HomeNot a week with a lot of news, and a lot of important news. Oh, and welcome to another edition of the WNR by the way. Early in the week, I also completed the October 2011 NPD analysis, which showed once more the strength of the Xbox 360 in the US, once again the stop selling console for the month. Battlefield 3 was the best selling game as expected, but it’s looking more like the case that the game was rushed to market to beat Modern Warfare 3, at least on the PC platform. The copy I ordered from the UK finally arrived, and while it’s a bit more stable than the beta, but not by much. For one, I had the sound looping/stuttering problem, which was solved by changing the affinity of the bf3.exe process in Task Manger to a single core – seems to be a common problem but one that remains unfixed by DICE/EA. It’s a shame, because otherwise, this is a game trying to bring in new things to the FPS shooter genre, while Modern Warfare 3 seems all very samey samey. Alright, let’s get started.
There is only one issue that dominated this week’s headlines, and it’s SOPA. I bet the politicians that sponsored the Stop Online Piracy Act didn’t expect the kind of public backlash that has happened, but if you try to mess with the Internet, expect a reaction.
I’m going to do this a bit different, so I’ll just briefly go through the news stories covering the week’s events, and then provide a bit more analysis on the whole thing. We start off with the EFF’s warnings against the dangers of SOPA, including ones that others haven’t thought of. Apparently, the bill is so broad that it calls into the legality of a lot of existing Internet tools and standards. Tools and standards like VPN, SSH could all be ruled illegal, as all could be used to bypass SOPA filters (and the legislation makes any tool that does that illegal). But with VPN, SSH, businesses would no longer be able to do anything securely on the Internet, and it could potentially cripple the economy. Of course, I’d doubt the government would have the guts to go after VPNs or SSH, but because the legislation is worded so badly, it gives the government the power to do so, and the copyright industry might just go after VPN and encrypted/anonymous downloading services if people start using these as ways to bypass SOPA.
As the Congressional hearing on SOPA was this week, Internet companies decided to make a stand this week against SOPA. The majors (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, eBay, AOL, LinkedIn, Mozilla and Zynga) all signed an open letter to Congress urging them to reconsider SOPA, with many others also urging Congress not to pass SOPA. And they need to stand up because their own interests may be hurt by SOPA, and they will be made the targets of copyright infringement as SOPA tries undo the DMCA’s ‘safe harbor’ provision. Plus, a lot of these firms have been fighting the good fight trying to support free speech in countries that want to curtail it, and if the US passes such a “draconian” (terms used by Google’s Eric Schmidt to describe SOPA) legislation, then the US loses its moral high ground on the matter, making global Internet censorship a step closer to reality.
This long infograph shows the full result of American Censorship Day, a day in which the Internet decided to fight back against pro-copyright interests
And finally, we have the hearing. A show trial if there ever was one, with one token voice against SOPA compared to the 5 that supported it. The US Chamber of Commerce was involved, as were drug company Pfizer (perhaps to try and highlight the counterfeiting aspect of the bill, but we all know it’s about movie and music downloads). As a rule of thumb, you should be against pretty much everything the US Chamber of Commerce supports, as the official sounding group is nothing more than a big business lobby group. Google was the only anti-SOPA voice as part of the very very small witness pool for such an important legislation, and even it was supportive of the “financial blockade” part of SOPA. No consumer, rights, public interest groups were called up to testify. But while these groups, and other tech companies, were not heard at the hearing, they made their voices heard in other ways, as the day of the hearing was officially declared as the American Censhorship Day. The event, in which Digital Digest was proud to take part in, was supported by more than 6,000 other websites, including Mozilla (where I first heard about this event), in which websites blacked out their logos and linked to americancensorship.org or offered a splash page where site visitors could contact Congress to tell them to stop supporting SOPA. Tumblr did the best work by making it easy for people to make phone calls to Congress. But it was you and people like you in the end that made the most difference, with over 1,000,000 emails sent to Congress, 3,000 hand-written letters via sendwrite.com, and more than 87,000 phone calls to Congress, with some 1,293 hours spent talking with actual representatives (that’s 161 representatives talking non-stop for 8 hours!). Amazing effort by everyone!
Whether it will make a difference, I don’t know. But we already have Nancy Pelosi on the Democractic side and Darrell Issa on the Republican side tweeting their opposition, or at least reservations of SOPA, so that’s some progress I suppose. Also, the petition put up on the White House’s own petition website has now officially gone over the 25,000 signatures required for an official response from the White House, and the number of signatures is still climbing – 41,463 at last count. While I’m sure the response will emphasize the importance of stopping piracy and protecting jobs, basically a MPAA/RIAA press release, but at the very least, it tells those in the position of power that we are watching them, judging them, and if they choose to side with corporations against the interest of the people, we will make them accountable for their actions.
So the battle-lines have been drawn. Congress and the White House now needs to decide whether to act in the interest of the people that actually elected them, or in the interest of one industry (at the expense of another). The truth is that the Internet and Internet related industries account for more of the economy than the movie and music industries combined, and these industries are just as creative, if not more so, than Hollywood and the four major music labels, which create nothing, but merely profit from the work of real artists. They’re the middlemen in an era where their usefulness is diminishing by the day, and they know it too, and desperate enough to do anything to keep their dying business model alive, even if it means having to curtail the growth of the Internet. The US Chamber of Commerce is involved because they’re for anything that takes away the rights of consumer and give it to big business, like tort reform (watch HBO’s Hot Coffee documentary to find out why you should care). This is so much more than just about piracy.
Does CNET deserve to be sued for allowing people to download LimeWire?
I’m still not quite sure if FilmOn’s Alki David is serious about suing CNET for copyright infringement, or whether he’s trying to make a point after CNET’s parent company, CBS, sued his FilmOn for copyright infringement. Probably a bit of both perhaps, as David re-files his copyright infringement lawsuit against CBS/CNET for their distribution of the, now illegal, LimeWire software. Doing as he promised back in July when the lawsuit was withdraw, the lawsuit has been re-filed with more plaintiffs added, and it alleges that CNET profited from distributing LimeWire, and even promoted the use of it by providing tips and instructions on how to use it for site visitors. If David is trying to make a point, then I do agree with him that big media often acts hypocritically when it comes to copyright infringement, often stealing ideas, entire works from others, while blaming all their woes on college kids and other downloaders. But looking at this case in isolation, and as an operator of a download website, I can’t really see any merit in the case. LimeWire the network may be illegal, but the software that connects to it is just a tool, and should be no more illegal than say a browser that can also be used to download pirated content. And it’s yet another situation where apportion of blame seems to be far too wide ranging, because if individuals who shared songs on LimeWire is guilty of copyright infringement, and that extends to the operators of the network due to the court decision, then extending it further to third party websites that distributed the software means you might as well also sue the ISP that allowed the download to happen, and so on. The blame has to stop somewhere.
In HD/3D news, the fallout from WB’s botched launch of UltraViolet continues, with reports that Flixster, the app used to delivery WB’s UltraViolet movies, is giving away iTunes vouchers for those that complain about not being able to get the digital download/streaming working.
The idea behind UltraViolet seemed sound. One central system employed by all the movie studios (except Disney) that enables buyers of DVD/Blu-ray versions of movies to get a digital copy/stream version of the movie instantly, available to view on a variety of devices.
The actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired. As far as I know, it seems while UltraViolet is indeed one central system, and that all your “owned” movies are listed under one UltraViolet account regardless of which studios (other than Disney) you purchased disc was from, the actual delivery mechanism is left up to each studio. WB has chosen their own Flixster app to do the delivery, but a lot of people are having trouble with it.
200+ "one star" ratings for the UltraViolet Blu-ray edition of the latest Harry Potter movie, as people protest WB's poorly thought out implementation of the new cloud based digital copy service
The way it should work is that UltraViolet should act like the new iTunes, where it not only tracks your movie collection, but also delivers the movies via a single app, or better, just downloads that are compatible with multiple devices. There should only be one signup needed, and that’s when you use UltraViolet for the very first time. After that, it’s all about adding movies to your UltraViolet collection, and that should be done through the simplest method possible (barcode/QR code scanning from a tablet/phone, for example).
Otherwise, you’ll end up like the current WB rollout, where people are so angry they’re posting one-star reviews on Amazon to protest against UltraViolet, and where you have to give out iTunes vouchers, when Apple is actually one of the main competitors to UltraViolet. Hollywood really does get in its own way sometimes, especially when it comes to the whole Internet thing (remember when they thought that nobody wanted a Blu-ray player with an Internet connection and made the feature optional?)
Stop fighting the Internet, and embrace it, you stupid fools. Advice for all, I think.
And that’s probably a good note to end this edition of the WNR on. See you next week.
P.S: Black Friday sales on next week. It looks like the sale has already started with Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection [Blu-ray] already on sale for about $24 cheaper, with The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy Extended Edition [Blu-ray] also going on sale at $27 cheaper (might be even cheaper tomorrow, when the sale officially starts for this item).
