HomeWeekly News Roundup (21 June 2009)
Sorry for this outrageously late WNR. Had a bit of a health situation that I needed to attend to. It’s a shame, since there’s lots of stuff to go through, so I will have to keep things short. And no, laziness is not the “health situation”. I wrote a mid-week blog about Nvidia’s Ion platform. An Ion is a charged atom, which makes the name so appropriate as that exactly what the platform does – it gives Intel Atom systems a much needed boost in the graphics department, particularly for HD video. It won’t be too long before you will see Blu-ray capable netbooks that can also double as a HTPC, I think.
Let’s start with copyright news. The MPAA admits it is losing the PR war, to what they have dubbed the enemy of copyright. There are a few people who don’t like any sort of copyright, but I think the majority of people do respect copyright, it’s just that they don’t like the way that it is being enforced.
Personally, I buy lots of DVDs. All legitimate. I don’t buy music much, mainly because I don’t listen to it much apart from Net radios (also legal). I do buy games, not a lot, but I don’t have a lot of time to play them anymore. But I am one of the people that the MPAA says is an enemy of copyright, simply because I refuse to support their methods. I respect that they want to keep piracy under control, but I don’t respect the way they have gone about things, which has made piracy an even easier choice for those that can’t stand DRM and the sometimes ridiculous prices for digital content that the MPAA members want to charge. I believe the best way to fight piracy is to make it unnecessary, and this means tackling the difficult issue of how to make money in a digital world, and how to make it harder for people to share content they don’t own, but at the same time not seriously affecting their user experience. I think this is all possible, and the music industry has been forced down this road already. It is just a shame that their business is a declining one, even without piracy, and so it makes for a bad example. But even they can turn things around if they price music aggressively, and take advantage of the digital medium’s low cost of distribution, replication. There will be losers in this revolution, as there will always be, but it’s a necessity and fighting against the tide will only make things more difficult. Embrace the change!
It’s unfortunate that the music industry’s changed tactics of pursuing legal avenues to stop piracy is just as clumsy and overreaching as their attempts with DRM. They are lobbying governments and telling them scary scenarios about the end of music and movies, in an effort to scare them into passing laws which have no place in societies based on the rule of law. The so called 3-strikes is so against the nature of the Internet, and justice and civil rights in general, that it’s hard to believe people are taking it seriously, the latest call for it are in the UK. Japan has just tightened their copyright laws as well. Apart from having no due process, the method will also mean a lot of false positives, as the most used identification method, which is based on using the IP address, is in most cases insufficient to identify people a court has ruled. And in the end, all it will do is to force people serious about pirating stuff to get more serious about hiding their activities, which is possible through encrypted VPNs and other technologies.
Jammie Thomas-Rasse: Sharing 24 songs will cost her $1.92 million
So the only people that will be caught are those that haven’t done much pirating and don’t know how to avoid capture. But these are the people that will be made examples of, much like the single mother that has been successfully sued for $1.92m, to scare people into behaving. But it won’t work, everyone knows it. And to go so overboard with the lawsuit to demand a multi-million dollar settlement will be a PR disaster for copyright groups, because it just reinforces how much out of touch they are with reality. $80,000 per song, for 24 songs, is a ridiculous number. There is no proof of the exact number of people that have been able to obtain songs from Thomas-Rasset, the sacrificial pawn in this game, so the figure is largely for punitive damages. Does sharing 24 songs seem like a $1.92m crime to you? Well it does to groups like the RIAA, and they’re not going to stop – the next on the hit list is AM/FM radio stations, which has just been labeled as “A form of piracy”. Let’s just stop people playing, sharing, listening to all songs – that will surely help save the business, not to mention the money they are paying to lawyers to fight these cases which might have been better used to find alternative strategies to operate in this new digital world.
The US had its digital transition, and for all purposes, it went off pretty smoothly. It is just as well that plans to do this were set in motion many years ago, before the crazies took control of the copyright debate, as otherwise digital TV would be saddled with DRM, most notably the Digital Flag. This would have prevented people recording any TV show that has this flag set, so no TiVo or delayed viewing, just to make sure that if you can’t catch something on TV live, or want to watch it again, you’ll have to fork out bucks to do it. If these crazies had been in control far earlier, the tape recorder, the VCR and even the PC might not have been allowed to exist, and is this really what we want, or what’s good for the industry and economy in general?
Onto HD news now. Another report which seem to indicate that while Blu-ray sales are up, DVD sales are down by much more. It’s going to be a while before Blu-ray can gain enough of a market share to really make a difference, but the decline in DVD sales probably has as much to do with the increase in gaming purchases as with anything seriously wrong with the industry it self.
The other piece of news is a poll which showed that Blu-ray standalone uptake is not quite increasing fast enough, and was even outpaced by the dead HD DVD format in the last year. Polls are interesting, but figures for uptake shouldn’t need to rely on polls, as there are real figures to be found.
And finally in gaming, Activision’s CEO has joined the chorus of people to call for a PS3 price cut. There is a veiled threat in there about pulling support for the PS3 (and PSP) if action isn’t taken, but I wouldn’t take it all that seriously. Do game publishers want cheap consoles? Yes. Will they pull support for the PlayStation family? No. But hopefully, this will give Sony extra incentive to even just consider a price cut.
That’s it for this week. Short and sweet. Long and boring coming up next week.