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Archive for September, 2012

Weekly News Roundup (30 September 2012)

Sunday, September 30th, 2012

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. It’s one of those weeks where I really can’t think of anything to say in the intro, so I won’t waste any more or your time by just getting on with it.

With major ISPs in the US all signing up to the “six-strikes” plan, one ISP wants to take it a step further. ISP Mediacom will suspend the account of anyone who has received two infringement notices, and after filling in paper work to get their account re-instated, will perma-ban the user after the next strike. This makes Mediacom’s copyright policy one of the harshest yet.

If you explain to them that your Internet connection was hijacked, then bad luck, Mediacom will say, because it’s your account and so you must be guilty. There is a way to file a counter-notification, but Mediacom appears to be discouraging even this most basic dispute process by warning users of the potential dire consequences of submitting a counter-notification, that once Mediacom hands the counter-notice to copyright holders, further actions “may include legal action such as lawsuits between the copyright holder and the customer”.

It’s hard to tell who Mediacom is actually serving – their customers, or the rights holders. I know who pays their bills though, and those that don’t want to condone this kind of behaviour should change ISPs immediately. Unfortunately, some may not have a choice on the matter.

Panama’s new copyright laws are some of the harshest in the world

While changing ISPs may still be a choice for some, changing countries may be a little bit more difficult. This is unfortunate for Panamanians, as Panama’s new copyright laws will be some of the worst yet. The laws were just pending at the time the linked article was written, but it has just been voted through the country’s Congress, apparently.

It’s not just that you could be fined up to $100,000 ($200,000 if it’s your second offence within a year) for downloading a $0.99 50 Cent song, or that you’re only given 15 days to mount any sort of legal defence, but it’s the way the money is collected that’s most at issue here.

First up, the fine is in addition to any other criminal or civil penalties, so in the worst possible scenario, you could be fined $200,000 by the government, sent to prison, and then still be liable to be sued by rights holders for who knows how much. And more disturbingly, the fine is collected by a government bureaucracy (the General Copyright Directorate) that keeps all the cash and pays employees bonuses based on their performance (presumably based on the number of fines they issue out). Yeah, I’m sure corruption and abuse will never be an issue here [insert sarcasm smiley].

If you want to find out why Panama has suddenly decided to go insane with copyright laws, you won’t have to look very far. A quick search on the RIAA’s website reveals this little piece of info, and the MPAA’s lawsuit against Hotfile also plays a role here because Hotfile was founded in Panama. Panama appears to be pandering to US interests as part of a geo-political power play, and possibly paying the price of receiving a favourable trade agreement.

And you just know that if not for the public reaction (which has largely remained silent in Panama), the MPAA and RIAA would love to have something similar in the US too.

One country that does seem to get the intricacies of the copyright law, and the general spirit of the law in general, is Portugal, where the country’s prosecutors this week refused to sue 2,000 individuals accused of piracy by ACAPOR, the country’s local anti-piracy agency. The prosecutor’s office ruled that personal file-sharing, even with an upload component and even with seeding after the download component is completed, is in fact not against the law.

ACAPOR’s stunt last year appears to be have backfired

The decision is especially embarrassing for ACAPOR, after their publicity stunt last year where they printed out IP addresses of alleged pirates and sent them in boxes to the Attorney General’s office. More costly though may be the prosecution office’s statement regarding the use of IP address evidence, which they have ruled to be insufficient in identifying the individual actually responsible (but as they are doing it for personal use, it’s not illegal anyway).

As expected, ACAPOR was not happy at the decision, calling the prosecutors lazy for not wanting to work hard to prosecute the 2,000 people ACAPOR says are illegally downloading.

My opinion is that the nature of copyright infringement has indeed changed with the Internet, which has definitely led to an increase in acts of infringement. It’s a problem that needs to be tackled for sure, but just not at the expense of justice and due process. Piracy is much more common today thanks to the Internet, but this only proves that the current laws, mostly written to deal with isolated cases of commercial piracy, cannot be applied directly to students, and single mothers, and everyday folk whose only intention was to save a few bucks (as opposed to commercial pirates, whose intention is to make large profits from their activities). There needs to be two separate set of laws, one to deal with commercial piracy, and one to deal with copyright infringement for personal use (since I don’t completely agree that piracy for personal use should always be legal and is always non damaging). And the statutory damages should reflect the differences between the two.

As for IP address evidence, it is circumstantial evidence at best, and cannot be relied upon solely to prove guilt. And even if you could somehow tie the individual who committed the actions to the IP address, a connection to a swarm does not equal a download or upload. At the very least, the IP should be monitored over time, and if possible, the amount of data transfer recorded to paint a better picture of what has actually transpired. If there are to be a penalties, then the penalty for someone who has seeded a file for 2 weeks should not be the same as that of someone who connected to the swarm for a couple of minutes before deciding not to download the file after all.

Now I’m a huge fan of Blizzard and their products, having wasted endless hours on the original RTS Warcraft games, Starcraft and its sequel, and eagerly bought Diablo III even though I was aware of the harsh DRM requirements. But after reading an interview with Blizzard’s CEO regarding D3’s DRM launch fiasco, I must say that I now have much less respect for the company as a result.

Diablo III’s launch was a DRM disaster, but a financial success – will the game continue to find commercial success now that participation rates are dropping rapidly?

In the best tradition of non-apology apologies Blizzard’s CEO Mike Morhaime put the blame on the launch issues squarely at where it belongs – on the accounting department! Or at least that seems to be the only plausible explanation for Morhaime’s statement about Blizzard severely underestimated the popularity of the game, as the bean counters who had been keeping track of the record pre-orders for the game must have forgot to carry a number or two in their calculations.

For such a heavily anticipated game, with so many pre-orders, and with a planned release (Blizzard had set the release date very early, something they normally don’t do), there’s really no reason why the demand could not have been anticipated.

Morhaime then goes on to praise the server team for doing a “heck of a job, Brownie” in only taking a “couple of weeks” to increase capacity. A month is still a couple of weeks, right? As that’s how long some players were left without a working game that they may have pre-ordered months ago.

So an “apology” turns basically into unadulterated back-patting, but when your harsh DRM has made you so much money, it’s hard not to get a bit arrogant, I suppose. Diablo III’s massively falling participation rate though may very well put a pre-mature end to the celebrations.

Speaking of back-patting, time to perform a mastabatory round on myself (eww) for finishing this WNR in double quick time. Size isn’t everything! See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, News Roundup | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (30 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (23 September 2012)

Sunday, September 23rd, 2012

I know I ranted a bit about iPhone 5 last week, but I probably should have divulged the fact that I did have one on pre-order (for my mum). Having got it on launch day and helping mum to set it up, my only thought about it so far is that, well, it’s very much an iPhone. I guess that’s a compliment of sorts, but there’s nothing really terribly exciting about it really (other than mountains that appears to be “alive” on the new Map app – check out Tahiti, for example). There are also some concerns about build quality and durability, two things that Apple usually gets spot on – there was already a chip on the black iPhone out of the box (apparently common with the white version too), and there have also been reports of the black paint being scuffed off (check out #scuffgate on Twitter). A bit of a poor show from Apple really, as design problems can happen any time you add something new, but build quality issues shouldn’t exist really.

Hey, I guess that turned into another rant of sort. To be fair, Apple is an easy target, and it’s not as if other companies don’t have the same or worse problems with their new devices. But expectations have been raised by Apple themselves, and so they can’t expect consumers to shrug and not care when a problem does arise.

Onto the news roundup then …

With US ISPs gearing up to be at the frontlines of the war against net piracy, a new report questions the fairness and transparency of the “six-strikes” system that will be used.

The MPAA/RIAA (and Obama administration) sponsored deal with ISPs will see users notified of up to 6 times for their alleged copyright offences, after which time a temporary disconnection may be issued. But University of Idaho Law Professor Annemarie Bridy says in a new report that the system is flawed because it the lacks the presumption of innocence, has an reverse burden of proof, lacks verification of the evidence being used, and is inadequate in terms of transparency in the design and implementation of the system.

In other words, alleged offenders are assumed to be guilty using evidence that hasn’t been independently verified or legally tested, evidence they have little recourse to argue against made worse by the fact that the burden of proof is on the accused, all the while happening in a system that was designed in secret and will be operated in secret.

At least there will be an appeals process, Professor Bridy says as she looks for the slim slim sliver of silver lining in the big grey anti-piracy cloud. The fact that permanent internet disconnection is so far not an option, unlike the similar French Hadopi system, is also a positive.

The MPAA/RIAA will probably argue that the scale of the problem requires expediency, something that can only be achieved by ignoring due process. And the need for expediency is as debatable as the potential damage resulting from web piracy – does piracy really cost the industry a lot of money? The French experience so far has not resulted in any noticeable improvement in things like revenue, even though piracy rates have dropped significantly, so you have to question the effectiveness of these schemes when judged by real outcomes such as revenue.

A set of unfair laws is bad enough, but when they’re not even effective, then that makes them worse. But when lobbyists like the MPAA or RIAA are tasked with writing these laws, then this kind of thing will always happen. And with the MPAA/RIAA basing their entire strategy on an irrational fear of the Internet, it’s no wonder that what they come up with will also be irrational.

And what makes the argument in Washington seem even more one sided is the fact that there aren’t that many lobby groups that are making counter-arguments to those being made by the MPAA/RIAA. Groups like the EFF, Public Knowledge and even the ACLU do have a say, but without special access to politicians that experienced lobbyists have, they’re often not even invited to the conversation, let alone allowed to have any meaningful contribution. Case in point, the “six-strikes” deal mentioned above.

The Internet Association will lobby for the interests of Internet companies, some of which will align with consumer interests

But that may be about to change. Some of the world’s largest Internet companies including Amazon, Facebook and Google have now teamed up to form their own lobbying group dubbed the Internet Association. The group, whose membership also includes the likes of LinkedIn and Yahoo, will be tasked with the role of protecting the interests of these companies, including the issue of Internet censorship and freedom.

It’s still sad that lobbying is still so effective in US politics, and that it seems that monied interests always seem to win out. But at this stage, it’s more a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them”, and while principles are one things, getting the crap beaten out of your industry is the more pressing concern.

And there’s also the concern that the Internet Association’s backers are all corporations with interests that may not always align perfectly with that of the average consumer. But for now, they mostly do, and there are different enough companies as part of the group to hopefully ensure it won’t be just a mouthpiece for the big boys (like the MPAA and RIAA are).

High Definition

But there are signs that maybe Hollywood has realised that they won’t have to destroy the Internet in order to protect its own business interests. Predictably, t’s the $$$ that’s showing them the way.

The tremendous growth in subscription streaming, and the increasing competition that’s occurring in the sector, is set to give Hollywood a mini-boom in revenue. With more players on the market than simply Netflix, the content holders are finally in a good position to negotiate ever better deals, taking advantage of the desperation of the new players to be able to compete with a behemoth like Netflix.

Either Netflix ends up paying more for exclusivity deals – the company is already paying more than $2 billion a year to license their existing content – or studios are able to negotiate non-exclusive deals with a wide range of distributors including Amazon, and an upcoming streaming venture between Verizon and Redbox. Epix, the company co-owned by Paramount, MGM and Lions Gate, recently managed to get $80 million more per year from their deals with these new companies than compared to their previous exclusive deal with Netflix, for example.

The industry is apparently keen to avoid the mistakes of the music industry by not locking themselves into one major players. For the RIAA companies, it is the dominance of Apple devices and iTunes that is putting them at a severe disadvantage when it comes to negotiating licensing deals. The only solution is to make extremely favourable deals with the likes of Amazon and Google in the hope of breaking up the Apple iTunes monopoly, but this may or may not work, and revenue takes a knock as a result. Book publishers are similarly hampered by the virtual monopoly Amazon’s Kindle enjoys.

But with the movie industry the last to fully embrace the Internet, they may yet learn from the mistakes of other industries. For now, it seems that some good has come out of the Internet after all, and that all it took was some innovation. And a new business model, and not more DRM and draconian laws to protect the old one.

The streaming availability of The Hunger Games in the US will be delayed by 90 days compared to Canada, something the Netflix says could encourage piracy

But it’s also hard to break old habits, as the issue of release windows has been raised again, this time for the streaming market. Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos warns that Hollywood’s insistence on having geographical based release windows for streaming content may end up encouraging piracy. Referencing Epix’s The Hunger Games, where Canadian subscription subscribers can watch it 90 days before their US counterparts, Sarandos says that this is an entirely counter-productive way to do business in the online age. Studios are still desperately protecting their sell-through income, and they think that the best strategy to achieve this is to prolong the sell-through period as long as possible. But, ironically, they fail to take into account piracy. Whether they like it or not, piracy competes with both sell-throughs and subscription streaming, and so by limiting people’s legal choices, all you end up is pushing them towards the illegal ones.

But when a single sell-through copy can make $15 for the studio, which is almost double the entire monthly price of a Netflix subscription (which will then be split among many different content holders), you can see why studios are a bit hesitant. But then again, piracy makes $0 for them, so negating the need for piracy will mean additional income. Less money per person, from more people, may be the name of the game, and this can only happen if Hollywood stops looking for the big profits, and start looking at the small.

With most of the recent attention being on Nintendo’s Wii U, Sony obviously felt a little bit left out and, to everyone’s surprise, they’ve introduced a brand new PS3 console. It’s a bit hard to to convey irony on the interwebs, so that bit about “surprise”, as with almost all new product launches these days, was not quite true.

It looked like the earlier leaked pictures were indeed accurate, albeit in poor quality. And the rumour about a low storage capacity version of the PS3 to compete with the Xbox 360 4GB was also true, except the 16GB slower style flash memory version actually turns out to be a 12GB SSD version, and that this budget version will only be available in Europe (and a few other countries, including Australia).

Other than that, the slimmer, lighter PS3 also now uses a top loader for the disc drive, and comes in 250GB and 500GB versions, replacing the 160GB and 320GB found on the not-as-slim-but-still-quite-slim PS3s at the same price points.

The new “super slim” PS3 will be available soon, but without a price cut, analysts are wondering “why bother”.

A bit surprising that North America doesn’t get the budget version, as that’s the marketplace that really could benefit from having a cheaper PS3 to compete with the Xbox 360. But maybe Sony are just testing the waters to see if there’s demand for such a console in the first place.

The lack of a price drop has analysts questioning the point of having a new PS3 console out, and they have a good point. But if both Sony and Microsoft want to prolong the life of their respective consoles, then there’s only so much price cutting one can do before they start losing money on the hardware again (having taken so long to finally start making money on them). And if longevity is not important because a new console will be out next year (seems unlikely now, at least for Sony, given the timing of this new PS3 refresh), then a price cut won’t help much in between now and then.

Okey-dokey, that’s that for the week. Have a good one.

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, News Roundup, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (23 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (16 September 2012)

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

Welcome to another issue of the WNR. For yet another month, I waited naively in the vain hope that more figures would start leaking out for August’s NPD analysis, but alas, that wasn’t to be the case. So as usual, the gaming section is where August’s NPD will live (on life support, coming in and out of the coma).

iPhone 5: Faster, lighter, thinner, and bigger where it counts (the screen). But is it still exciting and innovative?

Otherwise, it was a fairly quiet week. I suppose I should talk about the iPhone 5 release or whatever. Was that perhaps the most anti-climatic launch event in Apple’s recent history? Through the various leaks, almost everything about the new iPhone had been fairly well known long before the Wednesday launch event – Apple seems to have given up on the almost impossible job of trying to keep things secret. And even if we somehow didn’t know about the larger (well, taller anyway) screen, LTE and the other new stuff, none of it would have been a huge surprise anyway. There’s nothing wrong with incrementally improving an already well established product, but having failed to keep up with its competitors in terms of screen size, and features such as NFC, the least Apple could have done was to inspire us with some of the ways to use newly added features. This has been their strength in the recent past, so to hear them talk more about “faster CPUs”, “better graphics”, brings back painful memories of the PC upgrade cycle and how pointless it all was talking about MHz and RAM sizes.

With all that said, the iPhone 5 is set to become the fastest selling gadget of all time, so maybe I have no idea what I’m talking about (more than probable). Vote in our poll to tell us your thoughts about the new iPhone.

Google’s self-censorship continues this week, with The Pirate Bay joining the list of blacklisted search terms that will no longer be part of Google’s Autocomplete and Instant search products. The name of the website, and its domain name, joins notorious terms such as “torrent” and “RapidShare” as part of Google’s blacklist.

I have no idea what this latest move, part of Google’s appeasement policy, will actually do to combat piracy at all. I guess people who want to search for The Pirate Bay, but don’t know how to spell the words “Pirate”, “Bay” and “The”, may just give up and buy movies and music instead, or something. Interestingly, searching for “teh pyrat bey” still brings up TPB website as the first result, as Google’s auto-correct features appears to still show love for the website.

Meanwhile, TPB co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm has arrived safe and relatively well back in Sweden to face new hacking charges, and to serve the prison sentence imposed on his for his crime of being initially part of The Pirate Bay (as well as pay the million bucks he will be unable to pay), and further jail time for not appearing for a court hearing earlier in the year.

Speaking of millions of bucks in damages, the legal merry-go-around continues for Jamie Thomas-Rasset, as the appeals court ruled this week that the damages decision from the second of her three previous trials was the one that was perfectly valid, and that the judge had no right in those trials to reduce the damages amount to something reasonable like $54,000. Instead, Thomas-Rasset will be asked to pay $222,000 for the act of sharing 24 songs. I guess that’s better than the $1.92 million from the third trial.

There’s no doubt that a large percentage of the $222,000 is punitive in its nature, as even considering the thousand songs that Thomas-Rasset is supposed to have shared (only 24 of those were included as part of the trial), there’s no way that $222,000 worth of damages could have occurred via direct damages. If we take the calculation used to come up with the $222,000 in damages, and couple it with the 11,000 copyrighted songs that the RIAA identified were being shared on LimeWire before its demise, each having being shared a thousand time (the RIAA actually claimed each were shared “thousands” of times), the resulting total damages would be worth excess of $101,750,000,000 (that’s $101 billion). Even if you take the $222,000 and divide by the 1,000 songs that Thomas-Rasset is alleged to have shared, multiply that by the LimeWire figures, then that’s still more than $2.4 billion. And this was just one music sharing method.

The real question is, given Thomas-Rasset’s intent (ie. to download songs for free), is it really fair to class her actions along with wilful pirates that make and sell counterfeit CDs, or start websites fraudulently charging people to download songs that are pirated in the first place? Her intent was to save a few thousands dollars, at best, by downloading instead of buying, so should the punitive nature of the damages be hundreds of times greater?

As controversial as the French “three-strikes” Hadopi regime has been, with the very same thing coming to the US (but twice as many strikes! Beat that Frenchies. USA! USA!), the trials and tribulations of both Thomas-Rasset and her compatriot Joel Tenenbaum would have been far more agreeable if they had fallen foul of these graduated response laws, rather than having to go through the civil court system.

Ironically, three-or-more strikes actually works out better for those that do admit to pirating stuff. At least compared to the threat of a civil lawsuit. But for one craftsman in rural France, his Kafkaesque ordeal might point to the more unfair aspects of graduated response.

Alain Prevost has the unfortunate distinction of being the first person to be fined under France’s Hadopi laws. This is despite Prevost proving he wasn’t responsible for any downloads by bringing the real perpetrator, his soon to be ex-wife, to court to testify to this fact. Prevost was still fined 150 euros for failing to secure his Internet connection.

Having received two warning emails and letters regarding illegal downloads, Prevost actually implemented his own punishment by disconnecting his Internet account, and instructed his wife’s lawyer to write to Hadopi to explain everything. But the Hadopi agency did not like the fact that Prevost stopped responding to his emails (hard to do when you don’t have an Internet connection), and wrote to Prevost to order him to travel all the way to Paris to explain himself. Prevost declined the invitation, feeling such a trivial matter should not warrant the expense of travel. This apparently made Hadopi even more angry, and it was at this point the police were involved. Prevost was summoned to the police station to explain himself, and it is here that Prevost made his biggest, and possibly only mistake, in this whole ordeal – he told the truth!

Prevost told the police that his wife was most likely the responsible party for the downloads (something that his wife would agree to testify to), and that in a show of good faith, he would hire the services of a local computer expert, at his own expense, to clean his computer of any infringing files. If Prevost thought that explaining away his responsibility and taking pre-emptive actions to remove any infringing content would lead to the end of the matter, he would be sadly mistaken.

Prevost was then summoned to appear in court over his audacity to ignore Hadopi. Prevost brought along his wife to testify to the fact that he had not done anything wrong, but having told the truth to the police earlier on, this was used against him by the court who opined that Prevost must have had prior knowledge of his wife’s illegal activities, and therefore was still responsible. Prevost was eventually fined 150 euros, a lower amount than the prosecutors had asked for due to the fact that Prevost has no criminal record.

All of this because his wife might have downloaded two Rihanna songs, and all to only result in a small fine that probably doesn’t even cover a tenth of the expense that Hadopi used to catch this criminal mastermind. And what benefit to rights holders? Who knows.

High Definition

After the demise of HD DVD, everyone (including yours truly) thought that the next battle would be between Blu-ray and DVDs, and to an extent, that has been true. But the super quick way in which services like Netflix, VUDU, Amazon and iTunes have become ubiquitous among today’s connected multimedia devices suggests that the real battle is not between the new and old disc formats, but between having a disc format and, well, having no discs at all.

Fox Digital HD will allow HD digital copies to be purchased weeks before the DVD/Blu-ray ones

So when Fox, one of the biggest and earliest supporters of Blu-ray revealed plans to release purchasable digital downloads of their movies ahead of their Blu-ray and DVD releases, a few eyebrows were definitely raise. While early release digital downloads are not new in the strictest sense, they’ve mostly been one-offs – a release here, a release there. But the Fox initiative plans to bring the strategy forward for most of their A-listers, including the upcoming releases Prometheus and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and they’re doing it across as many devices as possible (supported platforms currently include Amazon, CinemaNow, iTunes, PlayStation, VUDU and Xbox Live).

And most importantly, all of these releases as part of Fox’s “Digital HD” initiative will be available on glorious HD (well, glorious by today’s download standards), thus directly competing with Blu-ray (although HT die-hards like myself might disagree, at least when talking about the quality of HD).

The immediate risk for Fox is that the digital downloads will cannibalize their disc sales, and also increase the risk of piracy. So Fox are either super confident about the DRM systems being used by its third party partners, or they’ve realised that pirates will pirate anyway, and that the pirated version would most likely already have been available long before the DRM-laden digital download version makes its official appearance.

August’s NPD figures, well what was made available anyway, showed nothing particularly alarming or surprising. The Xbox 360 continued to be the most popular console, with 193,000 units sold, down 37% compared to the same month last year.

The 193,000 was 48% of the entire home based console market, leaving 209,000 units between the PS3 and Wii. Given the most recent known results, this probably breaks down to something like 130,000 and 79,000 for the PS3 and Wii respectively, possibly even higher for the PS3 given that the proximity to the Wii U’s introduction.

Speaking of the Wii U, Apple weren’t the only ones to have launched a product this week, with Nintendo officially launching the $299 Wii U (with a more expensive “premium” version for $349, with more storage and accessories). Surprisingly, the rumours from last week about the release date was in fact correct: November 18, for North America.

Wii U TVii: Digital download and streaming for the Wii U, but the optical drive is a no-go zone for movies

What I found most interesting was the TVii announcement, which is set to turn the Wii U into a digital media hub in the same way that the PS3 and Xbox 360 already are. Supporting the latest digital streaming services such as Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and also offering support for TiVo DVRs, the Wii U is an odd device in that it does use Blu-ray sized optical discs, but it appears the only way to play movies would be via digital streaming or downloads. The next evolution of the game console may very well see the disc drive removed, with games being distributed digitally too.

But we’d all need bigger bandwidth allowances, if not unlimited quotas, before that can become a reality. Personally speaking, I’ve used up half of my allowance last month viewing Amazon Prime streaming titles, to the point where I had to ration my usage towards the end of the cycle. An additional $30 to move up to the next bandwidth tier doesn’t seem economical to me, at the moment.

That’s it for this issue. See you in seven.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, Gaming, News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (16 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (9 September 2012)

Sunday, September 9th, 2012

Hello there (saying this in my head in my best Obi-Wan Kenobi impersonation). Another week, another WNR. I know I’ve said it before (and this is the main problem, actually), but it’s hard coming up with a fresh and interesting intro, or just any intro, for the WNR week after week. I guess I could talk about the August NPD stats, which gave the Xbox 360 yet another monthly win as the most popular home based console (an 18 month record that will very likely end come the holidays, when the Wii U is released). But it’s depressing talking about the video games sales stats for the US, not only because the stats themselves are depressing (and they are), but it also reminds me how regular our NPD analysis feature used to be, and how, um, it’s not any more.

Let’s get through the news then …

If you had to guess which Hollywood celebrity would be the next to get himself involved in the digital culture wars, Bruce Willis was probably not the first name you would have guessed. So when the story that the Die Hard action hero was set to become a new type of hero, by standing up to Apple and fighting for our right to own the media we “buy”, it just seemed a little too good to be true. And guess what? It was!

What would John McClane do about Apple’s insistence that what you buy on iTunes will expire once you expire?

The story goes that Bruce Willis wanted to leave his considerable iTunes music collection to his kids after he dies (cue Bruce Willis is dead Internet rumours), but he is unable to do so because Apple’s user agreement (you know that 58 page thing that you didn’t read and clicked “I agree” anyway) does not allow licenses to be transferred. While it’s p0ssible to download a local copy of all the songs, they will all instantly and technically become illegal downloads once Bruce passes away, as the user agreement would then be invalidated at that sad moment. And Bruce, unwillingly to let this one go just like his off-duty alter ego John McClane wouldn’t let terrorists die without screaming memorable catchphrases just before or after, decided to do something about it and take on Apple in a lawsuit to fight for his, and all of our, rights.

But the story turned out to be yet another Internet rumour, one that seems to have been started by the UK’s usually credible Sunday Times (although their lack of a source for the story was a big warning sign), but it does raise an important point and bring it to the public consciousness, which is all that the fictional Internet hero Bruce Willis would have wanted anyway with his imaginary attempt to sue Apple.

As consumers, we really do put up with far too much from companies that, at the end of the day, are totally dependent on our patronage. Said companies are also far too eager to take advantage of our want for their products, tempting us with the next delicious iDevice, all the while taking away the rights that we’ve always taken for granted. In iTunes’s case, there really shouldn’t be any difference between a digital download that you burn to a CD (or store on a hard-drive), and a CD that you buy in a shop (that you then rip to your hard-drive). If anything, you should be able to do more with your digital downloads, because you *can* do more with them. But to be fair to Apple, they’re forced into doing this by the real powers to be – the record companies, who are just short-sighted and greedy enough to insist on something like this.

So whether it’s taking away our right to – own is probably the wrong word – forever hold a usable, transferable, license to the stuff that we pay for, digital or otherwise, or to harsh DRMs that we have to put up with that limits our right to do what we need and want with the same purchased goods, it’s really up to us, and heroes like the imaginary Bruce Willis, to fight for these rights.

Ubisoft’s controversial always-on DRM has been scrapped by the company, now hoping to make back lost customers due to their DRM shenanigans

And voting with our wallets, as hard as it may be sometimes, may be the best way to fight. With Blizzard still on a high following the financial success of Diablo III and its “always-on” DRM that seems to have prevented piracy (although clearly not hacking), another company has not been so lucky with its own “always-on” DRM experiment. Ubisoft, in an interview this week, finally admitted that their infamous UbiDRM has failed, and the company will no longer use the draconian DRM for their upcoming PC games.

Despite at first hailing the DRM as a huge success in reducing piracy rates, Ubisoft recently revealed that their piracy rate now was as high as 95%, certainly higher than other publishers which have never used “always-on” DRM. The quality and pricing of games may be a factor, but it could also be a factor that gamers deliberately chose not to buy Ubisoft titles as a way to protest the use of the harsh DRM measures.

Regardless, Ubisoft will now stick to an once only online authentication, and offer full offline gameplay for all their upcoming PC games, including Assassin’s Creed III. It’s good news for gamers, but it may be too little, too late, as the company’s reputation may have suffered irreparable harm from their DRM shenanigans.

Which begs the question, why has Blizzard manage to make “always-on” a “success”, at least financially? My guess is that because the game was so heavily anticipated, it still would have sold well if the requirement to play was, say, to strip off all your clothes, lather yourself with baby oil, and chant “Blizzard is awesome” backwards (the disturbing thing is that some do this anyway). The nature of the game, with online trading of in-game items, also lends itself to being more of an onliney type of game, and so in people’s minds, the requirement to be connected to the Internet to play doesn’t feel too much out of place. And also the fact that the game itself is pretty good, helped people overlook its deficiencies in terms of DRM.

It’s a tough balancing act though, because while the financial benefits are plain to see, Blizzard’s loss of reputation is not as easy to quantify. Every mistake, every server downtime, or hacking attempt, will lead gamers to blame Blizzard, as they have done so far, and it all adds up. But I guess as long as people are still willing to pay for the game (myself included), Blizzard won’t mind too much.

For those that did pirate Ubisoft games, I would hazard to guess that most of them did it via BitTorrent. Some, in order to prevent prying eyes, would have used a blocklist software in an attempt to prevent unwanted legal monitoring. Debate has raged on about whether these blocklists actually work, or simply do nothing except slow down your downloads (by blocking perfectly “innocent” peers), but researchers may have finally proved that these blocklists may not work all that well at all.

Researchers monitored 60 torrent files and eventually found hundreds of potential IP addresses belonging to monitoring agencies. But they found that only two-thirds were blocked by the blocklist software i-Blocklist. And all it takes it one agency to record your IP address, and that information can then be shared by a wide variety of groups, including law firms engaged in pre-trial settlement lawsuits, agencies helping with “three-strikes” regimes, and law enforcement agencies out to get the big fish pirates.

So the only safe way to BitTorrent, it seems, would be to use a VPN service, and one that takes your privacy seriously. VPNs can have a huge impact on download speeds, and also comes at a monthly cost that most would rather not pay, which is why so many rely on free blocklists software. The other alternatives are Usenet, or the ever shrinking pool of direct download sites. Oh, and not downloading pirated stuff.

So for now, it seems clear that the battle is being won by those seeking to monitor and stop BitTorrent pirates, but this escalation in the war against BitTorrent will probably only lead to the release of a free and totally private extension to the protocol, one that naturally guards against unwanted listening. It’s only a matter of time.

——

And another one bites the dust. Filesonic this week closed its virtual doors, or at least the website fell and couldn’t get up again, the latest victim of the US government’s crackdown on Megaupload.

Filesonic was one of the first to respond to the Megaupload takedown, some say an overreaction – it immediately shut down the ability for users to share files with third parties, as well as closing down its reward programs completely. The company had hoped it would reinvent itself as a personal cloud hosting service, but with players like Dropbox and Microsoft’s Livedrive already established, and a declining popularity that saw the website lose as much as 90% of its original traffic, it was always going to be a difficult task for Filesonic. Too difficult, apparently.

Whatever you say about Filesonic and websites like this (and yes, they did help people share pirated goods), they did have their (legal) uses too. If you had to share a 20MB file with several dozen people, email is not going to cut it, and unless you have your own web server, then services like Filesonic are essential. With that said though, without the need for pirated storage, there might not have been the need for so many players in the file hosting scene, and so perhaps what we’re seeing now is not only the reaction (and overreaction) to the Megaupload seizure, but also a general consolidation of the industry itself.

——

One of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Gottfrid Svartholm, has been arrested in Cambodia on orders from the Swedish government. Svartholm was one of the co-founders found guilty by a Swedish court of criminal copyright infringement, fined $1.1m and sentenced to a year in prison, time he has yet to serve.

Initial reports suggested that The Pirate Bay charges were behind Svartholm’s arrest by Cambodian police, but later reports suggested that it was more likely his hacking activities related to the Swedish Tax agency that prompted the international cooperation between the two law enforcement entities.

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t really change the fact that Svartholm, currently suffering from poor health, is being imprisoned in possibly quite poor conditions in a Cambodian deportation jail, and one wonders if there was a better way to have handled this matter by authorities on both sides (house arrest seems a bit more appropriate).

Based on the suggestion that The Pirate Bay verdict was the reason behind the arrest, the hacking community immediately responded by hacking the Cambodian government’s websites. But the clarification that a tax hack was behind the arrest may not change anything for hackers wanting revenge, and may even lead to an escalation the attacks.

With the two countries having no extradition treaty in effect, some legal wrangling will have to be performed before Svartholm is sent back to Sweden (but given his current living conditions, this may not be a bad thing).

On to gaming now. I haven’t talked about the Wii U in a while, but with its official launch event not too far away, and the release date certainly within the next couple of month, I thought now would be a good time to wet my beak in the rumour mill business.

The Wii U could get a release date by this time next week

The latest rumours sees the release date of the Wii U being November 18, which is probably not true, but also probably close enough to the real release date to not matter. The price of Nintendo’s next console could be anywhere from $199 to $299, based on baseless rumours, and it’s either much more powerful than the PS3/Xbox 360, or it’s not.

I think that’s all my bases covered.

I’m still not quite convinced by the huge controller though, and game consoles have been made or broken on bad controllers before. It’s a nice accessory, but I’m just not sure if that’s something people will want to use for all their games. Will it be comfortable enough to play, say, the latest Call of Duty game or even Mario?

And will the graphics, one of the key complaints of the original Wii after the hype surrounding the wand control system died down, stand up scrutiny in the face of the PS4 and Xbox 720, if/when they ever get released?

Time will tell I suppose, starting with the launch event in 4 day’s time.

Which should be just after the expected iPhone 5 launch event taking place on the other, Western, side of the US coast. So a lot of rumours being proven right, or totally wrong, this week it seems.

That’s all folks. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Gaming, News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (9 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (2 September 2012)

Sunday, September 2nd, 2012

How’s your week been? Me? Well, I’ve recently been working on a new project that’s come far along enough for me to provide some vague hints about. It’s another game app (and not just for Android this time), but one that’s a bit closer to home in terms of subject matter (as opposed to being a galaxy far far away). I hope to have it finished within a month or so, but that’s probably not going to happen given my track record.

As for news, not a lot, but interesting enough, so let’s get started.

Political lobbying is an art, and the MPAA have been one of the better performers on the stage of politics. Their bi-partisan approach to lobbying, not that dissimilar to the kind employed by Wall Street, is extremely effective at creating a solid foundation of support from within both major political parties. And with the Republican convention just finished in Tampa Florida, and the MPAA wasted no time in deploying their strategy yet again by praising the Republicans on their anti-piracy platform.

The Republican Convention is barely over, and the MPAA is already issuing high praises for their light on details copyright platform. Image/Photo Credit: Fifth World Art @ Flickr, CC

This is despite the Republican platform on copyright enforcement, particularly the online kind, being very light on details and high on rhetoric. There’s nothing in there specifically referring to any solutions or measures to tackle the web piracy “scourge”, with most of the platform being focused on dealing with nation states and the unspecified threat of “foreign” entities. But it’s hard to imagine that anything a potential Romney administration would do on the copyright issue that the MPAA wouldn’t be happy with, just as they’ve been pretty well served by the Obama administration these last 3 and something years, and will most likely continue to be well served should President Obama win re-election.

The truth is that both parties are firmly in the pockets of the MPAA, and that’s really a sad state of affairs. The fact that the MPAA will most likely be equally gushing of the Democrat’s platform when it is released at their convention shows why politicians are no longer caring about carrying out the wishes of the people, at least not on the copyright issue. There are obvious exceptions, of course, but you get the feeling that there’s too much respect for big business in Washington, from both sides of politics, when, given their actions in the last decade or so, it’s not really merited as well.

One well known victim of big business, the music industry in this case, is PhD student Joel Tenenbaum. Unfortunately, it seems that his copyright nightmare is set to continue, as a new judge this week found that the original penalty of $675,000 for downloading 30 songs was perfectly reasonable. The judge cited Tenenbaum’s disregard for warnings about his illegal activities, and also the fact that the wilful infringement fine of $22,500 per song isn’t even close to the highest possible, which is $150,000.

Joel Tenenbaum ordered to pay $675,000 again after new judge says fine is perfectly reasonable for 30 song downloads

Of course, this latest ruling goes against the rulings of both the original judge, and the appellate court judges, all of whom agreed that the $675,000 was excessive (they only disagreed on the reason for why this was excessive, with the original judge using constitutional grounds, while the appellate court judges did not feel this was appropriate). With these earlier rulings in hand, it’s unlikely Tenenbaum’s lawyers would simply accept this most recent verdict, and instead will continue on with their appeals.

Even if you include the upload component of Tenenbaum’s actions, it’s hard to see where $675,000 worth of damages come from. From a punitive point of view, perhaps, but surely $67,500 is just as punishing for a PhD student. And let’s not forget that statutory damages were invented in an era where most if not all copyright lawsuits involved companies, not individuals, and most of those infringement cases involved profit based motives, not the motive to simply save a few bucks on CDs (especially since downloads, especially the cheap iTunes kind, were rare at the time Tenenbaum did his deeds. I suspect he wouldn’t have done it if he had the choices available to him today, which speaks more about the industry’s late response to the Internet than the actions of Tenenbaum).

The RIAA obviously wanted to make an example of Tenenbaum, but this has not had the effect they had hoped for (to scare people to not pirate), and the longer this drags out, the worse it looks for the RIAA. If they hadn’t been so greedy (not for the money, but for their wish of an ever greater impact the verdict was to produce), they would have accepted the $67,500 verdict and the statement made from this verdict would have been a much clearer, cleaner one. Instead, they now look even more like bullies, and the back and forth movement within the legal system actually makes their case look much weaker as a result, in my opinion.

High Definition

Two weeks ago, I mentioned the news that the Moving Picture Expert Group had formally approved the draft standard for H.265, or more sexily known as HEVC (okay, not that much more sexy, I know). A lot of bold statements were made back then, with claims of HEVC being twice as efficient as H.264, but a lot of it was based on data analysis, rather than a subject analysis of the actual visuals (what looks good from a signal-to-noise ratio point of view, may not look good for the human eye).

This week, the results from a human visual study has been released that backs up the claims that HEVC will, given the same bitrate, offer better quality visuals than H.264 (already considered near “reference” for high bitrate encodings, such as Blu-ray). The best thing about this study is that, instead of looking at quality from a boring mathematical and error analysis perspective, this one simply involved 30 people (with some training beforehand) looking at videos and judging, subjectively, which was better.

The result? HEVC was comfortably the winner, especially at the lower bitrates. The study used videos encoded in near 4K resolution, and so by using bitrates as low as 0.75 Mbps (this was for an animated clip), the low end efficiencies of HEVC were fully exposed. Whereas H.264 struggled (understandably at 0.75 Mbps for 4K content), HEVC still managed to produce a more than decent job (a rating of just under 70 out of 100). For more complicated scenes, for example a live video of pedestrians crossing a busy intersection, 5 Mbps in HEVC yielded the same subjective visual quality as a 15 Mbps H.264 encoding. It’s only towards the higher end that H.264’s perceived quality started to catch up with HEVC’s, but it’s clear that for things like mobile or even broadcast TV transmissions, HEVC will be able to carry 4K streams without using up more bandwidth than current 720p or 1080p streams.

HEVC should help with the broadcast of 4K Ultra HD broadcasts, without requiring more bandwidth than today’s 1080p broadcasts. Image/Photo Credit: Pop Culture Geek @ Flickr, CC

This suggest that the need for a dramatic increase on the capacity being offered by Blu-ray at the moment, even for 4K content, may not be that great. Although even if the Blu-ray disc format remains unchanged, players will still need to be changed in order to support HEVC decoding. But versatile, and powerful devices like smartphones, tablets and maybe even game consoles, could all theoretically be upgraded via software to support HEVC. So for example, given a powerful enough device, Netflix could roll out an update that enables HEVC decoding, and allow Blu-ray quality 1080p video to be streamed without having to dramatically increase bandwidth requirements. But if a video format is tied to an optical disc, and non versatile hardware player (most Blu-ray players fall into this category, unfortunately), then there are all sorts of technical and standardization problems that makes HEVC rollout difficult without inventing a whole new optical disc format.

Probably the company still most invested in good old optical technology is Sony, one of the founding fathers of Blu-ray, but even they see the writing on the wall as this week, Sony announced they will cease production of PC optical drives starting early next year.

Instead, the company will focus more on drive-less devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and get them to tie in more with the media arm of the company and their digital distribution platform, Sony Entertainment Network. Productions of drives for their non PC devices will continue unaffected though, but it’s clear that even Blu-ray players and PS3s are becoming more of a gateway for online digital content, rather than simply doing their “full time” jobs.

Personally, I can see the move to pure digital speeding up once rightsholders get over their fear of the Internet and piracy. It’s an irrational fear, because discs can be even more easily ripped, copied and uploaded, but if you control the entire streaming platform, down to the hardware that plays it, it ends up being more ripping proof. Plus, instead of trying to make more on a selected few high profile titles, having a huge accessible library allows for “long-tail” traffic, which means you can offer a huge library of not so new stuff at much lower prices (ie. the Netflix model), and thus reducing the demand for pirated content. I would love to see some stats, but I suspect the piracy rates of all the stuff that’s already on Netflix streaming has dropped and continues to drop.

The biggest problem though, and this includes Sony’s move to create their own ecosystem by tying their hardware devices to the SEN, is that the traditional retailer will be cut out of the loop (as well as the companies that support/rely on them, like transport companies). Look at Apple – a lot of retailers sell their hardware, but only they can sell content on their devices. The closure of music stores and video rental stores is just the beginning of this phenomenon, and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of solution to the problem. I would certainly hate to live in a world where all content is only available to rent or buy from a handful of companies, your Apples, Netflix and your Sonys, and I think it’s in the best interest of content owners to actually have competition. Otherwise, terms will be dictated by the select few that have a virtual monopoly on content, and nobody really wants that kind of a situation.

Problems aside, I still very much yearn for the day where I can turn on my TV and, within a couple of clicks of the remote, have at my disposal every piece of visual entertainment ever made. If nothing else, it would be a fantastic thing for preservation of older content.

That’s it for now, hope it wasn’t too painful a read. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, Electronics, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (2 September 2012)

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Archive for September, 2012

Weekly News Roundup (30 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (23 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (16 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (9 September 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (2 September 2012)

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