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Weekly News Roundup (10 November 2013)

Sunday, November 10th, 2013

Another short one for you this week. This one is kind of my fault though. As you know, I’m the arbiter of what gets written up here, and that’s mostly based on personal interest (I believe this is what they refer to as journalism), and I just wasn’t really in a mood to be interested in much of anything this whole week. I think watching The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Never Let Me Go back to back may have been a real detriment to my mood for the whole week, especially given the order I watched them in.

Okay, enough word padding, here we go.

What is that idiom again? Something about people who live in glass houses. Or to be precise, people who are part of a global online copyright crusade and how they should really make sure their own copyright house is in order before pointing fingers at everyone else. The fact that the websites of the RIAA and the BPI, the music industry’s two main copyright lobbyists, both appeared to have been guilty of a case of copyright abuse isn’t really the point, as the fault was minor at best (and it’s common enough). No, the point is that if you’re going to be so rigid and strict in your interpretation of copyright law, like the RIAA and BPI have done so many times in the past, then you better make sure you’re not living in that glass house.

I think copyright is a fluid thing. It exist for some pretty good reasons, but it definitely should not be interpreted in a fundamentalist manner. There are lots of examples of copyright abuse that is perfectly reasonable, and if anything, should be encouraged by the copyright holder, or at the very least, a blind eyed turned to it. For example, using copyrighted music in a YouTube video, for example, is copyright abuse by the standards of the law. And the rights holders have the right to take action. But if the video would ever only be viewed a couple of hundred times, does it really matter? Or if it is a funny take on an unrelated subject (which would then fail to make it protected under parody exemptions, as the parody’s subject matter has to be related to the copyrighted material), one which would never hurt the original’s chance at making money, who is actually being wronged there? Another example. A piece of music that never achieved popularity becomes part of an Internet meme, should you then go on a massive DMCA crackdown campaign, which is of course your right. As I said, copyright is fluid.

So if we can forgive the RIAA and BPI for their copyright trespasses, perhaps they can show a little bit more flexibility and compassion the next time their rights are infringed. That’s all we’re asking.

This deal is getting worse all the time! Last week, it was the Sony bombshell that the PS4 won’t play audio CDs and MP3s, and won’t support DLNA. This week, Microsoft has confirmed that the Xbox One won’t play Blu-ray 3D films.

That in itself is not as big of a loss as say the lack of MP3 and in particular DLNA support. But it begs the question: why? There are tons of el-cheapo Blu-ray players that support 3D these days, is it really that much more costly for Microsoft to include 3D playback?

The Xbox One can play Blu-ray films, but not 3D ones

The answer is probably a yes. Licensing and royalty payments means that, even at a couple of bucks for each Xbox One sold, it will still end up amounting to millions of dollars in the long run. If the demand is there, Microsoft might add support via a patch. If not, they can either ignore it or sell it as an add-on pack in the future.

Both consoles will be fighting to win the upcoming console war, and profitability (which affects pricing) will be key to victory.

While the PS4 and Xbox One are deciding which previous generation formats they will and won’t play, Netflix is going ahead with the next-gen. Seven 4K clips, each around 8 minutes, are already available for streaming on Netflix. The description of these clips say they’re an “example of 4K”, with each clip being at different framerates (24, 59.94, 29.97 …). One would supposedly need a 4K capable Netflix player (and a 4K TV) in order to play these clips at their stated resolutions.

Netflix will have to weave a bit of bandwidth magic in order to make 4K work under current broadband limitations

So it looks like Netflix are serious about getting into 4K, something their CEO hinted at a couple of months ago. The testing done now will determine the likely bandwidth requirements, which will have to balance the need to provide a high quality 4K picture, along with a low enough bitrate to allow a greater number of households access to 4K.

It’s all very exciting (at least for video nerds like myself), but the overall feeling I have is that all these new exciting things are being held back by the current state of the Internet. Even as it is, web video services like Netflix and YouTube would be a lot more usable if they were coupled with an ultra speed broadband connection, one that can only be consistently offered by fiber-to-the-home connections at the moment (so speeds in excess of 100 Mbps, with 25 Mbps or higher upload speeds). That Netflix has to make sacrifices to quality for 4K, or even 1080p, proves that the Internet is just not fast enough (on average) at the moment.

That’s it for the week. I promise I’ll try to be less disinterested next week, which should ultimately mean more news stories. Until then, have a nice one.

Posted in 3D, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (10 November 2013)

Weekly News Roundup (25 September 2011)

Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Welcome to yet another edition of the WNR. Hope you’ve had a good week. It was mainly an uneventful week for me, except my graphics card broke early on the in the week, and so I had found the perfect excuse to do a little bit of upgrading. Faced with restrictions in budget, card length (my old Antec Sonata Designer case would only fit a card 23cm/9″ or less), power supply constraints (although my Antec EarthWatt 500W, with dual 17A rails on the 12V, is not the worst around), I eventually settled for a Radeon 6850, upgrading exactly +2,000 from my old Radeon 4850. While my Intel E8500 is now the bottleneck in certain games, it’s definitely great to be able to play most games at 1080p without having to turn down the details (or as in my old card’s case, all the way down to 1360×768 @ medium just so it doesn’t crash the faulty card). A quick, cheap, and not so nasty upgrade is sometimes a great way to give some life back to an old PC.

More than expected number of news items this week, so let’s get started.

In copyright news, it’s hard to know where to begin. I guess we should start with the source of the problem, the money. More precisely, the money flowing into Washington and other capitals of the world, as the copyright lobby spends millions scaring politicians into believing “net piracy plague” hype.

It was revealed this week that the MPAA spent $470,000 in lobbying in the last quarter alone, mainly to promote the hugely controversial PROTECT IP act, which if you’ve been following the WNR, you should already know that it has come under attack by a variety of professionals, from engineers, to entrepreneurs, to law professors. The idea of messing around with the foundation of the Internet, the domain naming system, just so the billion dollar movie industry can feel a little bit better, without actually solving any real problems, is I guess what these professionals are most concerned about. Basically, the MPAA has convinced politicians that the few harmless flies are actually killer bees, and that the only way to solve the problem is to launch a tactical nuclear strike (except in this analogy, the nuclear strike would probably solve the fly problem, whereas PROTECT IP won’t do anything to piracy).

What surprised me more was that, despite being only a fraction of the size of the movie industry, the music industry via its lobby group the RIAA actually spend almost three times as much money – $1.25M, in just one quarter. And somehow, this was still down on last year’s $1.4M, in the same quarter. Had the RIAA simply spend the money they’ve spent on lobbying and DRM, on actual innovation, they would have been the ones making the iPod and running iTunes, not Apple. Instead, they spend a million plus trying to get new legislation through that would allow labels to receive royalty from radio station airings – once upon a time, labels were happy to just get free airings for promotional purposes, but not any more I guess.

RapidShare will hope its recent lobbying spending of $260,000 is enough to convince Washington politicians not to kill off the file sharing industry

The same story also showed some lobbying from the other side, specifically, by Rapidshare. If PROTECT IP passes, they have the most to lose, since they will probably be the first website to get filtered, after having appeared in all the copyright blacklists. There would be far too much collateral damage if lawmakers outlaw public file sharing, because while I do admit Rapidshare has its fair share of pirated files, it’s also an essential service for many others to share large files without having access to your own FTP server. I can’t see how you can have a public file sharing service without the problem of piracy cropping up, but it’s not as if Rapidshare doesn’t have tools for rights holders to get infringing files removed – it’s just that rights holders don’t want to have to do the work to get them removed. Automatic filters are easy to escape by real pirates, but makes false positives hard to avoid – think of the YouTube false positive copyright thing and times it by about 1,000, since at least with YouTube, some kind of audio/visual analysis could be performed, while it’s harder with generic files.

The world’s second most famous music pirate, Boston University student Joel Tenenbaum, is back in the news this week as the RIAA’s appeal of an earlier reduction in damages, to “only” $67,500, was rejected by the appellate court. But not because they supported the original jury rewarded $675,000, but because they thought that Judge Nancy Gertner has jumped to the constitutional issues a bit too early in citing the reason for the reduction, when there were other legal recourse that should have been taken before going down this route. It appears that the appeals court agrees that $675,000 was inappropriate, and in their summary, even urged Congress to consider reducing the excessive statutory damages in relation to copyright infringement (but we’ll be lucky if Congress doesn’t do the opposite, and increase statutory damages). This is become a bigger issue, because back in the day, most copyright infringement lawsuits were related to commercial infringement, and so the statutory damages are relevant to those types of cases. Today, most copyright infringement cases relate to non commercial infringement, such as illegally downloading a 99 cent song for free, and so $150,000 per act of infringement doesn’t really fit the “crime” any more. A sensible copyright reform would introduce a new tier of penalties dealing specifically with non commercial infringement, because a fine of $150 per act is enough of a deterrent for those that actually fear the law on the matter (most don’t, even with $675,000 in damages as a potential outcome). And so for now, Tenenbaum faces $675,000 in damages again, which will of course be appealed.

But Boston University students aren’t the only ones having money trouble these days. Righthaven’s refusal to pay the $34,000 in legal fees it owns to Wayne Hoehn, possibly through lack of ability to pay, has forced Hoehn’s attorneys to petition the court to send US Marshals to seize Righthaven assets in response. Now that would be a beautiful sight to behold, wouldn’t it? Righthaven took the risk in trying to scare Hoehn into paying a settlement fee, only for Hoehn to refuse to lie down and fight his way to a win in court, and so it’s only fair that Righthaven should pay up. After all, they’re the ones who send letters threatening tens and hundreds of thousands in damages, if people don’t settle. They should have taken their own advice and settled, if they didn’t want to pay up (except I think the judge refused them the right to do so, heh).

Over to Europe right now, whose financial system should collapse any day now, but before then, there are some deck chair shuffling that needs to happen. In Italy, MPs from Berlusconi’s party (why is the guy still prime minster?) want to introduce the world’s first “one-strike” system, where people may get kicked off the Internet for just a single allegation of copyright infringement. Sometimes I think politicians are actually just using copyright as an excuse to kill off the Internet, as the Internet is making it harder to rule against the wishes of the people. And also to hide your bunga bunga parties. You know what this is? It’s fascism. And we all know how Italians deal with fascists (well, eventually, anyway).

The SFI's IP address being used for piracy should not be proof that the institute was engaged in piracy

On to Sweden, and the Swedish Film Institute has just gone through what hundreds and thousands of individuals have gone through, after the SFI was accused of pirating films because its IP address had been found in one of many BitTorrent swarms. It would be hard for the SFI to go with the “my router was hacked” excuse, because no hacking did occur, but because they operated a public Wi-Fi, and because the agency tasked with collection IP addresses aren’t cooperating with the SFI on the investigation, it has been extremely difficult for the SFI to find the source of the piracy. And if this doesn’t prove that an IP address does not equal the identity of the individual(s) who made the infringement, then nothing will. And if public Wi-Fi is now going to be the target of anti-piracy operations, then that’s taking a huge step backwards in terms of the Internet everywhere approach that we’ve become used to (and which many websites, like Facebook or FourSquare, rely on).

And this increasing perception gap between how the world works now, and how the copyright lobby/politicians want things to work, is probably why the German Pirate Party has won 15 seats in the Berlin regional elections. With their Swedish counterpart winning a seat in the EU parliament, pirate parties around the world could become the new Greens, as the issue of Internet privacy and rights become more and more important.

High Definition

In HD/3D news, next week should bring us the Star Wars numbers, an early signs show that it will be a big one. I’m a huge Star Wars nerd, having watched the originally trilogies at least 50 times altogether (and the new prequels trilogies about 6 times), but I’ve actually not pre-ordered the set. It’s not a protest at George Lucas or anything, but while Star Wars on DVD was a special moment for me, I’m a bit more meh about Star Wars on Blu-ray for some reason. Probably because, upscaled, the DVD edition still looks quite good, and from early reviews, while the Blu-ray version definitely looks better, the classic trilogies aren’t the “hi-defy” experience that many would be expecting. It’s not only the age of the film that the cause, but I think not going with a new transfer, given advances in technology since the last one, seems like a step backwards. Which is why I suspect we’ll get a new transfer in time for next year’s 3D version of the films, which means a new Blu-ray set (hopefully with the remastered films in 2D, as well as 3D), and so it’s hard to get too excited. I will still probably get it, I mean I got the LotR theatrical mess on Blu-ray.

Plus, I’m finding it difficult to get the time to watch movies these days, got a dozen or more on Blu-ray that’s still under shrink wrap.

For 3D news, this week, YouTube announced a new feature in which you can convert any existing or new uploaded 2D video to 3D. Cool if you like this sort of thing, but the 3D hype is definitely dying, and the 2D to 3D conversion could be the jump the shark moment for the format, because really, it’s an admission by YouTube that nobody is uploading any real 3D content.

And finally in gaming, those that saw and agreed to the new PSN user agreement, without reading it (obviously didn’t watch that South Park episode), may realise that they’ve signed over more than they realised.

Sony apparently sneaked a clause which makes it a lot harder for people to join in one of the many class action lawsuit against Sony for the PSN data theft. Those that signed the agreement will have agreed to go through binding individual arbitration before being allowed to join any class action lawsuit, with a Sony appointed arbitrator. If you don’t sign the agreement, then you won’t be allowed to use PSN, but you can opt out of the arbitration only by sending a letter to Sony HQ detailing your wishes, and within 30 days of signing the original agreement, and of course, all of these details were “hidden” in the wordy user agreement. I’m not going to comment on whether this is an underhanded move by Sony or not, but all I will say is that this is exactly what you would expect from such a company, and probably why it’s such an attractive target for hackers.

Diablo III could be a great game, but Blizzard are doing all they can to ruin it with "always-on" DRM and MMO restrictions, without any of the MMO benefits, in the single player mode

Diablo III is an eagerly awaited game, and Blizzard has a great reputation as a game producer. But the company’s insistence on using always-on DRM, they say for anti-cheating purposes, not anti-piracy, could really hurt their reputation, not to mention sales of the game. A recent play of the beta version seems to show a lot of quirks related to the always-on DRM, including the inability to pause games, and game glitches whenever the connection goes down (and it went down a lot, thanks to the flaky beta Blizzard servers), and eventually users get thrown back to the main menu, losing unsaved progress. Hopefully, the final version will not be as “crippled”, but without adding in a true offline mode, Blizzard is always going to set themselves up to fail. The good news is that there’s still a lot of time between now and the game’s release, so enough public pressure could make Blizzard do the right thing.

And that’s all that was for the week. I’m off to play Starcraft 2 in 1080p, extreme quality mode (which is more than playable at 50/60 FPS on my new 6850, at least when the on screen unit count isn’t too high). See you next week.

Posted in 3D, Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (25 September 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (14 August 2011)

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

Another pretty quiet news week, and once again, NPD has “released” stats for US video game sales in July 2011. More on the later though, let’s get through the small number of interesting news items this week in this relatively short WNR.

In copyright news, a couple of weeks ago, the story of a 70-year-old grandma being “caught” downloading video porn by a copyright law firm made the headlines.

If you have a Wi-Fi connection, you need to use WPA2 encryption

This week, a blind man is accused of doing the same. In a scenario that is likely to be repeated over and over again, the man, only known as Doe 2057, suspected that the Wi-Fi router his wife set up might not have been secured, which possibly led to neighbours abusing the connection to download Japanese porn, despite the man living in a “very upscale building”. Before we get to the rights and wrongs of copyright law firms, people really need to be more careful with their Wi-Fi routers. By not securing it, anyone could connect and use up your Internet bandwidth, and that’s actually a best case scenario. Worst case, they would have access to your network, and hence any file shared on the network. The same also applies to routers that use the default password (or no password). And I think router makers have to take some responsibility as well, as far too many routers ship with factory settings that do not have security turned on or use the easily broken WEP protocol – it makes them easy to install, a bit more compatible with older wireless devices, but a little bit of hand-holding in the set up software wouldn’t make the process that much more difficult either.

But with nobody taking any responsibility, the large majority of consumers ignorant of the need to secure their routers, copyright law firms are taking advantage of biased copyright laws. It’s certainly opportunistic, you have to say. The problem is that to actually fight the charges, as Doe 2057 found out, it’s usually more expensive than just paying the on average $2,500 settlement fee. And the copyright law firms know this, and have exploited it beautifully. It was also revealed this week that the number of people being “sued” this way, in the United States lone, has reached over 200,000, according to stats being kept by TorrentFreak. That’s half a billion dollar worth of settlement fees, but assuming not everyone pays up, it’s still a 8 figure amount that many law firms would be delighted to take in over the course of several years. If you ever get caught, you should definitely check out EFF’s page on mass copyright lawsuits, and learn about your options.

A new study seems to show that good games are pirated more, which might sound like common sense to you and me, but nevertheless the study “confirms” it as fact. Except it sort of doesn’t. The TorrentFreak article on this study has more details, including the top 10 list of most pirated games, there are a few cases, such as the awful TRON Evolution game, that still managed to be popular with pirates, despite being unpopular with critics. Similarly, the fairly average and not all all popular (sales wise) ‘Two Worlds II’ managed to get into the top 10, and the hugely popular Starcraft II wasn’t the most pirated game (Fallout: New Vegas was, which is fair enough I suppose). I would actually like to see a study that tries to find a correlation between game sales, piracy rates and the quality of the game. What I would like to know is that if high quality games have a higher or lower ratio of pirated copies versus paid for copies. And then take into consideration things like the exclusive online features of the game (eg. Starcraft II’s Battle.net support), as well as any DRM employed (eg. Ubisoft games). I think the results may be very interesting.

Speaking of DRM, Walmart is pulling out of the digital music business according to leaked memos, and this has implications for those that purchased DRM’d music from them prior to 2007 (before they went DRM-free). Luckily, Walmart seems to be doing the right thing and will keep the DRM servers online (they learned the hard way about turning off DRM authentication, back in 2008 when they tried it and met with strong public condemnation). But how long will they do it? Indefinitely? At some point, Walmart will decide unilaterally that it no longer needs to maintain DRM authentication, and all those “purchases” would be made invalid. The sensible thing for Walmart seems to be to transfer the DRM’d songs to DRM-free version, which should not really be that difficult, but I suppose it means extra licensing costs. It again highlights the problem with DRM, not only for consumers, but for content providers having to get locked in to a proprietary system for an undefined number of years.

High Definition

In Blu-ray/3D news, I posted a 3-in-1 news story just yesterday on developments in the 3D world.

The first of the three is not really that interesting, a story about 3D glasses vending machines outside of selected cinemas in California. The fact that people may pay $70 for a pair of passive 3D glasses out of a vending machine, in this economy, just seemed funny to me.

A standard for 3D glasses could help end consumer confusion and lead to cheaper glasses, but will it help 3D uptake?

The second story is slightly more interesting, but let’s talk about the third one first, which is about AT&T’s U-verse no longer carrying the ESPN 3D channel, due to low consumer demand. The blame is either with lack of 3D devices being sold, or lack of interest, and both could be true. The thing is, 3D is a gimmick, and one that perhaps you might want to give it a go from time to time, but the majority of TV watching will be in 2D.

Back to that second story, and this one is about a new standard for active 3D glasses being formed by Panasonic, Sony and Samsung, three of the biggest manufacturers of 3D. Panasonic hinted at this quite a while ago, especially when it found that Samsung’s active 3D glasses can actually workon Panasonic sets, but only if you wear them upside down, the ridiculousness of this probably prompted a rethink by these manufacturers. They also plan to address a major problem with home based active glasses, in that they’re mostly based on infra-red or RF signals, both of which are susceptible to interference, and in the case of IR, line of sight issues. Hopefully, with a standard in place, and other manufacturers signing up, the cost of 3D glasses can decrease over time.

And finally in gaming, as mentioned earlier, the July NPD figures have been released. Microsoft, as usual, were the first to provide actual hardware sales figures, not surprisingly because their Xbox 360 was the best selling home based console yet again. They also made it interesting by announcing the market share figures, at 45%, which meant that as long as one Nintendo or Sony release figures for the Wii or PS3, then we would know the sales number for the other (based on a simple calculation).

Unfortunately, neither companies came out with any figures, and it was left to Analyst Michael Pachter to come up with the good, via a sneaky reference to the Wii’s year-on-year result. So once I get all the maths done, I should have the NPD analysis up.

Alright, another short-ish WNR, but if there’s no interesting news, then there’s no interesting news, it’s not as if I can make it up or anything. Or maybe I can?

See you next week.

Posted in 3D, Copyright, Electronics, News Roundup, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (14 August 2011)

Weekly News Roundup (24 July 2011)

Sunday, July 24th, 2011

A solemn start to this week’s WNR. Our thoughts go out to those affected by the events in Norway. Tragedies such as this makes the issues that the WNR covers pale in significance to the many other problems in the world today, and while this is true, just because something is less significant, it doesn’t mean it’s not significant in its own limited way, it shouldn’t become an ignored topic. And life, as cliche as it sounds, must go on.

But, and I’m going a little bit off topic here, what really struck me was the media coverage immediately following the bombing, and, when looking back at it now, how slanted it was. I think many people, if not most, immediately came to certain conclusions about the terrorist attack. Conclusions that ultimately painted the suspect(s) as Middle Eastern. This, I can understand, because we are human beings, and we are emotion creatures and ones that that need a sense of understanding, when an event that makes little sense happens. We we jump to conclusions, join the dots even if it meant drawing some of our own dots to complete the picture. It’s understandable.

Once upon a time, the news meant facts. And in the absence of facts, the media kept us safe from our own human nature, or at least attempted to, to prevent us from jumping to conclusions, to remind us to hold our judgement until the facts, and the full facts, have emerged. But that today’s news media, and even the so called respected sources, all became cheerleaders for the view that only terrorists of the Islamic fundamentalist persuasion could have been responsible for the tragedy in Norway, shows us how news has become entertainment, how facts (and fact checking) has become optional, how accuracy has given way to expediency and the need to set a clearly defined narrative, and why all of this hurts our democratic society in more ways than even the most insidious terrorist masterminds can hope for.

Anyway, this was just something I wanted to get off my chest before we start this week’s, very much opinionated, narrative drive, and fact-check-lacking WNR (and you should consider yourself lucky that a hack like myself is not allowed to cover the more important issues), so sorry for the interruption.

Starting with copyright news, we start with the FBI’s arrest of members of the hactivism group, Anonymous.

Anonymous members are arrested by the FBI, but the attacks continue

I’ve expressed the opinion before that I was surprised the FBI or other law enforcement hadn’t taken action against Anonymous. I thought that, sooner or later, one of the targets Anonymous chose, and they did choose quite deliberately, would come screaming to law enforcement for assistance (as some of them were targeted *because* of their “too close for comfort” relationship with governments and law enforcement via lobbying). I don’t really want to get into a debate about the right and wrongs of hacking, leaks (wiki or otherwise), and hacktivism in general, but groups like Anonymous don’t exist in a vacuum – they exist and they are supported because of real (and sometimes perceived) bias, and until these biases are addressed, and the disenfranchaised feel they and their opinions are represented, there will only be more groups like Anonymous and LulzSec, not less, no matter how many arrests the FBI makes.

And you know something is not right when a private company, really out there to protects its own interests, end up being more representative of the general public than the government that the people have elected. This time, it’s Google arguing against the recently passed, and soon to be adopted, copyright law amendments in New Zealand. The NZ government, under pressure from the entertainment industry (and not even the industry in their own country), passed three-strike type laws, which allowed rights holders to force ISPs to issue warnings to suspected copyright infringers. But these kind of laws always assumed that an allegation equals guilt, that an IP address is enough to “convict”, and Google is arguing that, this shouldn’t be the case. The NZ laws actually specifically state that all allegations should be treated as fact, when the tribunal set up to deal with cases hand down rulings, even if the tribunal felt that the evidence was not enough. The whole rationale behind graduated response is to short circuit the legal system, to turn allegations into facts, because the problem is otherwise “too big” to deal with via the courts. An IP address is circumstantial evidence, at best, and the quantity of such evidence should not improve their quality.

A different kind of pirated porn

As otherwise, we might end up doing something silly like suing 70 year old grandmothers for illegally downloading porn. Oh. As far as I’m concerned, there’s not a huge bit of difference between the “sue for settlement” gang, and the graduated response proponents – both are taking flimsy evidence and trying to make a buck (or to prevent a possibly non-existent buck from being lost). So we have a grandmother who doesn’t even know what a torrent is, using a wireless router set up by a family member probably, one that was subsequently unsecured, and hacked into for “nefarious” usage. And we have the law firm involved allegedly telling her that the “unsecured router” defence was not a sound one, and that she should just charge the thousands of dollars in settlement fees to her credit card or possibly face a six figure amount in court. Other than the fact that it is a defence, and one that has been used even recently, there’s also the fact that had she gone to court (and it seems she’s determined to do so, good on her), there’s no way that any judge or jury, in their right minds, would ever reward $150,000 against her, that’s assuming the law firm involved even turns up to court. Expect the case to be dropped double quick, now that the media is involved (so I guess the news media is not entirely useless these days, not when it comes to potential “sensationalist” stories such as this one). But the 30 year old single males, using the same defence, probably won’t get very far, unfortunately, nor would he get the same kind of media coverage, despite probably being just as innocent.

The madness that is copyright enforcement these days all center around the idea that, stopping piracy is important because piracy is bad, M’kay. But is stopping or even just caring about piracy really that important? Not according to Super Meat Boy (no, this is not the porno the 70 year old grandma downloaded) developers, Team Meat. Super Meat Boy, again not a porno, is an indie game for Xbox Live Arcade and PC, and a pretty popular one at that, with 600,000 buyers as of April. The popularity of the game also means that it’s pirated a lot, but Team Meat’s Edmund McMillen says he just doesn’t care about piracy, his exact words were “we don’t f**king care”. It’s all about word of mouth, McMillen says, and piracy helps to spread it. I would add that people also tend to buy good games, or anything they feel has value, regardless of whether it’s available for free (illegally) or not. Nobody likes “stealing”, or at least committing morally ambiguous actions, and if they can afford it and it it’s good “value”, they will buy. So if game developers cared less about piracy and stopping it, and cared more about making good games like Team Meat has done, then maybe, maybe, piracy will solve itself (it also helps for Super Meat Boy to be part of a lot of Steam sales – I got my copy for $3.75).

High Definition

In HD/3D news, a milestone of sorts for Blu-ray this week as Disney announce their release plans for ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’.

Instead of having a Blu-ray+DVD combo, a Blu-ray only and one or two DVD editions, for the first time ever on a new A-list release, Disney will delay the DVD-only edition of the film for a month, and forgo the Blu-ray only edition entirely. So when the movie comes out on disc in October, it will only be available in two different combos (three, if you count the “DVD packaging” edition), including a 5-disc combo that also includes the Blu-ray 3D and Digital Copy versions, for $4 more (on Amazon). And since Blu-ray combos, even the ones with DVD packaging, are counted as Blu-ray sales, it effectively means ‘On Stranger Tides’ will be a Blu-ray exclusive, until the DVD only version is released a month later.

Disney is not new to this kind of release schedule, previously employing this for their classic animated releases like Snow White. And it has worked wonders to boost, artificially in some respect, Blu-ray sales numbers, making these Disney releases some of the most popular on the HD format. And it looks like ‘On Stranger Tides’ will be the next record breaker (although ‘Deathly Hallows Part 2’ might have something to say about this).

Is this really a big deal? I think it is. It’s the first step towards making DVDs obsolete, although it might mean they’re still around in combo form for some time yet. The truth is that, it doesn’t really cost studios all that much to include a DVD copy with the Blu-ray version (or vice versa), so it’s all about demand, perception of value and all that.

Digital Copy - insert, enter code, transfer, copy ... and then only in the "allowed" formats, is not worth the trouble

There was also the news that Fox is bringing Digital Copy to Android phones, which I didn’t think was big enough of a news item, since I already have a Fox Blu-ray that has a digital copy for Android (Unstoppable), and when UltraViolet rolls out, cross format compatibility of digital copies may not be such a huge issue any more. But it is kind of annoying, that if studios don’t include the right digital copy, your only choice to enjoy the movie on the platform of your choice is to buy it again, or illegally rip it (but the kind of “illegal” that nobody would get into trouble for, if you don’t share the copy with others). When we “buy” a Blu-ray, we’re not really buying the movie, or even licensing the movie itself – we’re only licensing the copy of the movie that appears on the platforms/media we are paying for.

And in gaming, not much, expect that I did manage to get the NPD analysis written, using the “guestimated” (ie. made up) numbers of the PS3 that I threatened to use in the last WNR.

The Xbox 360 was once again the king of consoles, although I predict the year on year growth the console has been experiencing may experience a slight pause, thanks largely to the larger than expected bump the console got last year this time for the then new “Slim” version of the console.

Story that I didn’t really cover this week included one about the PS3 3D headset. I’m sorry, but VR headsets, to me, are so 90’s, and you can never really make them light enough for them not to be a literal pain in the neck. The idea is sound though, that instead of having headache inducing 3D glasses based on flickering between images for your left and right eye, have goggles that actually give each of your eye a different picture, and then add head tracking to boot.

There’s also a story about the next-gen Xbox 360 having “Avatar-like” graphics. Maybe it’s just me, but I might be the small minority that thought Avatar’s CGI still looked quite fake, and some of the plants definitely had a “game console” look to them.

That’s all I have for the week. See you in seven day’s time.

Posted in 3D, Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 2 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (17 July 2011)

Sunday, July 17th, 2011

A news-tastic week, and I guess we were due one. It’s a shame, because I was quite busy messing up my Paper (Star) Wars Android game update, in which I released not one, not two, but three versions of the app. It always happens like this though, you get ready to release an update, do all the testing you can, confident that it works, and then you release it only to find that it’s introduced even more bugs than before. But sometimes it’s hard to properly test an app that, according to Android Market, can be deployed on 430+ different Android devices. I added a crash report feature to the app, so that I can get a report every time it crashes, and so far, no new crash reports in the last 72 hours, so that’s something I guess. I also took the opportunity to add an official website for the app, which includes some getting started tips, and also Facebook and Twitter pages.

With plenty of news to go through, let’s get started.

In Copyright news, opposition to the controversial PROTECT IP act is gaining momentum, as this week, more than 100 law professors from around the United States have signed an open letter urging Congress to reconsider the new copyright legislation.

So we’ve had Internet pioneer, leaders in the field of technology, and now also law experts, all coming out attacking PROTECT IP. The law professors repeated the same warnings about messing with the Internet’s naming system, but more importantly, they argued that, from a freedom of speech point of view. But it won’t be the first time Congress has ignored expert advice in favour of lobbyist suggestions, and so, I’m not too hopeful that PROTECT IP will be defeated.

Fair use creates jobs, while tougher copyright may destroy them

And the politicians will not find it a difficult to support the RIAA and MPAA, because, as you know, it’s all about the jobs. The RIAA and MPAA have been arguing that tougher copyright protection means more jobs, and a politician in the current climate can’t afford to be seen as being anti-jobs, even if it is at the expense of being anti-free speech. But a new report by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) shows that tougher copyright laws may actually have a negative effect on job creation, as it turns out, the US economy these days are very much driven by fair use related activities. Even I didn’t realise that fair use related industries accounted for 17% of the entire United States’ GDP, some $4.5 trillion in value added contributions. That’s much greater than the film and music business combined, and it makes sense when you see companies like Google, Facebook, Mozilla all embracing open source and taking advantage of fair use in some way.

PROTECT IP, in many ways, is just a protectionist measure in favour of the film and music business, and such measures always hurt other industries, and in this case, it’s the huge tech/Internet industry. But because one industry is more active in lobbying than the others, common sense does not always prevail in Washington. And just because the film and music business receives more protection, it doesn’t mean that they actually benefit financially as well, because tougher copyright laws does not equal more sales (and could even equal less).

If the US wants to see a real world example of tougher copyright laws, and the effect it has on revenue, they can simple look towards France, and see how their “Hadopi” three-strikes law (named after the agency, Hadopi, that is in charge of administering the program) is working out. A new report shows the extraordinary level of monitoring that occurs, some 18 million incidents of piracy were recorded in just nine months. But out of the 18 million, only 470,000 users were sent “first-strike” emails, warning them of alleged copyright infringement being conducted via their Internet accounts. And then, in what seems to be strongest indication of the effectiveness of three-strikes, only 20,000 “second-strike” emails were sent out, suggesting that 450,000 people took the first warning the right way and “stopped” pirating. And at the end of it all, only 10 people were being considered for further action after reaching their third strike – so that’s millions spent to catch 10 people.

But despite what appears to be a 95% reduction in piracy (going from 470,000 first time offenders to only 20,000 second time offenders), there’s almost no information on the actual economic benefits of the reduction in piracy, if the reduction even exists. I can only assume that there has been no positive effect on music and movie sales in France as a result of three-strikes, because otherwise, the RIAA/MPAA would be using it as evidence that every country in the world should adopt graduated response. And just because people stopped being detected, it doesn’t mean they’ve stopped pirating – direct downloads have never been monitored by Hadopi, and it’s impossible for them to monitor BitTorrent usage if it’s done via a VPN either.

It makes perfect sense to me though, that if someone who couldn’t afford to buy a movie or a piece of music still remains in the same situation after tougher copyright laws are introduced, and as long as this is true, there can be no increase in revenue. People will stop enjoying content illegally, and if they can’t afford the legal version, they will simply stop enjoying the content entirely. And this reduces the word of mouth effect, and also prevents “upgraders”, those that download illegally and then purchase later because they really liked the content. And so, tougher copyright laws may actually lead to revenue loss. The truth of the matter is that movie home entertainment revenue is much higher than what it was before the Internet become popular, and so is gaming. And that while the music industry isn’t doing as well, increased competition from other sectors (such as movies and gaming), and the increasing popularity of purchasing music singles over albums, are all more accountable for the decline in revenue than just piracy. The music industry needs to stop blaming piracy on all of its problems, and the movie industry needs to stop pretending there is a problem (what with box office receipts at an all time high, and home entertainment revenue up significantly compared to 15 years ago).

This graph shows that music industry revenue has been dominated by album sales ...	... and as you can see, albums were popular on CD but has been declining ...
... and this graph shows digital music is all about singles, which may explain the industry's revenue loss

The truth is that the way people consume content has changed drastically, and yes, a lot of that is due to the Internet. But with change, comes opportunity, and if the film and music industry aren’t interested in exploring the new opportunities, others will, and in this case, it has been the technology companies, like Apple and Netflix, that has benefited the most. And the latest to join their ranks may be Spotify, which has just been launched in the United States, albeit in a limited invitation only phase. Spotify attempts to address one of the fundamental shifts in media consumption, the lessening need to “own” music (well, people never owned music anyway, there merely licensed a recording of it), and the increasing need to consume (which makes owning far too expensive and time consuming to manage). So instead, people stream all the music they want in an on-demand fashion, for free if they’re willing to put up with ads. It’s completely legal, so no moral guilty as compared to piracy, plus the music industry can receive financial compensation. And those that do want to “own”, or at least rent, can buy one of Spotify’s paid for plans, with more money going towards the music industry. With Spotify, there’s almost no reason at all for pirating music.

Spotify is launching in the US, and there are now even fewer reasons for people to pirate music

And in a similar vein, UltraViolet for movies also attempt to change the way content is sold to more closely follow the consumer’s needs, an ambitious project that has the backing of more than 70 companies from a range of industries, with support, albeit reluctantly at certain aspects of it, from the movie industry. This week, UltraViolet licensing beings officially, and beta testing is also under way for an official launch later this year. If it works, it will finally allow movie lovers to buy the movie (or license it), as opposed to just buying the media that the movies comes on. It’s Digital Copy, but done right, with industry wide support, and done via the Internet.

And so, there is hope, that the music and film industry can embrace change and come out the other side stronger than before. Let’s just hope they don’t erode all of our civil rights, in a vain attempt to use legislation to stop copyright infringement, before then.

And finally, before we move on to other topics, the MPAA’s lawsuit against Hotfile has some new developments this week, as the judge in case threw out the MPAA’s claim of direct copyright infringement, simply on the grounds that Hotfile themselves did not upload any of the content that is considered to be infringing on the MPAA’s copyrights. However, the judge did feel Hotfile can be found guilty of secondary copyright infringement, of inducement to infringement by paying affiliates money for uploading popular content. I don’t think it will end well for Hotfile unfortunately, as the MPAA has chosen their target wisely, by choosing a file sharing host that actively promotes popular uploads with payment, and thus, encourage users to upload pirated content.

High Definition

In HD/3D news, a new report suggests that Blu-ray will beat DVD by 2014 to become the most popular disc format around.

But even by then, Blu-ray’s gain in revenue would not have offset DVD’s loss, and so it will be digital media that saves the day. The report, from London-based Futuresource, says that at that time, physical media will still account for more than half of the industry’s revenue, but digital media won’t be too far behind, accounting for 46% of the market.

While Blu-ray only accounts for 13% of the sell-through market last year, it’s not too hard to believe Blu-ray will get close to 50% by 2014, especially if you look at recent data as listed in our weekly Blu-ray/DVD sales analysis. Blu-ray revenue, in the US at least, appears to be already above the 20% mark on average, and for some recent releases like ‘Sucker Punch’ have managed to has a first week Blu-ray market share way above this average (61.42% to be precise).

Over 3.5 million Blu-ray 3D discs have been sold so far, but half of them were given away

There was also the news that 3D Blu-ray, despite the predictions of doom, has already sold some 3.5 million discs. Of course, half of these discs were given away with hardware, but with Avatar still not available for general sale on Blu-ray 3D, the number is still impressive. The main reason for the good result, and the good result of Blu-ray in general, is pricing. Blu-ray combos are now the best value packaging around usually, and with Blu-ray 3D “mega” combos becoming more popular (that is, the Blu-ray 3D version plus the Blu-ray 2D version, plus the DVD and Digital Copy versions), 3D is benefiting as a result.

What has decrease in value this week though is Netflix subscriptions, with price rises of up to 60% being announced. Netflix says the reason for the increase is due to their renewed focus on DVDs, by separating DVD and streaming into two separate, and cheaper plans (but at the same time, increasing the price of the combined plan). I suspect this price rise has to do with Netflix’s need to renegotiate digital rights for movies, with them having just agreed a new deal with Universal, and the need for a new deal with Sony. The rise in popularity of Netflix is obviously making studios feel they’ve not got the best deal they can, and they will want to squeeze as much out of Netflix as possible.

And before we move onto gaming, the news this week that new PS3s won’t be able to output Blu-ray in HD over component shouldn’t come as a surprise for those that read my news article on the Blu-ray analog sunset. Blu-ray’s copy protections system, AACS, mandated the removal of HD component support for all new players manufactured after January 1st 2011, and so the new PS3 model is just following the licensing agreement. The misinformation over HD being disabled even for games and streaming, is just that, misinformation.

And in gaming, there’s actually not much, but I wanted to address the NPD issue again. The NPD report for June has just been released, and as been the case recently, it’s light on actual details, especially for hardware sales figures. But Microsoft and Nintendo have decided to released hardware sales figures for their consoles, once again leaving Sony as the holdout.

I’m hoping a leak will reveal the Sony PS3 numbers in the next few days, but even without the leak we can deduce that the PS3 probably didn’t do very well in June, despite Infamous 2 selling extremely well. First of all, the Xbox 360 was the most popular console with 507,000 units sold, while Nintendo revealed the sale of 273,000 Wiis. Microsoft’s statement mentioned their 507,000 was nearly twice as much as other home consoles, confirming the Wii number at least and pointing to the fact that the Wii was probably the second best selling console. And with Sony’s statement only pointing to the success of Infamous 2, with no acknowledgement of year-on-year growth for the PS3 (something they’ve been vocal about recently). In fact, Microsoft’s statement actually says the Xbox 360 is the only console to have year-on-year growth in June.

So the PS3 sold less than in June 2010 (304,800 units), and so the only issue is whether the PS3 outsold the Wii or not. Microsoft’s statement mentioned that the Xbox 360 held a “48% share of the overall current-generation console market share”, although it was unclear whether this referred to June or the whole of 2011 (it’s not lifetime sales, that’s for sure). Assuming it is for June, and for home based consoles only, then a little bit of maths puts the PS3 at 276,250 units (if 507,000 was 48%, extrapolate to 100%, then minus the known 360 and Wii numbers, to get the PS3 number).

But I hate guessing, so I’ll wait a few more days to see if there are any leaks to confirm my theory, but if not, then I’ll give Sony the benefit of the doubt for not mentioned they outsold the Wii, and use the estimated 276,000 figure.

That’s all for this news filled week. I suspect the next week will be very barren indeed news wise. See you next week.

Posted in 3D, Copyright, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (17 July 2011)

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