DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Sorry for the brief hiatus last week – things got a bit out of control on all fronts, and something had to give. Things are bad to a normal-ish rhythm now, and so the WNR continues!

A few things to go through this week, but it shouldn’t take too long.

WordPress experiences a surge in invalid and abusive DMCA take down requests

DMCA abuse is real. And for a company like Automattic, the makers of WordPress, who deal with each and every DMCA take-down request manually, it’s a headache that’s growing exponentially. Automattic revealed that for the first half of 2017, the number of DMCA requests they received more than doubled, but the number of actual legitimate requests actually dropped in the same period.

This means that the number of false reports, some due to inaccurate information, others are deliberated attempts to silence critics, have dramatically increased. The problem is so bad now that Automattic have rejected 78% of requests in the first half of 2017. Now, it has to be said that the 9,000+ requests received by Automattic is not a huge number compared to what a company like Google receives, and so for now, Automattic can still deal with them manually, with a human behind every request to determine if they are valid or not. For others, it means an automated system to deal with these requests, most of which are also being created automatically by bots, and the legal threat of things means that these system will err on the side of caution, to approve requests even if many are not valid.

So it end up being a battle of bots, neither side accurate enough to avoid collateral damage, which is legitimate pages being removed for no good reason.

But sometimes there are good reasons to get something removed, even if the main motive behind it has nothing to do with copyright. Internet celebrity PewDiePie is in the news again for all the wrong reasons after using a racial epithet in a recent video. The Internet backlash was strong and totally expected. One indie game developer, Campo Santo, was finally fed up with PewDiePie’s antics, and no longer wanted him to make money off the firm’s game Firewatch. What Campo Santo did to force PewDiePie’s hand, on the other hand, was controversial. The game developer used YouTube’s Content ID, its DMCA take-down platform, to get the video removed. And they succeeded.

The problem with this is that even after Campo Santo made it clear that copyright had nothing to do with their wish to have the video removed, they still manged to do it, despite fair use probably being on the side of PewDiePie. And as this The Verge article explains, maybe it shouldn’t be this easy, or at least, it should be a lot clearer just who’s right in this legal clash.

Apple fully on board the 4K and HDR train with its updated Apple TV

So the big news in the tech world this week was the release of the Apple iPhone 8 and X. Big news, but hardly surprising because of all the leaks that, in hindsight, were spot on. Perhaps a little bit lost among the hype of the X was the announcement of an upgraded Apple TV that supports 4K and HDR.

Apple has always been a gatekeeper of sorts for the “mainstreaming” of previously niche technology. By now supporting 4K and HDR, perhaps it’s as official a signal as we’re going to get that these technologies are ready for prime time, ready to become mainstream.

The best part though about the announcement was the fact that there won’t be a price hike when it comes to buying 4K content – it will be the same as the HD version. In fact, if you’ve already purchased the HD version, you can automatically upgrade to the 4K version for free.

As for the X, nothing was too much of a surprise thanks to the leaks, but the removal of Touch ID was a “double take” moment for me. Samsung’s clumsy last minute addition of a fingerprint reader on the back of the phone was not the best move, but Apple removing it altogether because they couldn’t get the screen integrated fingerprint reader to work in time, could be worse. For those like me that tend to unlock their phone with the fingerprint reader the moment I pick it up and before I even look at the phone, the switch to Face ID might be hard. Apple will hope that it works flawlessly, or it will definitely be the point of attack for critics.

As for the lack of a home button, not even a virtual one like on the Galaxy S8, I know for a fact that some will find it annoying (at first at least, and then it will probably be like second nature to them).

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Well, that’s it for the week I guess. See you next week. Hopefully.

Sorry for the brief hiatus, back and refreshed from warm Far North Queensland. Back into the freezing grey wasteland that is Melbourne at the moment. Spring can’t come soon enough!

A short one this week before I freeze my fingers off typing this WNR.

Studios are failing to protect their movies

Movie studios might need to rethink the strategy of having simultaneous theatrical and digital releases, after the Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L Jackson comedy action hit ‘The Hitman’s Bodyguard’ was uploaded online in record time.

The source of the pristine, 1080p upload is speculated to be Netflix Japan, of all places, which somehow managed to secure the streaming rights to the film when other countries were still waiting for it theatrically (apparently, it’s being marketed as a Netflix Original Movie in the country, because it secured the exclusive distribution rights there). As good as it was for Japanese Netflix subscribers, this move might not have been the best for the film’s production company, Millennium Films.

Some time ago, I posted here that “if you can play it, you can rip it”. That’s still very much true, whether it’s DVDs, screeners, cams or streams. The only way to stop piracy is to stop people from actually being able to watch movies, and I’m not sure that’s what the film industry actually wants. Of course, giving a hit movie to Netflix, even in the far off land of Japan, may not have been the best idea either.

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You should have watched the GoT season finale by now, and so has millions of people who definitely did not watch it legally. Piracy peaked compared to the rest of the season, but did not break any records because of the increasing number of legal viewing options, and of course, streaming.

Not another bloody HDR format!

The HDR format war is heating up (about the only thing with heat in my house at the moment) even more with the addition of a third major format into the race. With Dolby Vision gaining momentum thanks to Paramount, Warner Bros. and Lionsgate all starting to release titles in the format, the humble HDR10 format feels like it’s getting left behind.

And it’s not just branding at stake here. Dolby Vision does offer a few additional features that, in some cases, significantly improve the picture quality. The most important of which is something called dynamic metadata. Instead of having one set of HDR data for the entire movie of TV episode, dynamic metadata allows each scene to have their own set of data, thus allowing an even greater range of brightness for scene after scene.

HDR10+ aims to solve this shortcoming by adding basically just dynamic metadata support to the existing HDR10 standard. It’s something Samsung came up with, and is now supported by major rival Panasonic and studio 20th Fox, all in an attempt to not have to pay the high licensing fees associated with Dolby Vision. Amazon already supports the format too.

A format war is always bad for the consumer, but this one is not as bad as long as studios encode their Blu-ray releases in multiple HDR formats (as is the case with Dolby Vision releases so far). HDR10 remains the “fallback” format in all cases, so even if you don’t have a Dolby Vision or HDR10+ TV, you can still enjoy HDR.

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I think when your fingers and toes start feeling numb in the bitter cold that is my study, it’s probably time to stop writing. See you next week (when it’s hopefully a bit warmer)!