HomeWeekly News Roundup (28 June 2009)
Going to do a very quick WNR this week, as I’m still feeling under the weather. Had to do a bunch of tests at the clinic to see what’s wrong – having things inserted, extracted, and cables plugged in wasn’t a nice experience, but I now know how my DVD player feels. And no, it’s now Swine Flu, although everybody here in Melbourne, Australia seems to have it.
In copyright news, more lawsuits, but this time in Ireland, where the record industry representatives are suing two Irish ISPs. It’s heartwarming to know that, despite the bad economy, that at least the lawyers are still finding excellent amounts of work available (at at $765 per hour as well).
Lawsuits, three-strikes, throttling – the industry’s favourite tactics, but not all government agree. The Spanish government’s strong dislike of the three-strikes rule has promoted their music industry to change tactics and abandon the three-strikes system. If only other government were as strong in their beliefs that due process is still something that needs to be protected.
And onto our favourite court case, you must have heard a lot about how The Pirate Bay case has been denied a retrial. This is true, but it is by no means the end of the road for the TPB guys. What happened, and as explained clearly a few weeks ago by Cynthia, our Swedish expert, a higher court has ruled that the judge in the original case was not biased. All this is means is that instead of having the retrial in the original court, the retrial will have to take place in a higher court. There are still a few more couts to go before it is all over. I don’t think we will find out anything definitive in 2009 in any case.
Real says RipGuard and ARccOS are not copy protection systems, and so do no fall under the DMCA
In my second favourite court case, the MPAA has filed new complaints against Real Networks, claiming they lied during the RealDVD trial. It all pertains to patent filings from a couple of years ago in which Real Networks claimed that ARccOS and RipGuard were copy protection systems, even though Real claimed in court they were not. The argument goes that Real thinks neither ArccOS or RipGuard can fully prevent the copying of a disc (only delay the process), and so they are not anti-copying features. The reason why the MPAA may be going after Real on these two additional anti DVD-copying measures, as opposed to CSS, is that Real does have a CSS license and it may be harder to argue that Real has ripped CSS, but in reality, it has left CSS intact in the copied file (and added a few other layers of its own DRM). The verdict is expected soon, but I don’t think Real will win if the argument is already on something as specific as whether ARccOS and RipGuard are copy protection methods – if the argument has been the higher issue of whether studios have the right to prevent usage that does not harm to them, which is the case when people make make digital copies of movies that they own and do not share with anyone else other than those that already have access to the original disc.
The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers say that your phone’s ringtone should be considered a public performance and they should receive royalty everything your phone rings. Yeah right.
Onto HD news, rumours abound that Toshiba will jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon soon. Is there some truth to this news story, or is this the new “Blu-ray add-on drive coming to the Xbox 360” line of stories that will always pop up from time to time, only to be refuted almost immediately. There does seem to be more truth behind this story as it comes from statements from Toshiba’s President when he was speaking to shareholders. And since Toshiba owns the Cell processor, it would be interesting to see a Toshiba Blu-ray player with high quality DVD upscaling as seen in their HD DVD players, plus ultra-fast response times like the PS3.
The rest of the stories this week were about last week’s story about a poll that showed HD DVD being more popular than Blu-ray, and hardly anybody cares about Blu-ray. There is a reason why I only devoted two sentences to this poll last week, because polls are misleading by themselves, and when you are trying to poll actual ownership stats, rather than relying on hard data, then it’s even less useful. The Blu-ray people’s response is that the poll is unfair because most people think their upscaling DVD player is in fact a HD DVD player, which might be the case, although it’s still the Blu-ray people’s fault for not educating people better on what is real HD and what is upscaled. Start by calling it “Real HD” to differentiate Blu-ray from “Upscaled HD” might be a good marketing idea.
And finally in gaming, a new PS3 firmware has been released. Firmware 2.8 doesn’t add anything major, but fixes a few things and improve some others, like a faster XMB, wireless controller auto-assign. Still a lot of people having bricked PS3s after each update, so read up the horror stories on the official PS3 board and see if you are willing to take the risk if your PS3 is already out of warranty.
Okay, the doctors are telling me to take it easy, so that’s what I will do. As if I needed encouragement to be lazy. See you next week, hopefully feeling a little bit better.