DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

We’re in the final stretch of 2011 now, so soon, I will have to mentally note to write 2012 instead of 2011 whenever I need to write a date. Plus there’s the whole world ending thing. A few interesting news items to go through, so let’s get started.

There can’t be a copyright section without discussing SOPA, and while the Internet public once again showed how awesome they are on American Censorship Day, what with the 80,000+ phone calls made to Congress, the fight is still very much on.

And that’s the message Mozilla has been reminding people of this week, as they’re hoping for another day of action next Tuesday, and want people to commit to calling their Senators to oppose the senate version of SOPA, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Like SOPA, PIPA aims to do the same things, by making tax payers responsible for protecting the outdated business model of the music and entertainment industries, and sacrificing the stability and safety of the Internet to do it. I don’t like to discourage people from taking part, but I think we all know down in our hearts that these attempts will be futile, as Washington politicians are driven by their pursuit of corporate campaign donations, and have long since stopped fulfilling their duties to the people who actually put them in office (by voting, not buy paying for campaign ads). But it’s the only option we have, and it’s one we must exercise.

Rep Lamar Smith (R-TX) compares download a movie from the Internet to child pornography

What I find most disturbing about SOPA/PIPA, or maybe just predictable, is not that the RIAA/MPAA are pushing for it, but the others supporters. The involvement of the US Chamber of Commerce, in particular, because their M.O. has been to be the public face for corporations to behind. In this case, I think Big Pharma are involved, and they’re more interested in the counterfeiting part of SOPA. Counterfeit drugs should be stopped, as they’re either dangerous, or they do violate the earning rights of pharmaceutical companies, or both. But what Big Pharma may really be trying to achieve with SOPA is to block cheap, but perfectly legal (at least in other countries), alternative drugs. In the end, it always boil down to money. To greed. The fact that is SOPA/PIPA is passed, and the US government will be able to seize domain names of websites that are “dedicated” to selling cheap drugs for those who can’t afford it, and to force search engines to filter out results to these websites, is probably why Big Pharma are involved, why Pfizer was one of only 6 groups asked to testify at the SOPA hearings. We can also see Big Pharm’s involvement via their political lap dogs, and one of the co-sponsors of the bill, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas has perhaps revealed too much this week in a written rebuttal of criticism of his beloved SOPA bill. Completely dismissing concerns about censorship and freedom of speech (it’s not a core issue for our supposed democratically elected politicians these days), what interested me the most was how Smith chided Google for actively promoting “rogue foreign pharmacies that sold counterfeit and illegal drugs to U.S. patients”, and Smith has a history of introducing or supporting bills that would benefit Big Pharma.

Smith, like many other clueless politicians before him, also once again linked web piracy to child pornography. “Like online piracy, child pornography is a billion-dollar business operated online. It is also illegal. That’s why law enforcement officials are authorized to block access to child-porn sites,” Smith wrote in support of introducing new laws to block online piracy. I find this statement quite incredible really. Does Lamar Smith of Texas think that the only reason law enforcement take action against child-porn sites is because it’s a “billion-dollar business”? I think there are other issues involved, which Smith appears to not care about at all, such as the actual welfare of the exploited children perhaps? And any time a politicians tries to link web piracy to child porn, it doesn’t elevate the seriousness of web piracy, it only serves to devalue the serious of child exploitation. So unless Rep. Smith really thinks that child porn is no more serious than college students downloading the latest Harold & Kumar movie, he should retract his statement, or face being accused of downplaying the seriousness of a truly heinous crime.

But while the moral opposition to SOPA/PIPA is well justified, and the technical opposition that has mainly focussed on the dangers of messing with DNS is also quite valid, one aspect overlooked is that, like most plans to stop piracy, SOPA/PIPA may just not work, particularly the highly controversial search engine filtering part! TechDirt dug up some stats that showed websites that will be prime targets for SOPA/PIPA, like The Pirate Bay, only rely on search engines for a small part of their overall traffic. So even if Google introduced a block to remove all results from all suspected piracy websites, the majority of web pirates would not be affected. And blocking the large sites on Google will just encourage many more smaller sites to take their place, to fill up the holes in the search rankings for terms that carry lots of traffic. And stopping thousands and thousands of smaller websites is going to be a lot harder than stopping a single The Pirate Bay (and we know rights holders don’t want to do the work, so they’re not going to track down each domain name and fill in the right forms to get Google to remove them), and this fragmentation will actually make web piracy easier. And this is actually the preferred scenario – the likely scenario is that malware sites will probably move in, and all those piracy newbs that don’t know the domain name of the The Pirate Bay or don’t know that you can type it directly into your browser, will get redirected to malware sites and billions will be lost as a result (see, I can make up monetary loss figures too).

And the DNS/IP filtering, as I’ve explained before, can be easily bypassed as well by people who don’t mind putting in the extra work, and I’m never surprised at things people are willing to do for free stuff (I mean, just figuring out how to use BitTorrent, including port redirections and stuff, is much harder than switching to a non filtered DNS). And the group responsible for “defeating” Google’s anti-piracy auto-suggest filter is back, as MAFIAA Fire releases a new add-on for Firefox called The Pirate Bay Dancing, which aims to circumvent blocking and filtering by randomly using one of thousands of proxy servers. It promises to work with any blocked site, even ones that are banned for political reasons, in countries that the US is now trying to emulate.

And it is all about the money. RIAA and MPAA money, and money from corporations in general, have corrupted the American political system, but the same money corrupts the copyright system too, it seems. This follows a breaking scandal in the Netherlands where, ironically, an anti-piracy firm stole the music it used in those anti-piracy ads you find at the start of DVDs, and it follows the plight of the poor artist trying to recoup what he’s owed, only to come face to face with the corrupt copyright business. The composer, Melchior Rietveldt, was given a “deal” in which he would have to give 33% of his royalties to the boss of a royalty collection agency, or face the possibility of not getting any money back. So you have anti-piracy firms performing commercial piracy, and you have copyright licensing firms doing backdoor deals and pocketing the real artist’s money for themselves.

Skipping ahead to gaming, but still within the topic of copyright, we have Sony revealing details about the memory card for its upcoming PlayStation Vita portable console, and once again, it’s exactly what you would expect from a company like Sony.

Sony will force gamers to buy new proprietary memory cards for the PS Vita, at $120 for 32GB

The PlayStation Vita’s memory cards will be yet again another Sony proprietary format, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s a new proprietary format that only works with the Vita – even Sony’s own proprietary MemoryStick format was apparently not good enough. Sony says this has been for performance reasons, and that may be partly true, but everyone knows that security is the real concern here (if performance was such a big problem, then why not dictate that only class 10 high speed SD cards can be used, and perhaps even run a speed test on cards before they’re allowed to be used on the Vita). By making the Vita memory card a proprietary format stuffed with DRM, and removing compatibility for the card to be used as a mass storage device (so that the card can only be accessed via Sony’s proprietary software), Sony hopes that hackers can’t use the memory card as a platform to launch a hack into the system, to avoid what did happen with the PSP.

But Sony’s actions may have the opposite effect, as hackers will see this new system that appears to be harder to hack, and see it as a challenge. But if there’s a way to use something, there’s a way to hack it to do something else, and I don’t think this will change regardless of how difficult you make it for legitimate gamers, now forced to pay a premium for Sony’s memory cards ($120 for 32GB).

Following up last week’s story about game retailers such as Steam and Good Old Games urging publishers to compete with pirates on service, not just on price, I have my own personal story this week with just how difficult paying customers have it compared to pirates. I purchased the game Sins of a Solar Empire a while back, it’s a game that doesn’t have DRM and I thought I would show my support (but mainly because it was on sale – pricing is still very important, more on that later). I had played the game a while back, but that was on XP, and now that I wanted to get the game running on Windows 7. While the game is DRM free, the full purchase process involves buying from Stardock’s Impulse platform, which has recently been sold to GameStop, registering within Impulse to download the game – Impulse was not required when I originally installed the game in XP, as it was only needed for updates. The Impulse platform is an app like Steam, that allows you to purchase, download and organize your game collection. Unfortunately, the serial code for the game I had would not register on Impulse, and searching the web, this appears to be a common problem. The only solution is to email Impulse tech support, and that’s what I did. But the problem is that it left me with a game that I purchased, that I wanted to play right now, and I’m unable to as a paying customer. So instead, I did what many would have done in my position – I downloaded a pirated version of the game, from a file hosting/sharing website without having to commit any illegal “uploads”, so I could play it right away. It took Impulse tech support 3 days to answer my query, which was to provide a new serial that would register.

Crappy games, like Duke Nukem Forever, is still popular with game buyers because it's been heavily discounted

And pricing, I have to say, plays a big part in game purchases. And I’m not talking about must-have games, but rather, the games that you might think you’re interested in, but not so much that you would want to pay full prices for. Right now, piracy seems to be the most popular way to get these types of games, but for me, the various Steam sales have become the better alternative. I’ve bought a lot of games just because they’re cheap, and for $5, you can’t really go wrong. It’s this type of thinking and impulse buy that could drive the PC gaming market, and also prevent piracy (or monetize piracy, as downloaders “legalize” their pirated copies by buying a legit one on the cheap). I understand that you can’t release new games at this low price point, but for games that have received less than positive reviews, the price drop should happen much more quickly than it does right now (to be fair, some publishers have already started embracing this principle – badly received games are often now purchased up despite the bad reviews if the price is right – that’s money the publisher otherwise wouldn’t have had, or wouldn’t even deserve for publishing a bad game).

Alright, enough ranting for this week – gotta save something for next week. See you then.

Steam's Autumn Sale is on, and if you're like me, then credit card (or PayPal account) will take a pounding as a result - and to make things worse, Steam's holiday sale is just around the corner!

Hope you’ve had a nice week, perhaps even a night Black Friday deals week. If you’re like me, then your wallet has taken a pounding, despite the Blu-ray and game deals being not all that great so far. The Amazon US/UK Black Friday Blu-ray sales, especially the spotlight/lightning sale items, have been generally disappoint though, not that it has stopped me buying a dozen or two Blu-ray’s, mostly from the BF general sales categories. Steam’s Autumn Sale is a bit more interesting, still has one more day to run, but the titles I really want haven’t really come up yet (snatched up Portal 2 and Orcs Must Die so far). Speaking of Steam and bargains, would you like some free Steam games? If so, and if you have luck with competitions and stuff, then you should try Steam Gifts, which is now open to sign-ups (no more invitations). The way it works is that you periodically get “points” which you can use to enter competitions for games gifted by other users, and if you’re lucky, then you can get lots of free games (I’m not so lucky, 0 win out of 33 entries so far). Most competitions have a couple of hundred to a few thousand entries, so it’s not easy, but it’s probably easier than most other competitions, plus it’s all free. Just realised that it’s actually counter-productive for me to tell you about Steam Gifts, since more people will make it harder for me to win – so, if you can, forget what I just wrote, and whatever you do, *don’t* sign up. Thanks.

Continuing on from last week’s anti-SOPA stories, remember when Nancy Pelosi tweeted in support of opposition to SOPA. It seems an important endorsement of a growing movement, and as a progressive politician, it seems like the right thing to support.

Unfortunately though, it seems Pelosi is yet another politician in the pockets of the movie industry, as the “backflip”, or what Washington politicians call a “clarification” came soon after the tweet, declaring Pelosi’s continued support for the film industry’s fight against web piracy, blah blah blah. And people wonder why Congress only has a 9% approval rating, or why if it suits some lobbying agenda, that even tomato paste on pizzas can be declared a vegetable, made more ridiculous by the fact that tomatoes are a fruit.

But one politician sticking to true convictions is Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. He as the only senator to stand up PROTECT IP when it pass through the Senate’s own judiciary committee, and he did it by placing a hold on the bill, delaying the vote until 60 other senators get together to vote the hold down. PROTECT IP, if you don’t know, is SOPA’s uglier older brother, and both try to do the same thing – make the government responsible for the copyright enforcement of the movie and music industry, at tax payer expense, by destroying due process and possibly the entire Internet.

Senator Ron Wyden is fighting the good fight to preserve the Internet and your freedoms

Unfortunately, Senator Wyden concedes that the 60 votes needed may not be far away, and he is now going to use a more common tactic to delay the voting – a filibuster! Not only that, he’s asking those opposed to PROTECT IP (and SOPA) to submit their names to stopcensorship.org, and Senator Wyden will read out people’s names during the filibuster. It’s a nice touch, and I hope there are enough names submitted for Senator Wyden to have enough to read during his filibuster. If only all politicians were like Senator Wyden, and actually stood up for the public’s interest, as opposed to that of corporations, the US and the world would not be in the state it is.

For those that think there’s too much hyperbole when it comes to the threats attached to SOPA and PROTECT IP, that these aren’t really that dangerous and “normal” people won’t get affected by it, then if you want examples what governments that are too copyright-friendly can get up to, then here’s a story from Denmark. Like what SOPA and PROTECT IP will allow the US government to do, Denmark banned The Pirate Bay, and now, a blogger who simply posted instructions on bypassing the block has had his home searched, and could face up to 5 years in prison. You see, in order to allow for the enforcement of website bans, the government has also had to ban tools and techniques that bypass the ban, something that’s in SOPA as well. But many of tools that bypass website blocks are industry standard tools, and the techniques are fairly straight forward and are used for other things as well (such as trying to stay anonymous online), and  just as the EFF warned the other week, something that’s not thought out like SOPA could make a whole host of perfectly legal, and extremely useful tools and techniques for engineers and Internet businesses, illegal.

And so 19-year old law student Halfdan Timm found himself facing arrest by police at his school if he did not cooperate with a search of his flat, and police ransacked through everything, including his roommate’s room, and even through his dirty laundry. All of this was based on a “hunch” by the film industry’s anti-piracy agency in the country, and this could very well happen to more people in the US if SOPA or PROTECT IP passes.

Ironically, while "the pirate bay" related terms are removed from the suggestion list, the actual domain name is still the top linked recommendation due to its number one position on the search ranks

And while Google was doing its best to put some at least some kind of resistance to SOPA at the Congressional hearings, they’re again walking the tight rope between giving the film/music industry what it wants, and ensuring their own interests (and that of web searchers) are not compromised. So this week, Google added more “piracy related” keywords to its auto-suggest/complete blacklist, now including the term “the pirate bay”, “isohunt”, “fileserve” and basically all the major file-sharing websites. When a keyword is black listed, it will no longer come up as a suggested or auto-completed keyword in Google search, but the search result is not affected. But as I said when Google first introduced this “do no evil” feature back at the start of the year, it won’t really appease the rights holders, because what they’ve wanted from the start was for Google to actually filter the results (and SOPA/PROTECT IP will give them that). Google’s policy of appeasement was never going to work, and I think they should just stick to their guns and don’t accept blame for what people are searching for.

With SOPA/PROTECT IP, and the government intervening in copyright cases, the future of mass copyright lawsuits will become even more uncertain. Most of damage to their cause is being done by Righthaven these days, with their scattergun approach and their ability to pick the absolute worse people to sue (plus the whole suing people for newspaper articles repostings, is just not as “sexy” as suing big bad pirates for downloading illegal movies). Probably their worst target so far has been Democratic Underground, a progressive political forum where they simply love to be in this kind of fight, and choosing people *not* willing to put up a fight is exactly what mass copyright, pre-trial settlement fee extracting lawsuits are all about. Anyway, this week, Stephens Media, the backers of Righthaven and also their only major client left, conceded that Democratic Underground had fair use rights to use a five-sentence reposting of a Las- Vegas Review-Journal article. The admittance to fair use rights is actually kind of a biggie, since the other cases Righthaven lost have been mostly on procedural issues (the question whether Righthaven even had the right to sue on behalf of Stephens Media). A five-sentence posting, to me, is definitely fair use, as if it isn’t then even just posting a link with a headline for an article may become the target of a lawsuit in the future, and that’s just counter-productive for all involved. If anything, a 5-sentence excerpt is really free advertising for the newspaper, as people, if interested in the story, will click on the accompanying link to read more, while those not too interested will get the gist of the article without wasting the bandwidth of the newspaper website – a win win, really. So I have no idea why Righthaven even sued in the first place, it was a loser from the get go.

And with Righthaven dying a slow death, the Australian version of mass copyright lawsuits seems to have hit a snag before it has even started, with the VP of Movie Rights Group leaving the company, and the website for the firm going down. It’s definitely been quiet the last couple of weeks, ever since the first stories surfaced of MRG’s attempt to sue thousands. We’ve only really heard from ISPs about what they intend to do, but nothing much from MRG. And since Australian law is different from US law, perhaps MRG has hit some hurdles in their attempt to get customer data, or to approach them with settlement offers based on the threat of statutory and punitive damages. Nobody will shed any tears if MRG does disappear into the wilderness.

Technically still a copyright story, but I wanted to give a bit more variety to this WNR, so into the gaming section it goes.

Ubisoft may withdraw from the PC market, says senior company employees, due to piracy. Or not. The confusion comes from Ubisoft creative director Stanislas Mettra, and his rather angry rant at “bitching” PC gamers, although he later retracted his statements saying that as English wasn’t his first language, he probably meant something else when using the term “bitching”. But I’m sure he wasn’t trying to say that all PC gamers were female dogs, although that would explain why nobody is paying for anything (dogs don’t have pockets to put their wallets in, you see). But Ubisoft producer Sébastien Arnoult didn’t retract his statement that “95% of our consumers” are pirates (and consume as in play the game, as opposed “consumer” in the normal sense of the word), and saying that is the reason why Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will not be getting a PC version.

Ubisoft may stop making PC games because of piracy

Ubisoft’s own “bitching” about piracy is really getting stupid now, and it looks like they’re more than willing to shoot themselves in the foot once more by ditching the PC market. But to be fair, their stupid DRM probably already drove away their last remaining loyal PC gamers, so they really have nothing much left to lose.

But it’s ironic that two game retailers, Steam and Good Old Gaming, both came out to attack Ubisoft’s stance, and both are companies that have been very successful selling PC games even when everyone else was saying that the market is completely dead due to piracy. Steam’s Gabe Newell says that piracy is more of a service issue than a pricing issue, and that’s definitely true. He again points to markets like Russia which had been abandoned by companies like Ubisoft due to high piracy rates, but by abandoning the market and not producing a regional version of the game (with the right language), it left gamers with only a single choice – piracy. By providing faster regionalisation and better services, Russian is now Steam’s second largest market in Europe. Trevor Longino from Good Old Gaming agrees, because he sees piracy as an easier way to get and play games than the current loopholes that publishers want paying customers to jump through, via creating multiple accounts, and offline and online validation.

But I think pricing is definitely also an issue. Steam themselves have pointed to higher total revenue when games are priced significantly lower. With digital distribution, there’s no actual cost increase associated with selling more copies, the only extra cost comes from tech support and perhaps support for online features. Publishers don’t pay much attention to tech support anyway, so it’s not as if more gamers would strain their (lack of) service too much. And online features can have their own marketplaces, where gamers can buy additional items, and so more gamers equals more revenue normally. And this is why free-to-play seems to be a new business model, and even Ubisoft is getting in on the act with Ghost Recon Online.

But I think there’s a good balance between free-to-play, and “pre-paid” games that also have purchasable optional online content, and done in a better way than DLCs that add nothing to the game experience, which sadly is the case far too often these days.

My finger hurts, so it tells me it’s probably time to stop typing. See you next week.

Not a week with a lot of news, and a lot of important news. Oh, and welcome to another edition of the WNR by the way. Early in the week, I also completed the October 2011 NPD analysis, which showed once more the strength of the Xbox 360 in the US, once again the stop selling console for the month. Battlefield 3 was the best selling game as expected, but it’s looking more like the case that the game was rushed to market to beat Modern Warfare 3, at least on the PC platform. The copy I ordered from the UK finally arrived, and while it’s a bit more stable than the beta, but not by much. For one, I had the sound looping/stuttering problem, which was solved by changing the affinity of the bf3.exe process in Task Manger to a single core – seems to be a common problem but one that remains unfixed by DICE/EA. It’s a shame, because otherwise, this is a game trying to bring in new things to the FPS shooter genre, while Modern Warfare 3 seems all very samey samey. Alright, let’s get started.

There is only one issue that dominated this week’s headlines, and it’s SOPA. I bet the politicians that sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act didn’t expect the kind of public backlash that has happened, but if you try to mess with the Internet, expect a reaction.

I’m going to do this a bit different, so I’ll just briefly go through the news stories covering the week’s events, and then provide a bit more analysis on the whole thing. We start off with the EFF’s warnings against the dangers of SOPA, including ones that others haven’t thought of. Apparently, the bill is so broad that it calls into the legality of a lot of existing Internet tools and standards. Tools and standards like VPN, SSH could all be ruled illegal, as all could be used to bypass SOPA filters (and the legislation makes any tool that does that illegal). But with VPN, SSH, businesses would no longer be able to do anything securely on the Internet, and it could potentially cripple the economy. Of course, I’d doubt the government would have the guts to go after VPNs or SSH, but because the legislation is worded so badly, it gives the government the power to do so, and the copyright industry might just go after VPN and encrypted/anonymous downloading services if people start using these as ways to bypass SOPA.

As the Congressional hearing on SOPA was this week, Internet companies decided to make a stand this week against SOPA. The majors (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, eBay, AOL, LinkedIn, Mozilla and Zynga) all signed an open letter to Congress urging them to reconsider SOPA, with many others also urging Congress not to pass SOPA. And they need to stand up because their own interests may be hurt by SOPA, and they will be made the targets of copyright infringement as SOPA tries undo the DMCA’s ‘safe harbor’ provision. Plus, a lot of these firms have been fighting the good fight trying to support free speech in countries that want to curtail it, and if the US passes such a “draconian” (terms used by Google’s Eric Schmidt to describe SOPA) legislation, then the US loses its moral high ground on the matter, making global Internet censorship a step closer to reality.

This long infograph shows the full result of American Censorship Day, a day in which the Internet decided to fight back against pro-copyright interests

And finally, we have the hearing. A show trial if there ever was one, with one token voice against SOPA compared to the 5 that supported it. The US Chamber of Commerce was involved, as were drug company Pfizer (perhaps to try and highlight the counterfeiting aspect of the bill, but we all know it’s about movie and music downloads). As a rule of thumb, you should be against pretty much everything the US Chamber of Commerce supports, as the official sounding group is nothing more than a big business lobby group. Google was the only anti-SOPA voice as part of the very very small witness pool for such an important legislation, and even it was supportive of the “financial blockade” part of SOPA. No consumer, rights, public interest  groups were called up to testify. But while these groups, and other tech companies, were not heard at the hearing, they made their voices heard in other ways, as the day of the hearing was officially declared as the American Censhorship Day. The event, in which Digital Digest was proud to take part in, was supported by more than 6,000 other websites, including Mozilla (where I first heard about this event), in which websites blacked out their logos and linked to americancensorship.org or offered a splash page where site visitors could contact Congress to tell them to stop supporting SOPA. Tumblr did the best work by making it easy for people to make phone calls to Congress. But it was you and people like you in the end that made the most difference, with over 1,000,000 emails sent to Congress, 3,000 hand-written letters via sendwrite.com, and more than 87,000 phone calls to Congress, with some 1,293 hours spent talking with actual representatives (that’s 161 representatives talking non-stop for 8 hours!). Amazing effort by everyone!

Whether it will make a difference, I don’t know. But we already have Nancy Pelosi on the Democractic side and Darrell Issa on the Republican side tweeting their opposition, or at least reservations of SOPA, so that’s some progress I suppose. Also, the petition put up on the White House’s own petition website has now officially gone over the 25,000 signatures required for an official response from the White House, and the number of signatures is still climbing – 41,463 at last count. While I’m sure the response will emphasize the importance of stopping piracy and protecting jobs, basically a MPAA/RIAA press release, but at the very least, it tells those in the position of power that we are watching them, judging them, and if they choose to side with corporations against the interest of the people, we will make them accountable for their actions.

So the battle-lines have been drawn. Congress and the White House now needs to decide whether to act in the interest of the people that actually elected them, or in the interest of one industry (at the expense of another). The truth is that the Internet and Internet related industries account for more of the economy than the movie and music industries combined, and these industries are just as creative, if not more so, than Hollywood and the four major music labels, which create nothing, but merely profit from the work of real artists. They’re the middlemen in an era where their usefulness is diminishing by the day, and they know it too, and desperate enough to do anything to keep their dying business model alive, even if it means having to curtail the growth of the Internet. The US Chamber of Commerce is involved because they’re for anything that takes away the rights of consumer and give it to big business, like tort reform (watch HBO’s Hot Coffee documentary to find out why you should care). This is so much more than just about piracy.

Does CNET deserve to be sued for allowing people to download LimeWire?

I’m still not quite sure if FilmOn’s Alki David is serious about suing CNET for copyright infringement, or whether he’s trying to make a point after CNET’s parent company, CBS, sued his FilmOn for copyright infringement. Probably a bit of both perhaps, as David re-files his copyright infringement lawsuit against CBS/CNET for their distribution of the, now illegal, LimeWire software. Doing as he promised back in July when the lawsuit was withdraw, the lawsuit has been re-filed with more plaintiffs added, and it alleges that CNET profited from distributing LimeWire, and even promoted the use of it by providing tips and instructions on how to use it for site visitors. If David is trying to make a point, then I do agree with him that big media often acts hypocritically when it comes to copyright infringement, often stealing ideas, entire works from others, while blaming all their woes on college kids and other downloaders. But looking at this case in isolation, and as an operator of a download website, I can’t really see any merit in the case. LimeWire the network may be illegal, but the software that connects to it is just a tool, and should be no more illegal than say a browser that can also be used to download pirated content. And it’s yet another situation where apportion of blame seems to be far too wide ranging, because if individuals who shared songs on LimeWire is guilty of copyright infringement, and that extends to the operators of the network due to the court decision, then extending it further to third party websites that distributed the software means you might as well also sue the ISP that allowed the download to happen, and so on. The blame has to stop somewhere.

In HD/3D news, the fallout from WB’s botched launch of UltraViolet continues, with reports that Flixster, the app used to delivery WB’s UltraViolet movies, is giving away iTunes vouchers for those that complain about not being able to get the digital download/streaming working.

The idea behind UltraViolet seemed sound. One central system employed by all the movie studios (except Disney) that enables buyers of DVD/Blu-ray versions of movies to get a digital copy/stream version of the movie instantly, available to view on a variety of devices.

The actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired. As far as I know, it seems while UltraViolet is indeed one central system, and that all your “owned” movies are listed under one UltraViolet account regardless of which studios (other than Disney) you purchased disc was from, the actual delivery mechanism is left up to each studio. WB has chosen their own Flixster app to do the delivery, but a lot of people are having trouble with it.

200+ "one star" ratings for the UltraViolet Blu-ray edition of the latest Harry Potter movie, as people protest WB's poorly thought out implementation of the new cloud based digital copy service

The way it should work is that UltraViolet should act like the new iTunes, where it not only tracks your movie collection, but also delivers the movies via a single app, or better, just downloads that are compatible with multiple devices. There should only be one signup needed, and that’s when you use UltraViolet for the very first time. After that, it’s all about adding movies to your UltraViolet collection, and that should be done through the simplest method possible (barcode/QR code scanning from a tablet/phone, for example).

Otherwise, you’ll end up like the current WB rollout, where people are so angry they’re posting one-star reviews on Amazon to protest against UltraViolet, and where you have to give out iTunes vouchers, when Apple is actually one of the main competitors to UltraViolet. Hollywood really does get in its own way sometimes, especially when it comes to the whole Internet thing (remember when they thought that nobody wanted a Blu-ray player with an Internet connection and made the feature optional?)

Stop fighting the Internet, and embrace it, you stupid fools. Advice for all, I think.

And that’s probably a good note to end this edition of the WNR on. See you next week.

P.S: Black Friday sales on next week. It looks like the sale has already started with Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection [Blu-ray] already on sale for about $24 cheaper, with The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy Extended Edition [Blu-ray] also going on sale at $27 cheaper (might be even cheaper tomorrow, when the sale officially starts for this item).

Welcome to the October 2011 edition of our regular NPD US video game sales analysis. In this feature, we look at video game sales, both hardware and software, for the month of October 2011 based on data collected by the NPD. As we approach the holiday period, some big name releases are and will be coming out, and a lot will be riding on a successful holiday period, especially due to the otherwise subdued year in sales that 2011 has been. Nintendo will hope for a good holiday period for the Wii, the last major holiday period for the console that traditionally does great during this time. Sony will hope that the PS3 can at least keep up pace with the Xbox 360 following the recent price cut in the US, even as global sales are catching up if not caught up already for the only console on the market with Blu-ray capabilities. For Microsoft, the holiday period is about maintaining and extending their sales lead in 2011. And so, October becomes an important month, made more so by the release of the mega-hit Battlefield 3.

As NPD no longer releases full hardware sales figures, this feature is reliant on the game companies, namely Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, to release their set of figures and based on “statement math” (that is, arithmetically calculate missing figures based on statements made). For October 2011, these are the statements made by the gaming companies:

• Nintendo reveals the Wii sold nearly 250,000 units, more than 250,000 3DS consoles, and nearly 180,000 DS (via PR email)
• Microsoft revealed 393,000 Xbox 360 hardware units sold, with 44% of the home based console market share (source)
• Sony did not reveal any hardware figures

With only a rough estimate for the Wii numbers, it’s hard to come up with an exact figure for the PS3, but assuming Nintendo’s “nearly 250,000” is much closer than 250,000 than 240,000, then combined with the Microsoft released data (if 393,000 is 44%, then 100% is  893,182, and taking out the Wii and 360 numbers from this), we get roughly 250,000 units for PS3 sales.

And so the figures for US sales in October 2011 are below, ranked in order of number of sales (October 2010 figures also shown, including percentage change):

• Xbox 360: 393,000 (Total: 29.2 million; October 2010: 325,000 – up 21%)
• PS3: 250,000 (Total: 18 million; October 2010: 250,000 – no change)
• Wii: 250,000 (Total: 36.8 million; October 2010: 232,000 – up 8%)

NPD October 2011 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of October 2011)

My prediction from last month was:

I think the hardware situation will remain largely the same. Games wise, Batman: Arkham City and Battlefield 3 go head to head, with Forza 4 on the Xbox 360 possible making the top 10 as well as a platform exclusive.

Fairly close to the reality, I suppose, although the strength in which Battlefield 3 sold probably surprised everyone, despite the hype suggesting it was always going to do well. And the only other “surprise” is the PS3 numbers, and how close it came to actually selling fewer units than the Wii (and it may have done so too, since our “statement maths” above isn’t too accurate based on roundings and precision errors).

Starting with the healthiest number, the Xbox 360 had another amazing month, as not only did it managed to easily beat the other two consoles, it also managed year-on-year growth compared to October 2010 – no mean feat considering we had the “Slim”, price cut and Kinect to give sales a bump, and nothing like that this year. But 21% growth is nothing to be scoffed at, and it’s clear that, at least in the US, the Xbox 360 is the dominant console of this generation, despite Wii still having quite a large lead at the moment (but if you look at the number of active players, the number of hit games, the online multiplayer scene, the multimedia hub features – the Wii is not in the same league as the Xbox 360). Global Xbox 360 sales, while still leading the PS3 probably at this point, may give up its lead sometime soon, but if you have to pick a clear winner for this generation, then based on the growth of the platform and the long term effects on the next generation and beyond, the Xbox 360 is a clear winner.

The PS3 is by no means a loser, and if Sony keep to their word of a 10-year product life for the console (and Microsoft follow Nintendo’s lead and release a new console before then), then the PS3 might still end up being the best selling console of this generation, at least in global sales. But compared to the last generation, in which the PS2 outsold the Xbox by more than a 6-to-1 margin (and outsold Nintendo’s GameCube by even more), then you can’t but feel that while PS3 may eventually “win”, the victory is somewhat hollow when you consider the decline from the totally dominating position the PlayStation platform was in the last gen. Of course, this kind of dominance would never really be long lasting (just ask Sega, or Nintendo before the Wii), but the company’s lack of focus on online gaming, too much focus on Blu-ray and the subsequent delay to the release of the console, the relative developer unfriendly platform (which was always going to be to Microsoft, a software company’s, advantage), the lack of attention to family/social gaming (the Wii sucks, but here’s Move, our version of it), and various setbacks including the recent PSN hack, were all mistakes that could have been prevented or at least mitigated. So coming into the holiday period, with sales flat compared to the same month last year, and battling the Wii to be a distant second place, it’s not where Sony wanted to be (they had hoped most PS2 owners would have upgraded to a PS3 by now, but instead, the Xbox 360 and the Wii stepped in to fill the “hardcore” and “family fun” void).

The Wii, for what it was, and what it has achieved, is also a huge success. Sure, most Wii consoles are now gathering dust somewhere (guilty as charged), but for a slightly enhanced version of the GameCube with a new innovative control system, it has done amazingly well. But much of it has been at the expense of losing all hardcore gamers to the other platforms, a situation Nintendo wants to address with the graphically powerful Wii U (because hardcore gamers keep playing, and keep buying games, not so much casual gamers who get distracted easily as soon as a new tablet or smartphone hits the market). If the Wii was about getting Nintendo back in the game, and a game where they were close to “going the way of Sega” in the last gen (the Xbox sold more units than the GameCube, despite it being a clunky first effort by a company that has never done console gaming, compared to the pro that is Nintendo).

Don’t know why this analysis has turned into a “look back at” type of deal, considering this generation still has a long way to go, but it just felt appropriate for some reason, as this may be the last holiday period where these 3 consoles compete in.

Let’s move on to game sales. Battlefield 3 broke all records (before MW3 will do the same this/next month), which is no surprise. BF3 fever affected me personally as well, having played and be completely pwned in the beta, I was out for more punishment and so bought a copy of the PC version. In fact, I was so caught up in the fever, I actually bought two copies (long story)! With 10 million copies shipped (as in to retailer, with 5 million of these actually “sold”), it’s a success. Batman: Arkham City, in any other month, would have been the clear winner, oh well. Again highlighting the dominance of the Xbox 360 in the US, two platform exclusive titles, the newly released Forza 4 and last month’s Gears of War 3, were in the top 10, a difficult proposition for single platform releases, as they were up against all platforms combined sales figures for the multi-platform games. Also interesting is that Just Dance 3 managed a top 10 entry, despite not being available on the PS3 until December. Ubisoft hasn’t said why the PS3 version is delayed, but I’m sure Microsoft will notch it up as a victory for Kinect over the Move. Here’s the full software sales chart for October (new releases for October 2011 in bold):

1. Battlefield 3 (EA, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
2. Batman: Arkham City (Warner Bros, Xbox 360, PS3)
3. NBA 2K12 (Take-Two Interactive, Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, PSP, Wii, PC)
4. Rage (Bethesda, Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
5. Just Dance 3 (Ubisoft, Wii, Xbox 360)
6. Dark Souls (Namco, PS3, Xbox 360)
7. Madden NFL 12 (EA, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP)
8. Forza Motorsport 4 (Microsoft, Xbox 360)
9. Gears of War 3 (Microsoft, Xbox 360)
10. FIFA 12 (EA, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP, 3DS)

Time to make my usual prediction. It’s the holiday period proper, sales will be way up, and Modern Warfare 3 will help in this regard as it breaks all records. The Xbox 360, the preferred platform of MW3 and also with a new Halo game being released, will be the clear winner yet again, but it will be interesting to see if the Wii can have one last good holiday period, and there’s a new Zelda game too, so that always helps. The PS3 does have Uncharted 3 though. If I have to guess, I would say the PS3 will beat the Wii. The top games will be the ones I’ve already mentioned, plus Skyrim.

See you next month.

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Coming up with an introduction to the WNR is actually the hardest part of writing it, and I just cannot get my brain to come up with anything this week. I guess I would mention that the NPD stats for US video game sales in October has just been released, but I haven’t written up the analysis yet, so that’s that. Better get on with it then.

Let’s start with the copyright news, we start with the music industry lobby’s full attack on opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

The controversial SOPA, if passed, will give the music industry, amongst others, to avoid pesky things such as actual evidence when it comes to forcing the likes of PayPal or Mastercard from cutting off service to websites that the industry sees as a threat, as long as they can come up with some sort of explanation that the site is primarily involved in piracy. In fact, they don’t even have to do that. As long as the website is merely suspected of potentially wanting to hide their infringement activities, then SOPA will allow the rightsholders to intervene, even if at that point, it’s not even clear, let alone established by a court of law, that any infringement has even occurred. So potentially, all the industry have to say is that “I don’t like the look of that website”, and they can deal a potential death blow to that website. So no wonder opposition is coming in from all directions.

Remember how PayPal and others screwed Wikileaks? The RIAA wants the same, but for every website, not just Wikileaks.

But RIAA says that all of this nothing more by hyperbole, and that the music industry needs these changes to survive. Survive from mass piracy, or survive the move from CD albums sales towards digital tracks, they don’t say of course, but SOPA could very well be used to destroy innovation by an industry that’s obviously not looking towards the future. Imagine a new start-up that offers a brand new service that hurts the existing business model of the music industry, the RIAA can use SOPA to fire off an infringement notice to say the financial providers of the start-up website. Trying to avoid trouble, the financial providers cease support for the website, and the website dies a quick death. Sure, the owners of the website can sue the financial providers, but that would require money, which at that point, the start-up probably doesn’t have much of. This may very be an extreme, but no law should give so much power to one side, against the other, and to replace civil court matters with agreements and dealings behind closed doors by private corporations. And with the economy the way it is, the country can ill afford to allow old business interests to kill off new innovations, that are really at the forefront of job creation.

And the RIAA have been busy not only defending “their” SOPA bill, but also attacking the old DMCA, which if you can remember, was their work as well. Apparently, the “safe harbor” provision that was added to protect online businesses is working too well and actually offering protection to online businesses, which the RIAA says was not the intention behind the provision at all. They blame it all on judicial branch of the government, the branch that’s the hardest to corrupt via lobbyist money, for interpreting “safe habor” wrongly. In particular, they want ISPs and websites to be the judge, jury and executioner and to take proactive action against infringing content, what they call “red flags”, which is a very vague notion of “you’ll know (it’s piracy) when you see it”. Except these types of actions will open up ISPs and web businesses to potential lawsuits for removing the wrong content, and it’s difficult to judge what is right and what is wrong when you don’t even know what content belongs to whom, without the rights holders getting involved. The RIAA says this shouldn’t be a problem, and it isn’t, for them! It seems web piracy is the gravest problem facing the music industry, and at the same time, it’s a problem that the industry shouldn’t have to do anything about – because the government, tax payers, web businesses should be doing all the work, taking all the risks, while the rights holders  receives all the theoretical and perceived benefits.

Google says a lot of DMCA complaints are invalid, and most are being used to attack competitors

But then maybe it’s a good thing, because whenever the rights holders are given carte blanche rights to remove infringing content on the Internet, they tend to abuse those rights. Google revealed a few years ago that a third of all DMCA complains filed with the company were invalid, and the latest example is Warner Bros. abusing Hotfile’s infringing file removal tool. Despite being sued for promoting piracy, Hotfile actually had one of the stronger anti-piracy tools for rights holders, allowing them to basically delete any hosted files they want without any real limitations. Unfortunately, WB, when given access to the tool, abused it by deleting content that didn’t belong to them and even open source software, and this is not just Hotfile’s allegation – WB this week admitted to pretty much all of it as part of legal proceedings between the company. Once again highlighting why automated, technical solutions to piracy filtering doesn’t work, WB admitted that their piracy filters removed content that only shared a partial name to the content they were trying to remove. And doing a simple file name check implies WB definitely didn’t download the files and check whether it actually contained infringing content or not. WB also admitted to deleting a popular, open source downloading tool that they obviously had no rights to, and they justified it because the tool helped to speed up downloads, and of course, all downloads equals piracy in the eyes of Warner. And WB admitted to all of this “collateral damage”, and it seems they’re not too fussed about it either, as they’re still asking the judge to throw out Hotfile’s lawsuit against the studio for the allegation that the studio abused the DMCA, which Warner appears to have just confirmed.

Over to Europe and two ISP, and The Pirate Bay, related cases that could have implications everywhere else. With UK courts giving the okay for ISPs to start blocking websites for anti-piracy reasons, the BPI, UK’s branch of the RIAA, wasted no time in asking the same ISP, BT, to start blocking The Pirate Bay. Calling The Pirate Bay a “huge scam” (I would argue against that, since a website that has the word “pirate” in its title and domain name is not trying to fool anyone as to what the website is about), the BPI fearmongering engine went into overdrive. If you visit The Pirate Bay, apparently, your computer will get infected with viruses, trojans and herpes, your identity will be stolen, and you may even see “inappropriate content”. The BPI wasn’t clear what “inappropriate” meant, but since BPI specifically asked BT to use their child porn filter to filter out The Pirate Bay, the implicit suggestion is probably pretty clear. And of course, given the economy today, the talking point of “they toor ur jobs” was bought up, against suggesting that piracy destroys jobs, while creating none (and yet, the industry says ISPs, web businesses and individuals are making too much money off piracy).

The other story was in Dutch-land, where BREIN is at it again, this time asking two ISPs to also block The Pirate Bay. But the ISP, having already won a preliminary court case against this very matter, say that the proposed blocking method, by IP address and DNS, won’t work and may actually kill their network.

How DNS Works

But before we get into the details, a little background info may be needed here. The way the web works, each server has one or more IP addresses assigned to it, and the server software can present the right website for you based on the IP address (sometimes, a single IP address can host several websites, and the server software can tell which site to serve up via the domain name you used to get to the IP address). Domain names are matched to IP addresses via Domain Name System  (DNS), which is basically thousands upon thousands of servers world wide that stores a constantly updated database of domain name to IP address translations (as well as mail server information, and all sorts of stuff). When the website owner starts a new website or changes the IP addresses, he/she changes his primary DNS server’s information, and that change is propagated to every other server on the Internet to ensure all data is synced. If data is not synced, and this does happen, then you may see different websites depending on which DNS server you connected to.

So back to the BREIN case. They want both an IP address/range ban, and also a DNS filter put into place so that if subscribers of these ISPs type in The Pirate Bay domain name, the DNS server would not return the right results. The first one is problematic because, to avoid filters, TPB could change IP addresses every couple of days, and this means the ISPs have to constantly track the IP addresses. And because IP addresses can be recycled/re-assigned, they may end up blocking the wrong website if they’re not quick enough with their detection, thus opening themselves up to lawsuits. The DNS filter method, which is also the one being proposed in the US by Protect IP and one that has come under much attack by anyone who knows how the Internet works, breaks the Domain Name System by destroying the sync between DNS servers, and slow down or stop the propagation of DNS changes, which will cripple the entire Internet. Net neutrality, which the FCC fought for and lost, would become law under PROTECT IP, as each ISP will now be able to tell you which websites you can and cannot visit, and may even redirect one domain name to another website (for example, thepiratebay.org ends up going to mpaa.org). But for the two Dutch ISPs, Ziggo and Xs4all, the immediate problem with both IP and DNS filtering is the effect on their own networks, with the constant changes requiring network reboots that can bring down the entire network. But BREIN doesn’t really care, and I’m just going to copy/paste what I wrote earlier, “because the government, tax payers, web businesses should be doing all the work, taking all the risks, while the rights holders receives all the theoretical and perceived benefits.”

Game publishers, especially PC game publishers, like to complain a lot about piracy, but it always seemed odd to me that they never actually listen to the people that may know a thing or two about what makes consumers buy games – the retailers! Steam, in particularly, has been talking a lot about DRM and pricing (maybe less talk, and more action on security would have helped … I kid). And this week, it’s Good Old Game’s turn to diss DRM. Nothing we haven’t heard already though, DRM only affects legitimate paying customers, it doesn’t stop piracy … all the usual things you’ve read on here. But it seems publishers have it in their head that they need to make it as hard as possible for the pirates by using DRM, which kind of makes sense, but “hard” is a relative thing and it’s mostly quite easy for the piracy groups to crack DRM. The other ways is to tie in non-intrusive DRM with value-added services, such as in-game browsing, chatting, cloud saves, and achievements, which is what Steam has done with success. A lot of success it seems, as GOG also revealed that even for games published by their own company, Steam sells many more copies than on the official GOG service, 5 times as many and 20 times more than all the other digital distributors combined. But even with their power, publishers still hold a lot of power over Steam, particularly in terms of pricing (and regional pricing), so the next time you complain about something being too expensive on Steam or the overseas version of the store carrying cheaper prices, the publishers are to blame, not Steam, which has time and time again presented evidence that cheap games => more revenue.

Skipping HD/3D, and moving quickly onto gaming, mainly because the next story is also about Steam, and it’s not a good one for the company. Steam was hacked over the last week, at first it was only the forum, but it seems the hackers have got into the main Steam database as well and accessed, possibly not downloaded, the database including user details, hashed/salted passwords and even encrypted credit card numbers.

Obviously, getting hacked isn’t good, but with Steam relying on a third party forum software (vBulletin), it was always going to be a risk. But the emerging details seems to show that the database was at least somewhat secured, with both hashed/salted passwords and encrypted credit card numbers. The former simply means that the password, unlike with the PSN database, was not stored as plain text and stored as a hash, a supposedly unique representation of the password, but unlike encryption, it’s one way and (theoretically) cannot be reversed. A salt was also used to make the hashing much harder to reverse back to plain text, if at all possible. And the CC number encryption, assuming it was strong enough, should prevent hackers getting any meaningful data, which is probably why they didn’t bother to download the database.

The much-maligned Steam Guard may have limited the damage hackers could have done to Steam

And if you use Steam’s Steam Guard service (I know, the one everyone hates), your account should be even more secure as the hackers would need access to your email account to access your Steam account. Not that it isn’t possible, because if you used the same password for both Steam and your Steam associated email account, then that’s how a hacker might get in, in the small chance that they could reverse the password hash (quite easy if you’re using a dictionary word, I’m told). So if you value your Steam account, and we currently have a poll asking you how many games you have on Steam, then it might be wise to change your password, remove any stored credit card numbers on the Steam system (just enter it every time instead of saving it, if you’re like me and likes to shop online, you’ve got it memorized anyway), and maybe have a bit more respect for Steam Guard. Just a bit more, mind.

And, we’re already over the word limit, but I would just like to offer a preview of the October US video game sales analysis. The Xbox 360 won again, Wii sold nearly 150,000 units less than the 360, and Sony refused to divulge any data again, but from statement maths, the PS3 either just narrowly beat the Wii, or was actually slightly behind, not great going into the holiday period. Battlefield 3 killed everything other game like a level 43 camper against a team of rushing noobs, with a record 10 million copies shipped on all formats (but Modern Warfare 3 might have something about this next month). The full analysis will be upped in the next day or so.

Alright, that’s enough words from me. See you next week.