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Weekly News Roundup (29 July 2012)

Sunday, July 29th, 2012

So the Olympics are under way. Didn’t watch the opening ceremony myself, not really my type of thing really, but by all accounts, it was pretty good. It’s even better in 3D apparently, but 3D is not my type of thing either. If either or both are just your type of thing, then you’ll be in for a treat, and there’s nothing like a major sports event to help sell a load of TVs, this time, 3D TVs in particular. But by all accounts, the 3D hype has been steadily dying, and it definitely hasn’t turned out to be the “must-have” tech that TV makers envisaged.

Let’s get this WNR started …

Having skirted the issue of whether the “always-on” Internet requirement for hit game Diablo III was for anti-piracy, anti-cheating/hacking, or was a genuine attempt to make a better game with better features, the makers of the game, Blizzard, this week finally admitted that the controversial “feature” is, at least partially, for anti-piracy. For the rest of us, this merely confirms what we thought all along.

Anti-piracy is in fact one of the reasons why Blizzard chose to use always-on DRM for its game, Diablo III

For anti-DRM activists though, the worst thing about Blizzard’s DRM is that it actually works. Not so much as a way to stop cheating or hacking, but it has worked to help delay efforts to pirate the game, and that has contributed to the record sales figures the game has recorded. While the disastrous launch of the game, and subsequent gamer complaints (such as lag, even when playing a single player game), will have hurt the company, at the end of the day, it’s the bottom line that counts and Diablo III is a huge success whichever way you look at it. Of course, what works for Diablo III may or may not work for other games. Diablo III was a highly anticipated game, a decade in waiting, and so when you get gamers *that* desperate, *and* when you do produce a good game when looking beyond the DRM, it seems gamers are more than willing to jump through dozens of DRM encumbered hoops and still call the game great. Try and do that to, say, a new gaming IP, a less anticipated sequel, and then fail to actually produce a good game, then gamers *will* vote with their wallet. It seems for now, DRM is not so much a deal breaker, but it does add to the game’s list of existing negatives. Add those negatives together and if the positives don’t outweigh them, then you’re in trouble!

A DVD ripping magazine for sale in Japan has seen four journalists behind it arrested thanks to Japan’s tough new copyright laws

Now I’ve never wanted to live in Japan – too crowded and busy for my liking – but there’s now even less reason for me to want to move there, because it seems I won’t last too long in the land of the rising sun before I’m arrested for crimes against copyright. After the Japanese parliament passed laws that could see people watching the wrong YouTube video go to prison for 2 year’s time, this week, police arrested four journalists for the heinous act of writing and selling a magazine. A magazine that did feature guides about DVD ripping and a cover disc that included some commonly available DVD ripping tools, but nevertheless, just a magazine. This is also the same set of new laws sees most Linux distributions getting banned in the country, as most include the libdvdcss library, used to allow DVD playback, but can also be used for DVD ripping. It’s almost as if companies like Sony were given powers to write the country’s copyright laws, and along with Germany as you’ll read about below, both countries are doing their best to show us what a pro-copyright dystopic future lies in wait for the rest of us, if rights holders get exactly what they want.

And if you happen to own a smartphone in this future, then apparently, you’re a no good stinking thief of a pirate. At least that’s what a group representing German rights holders think, because it’s demanding a piracy tax on any and all storage mediums, including the memory built into your smartphone or tablet. The group, ZPUe, wants tech vendors to pay them €36 ($USD 43) per smartphone sold, and it wants retroactive payment dated back to 2008. It also wants €9 for external HDDs bigger than 1TB.

You can tell this has nothing to do with protecting the rights of content holders, and all having to do with a big money grab (made possible thanks to biased copyright laws), because it seems ZPUe is not calculating these “damages” based on the size of the storage and how people use that storage, but just the average price of the devices themselves. Otherwise a 16GB or 32GB iPhone should not attract 4 times as much “tax” as a 2TB HDD, and with the popularity of iTunes, I suspect the majority of iPhone users don’t even pirate music or movies. It’s also a blatant attempt at double taxing by charging for every copy of the same song or movie stored on different devices – someone who stores pirated songs on their external HDD and then transfers them to their iPhone will effectively get taxed twice.

I don’t know what’s going on in Germany, but it appears the country’s copyright laws are truly f*@ked up. There have been reports of people being forced to pay thousands for an unsubstantiated claim of infringement, GEMA, their music royalty collection agency, banning official music videos on YouTube from being watchable in Germany (with users having to rely on proxies servers in China, the land of Internet freedom, in order to view content on YouTube that’s legal everywhere else), threatening legal action against kindergartens and schools for using modern music for singalongs (GEMA again), and recently, hiking up music broadcast rates by up to 2000% for nightclubs and restaurants (again, GEMA).

Speaking of schools, Australia’s National Copyright Unit (NCU) says that schools are paying millions per year in unnecessary copyright fees due to draconian laws that makes school pay for materials that does not even have copyright. With fair use laws being fairly limited here in Australia, teachers and schools are forced to pay copyright fees for everything from printing a web page, to saving a web document, or even asking students to print something at home.

Copyright protects the right of content creators (or licensees) to profit from their works (or that of someone else’s that they’ve licensed), but copyright was also created with the intention of protecting society’s right to access content for its benefit (which is why copyright was made to expire). For me, the latter is far more important than the former, because the argument that people will stop being creative if they can’t make money from their art is, frankly, nonsense. With less emphasis on protecting profits, what we will have though may be less attempts at money grabbing (eg. most Hollywood films), and that can be a detriment to the economy and entertainment, but it’s wrong to say that creativity always have to equal monetisation.

And sometimes monetisation can happen without any real creativity, at least nothing recent or current. Music’s big names including Elton John, Simon Cowell, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend have put their names on a letter addressed to British PM David Cameron, lobbying his government to introduce tougher copyright laws to allow artists to “earn a fair return on their huge investments creating original content”. Apparently, the availability of pirated content online is making people nervous about buying from legitimate places, despite recent studies showing that people who pirate stuff are also the same people who buy legal content (but they do it nervously, perhaps).

Some of Britain’s top musicians wants the government to crack down on copyright abuse to protect creativity, but creativity has been flourishing like never before, online

The stupid argument about piracy undermining buyer confidence aside, it’s interesting to note that the average age of the dozen or so people who signed this letter is 53. When was the last time Elton John, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend created anything even worth pirating (the odd remixes aside) – or are they blaming piracy for their increasing irrelevance to the music biz (which still creates new works and new stars at an amazing, almost hard to consume, pace)? Ageing rock stars believe they should continue to receive royalties for their ageing works, but when is enough enough? For an artists who has already made a large profit on their works, isn’t better now to let their works go free, so that it can be shared and re-mixed and re-used for eternity? It seems that, at some point, artists start caring less about what they’ve created, and start caring more about what they’re earning.

For me, the ease at which people can share stuff online, which the creative industries says is the catalyst for the piracy problem, has also been responsible for one of the greatest periods of creativity ever, and there are even studies and reports to prove this.

But again it goes to the definition of creativity, because what’s different about the Internet is that most acts of creativity there are not blatant attempts at monetisation. I think it has to do with the ability to publish, at almost no cost, on the Internet, versus the comparative high cost of traditional publishing – costs that have to be made back via monetisation. The thinking once upon a time was that creativity can only exists if there’s a financial incentive, but the Internet is proving this theory wrong, big time.

Just because Big Content can’t figure out how to make a buck out of it, it doesn’t mean that creativity isn’t flourishing online.

The quality of the created pieces, however, do vary quite a bit. You have well written blogs analysing the latest trends in copyright, HD and gaming. And then you have this one. But it’s free, so it’s probably worth the price of admission.

See you next week!

Posted in Copyright, DVD, Gaming, News Roundup | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (29 July 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (15 July 2012)

Sunday, July 15th, 2012

Happy belated Bastille Day. I’m not French. I don’t speak French, and I don’t really know anybody from France, but 14 is my lucky number, and so that’s the connection I have with the French. That and their fries are a personal favourite.

A couple of real eye openers that I will be covering in this week’s WNR, so without further ado …

Starting with copyright news, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has once against caught the ire of the MPAA by, well, not saying anything everyone else hasn’t been saying all along.

Wikipedia went black to protest SOPA/PIPA, and founder Jimmy Wales says the site may do it again if Hollywood insists on censoring the web to solves its piracy problem

Speaking at the Wikimedia conference, Wales drew upon personal experience in trying to legally watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones and criticized content holders for not giving the people what they want (and not just to see Joffrey’s head on a spike). Wales also warned that Wikipedia might go dark again if the entertainment industry continues to see web censorship as the solution to everything.

None of Wales remarks were that controversial in my opinion, but anyone who doesn’t agree with the MPAA’s line about pirates being thieves will always be savaged by the lobby group, and the MPAA didn’t disappoint on this occasion. Once again, the MPAA compared downloads to “stealing”, but went one step further by attacking those who only pirate out of convenience (like say if I didn’t feel like jumping through a dozen DRM’d hoops just to satisfy the studio’s piracy paranoia, or I had to download something even though I had already purchased it, just due to ease of use issues). But look at it this way: when your own customers would rather break the law and be called “thieves” than buy your product due to the sole reason of convenience, then maybe, just maybe, you have some work to do before you take a sledgehammer to the Internet. Just a thought.

Of course, even if Hollywood can’t get the government that they’ve already paid for to pass pro-censorship legislation, they can always rely on the threat of legal action to force other private companies to self-censor. PayPal is the latest to demonstrate what a good boy it is when it comes to all this anti-piracy stuff, and it has created a set of new rules for file sharing/newsgroup websites that, effectively, prevent these sites from using PayPal services. In what is surely another nail in the coffin for the once thriving cloud uploading industry (a shame really, since the legitimate services they do provide are invaluable in my opinion), the new rules basically allow PayPal (not even content holders) to dictate what can and cannot be stored on any file sharing website that uses its services. One service provider that has been in talks with PayPal even suggests that PayPal wants full access to all the backend tools to monitor al file uploads, even legitimate, private and confidential ones – a demand that is frankly insane. It would be like if a bank wanted to read all pieces of mail going through private post office boxes (which the bank handles payments for), just so it can reduce its liability in case something dangerous or illegal was sent. Of course, the bank would never be held liable for anything like this, but on the Internet and with the copyright lobby pushing hard, PayPal can become liable (so I guess it’s not all their fault).

At this point though, nothing from PayPal surprises people any more, everyone has had bad experiences with PayPal, and it’s worthwhile to remember that they were the same people who enthusiastically dumped Wikileaks over the tiny bit of governmental pressure. Part of SOPA/PIPA was to give content holders even more power to force private companies like PayPal to do exactly this sort of stuff, but it looks like existing laws and corporate bullying tactics are more than sufficient to ensure exactly the same outcome. So between this and Megaupload, it just goes to show SOPA/PIPA isn’t needed at all.

The death of Napster gave the RIAA the legal precedent and confidence to engage in a campaign of anti innovation in the years following, according to a new report

Speaking of Megaupload, the decision from this case could very well lead to the kind of landmark decision that will reverberate for years to come. And we don’t even need to look back that far to find how much of a hit on innovation such a decision, or a new set of biased laws, could be. A newly released report goes into detail on how the established music industry profited from now more than a decade ago’s Napster decision. Interviewing 31 leaders of digital music, including CEOs of some of digital music’s biggest firms, the report by Associate Professor Michael A. Carrier of Rutgers University School of Law attempts to show just how much of an effect a copyright decision can have on innovation.

On a high after the victory over Napster, the major music labels, represented by the RIAA, allegedly went on a crusade against all things Internet-y and innovative. By using the funds “earned” from one lawsuit, other websites and start-ups would be sued, until the funds, or suable start-ups, ran out. Not only that, the report alleges that labels strung along start-ups with “good” (and potentially status quo threatening) ideas by refusing to license content to them until these sites had enough traffic, and once they did, sued them for massive copyright infringement. But at the same time, labels were happy to receive huge up-front fees for start-ups they knew would never make it, or made licensing agreements that allowed labels to slowly bleed these new companies dry, the report further alleges. And instead of going after companies, labels would go after individuals associated with the companies, to perhaps add further intimidation for force a favourable outcome in any legal proceedings (although to be fair, everyone does this). Some in the rap business even spoke of physical intimidation, “being hung out of windows” and things of that nature.

For me, this show why Apple was so bloody clever with the iPod. By making the hardware first, instead of the software/website, Apple made a device that people wanted, loved, and one that the music industry *had* to accept. Had they gone with opening the iTunes store first (and by allowing non Apple devices to buy and play songs), it’s very likely that they too would have been hindered in their attempt to innovate.

With both Hollywood and the recording industry now strongly supporting (if not leading) the case against Megaupload, perhaps both feel another major decision is required to chill the next round of innovation, such as Megaupload’s very own “music label circumventing” Megabox. This mustn’t happen, and I hope it won’t.

As for the actual Megaupload case, the extradition hearing against Kim DotCom, a German-Finnish citizen that ran a Hong Kong based business and currently living in New Zealand and is now being extradited to the US for some reason, won’t be heard until next year, so this one could take a while. DotCom has offered to go to the US voluntarily to avoid the need for an extradition hearing, but only if he gets access to his own frozen/seized funds to pay for mounting legal expenses.

High Definition

People who visit my house often complement, or make fun of, my “oversized” DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray collection, which I always explain is perfectly reasonable and nowhere near as big as a lot of other people’s.

And now, I finally have proof that my collection is actually perfectly reasonable and I’m not at all an obsessed movie nut that must buy movies even though I only ever watch most of them once. Having spent $500,000 Australian dollars (which is about the same in US dollars), avid collector Greg (you thought that I was talking about myself for a second there, didn’t ya) has now put his entire collection of 50,000 CD, DVD and HD DVD titles, and some 3,500 Blu-ray titles, up for sale for “only” $55,000. Just the storage systems cost Greg $5,000, covers and sleeves another $12,000, and he’s including it all as part of the sale, as well as a HD DVD player, and a region A Blu-ray player.

Greg from Sydney Australia shows what a real movie collector is like, and you can be just like him if you pay $55,000 to buy his entire collection!

Greg is selling because his flat is no longer big enough for his, possibly still growing, collection. Ironically, the $500,000 he did spend on the discs could have gone a long way to buying a bigger house, which could have housed his collection in a more permanent fashion (or $445,000 on the house, and $55,000 to buy someone else’s 50,000+ title collection). But I’m sure Greg, like all collectors, regret nothing. Although, as one commenter, it looks like Greg might have spent $500,000 to do what an $8 per month Netflix streaming account can do. Ouch, but not really 100% accurate, since I’m sure he has tons of titles that Netflix doesn’t have, some of them in glorious high def that Netflix can’t provide (yet), but perhaps there’s a good point there too about a new more efficient way to have a movie collection ($8 per month for 50 years, the lifespan of DVDs and Blu-rays, still works out to be less than what Greg paid just for his shelves).

In any case, it does make my collection look rather small by comparison. I’m just hoping the saying “size doesn’t matter” also applies to movie collections!

Good news everyone. The NPD analysis will be back for June, as some intern somewhere probably screwed up and actually released some sales figures to allow for a proper comparison between the three major home based consoles, as well as a look at the sales figures for the new Vita portable. Will cover the results in detail in the next few days.

By my calculations, the PS3 sold just under 194,000 units in June, that’s almost 100,000 units more than the Wii, but also 63,000 units less than the Xbox 360. While the Wii has clearly dropped out of the race for the home console market, not by choice really, the PS3 still has a chance to compete with the Xbox 360 and get its user base up in time for the PS4 or whatever it will be called.

While the PS3 is actually pretty good value considering its media credentials, where the PS3 has really struggled though is in the lower end of the market, where the Wii used to dominate, and now the Xbox 360 with its cheaper 4GB console. So the news that Sony might release a 16GB version of the PS3, according to recently leaked photos and documents in Brazil, might not sound too surprising. Still very much a rumour at the moment, so I wouldn’t, say, bet your $500,000 movie collection on the news being true, but it would make a lot of sense if Sony really wanted to extend the life of the PS3. There’s still a market for the PS2 today, and that’s proof the low price strategy works.

What also works though is quitting while you’re ahead, which might be good advice for Sony, but I was talking more about this issue of the WNR to be honest. Any excuse to stop writing! See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, DVD, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Movies, News Roundup, PS3, PS4 | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (15 July 2012)

Blu-ray: The State of Play – May 2012

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

Welcome to another edition of our annual Blu-ray sales analysis. Since our last analysis, we’ve had the milestone releases of Star Wars (always an important milestone for any video format), WB finally putting us out of our misery by releasing the Extended cut of Lord of the Rings and the conclusion of the Harry Potter saga. With Internet based streaming more popular than ever, and with home video revenue stabilizing after a turbulent couple of years, it will be interesting to have a look at how Blu-ray has done this past year.

The data used in this analysis derives from our weekly updates, based on figures released by Home Media Magazine. Some of the historical figures you’ll see have also been adjusted, due to slight tweaking of the metrics used by HMM to create these sets of data, although the changes have been very subtle and does not change the bigger picture in any way.

We’ll structure this analysis in pretty much the same way as the last one, although there are a couple of new graphs introduced in this analysis, focusing on actual raw revenue figures for Blu-ray.

The first set of graphs show Blu-ray market share through the four year period that I have tracked them, with the release milestones pointed out.

Blu-ray Sales Percentage – 4 May 2008 to 21 April 2012 – Click to see larger version

A graph that’s always getting wider, here we can see the 4 year period in which Blu-ray market share has been tracked. Market share is defined as the percentage of sales belonging to Blu-ray compared to all discs sales (which includes both Blu-ray and DVD). So for example, the Blu-ray market share figure as of 21th April 2012 is 26.08%, it means that this percentage of all disc sales belonged to the Blu-ray format (and inversely, this suggests DVD market share is at 73.92%). The last of these above 4 distinct graphs is the last 52 weeks period that this analysis will be talking about. One thing you’ll notice about these set of graphs, compared to the same set last year, is the new vertical scale being used – this is to take into account a new record for Blu-ray market share, set in the weeks following the release of Star Wars and during the week that The Lion King was released. The record now stands at 40.22%, up from the 28% that was set in the last 52 week period (by another Disney release, Beauty and the Beast – of course, both Disney releases inject a kind of performance enhanced doping into the Blu-ray stats, as these were exclusively released as Blu-ray combos and all sales were credited to Blu-ray, even though the DVD version was included in the package). What this graph shows is that the performance of Blu-ray market share is still very much dependent on specific releases, with popular catalog releases such as Star Wars and the Disney classic often being better for market share, than say major hits (with the exceptions being the kind of movie Blu-ray is made for: action, Sci-Fi and anything that benefits from the improved visuals and aurals).

The next set of graphs show the market share as one continuous graph, as well as the growth rate when comparing one week’s market share with the market share figure of the same week a year ago (so if week 32 in 2010 had a Blu-ray market share figure of 15%, and week 32 in 2011 had a market share figure of 20%, the growth would be: (20 – 15) / 15 => 33%).

Blu-ray Market Share – May 2008 to April 2012

Blu-ray Market Share Growth – May 2008 to April 2012

The upwards trajectory of Blu-ray market share is pretty evident in the first graph above, but the slowing down of the growth is also pretty evident in the second graph. Last year this time, the trend graph stopped at just above 20%, while a year later, it stops just above 25%. The addition of an annual addition of 5% to the market share has been repeated for the last 3 years already, with a slight slowdown, so chances are, we’ll be looking at Blu-ray at an average of closer to 30% this time next year. The lack of really enticing new releases in the last couple of month hasn’t helped market share growth, and growth was always going to slow as Blu-ray market share approaches the magic 50% mark (when passed, it will signal Blu-ray’s “victory” over DVD as the dominant home video format).

Below is a new graph I’ve introduced to this analysis, and it shows Blu-ray growth, but for raw revenue, rather than market share.

Blu-ray Revenue Growth - May 2008 to April 2012

Blu-ray Revenue Growth – January 2010 to April 2012

With less data being available than the equivalent graph for Blu-ray market share, the trend here is harder to see, and more volatile. But revenue is always a bit more volatile, as you can see the violent spikes indicate the a major release milestone for the format. The effect of the recent drought of A-list releases can be seen quite clearly towards the end of the above graph, as revenue growth drops below 0% (ie. a revenue decline). As a comparison, revenue growth for the first 16 weeks of 2011 averaged 33.24%, while for the same period in 2012, it only averaged 14.45%.

The last two set of graphs shows a comparison of weekly market share figures with the same figure from a year ago, and the same comparison but with revenue figures.

Blu-ray Sales Market Share: 2008/11 versus 2009/12 Comparison (May to April)

Blu-ray Sales Revenue: 2010/11 versus 2001/12 Comparison (January to April)

Blu-ray Sales Revenue: 2010/11 versus 2011/12 Comparison (January to April)

The slowing growth of Blu-ray shows up in the above graphs as the gap between the same weeks, a year apart, shrinks, and even reverses, depending on the calibre of the release in the two compared weeks. What is interesting is that the revenue graph shows the seasonal nature of home video revenue, with the holiday period having a “tent-pole” effect for the rest of the year. The difference between the top market share graph and the bottom revenue graph (where growth appears a bit more evident with market share than with revenue) is due to the fact that DVD revenue has shrunk during the same period, which has allowed Blu-ray market share to rise, without needing a similar rise in revenue terms. The decline in DVD, therefore, is not just solely due to the emergence of Blu-ray, but also other external factors (mostly Internet based digital distribution).

The conclusion is therefore very expected. Blu-ray revenue and market share continues to grow steadily, albeit at a slowing pace, but it will be the calibre of releases that will determine when Blu-ray will take the next step forwards towards becoming the dominant home video disc format. 2011 was a relatively weak year at the box office (and hence, the late 2011 and early 2012 releases being somewhat average), but 2012 already looks like a bumper year for movies thanks to the likes of The Hunger Games, The Avenger, Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises and the next Bond movie, Skyfall, it bodes well for the second half of 2012, and the start of 2013, for Blu-ray.

Posted in DVD, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K) | 3 Comments »

Weekly News Roundup (25 March 2012)

Sunday, March 25th, 2012

Welcome to another edition of the WNR. Two weeks ago, I mentioned I was working on a project for Digital Digest that should be ready in about two weeks time. Unfortunately, the same is still true today, as I’m still working on it, and it’s still (at least) two week away from being ready.

And the delay is totally unrelated to Skyrim, or the fact that I unceremoniously passed 100 hours of play time this week. Most of what I’ve been doing in the game this week has been very “chore-ish”, having spent most of yesterday’s playtime moving from my house in Whiterun to Riften – meaning multiple trips carrying the assortment of goodies and junk that I’ve been hoarding at my old house, fast travelling the many miles between the two hamlets, all the while not wearing any clothes as to clear up as much carrying weight as possible. Trust me, it’s not as fun as it sounds.

A couple of interesting stories to go through this week, so let’s get started.

Google has dragged itself into the Megaupload affair by coming to the defence of Hotfile, or rather, the defence of the DMCA’s “safe harbor” provision.

The MPAA is currently suing Hotfile, and one of the argument that the industry trade body has made is that Hotfile should not be afforded the protection of “safe harbor”, due to the “rampant” nature of piracy that goes on on the file sharing website. Another argument is that Hotfile has not been cooperating with the MPAA fully in terms of providing the technical anti-piracy measures that the MPAA studios want. Google says both of these arguments are invalid because current case law does not strip away “safe harbor” based on “generalized awareness that unspecified (or even ‘rampant’) infringement is occurring”, and that there’s nothing in the law that says Hotfile must implement the type of content filtering that the rights holder requests, as the decision is mostly left up to the service provider.

Both of these arguments have been made against Megaupload too in the government’s criminal case against the file hosting website. And another key argument in the government’s case, which was also employed by the MPAA in the case against Hotfile, is that the website operators only removed content that had been specifically listed by the rights holder, and deliberately kept similar or even the exact same content on their network. Google argues that this is perfectly in-line with the spirit of the DMCA, with the burden of identifying infringing content belonging to rights holders (the only people that can decide which content should be removed and which should be kept). The argument works a little better for Google’s assets, such as YouTube, than for Hotfile/Megaupload though – it’s often in the rights holder’s interest to keep some “infringing” content active on YouTube due to promotional reasons, while at the same time removing others (even if it’s the same video, re-uploaded). With Hotfile/Megaupload, it’s unlikely that, for example, Warner Bros. would want to keep a copy of The Dark Knight available for download, but in Google’s view, Hotfile did exactly what the DMCA demanded it to do, nothing less, but certainly nothing more than what’s required, such as removing content that was not specifically listed.

Rapidshare, in a German court, is also facing similar accusations, and as a result, it could be forced to implement drastic site-wide filtering for all uploads.

The issue of how proactive a service provider should be is at the heart of the DMCA “safe harbor” argument, with content holders now accusing Internet companies of “abusing” the protection afforded to them by the provision, by deliberately turning a blind eye to ongoing infringement just because it has not be specifically named. But the alternative is for service providers to “second guess” the intentions, and the legal rights, of content holders, to take a “better safe than sorry” approach, the collateral damage from such actions which will mean a lot of harm to innovation and creativity (and is ever more the problem on YouTube, with its automated “Content ID” system and false positives). I don’t know what the answer is, but draconian blanket bans and filtering can’t be the best solution out there, not when there’s still so much that content holders can do to make the legal option the more enticing one. The DMCA, conceived by the likes of the MPAA, is already far too biased towards rights holders at the expense of innovation and creativity – but it seems it’s still not biased enough, hence the “need” for PIPA/SOPA/ACTA.

A letter is floating around in Europe "suing" users for uploading and downloading stuff to/from Megaupload

And the not so subtle bias in current copyright laws has also produced a climate of fear and uncertainty, with most people unaware of their actual rights when it comes to these kind of disputes. This has led to mass copyright lawsuits that use the fear, and sometimes the embarrassment, to “encourage” users to pay a pre-trial settlement fee to make the matter go away. It’s no wonder it’s been referred to as “legal blackmail”. But if you take this just one step further, something that many consider ethically suspect turns into an outright scam, and report this week suggest that Megaupload users are now being targeted. A fake mass copyright style letter is being sent to potential Megaupload users demanding a settlement fee, or the threat of a 10,000 euros lawsuit. The small matter of the law firm responsible for these letters not actually existing should be the first clue as to the validity of these claims, and also the fact that payments being made is going to a Slovakian bank account, for a law firm that’s supposed to be based in Munich.

Unfortunately, the MPAA’s actions may have only added to the believability of these scams , when they requested the web host of Megaupload to retain data, including user data, for future potential lawsuits. But even the MPAA knows the public’s distaste for this kind of thing, so they did make it clear that individual user lawsuits are not on the cards. A civil case against Megaupload and its “intermediaries”, on the other hand, now seems more than likely.

Moving on, Ubisoft this week hinted that the company might be suffering from a split-personality disorder when the company’s VP of Digital Publishing, Chris Early, spoke about intrusive DRM and how it’s doing paying customers a disservice. Not only that, Early says that Ubisoft really really wants to make DRM “go away” (I’ve got an idea where Ubisoft can put their DRM), and they think the best way to do it is through adding value to the legitimate gaming experience (they can start by not making the legitimate gaming experience a pain in the butt, thanks to their DRM). But what Early may be hinting at is the business model of MMO’s and how Ubisoft can learn from it, by incorporating some of the elements that keep people coming back (and paying) into the single player experience. I’m not sure ham-fisting MMO elements and the subscription model into single player games, along with a MMO’s requirement of always being online (which, for a single player game, is nothing more than a DRM. UbiDRM to be exact), is the best idea to be honest. Making better games, lowering the price, and providing online features, ongoing support, and exclusive content, might all be better solutions.

High Definition

Flags of truce came out this week in the HTML5 vs Flash vs H.264 vs WebM/Theora war, as Mozilla signaled their surrender. Sort of.

A little bit of background: The issue surrounds HTML5’s new ability to allow videos to embedded and played without the need to install third party plug-ins, like Flash. But just which video format HTML5 video would work with has been up for debate for a while now, with H.264 being the obvious choice (as it is the ones most used with Flash based videos today, and also an industry standard), but also the valid argument that the royalty and patent encumbered H.264 format isn’t ideal, especially since some of today’s most popular browsers are the open source variety. Mozilla, in particular, was strongly objected to H.264 support being made mandatory for HTML5 browsers. Google, sensing an opportunity, stepped up and produced the VP8 based WebM format. But the format failed to gain any traction, and so this week, Mozilla has had to do the unthinkable: start supporting H.264.

Firefox will soon join Chrome, IE and Safari as browsers to support H.264

Mozilla made the announcement this week that they would have to now offer H.264 support, especially for their mobile based products, as they see no other way forward without supporting a format that’s even more entrenched in the mobile market than on desktop/standalones. While Mozilla would not be providing a built-in decoder, they would allow their Firefox browser to use existing software and hardware capabilities to decode H.264.

In my opinion, this was always going to be the likely outcome. Google’s half-hearted support for WebM, some say hypocritically considering their Android platform offers H.264 decoding as standard, was never going to be enough to out-muscle H.264, especially since none of the major hardware makers were even interested to offer WebM support. And with Apple firmly behind H.264, and everyone else trying to out-Apple Apple, WebM had little or no chance to succeed.

So what does this mean for the average user? It means that HTML5 video now has a greater chance to succeed and become a true replacement for Flash, and that’s probably a tick in the win column for everyone, even if this is a set-back for open-source video standards. MPEG LA, the licensing authority for H.264, for what it’s worth, has promised not to charge royalties for this type of H.264 usage for the foreseeable future, so H.264 is free for the time being without being “free”, if you know what I mean.

The Girl with Dragon Tattoo DVD disc art

A real disc or a pirated one? You decide ...

And finally, a story that feels a bit “PR-ish” to me, where Sony’s DVD disc art for their remake of “The Girls with the Dragon Tattoo” is confusing people into thinking they’ve been sold a pirated copy of the movie. The disc art resembles a home made Sony DVD-R with the title of the film printed on to make it look like it was written on with black markers, and it’s supposed to be a reference to the main character of the film, Lisbeth Salander, and her hacking ways. Those that purchased the Blu-ray+DVD combo version might be even more confused, since the Blu-ray disc art is fairly traditional, which makes the “DVD-R” stand out even more.

But a closer look reveals the MPAA rating, region info, and even some copyright text on the supposed home made “DVD-R”. And the “DVD-R” being a Sony branded one, of course alludes to the fact that they were the studio behind the movie. So would it really have fooled people into calling up Redbox or whoever to complain, as was claimed by some of the news articles? Maybe a surprise at first, sure, but to be completely fooled? I don’t think so. All has happened though is that this story has given the DVD set some free publicity, which is why I’m cynically leaning towards PR campaign on this one.

Alrighty then, that’s pretty much the week as I remember it. Must get back to my “move” in Skyrim, still got 90+ each of dragon bones and scales to move, as well as my assortment of 400 iron daggers. This could take a while … see you next week.

Posted in Copyright, DVD, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (25 March 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (18 March 2012)

Sunday, March 18th, 2012

Welcome to another issue of the WNR. As promised, I put up the February US video game sales analysis earlier in the week. Nothing too surprising, just your usual “everything is doomed” set of stats. Is this a case of having a new normal, with the previous normal having been exaggerated by the success of the Wii, or something more sinister? With Microsoft saying this week they won’t be showing a new Xbox at E3 this year, and Sony in a similar state of mind, it will be up to the Wii U to save the coming holiday season it seems.

Work meant that my Skyrim adventures had to take a back seat this week, although I still had time to kill a vampire or two, a couple of giants (now much more easily dispatched via my legendary enchanted Daedric weapons), and the odd chicken via collateral damage.

Oh, it was also my birthday last week. I wonder at what age do you stop looking forward to your birthdays, and start dreading them because you’re getting older? For me, this happened on my 7th birthday.

Let’s get started with this WNR.

Big news for US web users this week, as from July onwards, your ISP will officially start spying on your net activities for big content (ie. the RIAA and MPAA).

With very little evidence showing “graduated response” actually works to increase revenue, remembering that this, and not reducing piracy, is the ultimate goal, it will be interesting to see what the American version can amount to. It will be different to the French version though, in that each ISPs can decide to take whatever action it deems necessary, including no specific action and just a continuing series of warnings – with permanent account suspension not being considered so far.

It marks an important milestone in the war against piracy, and along with the RIAA’s victory over LimeWire a couple of years ago, the closing of Megaupload (and others) this year, you’d expect that piracy rates would start dropping, if it hasn’t already. Yet, all you continue to hear is how the industry is still losing billions of dollars every year, and how the problem is getting worse. With the RIAA and MPAA getting what they wanted this time, yet again, would it then be safe to conclude that, if a year from now and with revenue still not up significantly, that enforcing copyright may not actually lead to increased revenue? I’ve always found the idea of people hoarding tons of money saved from piracy, instead of simply spending the money on something else, quite funny. As is the idea of people spending more money than they actually have, when their supply of pirated content is cut off (which is an impossibility in itself).

But according to the likes of the RIAA and MPAA, piracy is a $58 billion dollar a year problem, and that if the piracy problem is magically solved somehow, creative industries would suddenly gain most of that back in revenue. But with the RIAA and MPAA already equating every single instance of copyright infringement to be worth at least $150,000, via their much publicized lawsuits against students and single mothers, $58 billion may even seem a conservative figure. This “Copyright Maths” is the topic of a new TED speech by Rhapsody founder Rob Reid, a short must-watch video that shows how crazy the figures being thrown around really are. That an iPod classic can hold $8 billion worth of pirated songs based on the $150,000 calculation show how ridiculous it all it (a figure almost as ridiculous as the $40,000+ people are required to pay to fill up the same iPod with legal purchase).

And after the speech, Reid was asked what would be the best way to combat piracy. The answer was basically “give the people what they want”, by building legal services that people wanted to use, that makes piracy seem not worth the trouble. Do that, and the piracy problem will solve it self. Why go to the trouble of finding and downloading each song, when you have Spotify and millions of songs for instant gratification, for example. The same is probably even more true for movies, which are harder to download due to their larger file size (which also limits the amount of archived content that’s made available).

A full Kaleidescape set-up is for serious movie lovers, people unlikely to pirate movies (and more likely to overpay for them)

The problem is though that instead of giving people what they want, the movie and music industries are actually pursuing the opposite agenda. It cannot be better demonstrated than by the legal decision this week which banned Kaleidescape from selling its DVD and Blu-ray media servers. Piracy was just a convenient excuse for the body responsible for DVD copy protection, the DVD CCA, to legally pursue Kaleidescape, despite the core audience of Kaleidescape’s servers not being pirates at all. In fact, Kaleidescape demonstrated the amazing fact that, on average, each of their customers had a legal movie library of 500 titles or more. Considering the cost of these server set ups, it’s not hard to understand why this is the case, because their product is one for serious movie lovers with the required expendable income – and these people are not movie pirates. In fact, they’re probably the movie industry’s most hard-core customers.

So what does the industry have to gain by denying their biggest fans what they want? The answer is of course “control”. They’re perfectly happy to let you “convert” your DVDs to a purely digital format, with Wal-Mart this week offering a “DVD to Ultraviolet” service for $2 (or $4 to “upconvert” your DVDs to a HD digital version). But as always, it comes with a catch. You’ll have to use the movie studio’s preferred platform, live with their DRM system, which then controls how you’ll be able to use your digital copy (which may even expire in time). It will invariably mean a worse user experience than something for enthusiasts like Kaleidescape, but a better experience may mean a loss of control, and that’s just not acceptable. And if all of this means they can charge you again and again for the same thing, then that’s just a sweet, sweet bonus.

High Definition

With the new iPad still making headlines, I thought I would jump on the bandwagon and write something about what could be considered Apple’s first HD tablet (1024×768 is not HD, as if it was, then it meant that I had HD on my first 486 computer).

With the new iPad resolution coming in at 2K, or 2048×1536, that’s a resolution higher than your average HDTV. Of course, a true enthusiasts won’t just see the fact that the screen would perfectly render a 1920×1080 resolution video with a couple of pixels to spare, they will of course wonder if you could expand the resolution of the video from 1920 to 2048 and use up all of the available pixels for a 2048×1152 video.

iTunes 1080p compares well to Blu-ray, according to tests done by Ars Technica

But what may be more interesting is how Apple plans to distribute 1080p movies to the new iPad, as streaming of 25GB+ movies is not ideal, even with 4G. Ars Technica took the time to test several of iTunes’ new 1080p encodes, and compared it to the Blu-ray equivalent, and what they found was rather surprising – that somehow, a 5GB iTunes file isn’t 5 times worse in quality than a 25GB Blu-ray. By supporting the “High” H.264 profile, as well as increasing the “Level” support to 4.1, all now possible on the faster hardware of the new iPad (and iPhone 4S, as well as the updated Apple TV), the decoder can now be made to do more work, and the result is a more efficient encode. VUDU’s HDX does something similar to allow 1080p streaming on your average 10Mbps connection (Blu-ray, on the other hand, may require 30Mbps just for the video). Sure, you’ll lose a lot of fine detail, there will be banding and other aberrations, but that’s all moot on a 9.7″ screen. On a large screen TV connected via Apple TV, this may be an issue, but only for those serious about their movie watching, in which case, they would probably never consider Apple TV or iTunes 1080p anyway. For the rest, it’s “good enough”, and the convenience of it all makes up for everything else.

Mac Observer did similar tests but found wildly different results, so either Ars Technica did their test wrong, or Mac Observer did (or maybe video quality varies too much from movie to movie).

And with that, we come to the end of another WNR. See you next week.

Posted in Copyright, DVD, Electronics, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (18 March 2012)

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Archive for the ‘DVD’ Category

Weekly News Roundup (29 July 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (15 July 2012)

Blu-ray: The State of Play – May 2012

Weekly News Roundup (25 March 2012)

Weekly News Roundup (18 March 2012)

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