DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Welcome to the 10/10/10 edition of the WNR. I’m always weary when writing dates, since different regions use different ordering and it’s easy to confuse the day, month and year completely (which is why I always use the full name for the Month, and the year in four digits – as per the title of this post), so it’s good that, for one day of this year, I can throw caution to the wind and write the date anyway I want without any consequences. And to think, we only have two more years left of this, before we have to wait another another 89 years (think about it).

From my intro, you may have concluded that this was yet another quiet news week, hence the need to write gibberish. But there’s actually a few things to go through, not much, but a few. So the gibberish was merely coincidental, and regular readers would surely have gotten used to the gibberish by now. So let’s get started.

Starting with copyright news, we’ll start with what was very late news last week, in that the controversial ACTA has reached a basic agreement, and there has been more analysis since then about the new draft (final draft?) of this agreement.

TorrentFreak reckons that the new ACTA draft now tries shoves much less crap down our throats than what is was earlier, so I guess that’s good news. Ah, I remember like it was yesterday when I first heard of the ACTA, about how custom officials were going to search through my iPod looking for pirated songs, that ISPs were going to be forced to monitor all of our Internet usage just in case we do something the RIAA/MPAA don’t want us to do, and that the island of Manhattan was going to be closed and fenced off like a giant prison, with all the caught copyright infringers sent there to fend for themselves (this last part may not be true). It seems that the current version of the ACTA is very much a watered down version compared to previous drafts, and I guess that’s one positive of global politics, is that things rarely get done when so many countries are involved. Hurray for petty political bickering.

French Three-Strikes is up and running, with the first users receiving notification this week

But even without a global treaty forcing countries to take copyright control seriously by building giant island prisons, some countries are taking action anyway. France is a pioneer in this field. The country that gave us the French Revolution, has now been sold to the highest corporate bidder, in this case, the joint bid from the music and movie industries, and France’s Three-Strikes revolution has started. In case you’ve been living in a cave, or have had your Internet disconnected because you pirated one episode too many of Desperate Housewives (in which case, you would already know all about Three-Strikes, so skip the next half a sentence or so), the Three-Strikes systems give copyright infringers three chances to clean up their act before their Internet is disconnected. The first of the strikes has been sent out by HADOPI, and so the experiment begins. Will piracy stop? Or will people simply start using sources of pirated content that HADOPI can’t monitor? And if the piracy rate drops, will the music and movie (and software) industry make more money? Only time will tell, but I suspect the only real effect will be the increasing amounts of anger experienced by the Internet public.

Which explains why Operation Payback, 4chan/Anonymous’s global Internet attacks on those perceived to be on the wrong side of the great copyright crusade. I haven’t even kept track of all the organisations that Operation Payback has targeted, I think their most recent target was in Spain, but as they “group” has proclaimed, the attacks will continue until they’re less angry, and things like Three-Strikes won’t really help in this respect.

Getting caught in the cross-hairs in all of this is fair use. There are many reasons why copyright should be respected, and there are also many situations where protecting the public interest is more important than protecting “potential” profits for copyright holders. The Library of Congress’ National Recording Preservation Board has made a passionate plea for changes to the copyright law so cultural preservation, particularly for audio recordings, isn’t being hampered by copyright holders too protective over their content. Due to the various laws and amendments made to the copyright act, giving copyright holders ever increasing power and time to hold on to their content, many recordings made early last century are in danger of failing to be preserved because copyright holders aren’t releasing content that clearly has no commercial value any more. Some recorded vaudeville performance, for example, are destined to be lost forever as greedy copyright holders refuse to release recordings to the public domain, despite there being no market for such content since the 1930’s. It’s easy to forget that copyright laws were invented to protect the public interest, as much as the rightsholders, which is why copyright do expires, so content can fall into public domain and be preserved forever. DRM, another invention of copyright holders, may be even more harmful than any laws that exist. It’s very much unlikely any DRM protected content can be decoded in some distant future. We don’t even have to imagine that far to see how dangerous DRM can be, people who purchased content from one of the many failed online music stores that used DRM will know exactly how hard it is to recover their purchases, even after just a couple of years. Luckily, most DRM measures are fairly ineffective, and so easily breakable, but that won’t always be the case.

Hollywood may be making less money on bad movies than ever before, due to the Internet and online piracy

So with the copyright crusade taking many victims, what exactly are the rightsholders trying to achieve? This week, we had MPAA execs come out and explain their reasoning for fighting piracy. Apparently, even the MPAA is aware that piracy cannot be eliminated, saying that “Piracy has always been and will always be with us”. You see, the MPAA’s aim is only to reduce it so much so that they “can make enough revenue in a legitimate market to recoup expenses and continue to make new movies”. You see, behind the record profits, movie studios appear to be struggling to bring out movies, because it’s hard to even recoup expenses at times. The proof is right here if we look hard enough, I mean there hasn’t been a Saw movie since 2009, and who is to say six Saw films is really enough? Of course, movies like Inception are the “Exceptions”, it’s a real struggle for a lot of movies to make back the money that went into making them. You see the reason is that, simply, most of the movies that Hollywood produces are, how do I put it, crap! In the past, when people couldn’t just download crappy movies, they actually had to pay for a ticket before walking out in disgust twenty minutes in, and this meant a lot more movies were able to “recoup expenses” and so allow studios to  “continue to make new movies”. And before people knew how to rip DVDs (that whole six month before people discovered you could break DVD’s ineffectual CSS copy protection by simply breathing in its general direction), they may get tempted by the cover and buy the crappy movies, whereas now they can simply download it and delete it twenty minutes through in disgust, and hence provide no income at all to struggling studios, who are now forced to having to actually make good movies that people will want to pay to see, like The Dark Knight, Avatar and Inception. But Chris Nolan is only one guy, and who know when James Cameron will make another movie. So it’s no surprise really that Uwe Boll’s Far Cry was one for the first movies to get into the sue-for-settlement game, is it?

There must have been something in the water last week, because yet another victim of the piracy trade also came out to suggest that, maybe, piracy isn’t the only reason for lost profits. Nintendo’s CEO refused to blame piracy for lost Wii, DS sales, believing that good games will still sell regardless of piracy. Interesting. So people pay for good stuff, and pirate the not so good stuff? Who would have thunk it! The reality is that people who can’t afford to buy will probably pirate, in which case no profit has been lost a result. There’s only probably a very small minority that will always pirate, even if they can afford to pay. And so I think most of the revenue losses come from the fact that people are not buying things that are not worth the money being paid, and with so much good stuff out there competing for our hard earned dollar (even if it is worth less and less every day, if you’re earning the US kind), buyers are a lot more picky. And piracy, rightly or wrongly, allows many to “sample” goods without having to feel cheated by paying for the full sticker price, and in most cases, the goods are as they suspected, not worth the money being asked for it. But producers will argue that without people buying the poor quality junk, then these purchases can’t subsidize the cost of producing good quality stuff, and that’s true. So some kind of balance has to be reached where perhaps producers can make the junk cheap enough to tempt us to go against our better judgement, while keeping the good stuff cheap enough so that not too many people fall into the “can’t afford it, so must pirate it” category.

And an update on everyone’s favourite newspaper copyright lawyers, Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle is ready to settle her Righthaven lawsuit which alleged that she posted some newspaper’s articles without permission somewhere. It’s a shame, I was hoping for a real legal battle, but I guess in the middle of an election campaign, that was never likely to happen.

In 3D/HD news, Iron Man 2 was released a short while ago and the figures suggest that it will be one of the best selling titles on Blu-ray ever, which is exactly what the format needed after a sluggish few weeks recently – the stats will be posted on Tuesday at the usual place.

Toshiba's 20" Glasses-Free 3D TV is expensive at $3000

For 3D lovers, there was some exciting news this week as Toshiba released its first glasses-free 3D TVs. If you’ve read my earlier blog post/FAQ about 3D, you shouldn’t be too surprised about glasses-free 3D TVs, but as I mentioned before, there are a lot of drawbacks to this technology currently. For example, the Toshiba 3D TVs only allow 3D effects from nine fixed viewing positions – if none of these positions matches your sitting positions, then you can forget about the 3D effect. Now, new versions of the same technology is enabling greater number of viewing angles, I think I read somewhere one even offers 64 viewing positions, but for me, it’s not so much finding a sweet spot, as staying there for the whole duration of the movie (and making sure you don’t move your head too much). Of course for some, that may still be a better compromise than wearing dorky glasses.

Another problem, which the Toshiba releases make clear, is the cost of the technology. 3D effects rely on each eye seeing something different to trick our brains into thinking we’re looking at something in 3D. Glasses work by quickly shuttering the LCD so that we’re only seeing out of one eye at any one time (it’s synced to the TV so that each eye is seeing that they’re supposed to be seeing – all of this is done very quickly so we don’t notice that we’re really only seeing out of one eye), but the image we see out of each eye will be the full resolution of the TV. However, with these glasses-free TVs, it relies on barriers that block out different pixels on the TV depending on the angle of your vision (with each eye seeing something different, because of the different viewing angles). This blocking of pixels means that each eye is not seeing the full resolution of the TV, and so in order to created an HD image, more pixels are needed than what is normally required. For the larger Toshiba 20″ 3D TV, four times the number of pixels of a 1080p TV was needed to create only a 720p picture (essentially, the panel is a 2160p one, if my maths is correct), and this is why this small TV costs nearly $3000. Not only is the panel expensive to produce, the processor needed to manage this many pixels also needs to be powerful (Toshiba uses their Cell technology, the same processors that power the PS3).

But you see the problem now though. If it ever becomes cheap enough to produce 2160p TVs to make  these 720p  glasses-free 3D TVs affordable, then people will start to want 2160p 3D (or at the very least, 1080p 3D), which would already be possible then with 3D glasses. This, plus the viewing angle problem, means that there’s still a lot of development needed for this technology. Although the smaller 12″ model would definitely make a very cool digital photo frame.

And half way lodged between movies and gaming, PS3’s Netflix will go disc free this month, with the PS3 Netflix app soon to be available meaning users of Netflix no longer has to insert the what must now be very worn Blu-ray disc into their PS3s to access Netflix’s streaming service (as CrunchGear noted, it’s extremely ironic that an online streaming service still required a disc to work).

And for those with money to burn in this economy, you can now pay Best Buy to upgrade your PS3’s firmware. For $30, Best Buy’s Geek Squad will press left on the PS3 controller until the “Settings” icon is highlighted, go down to “System Updates” option and press “X” for you. I know the US dollar worth less than the paper its printed on these days, but $30 is still $30. Yes, a firmware update is a bit more complicated than just pressing a bunch of buttons  (but not much though), since you do need the PS3 to be connected online first, but I suppose people that want PS3s will probably know how to do that already. In any case, those buying PS3s as gifts for others may not know what the deal is, and so may pay for this just to have peace of mind, and I think that’s probably the demographic Best Guy is going for. It is funny though reading through the list of “benefits” you get for your $30 – I mean, you’d be crazy to not want the “system runs smoother” functionality. Joking aside though, if PS3 firmware updates are breaking the Blu-ray drive as some have claimed (or launched a class action lawsuit for), then maybe paying $30 isn’t such a bad idea if Best Buy covers the cost of whatever happens due to a bad update (ie. the $150 Sony charges to fix the PS3 if something did go wrong).

Alright then, that’s it for this week.  I have it on good authority that, yes, there will be new events occurring  next week in which an article will be written and published to inform the general public, and thus creating something called “news”. And I shall do my best not to skip over the really important ones due to sheer incompetence and/or laziness. Have a good one.