DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

It’s been a busy week on my end. The first piece of good news is that my Samsung 3D TV finally arrived, and it was delivered to me on Wednesday. I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but early impressions are very good indeed. Not sure I’m a huge fan of the 3D though, I’ve always felt it was a bit gimmicky, but I’m only buying the TV for the 2D – the 3D is a nice bonus that will keep me entertained for a bit and allow me to experiment with a few things (like perhaps providing some 3D trailers for you all to download in the near future). I also got a bit of work done, to my surprise. The much delayed NPD US video games sales figures for May were finally made available, and my analysis of it is here. No big surprises, but the video game industry is not immune to economic conditions, and so is still suffering. June will be interesting because the Xbox 360 “Slim” went on sale in the middle of the month, and we have the E3 hype as well. And in terms of other news, there were a few as well, so let’s get started (and finish quickly, so I can go play with my new TV).

Let’s start with the copyright news. A couple of weeks ago, the judge in the isoHunt copyright cased allowed the MPAA to submit keywords that would be censored on the BitTorrent search engine, but now the founder of isoHunt, Gary Fung, says that instead of trying to stop piracy, it’s now bordering on censorship, or at least an attempt to completely cripple isoHunt, even for the legal stuff.

Alexa's pageview ranking for Mininova shows that it's not easy for torrent sites to go legit

Part of Fung’s argument is that very keywords include common words such as “21” or “Dad”, as these are words used in movie titles. If you had a list of every movie title, then surely that would cover so many words as to make the search engine completely non effective. A more logical and fair way to do it would be to remove common words from the list of “banned” words, and to only block phrases, as opposed to just words (so “Born on the Fourth of July” would get blocked, but the keywords “Born”, “Fourth” and “July” aren’t blocked). But this decision was never about logic or fairness. It’s interesting to analyse the decision again given the recent YouTube ruling. Of course, YouTube’s main purposes contains a lot more “fair use” than say a Torrent download website, but the important aspect of the YouTube ruling was the copyright holders are partially responsible to locate and remove infringing content (after all, only they can decide what’s infringing, and what’s not), and putting it all on the website operator is not fair. So if isoHunt had a policy where they block out the obvious pirated torrents, and then add a function to allow studios to request removals of others, then that would be enough. Of course, whether isoHunt would still be viable as a commercial operation, without pirated content, is up for debate. Mininova was never the same after it removed all of its infringing content, but it’s still a relatively big website, although that may fade due to incoming links being removed and stuff.

ICE Officers raids and seize assets from nine websites suspected of offering pirated content

Following last week’s announcement of a crackdown on online piracy,  US Immigration and Customs (ICE) has acted quickly this week to close down and seize the assets of nine websites suspected of offering pirated content for online streaming. It’s good to see the government reacting so quickly to a current ‘crisis’, as opposed to say waiting days and weeks to get a response through. Like Katrina and BP’s Gulf of Mexico disaster. It’s good to know where the US government’s priorities are in these dangerous times, what with Hollywood studios on the verge of bankruptcy and everything. The other crime wave affecting the US right now is of course college students downloading films. And this is why Congress in 2008 passed the Higher Educational Opportunity Act which, amongst other things, forced educational institutions to join the fight against online piracy, or face the risk of losing federal student aid. This act has now come into effect. So if US colleges don’t spend their own money and time stopping students from downloading The (new) Karate Kid, then they’ll lose funding and will have to close down. Sounds like a fair compromise to me, risking education of the next generation to prevent them from downloading MP3s. It’s definitely fair to the music labels and movie studios, who don’t have to move an inch now and can get colleges to do their anti-piracy work for them, all for the price of a few lobbyists.

This week was also when the judge overseeing one of the US Copyright Group’s mass lawsuits was to decide on a challenge from the ACLU/EFF as to the legality of putting so many defendants in the same lawsuit. Unfortunately, the US Copyright Group won their motion, although the ACLU/EFF also had a few victories of their own. So the judge has decided it is okay to put a bunch of people together, most of whom have never communicated directly or indirectly with each other, in the same lawsuit. But the USCG must now also work wit the ACLU/EFF to draft a warning notice (to forward to people listed in the lawsuit), and this is where the ACLU/EFF will ensure that the notice contains plain English and perhaps contain language that doesn’t  scare people into paying for the pre-trial settlement, if they really do believe they’re innocent. The judge also ruled on Time Warner Cable’s motion to quash the subpoenas, as it violated a previous agreement with the USCG to limit the number of requests per month. The judge ruled just shy of a complete quashing, but did rule that the agreement was valid and that the USCG must limit request to 28 per month, which should really slow down USCG’s efforts (although they’ll probably just pick IP addresses from other ISPs to “sue”).

Onto HD (3D) news (I really should update the “section graphics” to your left, or above if you’re reading the newsletter, to include 3D). For those hoping Blu-ray would arrive soon on the Apple range of hardware, well, your wish is unlikely to be answered.

Still no Blu-ray on Apple Macs ... not if Jobs has anything to say on the issue

Apple boss Steve Jobs has once again, this time in an email, showed his disdain for the Blu-ray format, predicting it will be beaten by digital downloads and streaming services. He compared Blu-ray to all those “failed” HD audio formats, none of which has managed to replace CDs, let alone MP3 and other digital formats that has replaced CDs. As you may recall, he previously called Blu-ray a “bag of hurt”, due to the licensing requirements of the format. When the person communicating with Jobs stressed that Blu-ray does have uses in data and video archiving, Jobs was quick to point out that streaming and digital rentals means that you don’t need massive amounts of local storage for movies. And I guess for data archiving, with the price of external HDDs dropping so quickly, these offer good portability, and excellent value for money, compared to Blu-ray discs, you have to say. Even USB drives are approaching capacities beyond that of your typical dual-layer Blu-ray, which may explain why the Blu-ray people have added BDXL and larger capacity discs to the specifications (unfortunately, they’re not backwards compatible, so new burning hardware is needed to take advantage – a disadvantage that USB drives don’t have).

I could have put the next piece of news under gaming, but it’s probably more relevant here. The much rumoured Hulu subscription service is now a reality, and it’s coming to a whole host of devices, including the PS3, Xbox 360, and TV and Blu-ray players from Samsung, Vizio and Sony. PS3 owners will be amongst the first to get it, with the $9.99 monthly cost possibly on top of the PlayStation Plus service cost (rumoured only). Xbox 360 owners may be the last to get it however, but don’t fret, the best Hulu experience may yet be on the 360, as Hulu are working to make the service Kinect compatible (so gesture, voice commands to control the Hulu interface). All of this means nothing to me because Hulu isn’t “available” in Australia, even though I have a Samsung TV and soon will have a Samsung 3D Blu-ray player (free by redemption), both of which are capable of supporting Hulu.

And a further blow to Adobe this week as adult website Digital Playground announced that they may choose HTML5 over Flash. It seems a lot of websites now have to make the choice, because supporting both may be expensive, and Google’s WebM/VP8 now means websites don’t have to sacrifice quality (too much) if they choose the HTML5 codec.

And finally, in gaming, a new PS3 firmware is available. Firmware 4.0 adds Facebook support and support for the new subscription based PlayStation Plus platform. After criticizing Xbox for asking users to pay for Xbox Live Gold, it seems Sony finally saw the light and decided to have a go at their own premium platform.

Luckily, multiplayer gaming is still free, as are many other features, but as speculated above, some of the premium features like Hulu may require the Plus platform.

A brief look at Amazon shows that Kinect is still selling better than Move. But the latest news is that Kinect may only offer two player simultaneous play, even if it does support tracking of up to 6 players. What this means is that up to 6 players can “join” the game, but 4 will have to wait their turn at any one time, while two can play. The limited angle of the camera lens may be responsible, as well as the hardware requirements of processing too many people at the same time. This would appear to make the Wii or Move the platform of choice for 2+ player motion gaming, but the PS3 only supports 7 connected devices, including any other controllers or wireless devices, so 4 player simultaneous play with both Move and Navigator (“remote” and “nunchuck”) is not possible either. Plus it would also cost quite a bit to get it going. Of course, there’s still no actual official confirmation, the information on hand is from leaked specifications which may or may not be final. But since none of the demos so far has been for four players, and the limited angle of any camera system, I suspect this to be true.

And that’s the news for this week. More for you next week I should hope. Until then, have a good one.

Oh, almost forgot to mention that today, 4th of July, is a very special day indeed. Yes, it is the birthday of Digital Digest, in its 11th year. I don’t plan on making a big deal of it like last year, so much so that I’ve nearly forgotten!

Slightly later than usual, due to NPD releasing their figures later, but better late than never. Or is it. With Awful April out of the way, everyone was keen to find out whether the next month be Merry or Miserable May. Once again, NPD is not providing PS2 sales numbers and only the top 5 game sales have sales figures. The figures are from NPD, a marketing research firm that releases games console sale data every month.

The figures for US sales in May 2010 are below, ranked in order of number of sales (May 2009 figures also shown, including percentage change):

• DS: 383,700 (Total: 42.1 million; May 2009: 633,500 – down 39%)
• Wii: 334,800 (Total: 29.2 million; May 2009: 289,500 – up 16%)
• Xbox 360: 194,600 (Total: 20.1 million; May 2009: 175,000 – up 11%)
• PS3: 154,500 (Total: 12.4 million; May 2009: 131,000 – up 18%)
• PSP: 59,400 (Total: 17.3 million; May 2009: 100,400 – down 41%)

NPD May 2010 Game Console US Sales Figures

NPD Game Console Total US Sales Figures (as of May 2010)

My prediction from last month was:

The PS3 shortage continues, and so it will still do poorly in sales I think, and probably outsold by the Xbox 360 with the hardware sales order remaining the same as this month. On the software front, the Xbox 360 version of Red Dead Redemption should be the top seller, with the PS3 version closely behind. Alan Wake, the much hyped Xbox 360 exclusive, should be in the top 10 as well. There might be room for the PS3 exclusive 3D Dot Game Heroes as well. Along with the usual Wii titles, the new Super Mario Galaxy 2 should rank in the top 10 as well. Overall sales should pick up compared to April, but probably still down year on year at least for the hardware figures.

I think most of what I posted came true, which is a rarity indeed. The PS3 stock shortage did hinder sales to the point where even growth compared to the same time last year was muted, although still comfortably up. I don’t know what’s the issue with Sony’s PS3 production, but the problem appears to have been sold for June already. Perhaps they were saving stock for an expected bump in sales in June, due to E3 and the announcement of Move, but who knows. For Sony’s other console (the one that still matters to the NPD), the PSP, sales are not doing too well, once again a 40+% drop in sales against a year before. The PSP really hasn’t decided what it wants to be, unlike the DS which has firmly established itself as the portable console of choice for an ever younger audience (of both genders, importantly). With iPhones, iPads and all sorts of portable devices, the traditional gaming demographic (young males) may be finding a dedicated console a bit of an overkill. Nintendo was wise to market the DS to anyone but the traditional gaming demographic.

The Xbox 360 continues to do well, once again outselling the same month last year, and outselling the PS3, which is all you can ask for really. The E3 surprise announcement of the new “slim” Elite and the subsequent almost immediate release means June was probably a good month for the Xbox 360, the new console having secured top of the sales charts for the last week or so at least on Amazon. The early pre-order numbers for Kinect is promising, certainly gathering a bit more interest on Amazon than the PlayStation Move, but these figures mean nothing right now – only when both add-ons get closer to their release date, will we then be able to see just which will be the most popular, and which will help generate console and software sales.

For Nintendo, a year-on-year growth for the Wii is rare these days, and so it was a good month. Unfortunately, DS sales dropped rather alarmingly again, that’s 58% and now 39% drops in sales, but this was up against the release of the DSi last year, and so it’s somewhat understandable. Nintendo will hope the 3DS will be the next must have console.

Speaking of Move, Kinect and the 3DS, I’ve just put up a poll asking which of these interest you the most – you can vote in it here.

Onto software sales now. As expected, Red Dead Redemption was top, with the Xbox 360 version not quite outselling the PS3 version by 2:1, but the days where the number of Xbox 360 consoles sold had a 2:1 margin over the PS3 are also gone as well (it’s now 1.62 to 1, which stacks up quite neatly to RDR’s 1.66 to 1 sales ratio for the Xbox 360 version). And as I noted last month, Super Mario Galaxy 2 also ranked in the top 10, at a high 3rd place too, just a few thousand units shy of 2nd place. This was one of three Wii titles in the top 10, the other two being the usuals (Wii Fit Plus and New Super Mario Bros.). The Xbox 360 did one better with 4 titles in the top 10, the exclusive Alan Wake as expected (but did poorly than I think what Microsoft would have wanted for such a hyped up game). The PS3 had two titles, including RDR and the multi-platform UFC 2010: Undisputed, which went close to outselling the Xbox 360 version of the same game. But without full figures for all the top 10 software sales, there’s no other analysis that I can provide, such as overall market share, but it would be safe to say that the Xbox 360 led the way, with the Wii in second place, and the PS3 in third.

Here’s the complete list of the top 10 software sales:

1. Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360, Take-Two) – 945,900
2. Red Dead Redemption (PS3, Take-Two) – 567,100
3. Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii, Nintendo) – 563,900
4. UFC 2010: Undisputed (Xbox 360, THQ) – 221,200
5. UFC 2010: Undisputed (PS3, THQ) – 192,300
6. Wii Fit Plus w/Balance Board (Wii, Nintendo)
7. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii, Nintendo)
8. Alan Wake (Xbox 360, Microsoft)
9. Pokemon SoulSilver (DS, Nintendo)
10. Skate 3 (Xbox 360, EA)

It’s time to make my usual predictions. With the PS3 stock shortage crisis over, PS3 sales should rise. The Xbox 360 would otherwise have been relegated to third place amongst the home consoles, but the new “slim” Elite may save the day, and maybe even sell enough to keep it above the PS3. I keep on expecting either the PS3 or Xbox 360 to outsell the Wii, but it hasn’t happened very often, and June is probably the same, although it has a greater chance than previous months. Not a huge month for new game releases though, so RDR may remain in the charts, with Super Mario Galaxy keeping up sales and possibly stealing a march on the RDR games.

See you next month (or sooner, if NPD don’t again delay the stats).

A combination of a busy week for me personally, and a relatively quiet news week (World Cup related?), means there’s not much going on this week. There is so little this week that there is good justification for not even publishing a WNR this week. Well, not exactly that little going on, but the lazy side of me almost convinced me to skip. Unfortunately for you, I decided in the end to write this edition instead, so you’ll have to put up with even more ranting (given the absence of real news) than usual.

Starting with copyright news, I know I just said a paragraph ago that nothing much happened, except something really big did happen during the week, something of a landmark perhaps in the struggle between copyright holders and the Internet.

Viacom will be licking their wounds after having their massive lawsuit against YouTube thrown out of court

The big news was of course the judge’s decision to throw out Viacom’s lawsuit against Google’s YouTube. The judge decided that Viacom didn’t really have a case at all, not when YouTube is protected by the “safe harbor” provisions found within the DMCA. Safe harbor provides protection to publishers like YouTube as long as they show an adequate effort in trying to prevent copyright infringement. YouTube has always had a policy of removing copyrighted content if the copyright holders complain, and so the judge thought this was more than adequate. The fact that YouTube revealed Viacom employees may have been secretly uploading copyrighted content for promotional purposes may also have helped YouTube’s case. To be fair, this decision wasn’t a total surprise. Nearly defunct video sharing website Veoh won a similar lawsuit against the Universal Music Group, and that set the precedent to allow YouTube to get this victory this week. What this all means is that the court system now recognises that it may be impossible for mega websites like YouTube to completely prevent unauthorised copyrighted material appearing on their website, but that as long as they have a working policy in place, then the copyright holders should also share the burden of identifying and removing unauthorised content. The copyright holders, as always, want others to do their job because they believe that this problem was created by the Internet and the companies that profit from them, which to be fair, is a valid point. However, the same Internet has also provided many benefits and new opportunities to the same copyright holders, and it’s not anyone else’s fault if they choose not to take advantage.

Of course, Viacom will appeal, and who knows how the next judge will rule, especially in a technology based court case – the decision is very much based on how the judge grasps the technical issues. However, even Viacom must admit that YouTube’s anti-piracy tools are much more advanced than when Viacom first decided to sue, so perhaps part of their objectives has been achieved already, to make YouTube take copyright more seriously. When it comes to copyright, the current YouTube is much more copyright holder friendly, almost too friendly, what with the recent bout of “Downfall Hitler” parody removals. Perhaps this win will allow YouTube to readjust their removal policy to be a bit more balanced.

Is the BPI planning to sue Google, and if they were, will they still do it after Viacom's court setback?

While Google has just successfully escape one lawsuit (for now), techdirt believe that they may be set up for another one, this time over in the UK by the BPI. They analysed the way the BPI filled DMCA notices, and noticed the odd way in which it was done which reminded them of the way Viacom operated. The plan seems to be to get Google to be responsible for removing pirated content on file hosting networks such as RapidShare, again an attempt by copyright holders to get others to do their hard work. Of course, this was before the Viacom decision was handed down, so even if the BPI had plans to sue Google, they may be reconsidering now.

There seems to be many ways to fight piracy, but nobody has really consulted the public as to what they think will help reduce piracy. PC Advisor ran a poll, and like many similar polls, the results are always interesting. The public mostly understands the wishes of copyright holders to stop piracy, but most of them feel that this can be achieved via better pricing and better services, something I’ve echoed on these pages frequently. Of course, consumers always want to pay less for more, but the digital revolution actually allows for this to happen without hurting bottom lines (and may even help enhance it). Very few people will completely agree with the industry’s current anti-piracy strategy, which ranges from “legal blackmail” (as described by politicians in the UK, in response to actions by groups similar to the US Copyright Group’s mass litigation/pre-trial settlement mailings) to lobbying, or rather, scaring politicians to pass illogical and draconian laws to help the industry protect its income (do any other industries get the same level of support, from all major political parties, as the music and movie industries?)

Here's a picture of Vice President Joe Biden thinking hard about how he can be of even more help to his RIAA/MPAA buddies

But when lobbyist speak, the politicians listen, and the Obama administration has been very good friends with the RIAA and MPAA for the first part of their term in office. Vice President Biden, a long time friend of the RIAA, launched the White House’s new anti-piracy crackdown this week. Once again, Biden likened online piracy to actual store theft, and this time even increased the hyperbole by adding physical violence/damage to the equation. “This is theft, clear and simple. It’s smash and grab, no different than a guy walking down Fifth Avenue and smashing the window at Tiffany’s and reaching in and grabbing what’s in the window,” said Biden. Well, I think it’s a bit different to that actually. For the Tiffany’s example, there is actual physical damage (I would say this, in the online world, would equate to server hacking and damage of some kind), plus, what is stolen cannot be replaced without additional cost to the owner of the goods. This is simply not true with digital downloads, because the “original” has not been moved or damaged in any way. If anything, it’s more like someone walking into Tiffany’s, looking at a design for an engagement ring, and then going home and recreating the exact same ring at their own cost. This is also a sort of copyright theft, in that the design of the ring was “stolen”, and you could argue that Tiffany’s lost money due to a lost sale. But as you can see, this is very different to grabbing a brick and smashing up Tiffany’s to steal a ring. It’s hard to tell if Biden said this because he really wanted to help his RIAA/MPAA buddies, or whether he really believes this to be the case. If the latter is correct, then we’re all in big trouble, because paying lip service to your friends in politics is at least common place (although you may say ignorance is common place as well).

The administration’s new initiative did have any real specifics, but hinted at supporting industry attempts to get the ACTA shoved down the throat of citizens around the world, and even offered some kind of support for the controversial actions of the US Copyright Group. You would expect liberal institutions like the ACLU and the EFF to be in agreement with the Obama administration, but both have come out against the actions of the USCG, going as far as filing a friend of the court brief to prevent the USCG lumping thousands of defendants into the same lawsuit. The judge then asked USCG to explain why they did this, and the USCG now has replied to the court saying that the BitTorrent infrastructure is what made them do it. It argues that users of the same swarm upload and download from each other simultaneously while trying to obtain a full copy of the file in question, and so that’s how the defendants are linked. Of course, there’s no evidence that any of the defendants were part of the same swarm at all, and this also highlights one of the often ignored technical points of BitTorrent file sharing – that most users do not upload an entire copy of the file to any other user, only pieces, which when looked at as a piece of data, is completely useless. The technical argument to make here would be that because each users is only contributing a very small part of the pirated file, then perhaps the damages should reflect this as well. And if an user somehow managed to download a full copy of the file without providing any uploads, and thus only break the law in respect to obtaining pirated material, and not “make available” such materials, would their actions be more or less damaging than someone who uploaded hundreds of full copies of the same file? If you buy a pirated DVD from a stall, did you commit the same crime as the stall vendor who produced and sold the pirated DVD? These are all interesting questions I would like to see addressed in a full trial, but that’s something the USCG do not want, apparently.

Where is my damn 3D TV, Samsung?

That’s all the copyright news I had, and there isn’t much going on in terms of Blu-ray, 3D or gaming, certainly not as much as I would have to write about if I had my 3D TV at home, instead of still being on pre-order. Come on Samsung, don’t disappoint me.

There is actually a bit of gaming news that I didn’t post online, and that’s rumours of the Xbox 360 Kinect being priced at $119.95, as opposed to the widely believed price point of $150. The $150 Kinect is already selling quite well, certainly better than the PlayStation Move, so a cheaper Kinect might do even better. I do remember some Microsoft dude hinting that people will be very happy with the eventual Kinect pricing, which I suspect means the official pricing will be lower than what Amazon and others think it is now. If the news is still slow next week, then I will write up something about my thoughts on Move, Kinect and the Wii. It is my opinion that the Wii is actually a big failure *if* you do not count Nintendo’s software contributions to it, and it’s very unlikely Nintendo will help out  Sony and Microsoft to make fun games for the Move/Kinect. Can Sony and Microsoft succeed where Nintendo has failed, to get third party publishers to produce great games that utilize each company’s motion control system, and if they fail in the same was in this regards as Nintendo, can Sony and Microsoft do what Nintendo can do with titles like Wii Sports, Wii Fit and Mario Kart?

That’s all for this week. I warned you there wasn’t much happening didn’t I? Hoping for more stuff next week …

The World Cup is taking up a lot more of my time than I had estimated earlier, despite the paucity of good football on show. I was expecting a mid week update for the NPD figures, but NPD are delaying the release of the numbers until later. Technical difficulties are blamed, or may be they were too busy watching the World Cup too. Other may also have been busy with the games, because there isn’t a whole lot of news this week either (again, it could just be because I haven’t been looking as hard).

Let’s start with copyright news. Bad news for UK HDTV viewers, as Ofcom officially agrees to the BBC’s demand to add DRM to all upcoming HDTV equipment. The BBC used the same argument as the MPAA when they also wanted DRM to be added to TVs, and guess what, it worked.

The BBC argued that having DRM means they can bring more high value content to people’s screen via free to air TV. Of course, the lack of DRM hasn’t prevented them, and others, from bringing the same high value content before, and the way Ofcom has set out this thing, people with older PVRs (or ones that don’t belong to the Freeview standard) will still be able to record the DRM’d content most likely. So what’s the whole point of this? Basically just like any other DRM scheme, to give copyright holders a false sense of security, which in their opinion, is better than none.

LimeWire is sued again

It’s been a bad time for LimeWire, as they’ve been sued again, just a week after the RIAA claimed that they deserve billions of dollars of damages stemming from LimeWire’s operation. This time, it’s the National Music Publishers’ Association that is doing the suing. The billions in damages that the RIAA want is simply ridiculous. It’s basically saying that the people who downloaded music illegally on LimeWire’s network and zero dollars in the process would have otherwise spent billions of dollars has LimeWire not existed. It’s like saying, using an analogy that the industry just loves, that a car thief would have paid full sticker price for a car if he hadn’t stolen one. At least with the car, there is actual physical loss (the car owner loses something that can’t be replaced without spending more money)  – there is none with digital files, not when the owner can make infinite copies at no cost.

And it seems I’m not the only one that thinks the industry’s estimates for losses are greatly exaggerated, to put it mildly. Experts testifying before the US International Trade Commission are saying exact this. The best quote I’ve found is this one, made by Harvard Professor Fritz Foley: “It seems a bit crazy to me to assume that someone who would pay some low amount for a pirated product would be the type of customer who’d pay some amount that’s six or 10 that amount for a real one.”

The very type of people who would get pirated content at low cost (or for free) is exactly the type of people that probably can’t afford to pay for the legitimate version. This isn’t always true, but with so much content available at varying cost, you’ll have to be a millionaire to be able to afford to pay the cost of stuff that web pirates are downloading for free. And yet, the industry seriously believe that if they can just wipe out piracy completely, then all those people who aren’t paying for stuff will automatically start paying full price for everything. And what are these pirates doing with all these lost billions every year if they’re not spending it on legitimate buys? They must be laughing all the way to the bank where their vast amount of savings are stored, savings that are the result of not having to pay $0.99 for songs.

At the hearing, which was organised by the USITC at the request of the US Senate’s Finance Committee (who are trying to work out how much blame China should get in terms of Intellectual Property damage), some experts even expressed the controversial view that counterfeit goods actually helps the economy by employing people and making it possible for financially challenged people to spend money on stuff, even if it is just a fraction of the retail price. By extension, it will be interesting to find out if web piracy is also contributing to the economy, in terms of advertising, creating product hype and contributing to people spending money on Internet services (this point the copyright holders will agree with, as they have continuously blamed ISPs for profiting from piracy).

The Nintendo 3DS will play 3D games without glasses, and store games internally

A IEEE working group is trying to create a new DRM standard that at least gives consumers some rights when it comes to managing their own content. The goal is to basically ensure once people purchase digital content with DRM, they are entitled to the same rights as people who purchase something physical. Including the ability to “loan” out your digital content to a friend. So to mirror a non digital physical object (say a VHS tape, if people still remember those things), the  content cannot be duplicated (without quality loss), but can be loaned out as the “ownership license” is temporarily transfered to your friend, but with the risk that your friend might then pass on the “ownership” to others (ie. lose your tape, the bastard), and thus prevent mass distribution/sharing. It all sounds reasonable in principle, but the whole point of digital is that you have more flexibility than physical objects/media, and getting rid of the one of the major advantages of digital content seems kind of self-defeating to me. I still believe that the best way to prevent people from obtaining content illegally is to give them good reasons to pay for content, which includes things such as access to a superior catalog of content, additional services that pirates can’t offer, along with prices that are so reasonable that it makes pirated content look decidedly bad value in comparison.

And that may be what Nintendo is doing with their new 3DS console when it comes to the fight against piracy. Instead of releasing a new DRM scheme (which Nintendo may still do), they are copying some of features of the flash carts that have made piracy so easy. One of the more important features that flash carts provide is the ability to store you games digitally on file, instead of having to carry all your carts with you. A flash cart with a 4GB SD memory ca4rd can carry 50 or even 100 games, without it, you’ll have to carry a small briefcase just to fit in all your game carts. But the 3DS will finally allow you to “install” games to the internal memory, and not only that, you won’t even need the original cart to play the games (unlike the “install to HD” features of PS3/Xbox 360 games. And if Nintendo can create some kind of official homebrew environment, maybe an Apps store type feature, then they relegate flash cart usage to game piracy only, and it makes their case against them that much stronger, and makes their fight against piracy much more effective.

Let’s move onto 3D/HD news. To follow up on last week’s news of Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs being the first general sale Blu-ray 3D title, it’s good to see that the price for this title has already started to drop on Amazon.com

The $36 original price has already dropped to $28, and hopefully it will drop further. And it appears my suspicious were correct in relation to the Monsters vs Aliens Blu-ray 3D, in that the crosstalk/ghosting problem may be a problem of the movie encoding. Early tests with the “Cloudy” 3D on Samsung TVs seems to show much much less ghosting, so the encoding may really be the source of the problem. If so, Samsung needs to get the movie remastered as quickly as possible, because it’s making their 3D TVs look much worse than their competitor’s.

Gaming wise, we’ve learned a lot more about Kinect, Move and the 3DS during E3. The 3DS will be able to produce 3D without glasses using the Parallax Barrier method I think, and I’ve updated my 3D Blu-ray – What’s it all about blog post/FAQ with one of more frequently asked questions of recent – why can the 3DS do 3D without glasses when we still have to wear them to watch 3D on TV? The short answer is that the Parallax Barrier technology is just not ready for big screen TVs and home viewing.

Microsoft unveiled their somewhat uninspiring lineup of Kinect games at E3

As for Kinect, the overall verdict seems to be: impressive hardware, uninspired game line up. And you can probably say the same for the Move as well, apart from the fact that Sony has marketed the product to hardcore gamers, along with casual/family gamers, with some success. It’s interesting watching the Microsoft presentation, where they split the event into two, the first part for hardcore gamers (Metal Gear Solid, a new CoD game, Halo Reach), and the second part was very casual/family oriented. I think we just have to accept that Kinect is not meant for hardcore gamers and move on. I don’t know why some Xbox 360 gamers are complaining about Kinect destroying the 360 as a console for serious gamers – it’s not as if Microsoft or publishers will stop making the games aimed at hardcore gamers just because Kinect is out. It’s best to think of the Xbox 360 as a console that has two personalities, and you can choose which of these personalities you want to identify with.

We did get a Xbox 360 Slim, and that seemed to have gathered more excitement than the Kinect, but mainly because the news came out of nowhere really, and that it’s already shipping as I type. Included is a larger 250GB HDD, built-in Wi-Fi just like the PS3, but with Wireless-N support built in, and well, it’s smaller and Microsoft says its quieter as well.

Xbox 360 Kinect and "Slim" are top sellers on Amazon

While the Kinect pricing hasn’t been officially announced, pretty much everyone thinks its $150. This price is the retailer’s estimate of the final pricing only though, so don’t be surprised if it’s lower (or higher). Amazon already has it up for pre-order (if the price does drop, Amazon will always give only charge you the lowest price during the entire pre-order period), and along with the Xbox 360 Slim, both are top of the sales charts at the moment. Both Kinect and  Move have been in the top 100 for 4 days – Move is currently 49th in the sales charts. And the fact that Move is available 2 month earlier than Kinect, and yet the Kinect is still outselling the Move, bodes well for Microsoft. Perhaps the novelty factor of Kinect is also helping to drive sales, as opposed to the common conception that the Move is basically an upgraded Wii.

The Xbox 360 slim, or rather more accurately, the new Xbox 360 Elite is genuinely doing well though, having been top of the sales chart every since it was put up. June could end up being a very good month for Microsoft in terms of the NPD sales figure. As for me, I’m definitely getting the “Slim”, but probably as part of a Kinect bundle, hoping Microsoft bundles the camera device with the new Elite console at no extra cost. And I know I’ve rubbished and questioned previous rumours of a Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360, mainly because I think it’s a giant fail if Microsoft released a Blu-ray drive for their  noisy console which just makes for a lousy comparison with the PS3, which can also play games on Blu-ray disc.

The new Xbox 360 Elite being released this week was a total surprise

For those that think the $149.99 price point for Kinect is too high, you have to consider the fact that this is the price for 4-player simultaneous play. If you want to do 4 players with Move, the minimum cost is $250 ($99 wand + camera bundle, plus 3 more wands at $50 each). Even for 2 players, you will need at least $150 ($99 want + camera bundle + $50 wand), and up to $250 if the game requires two wands for each player. And that’s not even including the Navigator controller (aka the Move Nunchuck) for $30 each, although it’s apparently optional as you can use a standard PS3 controller to perform the same actions (if you don’t mind holding the controller with only one hand). And then you’ll have to find a place to store all of these accessories. Of course, we still wait for Microsoft’s official announcement (in August, at Gamescom), and the final price could very well be $99 (or as I mentioned before, bundled with the Elite for free).

Anyway, that’s enough writing for this week. Got to rest up for watching some World Cup action later on. The boring football does make me feel sleepy, but I guess that’s what the Vuvuzelas are for, to keep people awake!

What started as a pretty quiet week in terms of news turned a bit more busy in the last few days. E3, the US Copyright Group, Adobe, Sony all made the news later on in the week, whether it was new rumours, or new downloads, it’s all covered by this week’s Weekly News Roundup. Are you enjoying the World Cup? I’m not a big fan of the Vuvuzelas though, nor drums, bells, whistles, or anything else that makes artificial stadium noise. Cheering, singing, chanting, swearing, and the occasional round of claps, is what it’s all about. Hearing the crowd’s anticipation, nervousness, exhilaration, depression, makes the game a much better spectacle, and I think the players appreciates the interaction with the crowd as well. Vuvuzelas and other artificial noise drowns out all of these, and I think it takes something away from the beautiful game. But it also does drown out the Samsung plasma buzz, so silver lining and all.

Speaking of Samsung plasma TVs, I still haven’t gotten mine yet, so no watching the World Cup in 3D 🙁

Starting with copyright news, the Canadian DMCA is still under consultation, but the IFPI, the RIAA’s International wing, has come out attacking the proposed changes as not going “far enough”. You know what, if the RIAA and their axis of evil friends don’t like it, then perhaps there’s something to like about the DMCA.

I think the RIAA’s biggest problem with the bill is that it finally makes CD ripping legal, and format shifting as well (so CD to MP3 => legal). But there’s nothing they can do about that now, since CDs don’t have DRM, a decision the RIAA may forever regret (not that having DRM actually stops piracy or anything, but at least it makes ripping them illegal in the eyes of the law, with the caveat that prosecuting someone for ripping their own CD/DVDs for personal use is likely to end up a futile endeavour).

But it again just highlights the stupidity of making the breaking of DRM illegal (exemptions apart), regardless of the intentions behind the attempted break. If CDs don’t have DRM, does it then make it legal to pirate CDs? Of course not. The music labels still have the same level of legal protection as movie studios when it comes to DVDs that do have DRM. And is DVD DRM preventing DVD ripping or piracy? Of course not. And with DVD (and even Blu-ray) DRM so easy to break, it’s about as useful in stopping piracy as making users read those unskippable copyright notices at the start of the disc. Of course, in the area of placing limits on what users can do with their own stuff, then it’s a huge success. While the some studios and anti-piracy agencies claim they would never sue anyone for breaking DRM for personal purposes, the fact is that if they wanted to, they can. It’s having this level of power and control that made the studios fall in love with DRM in the first place, not its value (or lack of it) in fighting piracy.

Just what is freedom of speech, and what is "making available" pirated downloads?

And just how far can this power grab by studios go? Well, if you live in the Netherlands, then it can go very far indeed. A Dutch court has just ruled that even talking about piracy may be a crime. The case relates to an Usenet community, in which the user “spots” potential downloads. Not by linking or anything, by simply talking about the general location of where downloads are located. Apparently, this is just as bad as linking, which is just as bad as hosting, in the court’s eyes. What’s next? Guilty of copyright infringement for even thinking about illegal downloads? Thought-crime anyone? I think this is another instance of legal authorities not really understanding the way the Internet works. The Internet was designed by the US military as a way for communications to still work even after a massive nuclear attack, and this works by building a “web” of connections, allowing every server to potentially route to every other. And not only is the underlying connection all connected, web pages containing links can also link to potentially every other website in the world, depending on how many links you want to hop to. And then there are search engines like Google, which aims to be able to link to every resource on the Internet. So what does all of this mean? It means that if direct hosting, direct linking, indirect linking and now even indirect discussions are all illegal, then by the way the Internet works, every site can potentially link to the illegal download in question, every router can potentially carry the illegal download to the end user, every search engine can potentially allow users to find the illegal download in question, and so every website on the Internet is illegal. I now finally understand why the CEO of Sony Pictures said that nothing good has come out of the Internet being invented.

The RIAA wants the assets of LimWire and its creator to be frozen, because they want to seek billions in terms of damages. Billions! I think I’ve said this before, but I would really love for the RIAA to prove just how they derive their claimed losses due to piracy, and the only way may very well be for all pirated content providers around the world to stop for a month, just a month, and see how much more money the RIAA makes during this time (if any). Then time this by 12, and then the RIAA will have their annual “loss” figure. Would I be surprised if this figure turns out to be negative, in that the RIAA may make *less* money as people stop listening to their music (illegally, for free) for a month and they lose the free publicity the Internet provides musicians? Not really.

The ACLU is joining forces with the EFF to help users fight against mass BitTorrent lawsuits

The rest of the week was dominated by louder and louder condemnations of the way the US Copyright Group is going about its anti-piracy “pre-trial settlement” business. The EFF and ACLU are stepping in and they want a judge in charge of ruling on one of the USCG’s mass subpoenas to dismiss all but one of the subpoenas. They say that the USCG must present evidence that all of the John Does as part of the subpoena have been joined in the same lawsuit for a reason, that they were all part of the same transaction or have some kind of common connection. You see, some groups uses this kind of “subpoena spam” to greatly simplify things for themselves, and may only be using these subpoenas as a way to threaten people to pay up, with no real intentions of going to court. But the ACLU and EFF may very well want a full trial, and if they can get the right decision, then the USCG may have to stop their very lucrative business. If the ACLU/EFF can get in touch with many of those that claim they’re innocent of the acts that the USCG has charged them with, then perhaps winning a trial won’t be too difficult. These kind of mass mailings always catches a few innocents, those that have had their connection hacked, or IP spoofed, but most will pay up to avoid the trouble of going to court, especially when threatened with the possibility of $150,000 in damages that the USCG may seek. And the USCG is targeting more and more movies, with sources claiming that they are watching 300 illegally download films, and if they only record 500 IP addresses for each movie, then that’s 150,000 potential “pre-trial settlement” payments, and even if just 50% of those pay up the minimum amount required by the USCG, then we’re already taking about more than a hundred million dollars in terms of income.

This makes me think that something will be done about the USCG’s actions, but it will be something that’s even worse I think, as the government can use the actions of the USCG to justify things like three-strikes, which they will promise that any new laws will come with safeguards to prevent companies that seek to profit too much from anti-piracy activities without at least giving users some warning first. Three-strikes is better than one strike, after all. If I was the head of the MPAA, I would use groups like the USCG to do all sorts of nasty things and then use this mythical bogeyman as a way to scare people into thinking that something only slightly better, but still very bad (like three-strikes), is the right, better solution. It’s better, but it’s not good (take note Larry David), and it may eventually become worse.

Onto HD/3D news. I know in my 3D Blu-ray – What’s it all about? blog post I mentioned the lack of 3D Blu-ray titles for general sale, but it seems I spoke too soon, because Sony are readying their first general release 3D Blu-ray movie to be made available June 22nd. The title is Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and it will be followed shortly by others titles.

You can finally buy a Blu-ray 3D movie, but it's gonna cost you!

This is good news, and more “real 3D” content means it will be easier to benchmark the various 3D TVs so we can find out for sure which current technology, LED/LCD or plasma, is better for 3D, and which particular models are best at it. There’s a big question mark around using Samsung’s exclusive Monster vs Aliens, since some of the ghosting artifacts found when watching the movie may in fact be a problem with the movie encoding, as opposed to Samsung’s 3D technology. But it’s a bit pricey though, at $36 on Amazon, that’s twice as expensive as most other Blu-ray movies. Ouch.

3D notebooks will be everywhere, with Toshiba joining Acer and Asus, amongst others, to release a new 3D enabled notebook. This seems a bit gimmicky for me, even on top of the “gimmickiness” of 3D. 3D requires a big screen and controlled lighting environment for the best enjoyment, and I’m just not sure notebook screens can offer this. Plus, 3D gaming requires a lot of GPU power, and this is something that notebook cannot do, compared to desktops and consoles. But if these machines can be connected to 3D TVs and used as 3D Blu-ray players, then perhaps that’s where they may be useful.

Adobe has finally release version 10.1 of their Flash player. Despite the minor version number change, this one includes a lot of changes, and it took long enough to get from beta to gold as well. The most important new features is GPU assist support, which may make HD YouTube finally playable on certain netbooks and CULV laptops. My first impressions were that CPU usage was down, but playing a 1080p YouTube clip was still more processor intensive than playing a Blu-ray movie via PowerDVD, so hopefully more improvements can be made in this area (but the nature of the Flash plugin will always mean more overhead I suppose).

Blu-ray firmware updates are far too frequent it seems for the average user, many of whom don’t even know what a firmware is. This is one stumbling block for Blu-ray on its path towards mainstream acceptance. DVD players didn’t have this problem, and there’s always an inherent danger in firmware updates, since if the power goes out during the middle of an update, then the player could be fried unless it was well designed to prevent this sort of thing from happening (like some kind of firmware reset function).

And finally in gaming, with E3 just around the corner, there’s plenty of rumours about what each of the major companies will be promoting during the show. I’ve collected some of the popular rumours in this post, with ratings on how likely each rumour will turn into fact.

We know Sony will be promoting Move, Microsoft will be promoting Project Natal (or whatever they’re calling it by this time tomorrow), but will the 3DS be the only thing Nintendo has to show? Nothing for the Wii? Nothing like a Wii 2 or Wii HD to steal Move/Natal’s thunder? I find it all hard to believe. Watch this space.

Speaking of the 3DS, some developers that have had a chance to play with the hardware say that it is as powerful as the Xbox 360 and PS3. Now I find this even harder to believe. Can the 3DS give Xbox 360, PS3 like graphics on the lower resolution screen, perhaps, since what will look good at 720p on a big TV, will look similar at much lower resolution on the smaller screen. So perhaps this is what was meant. But graphics has never been what the DS (or any of Nintendo’s other consoles) are about. And 3D without glasses could be fun.

For 3D with glasses, the PS3 now has some 3D games for you to try out, no firmware update required since the required update had already occurred in April, so all you need to do is to update the supported games themselves (if you’ve already purchased them). Some people who have tried it say it’s fantastic, of course I can’t test it for myself because my 3D TV hasn’t arrived yet 🙁

And so we come to the end of yet another Weekly News Roundup. E3, and perhaps another round of NPD figures (for May), will ensure the next issue of the WNR will be fairly gaming dominated, for a change. Have a good one.