DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

I spent most of this last week watching Dexter on Netflix. I do worry though that binge watching a show about a serial killer might have a bigger impact on my psyche than your typical binge watching choice. Binge watching is great for killing a bit of time now and then, but if it cuts too much into your life schedule, then it can become harmful.

But it’s okay, I’m far too lazy to ever become a serial killer. Or a serial anything.

Onto the news.

The randomness of DMCA takedown submissions to Google has once again reared its ugly head, with HBO asking a page containing a download for the popular open-source VLC media player to be delisted from Google’s results.

With more than 14 million links being removed from Google’s results just in the last month alone, and with little or no consequence for submitting incorrect takedown requests, mistakes are going to happen. It’s likely that HBO outsourced the collation of these links to a third party, which then probably used an automated keyword based algorithm to locate suspicious links. If that third party failed to do some basic verification of the automatically gathered links, then this is what happens.

While Google probably has their own method to detect and ignore incorrect takedown requests, but mistakes still do happen. If it’s a popular domain or page, then the site owner might file a counter claim which will be successful and will get the URL reinstated. But on a page like this one, where it’s a legal download on a torrent site, it’s unlikely the site’s owner, or the people who make VLC, will make the effort to file a counter claim, and so once the mistake happens, it’s permanent. Just how many permanent mistakes have happened via Google’s DMCA process, nobody knows.

As for HBO, at least they didn’t try to remove their own webpages like they did last time.

The MPAA supports getting money out of piracy, but not if it has to do any of the work

Opening up another front in the war against piracy, Google (and Microsoft, Yahoo and other major web advertisers) this week announced new plans to stop the flow of money to websites suspected of providing infringing content. The new plan was brokered by the Internet Advertising Bureau with help from the White House, and will allow rightsholders to alert ad networks of potentially infringing sites and get them booted off the network.

With the MPAA harping on about getting money out of piracy, you’d think they would be the first to offer support to this new initiative. But surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, the MPAA wasn’t impressed at all, calling the new initiative too narrow, and saying that too much of the anti-piracy burden is being placed on rightsholders.

The “everyone else should do the work, not us” stance isn’t a new one from the film industry, but having just months ago praised industry-led efforts like this one, the MPAA’s dissatisfaction is a bit hard to understand. If I didn’t know better, and I don’t, it would almost as if the MPAA preferred the likes of Google and Microsoft to do nothing. This way, the tech industry can continue to be the scapegoats in all of this, the straw men in their bid to get continue the government subsidization of this billion dollar industry.

Whatever the reason is for the entertainment industry’s single-minded pursuit of a technologically-led solution, the technology sector is actually coming up with real and working entertainment-led solutions to the same problem. A newly published report from Norway shows that music piracy rates are now only a sixth of what they were in 2008, and it’s largely thanks to legal alternatives such as Spotify.

The report found that illegal music downloads topped 1.2 billion in 2008 in Norway, but is now down to only 210 million (as of 2012). Further proving that Spotify and platforms like it are solving the piracy problem, the report found that 47% of those surveyed used Spotify, with an amazing half of these people also choosing to pay for the premium version of the music streaming service. Just goes to show that people are willing to pay for music, as long as you give them a product that’s worth paying for.

Spotify helping to kill music piracy at least in Norway

Film and TV piracy in Norway also declined, but not by as much as music piracy. With Netflix only available in Norway from October 2012, we’ll probably see bigger declines when the 2013 figures are out.

But not everyone is happy with Spotify though. Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich of Radiohead last week pulled their music from Spotify, criticizing the music streaming platform of being “bad for new music”. The musicians criticized Spotify’s royalty payment system, which they say ensures new musicians will never make it, while Spotify “shareholders will shortly being rolling in it”.

Spotify responded to the criticism by saying that $500 million in royalty payments have already been paid out to rightsholders, and that this figure is likely to reach $1 billion by the end of 2013, and that much of this money “is being invested in nurturing new talent and producing great new music”.

Note that payments to rightsholders does not always equal payment to artists. Music labels talk about artist rights, but the reality is that only a small slice of revenue actually goes to the artists. In the age of record stores and CDs, where labels did all the promotional work, this may have made sense. But in the age of self-publishing, perhaps it’s time for artists to take control of their own destinies, and get a bigger slice of the pie as a result.

The June NPD stats are out looking at US video game sales in that month, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 was again the top selling home-based console with 140,000 unit sales. This is the 30th month in a row that the 360 has been the best selling console.

Sony was their usual quiet self, despite the critically acclaimed The Last of Us being the top selling title of the month, the third highest selling game in June since 1995.

Nintendo did put out a PR statement, but it was exclusively focused on the 3DS, which did sell 225,000 units. No mention of the Wii U at all, which doesn’t bode well for the much-maligned console.

It’s definitely the calm before the storm at the moment, what with only a few more months left until the release of the PS4 and Xbox One. I just hope that with a new generation, the NPD and the gaming companies involved will be more generous when it comes to releasing sales figures. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

All right, that’s it for the week. Not too long, not too short. Just right. See you next week.

As part of a new project I’m working on for our Australian readers, I’ve been testing out the various US based video streaming services. Man, you guys are really really spoiled in terms of content and price. Take Netflix for example – if it had been launched here first in Australia, the price would never have been $7.99 per month. More like $79 per month, probably with less content and more restrictions as well. And it’s not just content and price, it’s also quality. To put it into perspective, Netflix Super HD’s maximum quality is probably better than anything we see in broadcast here in Australia, and that includes the $100+ per month HD cable I’m paying for.

I just hope I have enough bandwidth. I thought 300GB per month would be more than enough when I switched a month ago, but having used 15GB per day for 3 out of the last 5 days, I’m not so sure now.

Despite the Netflix (and Hulu Plus) bingeing, I did manage to get some work done (plus the bingeing was part of work, um, yes), so here’s the WNR.

Microsoft, maybe. But Google, the BBC and Netflix as bad guys? Most people won’t think that. But when it comes to adding DRM to HTML5, all of them are indeed on the wrong side of the issue.

The reason these companies all want to ditch Flash or even Microsoft’s own Silverlight is that with HTML5 and native support by modern browsers, it makes writing video applications for PCs (and tablets and smartphones) that much easier. Instead of maintaining a dozen different apps for different platforms, you can build a HTML5 based one and customize that for each platform.

It’s still not too late to stop DRM being added to HTML5

But in order for the switch to HTML5 to happen, DRM must happen too. To be fair, the requirement for DRM doesn’t come from these tech companies, but from the media companies that supply them with content. So once again, the story becomes “Hollywood wants DRM”, which isn’t really isn’t news is it?

Still, adding DRM to HTML5, the first HTML standard to have it if Netflix and co get their wish, is bad news. Not only does it mean an expanded proliferation of DRM, it also endangers the free nature of the web itself.

But since everyone loves Netflix, and hates Silverlight and Flash, it’s gonna be hard to get people worked up about WWW DRM. This petition is probably the closest we’ll get to an Internet protest.

I don’t really get it though. Netflix’s $7.99 per month makes pirating anything that’s already on Netflix quite pointless. And releasers usually takes the paths of least resistance, which for movies would be via DVD/Blu-ray rips, and HDTV recordings for TV shows. The only time people will bother ripping a Netflix stream would be for exclusive shows like House of Cards (and only when another source isn’t available). But then again, for $7.99 per month, the only people who end up pirating would be those that you really can’t squeeze any money out of, so where’s the loss in profit?

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If a government mandated filtering solution isn’t going to happen, and I hope it won’t, then the next best thing for Big Content may be a commercial solution. Up steps McAfee, as a new patent application filed by the company aims to add an anti-piracy filter to the company’s existing SiteAdvisor service.

SiteAdvisor is right now mainly used to blocks access to search engine result links for malicious or adult content, but this new patent seeks to expand the tool’s functionality to include copyright infringing content. So even if Google doesn’t filter out links to sites like The Pirate Bay, SiteAdvisor will step in and do it for them, although the system administrator will have to option to still allow visits to these sites (after the user is forced to read a warning message).

And if the companies behind the major security software tools can all be convinced to implement something like this, patent permitting, it would be like Christmas come early for the likes of the MPAA and RIAA. It won’t stop what I would like to call “persistent pirates” (they would have turned off SiteAdvisor or the equivalent feature in their security software from day one I suspect), but for the “casual pirates” that Hollywood and the music industry insists are prevalent, those that are unaware of their “seriousness” of their activities or lack the technical know-how to bypass these kind of filters, it might just be enough.

Watching Game of Thrones can be harder than actually winning the Game of Thrones

But I think most pirates know exactly what they’re doing, and why. Just like Australians who download Game of Thrones know the exact rationale behind their actions. Which is why it was fairly undiplomatic for US ambassador to Australia Jeffery Bleich to post a long-ish rant on Facebook calling Aussies that download GoT no good thieves, making Ambassador Jeffery just as popular as King Joffery in the process.

Once again the tired, and plainly wrong, analogy of theft was used, admittedly a very clumsy one involving stealing a book from your neighbour’s home that I’ve not seen before. Apparently, downloading a *copy* of a Game of Thrones episode is just the same as breaking in to your neighbour’s home and stealing a book. This analogy would only be true if Australians were actually going into other people’s homes and stealing hard-drives full of pirated GoT episodes, which ironically would actually make people think twice about piracy for fear of an unwanted home invasion. Or if Aussies broke into HBO headquarters and stole the original and only copy of GoT episodes.

The correct analogy of course is one that involves your neighbour taking the time and effort to photocopy all of his books and then leaving copies on the street for anyone to take. By taking a copy, you’ve committed copyright infringement. If the right (or wrong) people took copies, it may lead to lost sales and hurt the rights owners. It may even hurt them so much as to bankrupt them. But it’s not exactly home invasion and burglary, is it?

And what if one of the people who picked up a photocopied copy, a person that never intended to buy the book in the first place, love it so much that he went to the bookstore immediately and purchased a copy? Doesn’t this count as a gained sale? Hasn’t the publishers, only in this one isolated incident to be fair, benefited from piracy?

As for the rationale behind taking and not buying, what if the bookstore was located really far away, like in another country? Or that for no particularly good reason, you had to wait months in order to buy the book locally compared to other countries, and that when it does arrive, it’s only available in an expensive, leather-bound, big print edition that weighs a ton, instead of an edition that you might actually want? That photocopied copy might then start to look like the much better deal, even without considering the pricing differences.

But no, it’s much simpler to just trot out the tired out analogies about stealing, shoplifting, and burglary apparently, and the equally tired and frankly dishonest lines about job losses and billions being lost every year.

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The Pirate Bay has moved home again this week. That’s twice (or three times, if you count the temporary move back to the .se domain) in two weeks. This time it’s Iceland that becomes The Pirate Bay’s new port, with the new .is domain name. Unlike the Greenland domain name authority’s self-censorship of The Pirate Bay, the Iceland equivalent says that a court would have to decide on the fate of the new .is domain name before they would be willing to take any action. And quite rightly so, because it’s not the place for a domain authority to be judge, jury and executioner.

I said last week that I wanted to wait another week to comment on the March NPD results, to see if more hardware numbers roll in. They haven’t, unfortunately. So analysis turns to a game of educated guessing. Thanks a lot, NPD!

But if I had to guess, I’d have to say that the Wii U probably didn’t sell very well in March. If you asked me to tell you why the Wii U is struggling, then I’d probably have to say that it was down to several factors.

Wii U sales remain sluggish because it isn’t a huge improvement on the 360/PS3, nor is it cheaper or a better media device

One, the Wii U’s hardware, while an improvement on the Wii, is barely an improvement on the more than half-a-decade old PS3 and Xbox 360. If Nintendo wanted to go after the hardcore gamers, the Wii U isn’t going to do it.

Two, casual gaming has moved on from the days of the Wii. Now, it’s all smartphones and tablets and really really cheap games. The Wii U has a tablet, but can it really do things, in a standalone fashion, that the iPad cannot? Plus, Wii U games are still expensive.

Three, the cost. With the PS3 and Xbox 360 getting to the end of their release cycles, the Wii U is just too expensive by comparison. It’s just not good value, as it doesn’t play Blu-ray like the PS3, and its media streaming capabilities aren’t better than the Xbox 360’s. The lack of game titles surely can’t help, even with the presence of first-party exclusives.

So while more first-party games will help the Wii U, but by holiday 2013, the much more impressive PS4 and Xbox 720 will be out and I suspect the the Wii U will look even more outdated by then. Which is a shame, because had the Wii U been here just a year earlier, it might have been a completely different story.

Speaking of stories, I must get back to mine on Netflix. So many things to watch, so little time. See you next week.