HomeWeekly News Roundup (18 July 2010)
It’s like London buses, they say, you wait ages for one and then two comes along. That’s what happened this week with mid-week blog posts – two of them in the same week! I finally updated a feature that I haven’t touched in more than a year’s time, with a new edition of the “If I were to buy a new computer today …” feature. This feature helps to satisfy (a small part) of my desire to buy new tech all the time, as I can live vicariously through my readers (the use of the plural version may be inaccurate) by researching and finding out what kind of system I would buy, if I were to buy one today. I think I enjoy the research more so than the actual new computer itself, for some odd reason. I posted a couple of specs for different systems, so while everyone will have their opinion on what’s best, this may be a good start for those that don’t like the research part.
The second blog post was the June NPD US video game sales analysis. It’s come quite soon after the May analysis, but that’s because the May figures were delayed by NPD. Some good news in there for Microsoft, as their Xbox 360 console beat pretty much everyone except the DS, thanks to the new Elite “slim” form factor. I’m definitely on the market for one of these new slims, but I’ll wait until the holidays period to pick up a bargain (perhaps a bundle with Kinect, who knows).
Not a whole lot of “new” news this week, but some follow-ups of previous stories, and I am running a bit late today/tonight, so I’ll get through things quickly (and if you want more stuff, you can read my *both* of my mid-week blog posts, of course).
Starting with copyright news, despite the legal authorities trying to clamp down on law firms getting into the anti-piracy-for-money business, the pre-trial settlement style letter campaigns, more law firms are getting into the lucrative business it seems.
7000 people who have downloaded a Ministry of Sound compilation in the UK will receive a letter soon asking them to pay £375 to settle the matter out of court
The most recent is Gallant Macmillan, who represent the copyright holders of Ministry of Sound albums, amongst others, and they will be asking for £375 from those suspected of pirated a particular MOS compilation. But they claim they are doing things a bit differently, perhaps to avoid a public backlash, or to prevent authorities from finding fault with their actions. The funny part is that the £375 actually includes the cost of the compilation itself, which normally retails for £8.75, and so suspected pirates can actually keep turn their illegally downloaded songs into legal songs by paying the settlement fee. An expensive way to buy music, for sure. And instead of a situation where the copyright holders aren’t dealing with the law firm directly, but through another party in between (possibly to avoid the bad publicity if it all turns sour), Gallant Macmillan will only directly represent the copyright owners who have intention to sue, and not just the the threat to sue with no real intention other than to get some money through settlement fees. The law firms will all say the high fees, compared to the actual cost to the copyright holders, is high due to investigative costs and other legal costs, but the real intention perhaps is to scare people into paying and maybe even scare them enough to stop them pirating in the future. Of course, for every person that is scared into submission, there are hundreds of thousands that will still go on downloading.
And if these “small time” lawsuits (or threats of one) can’t scare people, then perhaps the government can do so through some kind of global treaty like the ACTA. And scary it is. Claims that hundreds of thousands of people in the UK alone could be jailed if the ACTA is adopted as law, by making copyright infringement a criminal matter, not a civil one, and even making “attempted piracy” a crime (so do a search on Google for “Toy Story 3 torrent” and you may be headed for jail). But most scary of all is that it’s all very secretive, as if the government know that the people that they represent will not like what’s in the ACTA and have done everything they can to avoid the public knowing about it – the US negotiators have been the key backers of keeping the negotiations secret. However, when the EU Pirate Party (remember that they now have a member in the EU parliament) invited themselves to a meeting to discuss the ACTA, and then were told that not only are they not allowed to discuss any aspect of the meeting of the ACTA with the public (which may very well be illegal under the EU parliament rules), that even notes weren’t being taken for the meeting in case it gets leaked. And it is then that the Pirate Party walked out on the meeting in disgust. But the leaks do continue from people that find the secretive actions unacceptable, but the more we read about the ACTA, the more scary it becomes. But you can just imagine members of the RIAA and MPAA sitting in the shadows, smiling contently, watching as their wishes becomes reality. Sort of like Cancer Man in the X-Files (the first few seasons, anyway).
The RIAA is spending millions to get back thousands, fighting piracy through legal channels
And you can see why the likes of the RIAA and MPAA want government to take over their job of preventing piracy. Because it’s expensive, and relatively unproductive. The RIAA’s latest accounts showed that in 2008, they spent $17.6 million in fighting online piracy, but only got $391,000 back in damages. Of course, they’ll say that getting money back from past acts of piracy is not the main point, the main point is to stop future piracy. But I’ll leave you to judge whether their efforts in 2008 have paid dividends or not in 2010, whether piracy is more or less common now. But not everyone in the music biz thinks the fighting piracy head on will result in anything. Peter Jenner, president of the International Music Managers Forum, a group that present feature artist music managers, says that the current thinking about copyright enforcement is no different to the 1930’s thinking about alcohol enforcement, also known as prohibition. And both, he says, are laws that is “offensive” to the general public. Jenner proposes some kind of levy to help pay for content being shared online, much like how people in the UK pay their licensing fees for the BBC. I’m not sure I agree with a “piracy tax”, since it’s unfair on those that don’t download pirated stuff on the Internet, however if there is a legal, publicly owned point of distribution, say a BBC for the Internet, and where a small costs are paid to access a good amount of content, then perhaps the solution has some merit. Much like how free to air TV exists, perhaps a free to download service, paid for by taxes and levies, might also exist to provide a good amount of digital entertainment to those that cannot afford to pay for premium content on a subscription based service, much like subscription TV. Using the same analogy, there will always be people who will try and succeed at getting “illegal cable”, but you can’t prevent all piracy, that’s just impossible.
And speaking of expensive lawsuits, Viacom’s billion dollar lawsuit has cost Google $100 million to defend (successfully, for now), Google’s CFO revealed. It’s money well spent (and peanuts to a company like Google, to be honest), and it’s an important victory for the Internet, not just Google. However, you can only imagine how much money was spent by Viacom, and you add both together, and apart from making a lot of lawyers happy, what else did it really achieve. Piracy is a cost to the economy, but sometimes anti-piracy is also a cost, and perhaps more costly if lawsuits had stopped websites like YouTube before it got off the ground.
On to HD/3D news. The news last week was that the PS3 will get the Blu-ray 3D firmware sometimes in September. It’s good news for buyers of 3D TVs, and for 3D TVs in general, since it suddenly means there are millions of potential Blu-ray 3D capable players on the market all without people having to pay anything for it (other than the loss of the PS3’s Other OS feature).
The PS3 will start supporting Blu-ray 3D in September, but it's not known whether there are any limitations imposed by the PS3's relatively older hardware
There’s still some confusion about whether HDMI 1.4 will be needed, since the HDMI hardware on the older PS3 predates even HDMI 1.3. But Sony seems to think that this won’t be a problem, and I guess you have to trust them on this, and they even went as far as saying “The [June] upgrade basically makes every PlayStation 3 HDMI 1.4 compatible”. I don’t remember anything about an update that made the PS3 HDMI 1.4 compatible, other than the “HDMI deep color” option added in 3.40. But as long as the HDMI hardware can handle high bandwidth transfers, then it should work perfectly with Blu-ray 3D, without having to limit the resolution for each eye to only 1080i or something. And as part of the announcement, 3D support for YouTube will be coming to the PS3 soon, which will be interesting. It’s either going to be the same kind of 2D to 3D feature that exists on Samsung, Sony and a few other manufacturer’s 3D TVs, or it will mean that YouTube will accept uploads of native 3D content in the future and display it as so. Interesting anyway.
Not much going on in gaming other than what I wrote for the NPD analysis.
And that’s another WNR for another week. I hope you have a good week ahead and see in at the same place, same time next week for another edition of the WNR.