![\"iPhone](\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/iphone_5.png\" "\\"iPhone")
<\/a>iPhone 5: Faster, lighter, thinner, and bigger where it counts (the screen). But is it still exciting and innovative?<\/p><\/div>\n
Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet week. I suppose I should talk about the iPhone 5 release or whatever. Was that perhaps the most anti-climatic launch event in Apple’s recent history? Through the various leaks, almost everything about the new iPhone had been fairly well known long before the Wednesday launch event – Apple seems to have given up on the almost impossible job of trying to keep things secret. And even if we somehow didn’t know about the larger (well, taller anyway) screen, LTE and the other new stuff, none of it would have been a huge surprise anyway. There’s nothing wrong with incrementally improving an already well established product, but having failed to keep up with its competitors in terms of screen size, and features such as NFC, the least Apple could have done was to inspire us with some of the ways to use newly added features. This has been their strength in the recent past, so to hear them talk more about “faster CPUs”, “better graphics”, brings back painful memories of the PC upgrade cycle and how pointless it all was talking about MHz and RAM sizes.<\/p>\n
With all that said, the iPhone 5 is set to become the fastest selling gadget of all time, so maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about (more than\u00a0probable). Vote in our poll<\/a> to tell us your thoughts about the new iPhone.<\/p>\n Google’s self-censorship continues this week,\u00a0with The Pirate Bay joining the list of blacklisted search terms<\/a>\u00a0that will no longer be part of Google’s Autocomplete and Instant search products. The name of the website, and its domain name, joins notorious terms such as “torrent” and “RapidShare” as part of Google’s blacklist.<\/p>\n I have no idea what this latest move, part of Google’s appeasement policy, will actually do to combat piracy at all. I guess people who want to search for The Pirate Bay, but don’t know how to spell the words “Pirate”, “Bay” and “The”, may just give up and buy movies and music instead, or something. Interestingly, searching for “teh pyrat bey”\u00a0still brings up TPB website as the first result, as Google’s auto-correct features appears to still show love for the website.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, TPB co-founder\u00a0Gottfrid Svartholm has arrived safe and relatively well back in Sweden to face new hacking charges, and to serve the prison sentence imposed on his for his crime of being initially part of The Pirate Bay (as well as pay the million bucks he will be unable to pay), and further jail time for not appearing for a court hearing earlier in the year.<\/p>\n Speaking of millions of bucks in damages, the legal merry-go-around continues for\u00a0Jamie Thomas-Rasset, as the appeals court ruled this week that the damages decision from the second of her three previous trials was the one that was perfectly valid, and that the judge had no right in those trials to reduce the damages amount to something reasonable like $54,000. Instead,\u00a0Thomas-Rasset will be asked to pay\u00a0$222,000 for the act of sharing 24 songs<\/a>. I guess that’s better than the $1.92 million from the third trial.<\/p>\n There’s no doubt that a large percentage of the $222,000 is punitive in its nature, as even considering the thousand songs that\u00a0Thomas-Rasset is supposed to have shared (only 24 of those were included as part of the trial), there’s no way that $222,000 worth of damages could have occurred via direct damages. If we take the calculation used to come up with the $222,000 in damages, and couple it with the 11,000 copyrighted songs that the RIAA identified were being shared on LimeWire before its demise, each having being shared a thousand time (the RIAA actually claimed each were shared “thousands” of times), the resulting total damages would be worth excess of $101,750,000,000 (that’s $101 billion). Even if you take the $222,000 and divide by the 1,000 songs that\u00a0Thomas-Rasset is alleged to have shared, multiply that by the LimeWire figures, then that’s still more than $2.4 billion. And this was just one music sharing method.<\/p>\n The real question is, given\u00a0Thomas-Rasset’s intent (ie. to download songs for free), is it really fair to class her actions along with wilful pirates that make and sell counterfeit CDs, or start websites fraudulently charging people to download songs that are pirated in the first place? Her intent was to save a few thousands dollars, at best, by downloading instead of buying, so should the punitive nature of the damages be hundreds of times greater?<\/p>\n As controversial as the French “three-strikes” Hadopi regime has been, with the very same thing coming to the US (but twice as many strikes! Beat that Frenchies. USA! USA!), the trials and tribulations of both Thomas-Rasset and her compatriot Joel Tenenbaum would have been far more agreeable if they had fallen foul of these graduated response laws, rather than having to go through the civil court system.<\/p>\n Ironically, three-or-more strikes actually works out better for those that do admit to pirating stuff. At least compared to the threat of a civil lawsuit. But for one craftsman in rural France, his Kafkaesque ordeal might point to the more unfair aspects of graduated response.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n