in Australia, the launch price of the 60GB console was close to the $USD 900 mark). This was despite Sony still losing money on each console sold. The reason for the high price was the included Blu-ray drive, and Sony argued that since Blu-ray players were quite expensive at the time, the PS3 actually represented good value for those also looking for a Blu-ray player.

This move paid off by ensuring Blu-ray won the highly tedious HD wars, but the victory came at the cost of lost market share to the likes of Nintendo and Microsoft. It also ensured Sony lost a ton of money for the first few years of the PS3.

But with Blu-ray players worth almost nothing these days (saw one today advertised for $USD 40), there aren’t any reasons why the PS4’s price point should be any higher than that of its rivals.

Although it could still be a lot higher than that of the Xbox 360, as Microsoft may be releasing a $99 version of the console to be launched along with the Xbox 720. It may be a response to the Xbox 720’s lack of backwards compatibility, but it could also be a move on Microsoft’s part to add new customers for the console. It might target those that want it as a cheap media streamer, with the added bonus of heaps of games of all types, from the casual/family to the hardcore. The only thing better than it would be a $99 PS3 (hint, hint)!

The cheap Xbox 360 and the cheaper (on debut) PS4 should help lift video game sales, but for now, things are still stuck in the doldrums. The March 2013 NPD US video game sales data has been released, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was top of the consoles with 261,000 units solds, but still down nearly 30% compared to a year ago. I actually want to wait a bit to see if any more data emerges for the Wii U in particular before commenting further on March’s NPD results, so let’s talk about it next week.

And that’s it for this edition of the WNR. See you next week.

A mixture of boredom, creativity and a desire to play SimCity (the game has been so cruel to me, I guess it must be some kind of Stockholm Syndrome), I decided to start writing fake SimCity news and publishing it on my own fake online newspaper. Introducing The Simsville Bugle, reporting the latest news as told from the perspective of citizens of my very real SimCity city, Simsville, home of the Fighting Llamas. What do Simsvillians think of the recycling center bug, or the poor traffic algorithm in the game, that once you have an University, you no longer need to have a grade school or high school, or the fact that you have to put a water pumping station to suck in the outflow from the sewerage processing facility to have enough water for a large city? Read all about it in The Simsville Bugle!

Yep you guessed it, a slow week.

Consumer rights took a blow this week as a New York federal court confirmed the notion that none of us owns the the digital content we buy. Or more precisely, what we buy in digital form is not the same as our purchases in physical form.

The case involved start-up ReDigi, who came up with the novel idea of allowing users to sell their iTunes collection. This did not go down well with record labels, and one of them, Capitol Records, sued ReDigi for copyright infringement. This week, the court sided with Capitol and basically confirmed what we have all suspected, that we don’t really own the stuff we buy, we merely license it.

Buying a DVD or Blu-ray may not yield much resale value, but at least there is a resale value, unlike digital buys

To be fair, this has always been the case. Just because you purchased a Michael Jackson Thriller CD, it does not mean you actually own the music contained on it. You licensed it, but you did own the CD from a re-sale point of view, because of the first-sale doctrine that limits the rights of the copyright holder of the recording, Sony BMG in this case, from interfering with what you intended to do with the CD once you purchased it.

But first-sale has never applied to purely digital content, and so the court had to side with Capitol. Without the transfer an actual physical object, all you’re doing when you part with your hard earned 99 cents is buying the right to license the music for personal use, usually tied to the platform you purchased on or in the case of DRM, the actual digital copy of the file you purchased. You also normally get less rights in terms of returns and refunds, as many who “purchased” SimCity on Origin found out when they tried to get a refund (those who purchased via Amazon had better luck).

Which begs the question, if what I’m buying has no re-sale value, and usually cannot be returned for even a partial refund, then why do content holders continue to price digital content at the same or almost the same price point as physical purchases?

But I guess given the popularity of iTunes, Steam and other digital outlets, consumers don’t seem to mind too much. I’ve even read stories of people who sold their movie collection and converted it all to iTunes “purchases”. I guess the convenience of digital outweighs the reduced rights you would get as a consumer compared to physical buys. But we are getting less for our money, and so it only makes sense we should be parting with less of our money in the process. Much less!

——

Things did not go as planned for The Pirate Bay this week, as a switch to a new .gl domain name was halted and reversed by an uncooperative domain registrar, and for now, .se is still the home of TPB.

The switch came about due to fears of the .se domain names being seized, but a move to Greenland’s .gl was not happening either, as the company responsible for managing .gl domain names refused to get involved with the controversial company.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at this week’s events, since service providers have been scared to the point where they’re more than willing to do the dirty work of rights holders without much pressure.

The Pirate Bay ship trying to find a friendly port to dock their domain name, but it’s not easy

The Pirate Bay says they still have plenty of domain names available for use if the .se domain gets seized, although the original .org one does still work, despite earlier fears that it might get seized too (that was a year ago, and the reason behind the initial switch to the .se domain name). Not that changing domain names would really affect The Pirate Bay that much – they could use the domain name ItchyMonkeyNuts.info and they would still be popular, and easily found!

In sort of related news, Google has bowed to pressure from the likes of the RIAA and will allow unlimited DMCA takedown request submissions for “trusted” participants, according to a report by TorrentFreak.

The RIAA has been critical of Google in the past, accusing the search giant of limiting the number of DMCA takedown notices. Google said at the time that this was a technical limitation, and also in place  to avoid abuse, but they will now allow trusted groups like the RIAA, MPAA and the BPI to circumvent these limitations.

The relaxation of these limits should see the number of takedown notices soar from the current high of around 20 million per month. In just over a year, the number of notices sent per week has increased from about 300,000 to nearly 4.5 million.

Game publisher EA has been named The Worst Company in America, two years in a row. Coming after the whole ongoing SimCity fiasco, perhaps the title “worst company in America” might be a slight exaggeration, but the worst gaming company in the world might not be stretching things too much either.

The Simsville Bugle has all the latest news from the SimCity city of Simsville

It’s not just SimCity though. Mass Effect 3’s rushed ending, selling FIFA 12 on the Wii as FIFA 13 with a few minor changes, the excessive use (or is that “abuse”) of DLCs, and the cynical milking of loyal gamer’s goodwill with mediocre sequels, have all added to EA’s bad reputation. This video tries to explain why EA’s actions are hurting the gaming industry as a whole, why we may be close to another gaming industry crash, and it’s worth a watch, despite its length.

Games are bigger and more expensive to make these days, and so this either means the risky move of taking more time to make a good game (like what Valve does), or the more cynical move to churn out as many games as possible in the shortest time possible and abuse a franchise to death, or incomplete and untested games that gets “fixed” via future DLCs. More and more companies are doing the latter and taking the gamer for granted, which is exactly what happened before the video game crashes of yesteryear.

And that’s it for the real news of the week, time for me to go away and write some fake news for The Bugle. See you next week.

Maybe it’s the post-Easter lull, or I was just even lazier than usual (“that’s not even possible”, I hear you say), but it’s been a spectacular boring week in terms of news this week. After reading the 86th story on how many people illegally downloaded a Game of Thrones, and in the days after I wrote my piece on it, I mean, really?

So as you’ve guessed, this is going to be a really really short WNR. Not my fault. Not really. Maybe a little.

Before we get to the only story of the week (I know, I know), there were a few notable mentions – stories not good enough to warrant an whole article, but still interesting.

Game cancelled for bad console, or bad game cancelled for console, depends on which way you want to spin it!

First up is the non story about Aliens: Colonial Marines being cancelled on the Wii U. Now, I could have spun into a story about how developers were abandoning the Wii, due to the poor sales figures. But I think it’s really just a case of developer abandoning poorly designed and implemented game. I wish more developers would do that, especially with games based on established franchises, and spare the rest of us the disappointment and frustration that comes from ruining our cherished memories of classics of days gone by.

This article in the WSJ is quite interesting, but has a bout of too-long-didn’t-read about it (to be fair, anything over 140 characters these days are labeled by some as tl;dr, but I do recommend you read this one). It’s about how content industries in the US come up with their controversial calculated losses due to piracy, and the debate surrounding just how much damage web piracy is having on sales. Even the MPAA has backed away from earlier studies that put the estimated cost to the economy at anywhere between millions and billions. I don’t think there’s any doubt that piracy is hurting sales, but how much is the million to billion dollar question. My estimate put losses at $275.5 million per year. It’s true that I pulled that number out of my @$$, but it’s probably no more or less accurate than any other figure out there.

How long before the Google notice about a DMCA complain is subject to its own DMCA complain?

The ever informative TorrentFreak this week has another wacky story about Google DMCA takedowns, this time a rights holder has asked the actual DMCA takendown notice to be taken down. Whenever Google receives a DMCA takedown request, a copy of it is posted at Chilling Effects, and Google’s search results will usually post a notice with a link to the relevant Chilling Effects page for the notice. But as TorrentFreak notes, it doesn’t take much effort to take the Chilling Effects database of infringing links, and create “one of the largest pirate search engines available” from the data there. So taking down the infringement notice is the logical thing to do, except that this creates another Chilling Effects page, which will need to be taken down again in due time, and on and on we continue until we’re stuck in the deepest level, Limbo.

And now onto the Game of Thrones news I talked about earlier.

Holy crap! GoT Giants!

Despite the best efforts of HBO, by shortening the artificial airing delays for the latest episodes of Game of Thrones outside of the U.S., the first episode of season 3 of the hit show has still managed to break piracy records.

At one point, the most popular torrent for GoT had more than 160,000 peers, and only a day after the show aired, it has already been downloaded more than a million times.

Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly if you actually live here, Australia was one of the top locations where the show was downloaded illegally. The show’s popularity in Australia isn’t the issue, and with only a 2-hour delay between the U.S. airing and the Australian subscription TV premier, access seems to be less of an issue as well (originally, subscribers had to wait 6 month for new episodes).

But pricing, I think, is still why so many Aussies turn to BitTorrent. Despite the country being a prosperous one by relative terms, the fact that we end up paying many times the price of people in the U.S. or even the U.K., means that many feel that the legal option cannot be considered as a reasonable option. The cheapest way to watch the latest GoT episodes, with “only” a two hour delay, costs at least $USD 63 per month, most likely double what people in the U.S. are made to pay (this gets you basic cable plus the movie channels, one of which shows the latest episode of HBO shows). Those that want to watch via the net, legally, are left with the option of an iTunes season pass at $35 for the HD version of the show, and a hefty 2-day delay for new episodes.

For now though, it seems HBO and the show’s creators, and even Australia’s subscription TV provider, are not pulling their hairs out over the piracy rate. The high piracy rate is a testament to the show’s popularity, and that’s something you can’t buy, and that’s a good thing. In the end, it all comes down to a simple formula: take the number of people who want to watch the show and subtract away the number of people who can actually afford to watch the show. With the first number really high, and the second number low because of cost and accessibility issues, it’s no wonder the piracy rate is so high, here in Australia, and elsewhere. Reducing piracy may end up lowering the first number without actually increasing the second number, which is totally not what you want (as the first one determines things like DVD and Blu-ray sales too).

That’s about it for this shortened edition of the WNR. Short and sweet. Like a Hobbit marinated in honey sauce. Hmm, soft and juicy Hobbitses.