HomeWeekly News Roundup (4 March 2012)
As promised, the WinDVD 11 is up. WinDVD and PowerDVD have long been competitors, but with Cyberlink deciding to make PowerDVD into more than just a multimedia player, it seems Corel has gone the opposite direction and has decided to focus on the core features, and compensate by reducing the price. It’s not a bad strategy, since while the new version of PowerDVD does do a lot more, especially as a media hub, there are better, more dedicated software available. That’s not to say PowerDVD’s core features are being ignored – it’s more of a case of them being very good already and having little room for improvement and Cyberlink having to seek other ways to improve their software and justify the price of the upgrade. WinDVD, on the other hand, still has room to improve everywhere, and they’ve made some good progress in the latest version (which only took me 5 month to review).
If I seem a bit obsessed with the PowerDVD/WinDVD rivalry, it’s because I am, having done the reviews for both many many times over the last decade. You know you have to be obsessed over something when your other, more current obsession, had to take a back seat to it. Which brings us to …
Skyrim Update: Having mastered Alchemy, Smithing and Enchanting, I made myself some awesome Daedric armor and weapons. Am now able to slice and dice my way through almost any levelled enemy. Yes, even giants!
As for news, it’s been pretty quiet, with a lot of the focus on stories already covered previously (like The Pirate Bay’s transition to Magnet Links on the day that Leap Day William visits), or more incremental updates on the whole Megaupload prosecution (with just the right dash of character assassination against Mr. Dotcom, although he does make it easy).
Again, it’s a week where we only have a couple of copyright related news items, we start with a real world example of why Internet censorship can be very hard to get right, and very easy to get very very wrong.
Apparently, users of at least one ISP in Denmark were denied access to 8,000 legitimate websites, including Facebook and Google due to a SNAFU with the country’s voluntary Internet filtering scheme. Apparently, the legitimate 8,000 strong list of “good” websites was uploaded in place of a list of “bad” websites, due to operator error and poor operating procedures. The problem wasn’t corrected until 3 hours, and many complaints later. Now, it has to be said that the filter is predominantly used to block access to websites containing indecent images of children, a noble intent and something that’s worth doing (although my understanding is that these filters are often easily bypassed anyway). But if the rationale behind the filter changes to be about protecting the business interests of the likes of Sony and Universal, then not only would it detract from the more serious work of preventing access to child pornography, there’s also more room for error, as the sheer number of websites that needs to be blocked will increase incrementally from day one. And the biggest fear is not that 8,000 legitimate websites get blocked, but rather, just the odd couple of less than popular websites getting incorrectly blocked – a small enough error that’s hard to notice and even harder for the affected websites to rectify, without any sort of due process.
Germany's music performance royalty collection organisation, GEMA's disagreement with YouTube means legal, official music content on YouTube are often inaccessible
There are two more SNAFUs to go through this week, one intentional, and one not so much. We start with the intentional one in Germany, in which (and I’ve only been made recently aware of) the country’s performance royalty collection organisation, GEMA, has apparently been waging a bitter way against YouTube (that’s *so* 2007). The repercussion from the dispute means that people in Germany have been missing out on access to a lot of legal YouTube music content. Not that any of this is that new, but it was brought up again this week by a Twitter post, in which one user complained about having to use Chinese web proxies to access Sting’s new official music video, a situation the user describes as “f*cked up”. The irony here of course is the use of Chinese web proxies, not exactly a country well known for its Internet freedoms.
The short term greed and irrational fear of the Internet by some content holders (and those seeking to profit from content) is exactly why, in my opinion, web piracy is such a big problem today. For every user that resorted to a Chinese web proxy, more will have probably went onto their favourite BitTorrent network and downloaded the music video. And as a result, YouTube is denied profit, Sting is denied the ability to connect to fans via official channels, and nobody really benefits. It’s such a problem that even some of the music labels have started complaining about GEMA’s actions, because revenues are starting to be affected.
Trying to watch "Game of Thrones" online, without resorting to illegal means, is almost as hard as trying to rule the Seven Kingdoms without getting your head chopped off
As many smarter than me have already said, access is the key problem, and it’s a key driver behind the web piracy. It might have been possible in the past to deny access to content in order to reap better financial rewards, but that’s when people didn’t have the tools at their disposal to seek alternative, and illegal, access to the same content. The same strategy doesn’t work any more, basically. This web comic (note: rude words present), which explains the process of trying to watch Game of Thrones online, tells the whole story about access problems better than I ever could with words. And it’s even worse in places outside of the US, as the “Game of Thrones” situation is repeated for pretty much every TV show, and without access to cable and network TV options either. There are huge financial opportunities being missed right now due to content being made unavailable due to short term greed – instead, money is being wasted on anti-piracy, and our rights are being trampled in order to fight the ultimate futile fight. Make content available, and at for a reasonable price (not $40 for a season pass, when the Blu-ray set can be had for the same price), then the piracy problem will solve itself!
From the absurd to the, um, even more absurd – how about getting your YouTube video flagged for using copyrighted music, when the only “songs” on your video’s soundtrack is that of birds? That’s exactly what happened to one YouTube users, whose video about collecting wild vegetation for making a vegan salad turned out to be a controversial one. Music licensing firm Rumblefish made not one, but two claims on the video’s soundtrack, first after YouTube’s automated system flagged the video, and second when the user’s appeal (something along the lines of “it’s just birds singing”, most likely) was turned down. And I bet it’s not an isolated incident either, and it probably wouldn’t have been resolved to the original user’s satisfaction without the attention it garnered online (and unfortunately, not all incidents gets reported or gets the attention it needs). With the copyright claimed, Rumblefish were free to make money off a video that they had no rights to, so isn’t that the very definition of copyright infringement? And isn’t it a lot worse than what many YouTube “pirates” are doing, considering many of them are not doing it for money?
The silly DRM news of the week goes to Microsoft, Google and Netflix’s attempt to add DRM to HTML5 videos. HTML5 videos have been designed to allow browsers to offer native support for streaming videos without the need for a separate plug-in like Flash. But Flash supports DRM, and so the likes of Microsoft, Google and Netflix would like to see some form of DRM added to the HTML5 standard. It’s unworkable though, as one Google engineer points out, because this would mean open source browser makers would have to use proprietary, closed sourced code for the DRM component, or fail to fully support HTML5. The cynical side of me can see why Microsoft and Google, who make competing browsers to the open source Opera and Firefox, would want to see this happen. But I can forgive them because I know deep down, they don’t want DRM either – they have to implement them in order to satisfy the wishes of paranoid content holder though.
And we really get back to the core problem – paranoid content holders.
Nothing else to cover this week, so it’s time to say goodbye for now (and hello again to the world of Skyrim). See you next week.