HomeWeekly News Roundup (12 July 2009)
We’ve had a good response to our 10th Anniversary Competition, so if you haven’t entered yet, then don’t forget to get your entry in. There’s still time, the competition closes at the end of the month.
I had a mid-week rant (well, yesterday actually) about the state of patching for PC games, specifically for Fallout 3. The way developers are using their customers as beta testers is not really helping the struggling PC gaming industry. And certain companies are better than others at fixing bugs, and some even go as far as adding in new features for no extra cost. But others are either shy about releasing patches (Atari’s Test Drive Unlimited comes to mind), or in Fallout 3’s case, releasing patches that cause even more bugs. Anyway, onto the news for the week, while not numerous, but is still interesting.
In Copyright news, there’s more clarity in the Pirate Bay sale situation. TPB’s spokesperson has clarified a few points in an interview with TorrentFreak. But it is still unclear which direction the new owners will go, whether they want to strip out the torrents for the pirated content (which defeats the whole purpose of TPB, and of course, makes it worthless), or they plan to keep things the way they are and face any legal problems as they arise. The Pirate Bay founders will now concentrate on the Video Bay project reported here a few weeks ago (the YouTube alternative, but without the copyright filters).
The Swedish Pirate Party is still wallowing in their victory, and they may even get a second MP in the EU Parliament if Sweden ratifies the Lisbon Treaty. But they already have one MP and Mr. Christian Engström has used his election to highlight the issue of online freedom, and how the copyright industry threatens it. With multi-million dollar amounts being awarded against individuals, and governments acting crazy trying to circumvent their own legal processes to appease the music/movie industry, there ought to be a Pirate Party and Pirate Party MPs in every parliament or congress around the world to keep things in check.
The Thomas-Rasset story (good title for a TV movie) continues and she will seek a new trial. She’s gotten a lot of sympathy from everyone, including one of the artists of the 24 songs she shared. Even the judge of the previous verdict (the one before the last one) overturned it due to the fact that it was excessive, and it wasn’t anywhere near $1.92m. The best PR move that the RIAA can make now is to settle with Ms. Rasset for a reasonable figure, although it might already be a little bit too late for this.
This mans wants to take your Internets away ...
Sarkozy’s Kraozy Internet “3-Strikes” plan was watered down by the French Constitutional Council, but the amended version has been passed in the French senate, controlled by Sarkozy’s party. The current version will still require a judge’s action before any Internet bans can be implemented, which makes the process slightly fairer, but the whole point of the bill is now under threat since it was all about having a speedy (ie. non constitutional) process to ban people from the Internet, and they probably won’t get this if a judge has to be involved at any point. The court will probably decide after a while that it’s just too much work to implement bans to the millions of people who download pirated stuff in France and give up. Hopefully.
On the other side of the Pyrenees, things are much better. A Spanish judge has basically ruled that downloading pirated content does not constitute a crime, since no money can be proved to be lost. As long as the downloader doesn’t go on to sell the content, then no laws have been broken. My interpretation is that the person who originally made the download available, if not doing so for profit, then probably hasn’t broken any laws either. This kind of sane, informed decision that actually makes sense is all so rare these days. More judges (and juries) need to go back to the basics and understand the burden of proof is on the RIAA and MPAA to prove that money has been lost, that the person downloading the pirated material would have otherwise purchased the content based on past habits. Otherwise, all they have proved is that someone who doesn’t buy things continue to not buy things, and so therefore, they lose nothing. And they may actually gain a lot in terms of publicity for their products, which is why the Internet is being used so heavily these days for promotional purposes.
Moving on to HD news, Netflix infamously introduced its Blu-ray tax, a reasonable $1 extra per month, for Blu-ray renters. The story now is that the $1 not only covers the extra cost of procuring Blu-ray movies, but that because Blu-ray movies are more easily damaged than their DVD counterparts, this extra fee is also necessary to buy replacement copies.
This comes after several users reported receiving several Blu-ray discs that had cracks in them and were unplayable. Blu-ray discs are supposed to be tougher than their DVD counterparts, mainly due to a harder surface that is more resistant to scratches. This makes them less likely to develop disc reading problems due to scratches, but also makes it harder to fix scratched discs because the standard DVD polishing method won’t work. However, perhaps this harder surface makes Blu-ray discs less flexible than DVDs (they certainly seem thicker, from my experience), and this makes then easier to crack, especially when sent through the post and being abused by renters over time. It’s certainly something worth investigating, and perhaps harder envelopes are needed to protect Blu-ray rentals (and this may mean a hike in the “Blu-ray Tax”).
LG HR400 combines a Blu-ray player with DVR ... but will we see something like this in the US?
LG has released a new Blu-ray player in the UK that has a built in hard-drive for recording free to air (Freeview) TV programs. It is a Blu-ray Profile 2.0 player so it has an Ethernet port, and it uses this to support YouTube playback. DivX playback is also supported. Why highlight this player? Well, it’s just interesting to note that something like this is available first in the UK, and not in the US, and I’ve always wondered why. At first, I thought it might have been due to copyright concerns, and that’s probably true to some extent. Then I remembered the popularity of TiVo and perhaps this is why DVD recorders (with or without built-in HDDs) never took off in the US. But with the switch to Digital TV, and the willingness of companies like LG and Samsung to make hybrid Blu-ray/DVRs, hopefully this will break up the TiVo monopoly a bit. I’m certainly expecting this type of player to be available in Australia, where TiVo only has a small presence and DVD recorders are still relatively popular.
And while BitTorrent is widely recognised by the industry as the enemy of movie theaters, one theater in Norway has demonstrated that BitTorrent might actually help the movie industry. By using this technology to stream movies to show on the big screen, rather than relying on expensive hard copies to be sent to cinemas, 2K resolution movies can be downloaded or streamed for distribution. My feeling is that BitTorrent gets a bad name for its association with pirated material, but the technology it self is not illegal. It is in fact the future of content distribution online, and it is also cost effective as it leverages the downloader’s own connections to ensure the connection of everyone else is of a good speed, and helps to spread the cost of downloads away from the content provider. If Hollywood does come to its senses and decide to sell streaming movies online, then BitTorrent or some similar technology is the way to go.
Sorry, no gaming news this week of note. Lots of noise about Wii MotionPlus and Wii Sports Resort, which will no doubt top the sales charts when the figure come out. The figures for June 2009 should be out this week, and as usual, the full analysis will be posted soon after.
See you next week.