News written by Dave Horvath (December, 2006)

In all its efforts to corner the market in next generation digital distribution, Redmond's own Microsoft seems to have possibly choked its new flagship Windows Vista too much with copyright protection. In a recent article submitted by Peter Gutmann, a medical imaging specialist, the author argues that Microsoft has made its newest OS far too cumbersome for the mass market and will eventually lead to the demise of its own DRM practices. Mr. Gutmann states that the way in which Microsoft has locked down Vista in hopes to keep copyright infringement of the latest HD-DVD and Blu-Ray technologies to a minimum will only succeed in forcing users to buy faster hardware to cope with the degraded performance of Vista.

Vista has proven to be a fast OS, when its spec'd with the latest and greatest hardware, but to the average consumer, it proves to be far too bulky of an interface to run even as efficient as the version its replacing (Windows XP). Gutmann states that the Vista Content Protection specs could "very well constitute the longest suicide note in history". He further goes on to say that the efforts to force users into faster hardware to cope with the security of Vista will have a detrimental effect on the PC market as a whole; both hardware and software.

United States Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan has released a statement saying the 24 year old defendant Scott R. McCausland, one of three who operated a P2P network known as Elite Torrents has been sentenced to five months jail time and five months house arrest for providing illegal copyrighted material for download.

Part of a government agency sting operation codenamed D-Elite, the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigated and shut down their main website which was found to be a portal for file sharing copyrighted materials. The homepage of Elite Torrents was replaced with a message stating, "This Site Has Been Permanently Shut Down by the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)". Within the first week, more than half a million page hits read that welcome message.

Elite Torrents had been known to be a valuable source of pre-release software, movies and games and was even noted for having the Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith movie some six hours before the first theatrical viewing. Consequently, the file they provided was downloaded over 10,000 times in the next 24 hours. United States District Judge Sean J. McLaughlin did not look upon this lightly and stated that online pirates, "are not modern day Robin Hood’s, but rather common thieves motivated solely by the desire to get something for nothing."

Music entertainment giants Sony BMG Entertainment will pay the sum of $1.5 million in addition to thousands of consumer refunds to settle out of court. A lawsuit brought up in California and Texas courts was filed over Sony putting DRM and anti-piracy software on their music CDs which would then become installed on the consumer's computer. This was not only hidden from the consumer but was found to open a huge back door security hole in the user's machine. When this was brought up to the people at Sony BMG, their removal tactics at the time caused damage to the computers they had infected.

The two types of copy-protection software that were loaded on consumer's computers are known as MediaMax and XCP.

The two settlements state that California and Texas will each receive $750,000 in civil penalties and costs. Additionally, Sony BMG agreed to reimburse consumers who had their computers damaged when attempting to uninstall this malicious software. Although this sounds noble in effort, Sony has agreed that anyone who files a claim can receive a ratehr generous sum ranging between $25 and $175 in refunds. I, personally am not sure who at Sony BMG did market research on average repair costs, but this seems a tad low.

A privately owned and operated organization out of Silicon Valley began testing its latest tool in the ever mounting crusade to abolish copyright infringement on the Internet. Attributor Corporation of Redwood City, California developed a tool that can scan the entire contents of the publicly accessable Internet for misuse of copyrighted audio, video, images and even text.

Media companies have been fighting what some may seem a losing battle against copyright infringement and have invested billions in protecting their intellectual property. Attributor Corporation, which was founded a year ago had remained in the shadows until now; ready to swoop in like a guardian angel to those looking to protect their assets. Technology such as this could prove to be a welcomed tool in their arsenal to compliment current DRM practices.

The co-founders of the company, which are ex Yahoo executives, claim to have come up with a proprietary technology that is able to comb large chunks of data from the Internet and scan them thoroughly for any content flagged as licensed to another party. With their practices in their current state, although not deployed, could retrieve some 10 billion web sites by the end of this month.

Electronics firm Toshiba announced today that it has launched its HD-E1 High Definition DVD system to European audiences in hopes to sway them against rivals supporting the Blu-Ray format.

Toshiba forcasts some 500,000 HD-DVD sales worldwide by the time March 2007 rolls around with its most recent launch. This, in part is a strategy to gain the market share against companies struggling with Blu-Ray production. Companies such as Sony, Panasonic and Samsung in cooperation with quite a few movie studios have been chomping at the bit to get their own product on store shelves, but blue laser production has been slow due to defective parts in the assembly line.

The HD-E1 plans to retail for a scant £450. Scant in comparison to their rival's product which weighs in at almost double that amount. A more feature intensive system is set to launch later in January 2007 to the tune of £649.

Source:
BBC

Known for its flash memory and MP3 players that hit the market with most of the functionality of the market leading competitors yet at cheaper prices, SanDisk is the target for a recent lawsuit and injunction by the Italian company Sisvel S.p.a.

With the injuction submitted to a Berlin court, Sisvel were granted seizure of SanDisk products at a recent trade show. German authorities raided the 2006 IFA trade show and took control of any and all SanDisk MP3 products on display as well as advertising materials. The grounds for this seizure come by the fact that Sisvel believes SanDisk had not secured the proper patents for its MP3 playback on their devices. According to a Sisvel representative, the Berlin District Court ruled the seizure legitimate and warranted even though no ruling has come about stating that any actual patent infringement has been committed. As backwards as this may sound, this potentially could open the door to future devices in that more companies may be obligated to obtain patent licenses for anything with Sisvel's MP3 audio playback.

Many consumers may not know of Sisvel, but they have obtained many of the patents for various forms of audio playback. They claim that their patents are essential for all forms of MP3 playback and have convinced many hardware giants including Apple and Microsoft to purchase them. SanDisk claims that its players do not infringe on their territory in anyway and holds fast to their claim that they owe Sisvel nothing and will not pay them anything.

Software giant, Microsoft has officially released it's project XNA Game Studio Express for developmental purposes on the Xbox 360 console. Their hope is to find budding, undiscovered talent in amateur game developers that can produce homebrew games for the Xbox 360. Originally announced back in August, the product has become live and is free for download.

While free sounds great, you'd do little with the source code as you can't publish it anywhere without subscribing to the $99 yearly subscription fee that grants you access to sample code and the ability to upload your projects. Microsoft hopes that new developers will turn to this service for help with white papers and game assets put up not only by Microsoft themselves but also third-party developers. Additionally, it appears that in order to allow your project to be consumed by the masses, you'll also need to partake in their $49 four month subscription that allows your finished games to be downloaded via Xbox Live.

XNA Game Studio Express will function on any PC running Windows XP and uses the coding standards for Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and Microsoft.s .NET Compact Framework.

Microsoft states that downloaders will need to have an Xbox fitted with a hard drive and hints that potential downloaders may also need to subscribe to the XNA Creators Club. Reason being is the downloads will require compiling of source code in an Xbox 360 format. They stress that the intent is for non-commercial means, however the XNA project can be used to produce commercially available Windows content. Additionally, they warned that these XNA created games will not be able to be transferred via memory card, CD or DVD at this time.

It seems to be common place anymore for one company to scream copyright infringement over another because of the most minute details in their own intellectual properties. Almost daily we hear about a lawsuit being issued because someone came increasingly close to a successful product strategy. However, I'm not too sure the judges were prepared when they heard the case over Apple's newest gripe.

There's a British company by the name of LoveHoney who has caused quite a bit of stir within Apple's ranks over their flagship product, the iPod. While ingenius accessories for the famed iPod are nothing out of the ordinary, LoveHoney had successfully created some time ago the iBuzz. The whole point of the iBuzz is so that a couple or even a solo artist can pleasure themselves all the while keeping beat with the tempo of whatever is playing on the iPod.

One would think that this possibly morally objective accessory would be Apple's biggest gripe, however that doesn't seem to be the case. Apple is more upset by the fact that on LoveHoney's website, they portrayed a silouette of a woman in the midst of said pleasure in true iPod form. The famous neon colored backgrounds with a shadowed person carrying an iPod in perfect clarity has been a symbol of iPod since it came into the mainstream. Apple is suing LoveHoney, not for what the portrayal was, but merely for the fact that they used their advertisement scheme as their own.

The British government commissioned a report entitled The Gowers Report which serves to modernize current copyright infringement laws to match the changes seen by the advent of the Internet.

The report states there should be new practices followed against copyright infringement, it does stand by the consumer in stating that the consumer should be able to move, alter or modify their purchased music for their own personal needs how they see fit; such as from CD to MP3. In addition, it recommends that the copyright protection statute of limitations currently set to 50 years, be extended. They'd like to see intellectual properties protected for a proposed 95 years. With copyright protection only at 50 years, works that were released from the UK in the 1950's would soon be open to the general public to do with what they wish. Apparently the music industry is interested in still making a profit after that much time as passed.

The report also brings up the point of punishment. They'd like to see the punishment for people who deliver and distribute intellectual propterty such as music or films on the Internet to be just as harsh as the bootleggers who make hard copies and sell them on the street. Currently, Internet related distribution faces up to 2 years in prison, while selling hard copies warrants 10 years. The reports calls for these two crimes to be looked at equally and punished evenly.

If you were one of the lucky few to actually obtain a PS3 and are not hording it on the likes of Ebay, you can treat yourself to the latest firmware update from Sony; version 1.3.

Sony released the update to add different features that would come in handy. These features include the ability to backup your SD cards, USB flash drives or memory sticks directly on the PS3 hard drive. Another welcomed addition is the inclusion of HDD formatting. If you happen to put something on the PS3 that makes it do crazy things, you can bring it back to factory defaults like nothing ever happened. Of course, just like any reformatting option, it'd completely erase anything extra that you placed on the drive.

What you will not see in this update is the promised fix to the 1080i resolution bug that has affected the launch devices. Earlier, Sony had released a statement saying that they would fix the bug in the firmware that did not allow it to properly display 1080i resolution, but instead bump it down to 480p. Instead of fixing this issue, they merely changed the heirarchy of display preferences so that 1080i was near the bottom of the list. Sony has since retracted its statement in that they will fix the problem. Future updates will tell whether or not they will address this problem.

A letter recently was sent to CEO Chad Hurley or YouTube by the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC), in protest of their continued failure to proactively remove copyrighted materials from their website. JASRAC's main complaint in the matter was that YouTube has no policy in place to monitor content put onto the site by users and will not remove said copyrighted material until there is a formal complaint or threat of lawsuit issued to them.

One snippet from the offical letter sent by JASRAC and 22 other Japanese companies stated, "Taking into account the current status of your service, we believe that your company should not just wait for rights owners to take the 'Notice and Take down' procedures but should bear the responsibility to prevent, in advance, copyright infringements such as illegal uploads and distributions, or to avoid those infringements".

This new protest comes just a month and a half after YouTube was forced to remove some 29,549 files that infringed on the copyrights of 23 Japanese media companies. Neither this complaint or YouTubes removal of the files stopped users from consistantly uploading copyrighted material to the website for public consumption.

Analytical network equipment provider, Sandvine released a statement recently citing that ISPs should proactively be on the lookout for increased online gaming and online video downloading in the very near future.

In recent studies, Sandvine saw an increase of 80% of traffic for the Xbox Live servers just following the release of several highly anticipated game titles. One of the latest releases, Gears of War gave Xbox Live a tremendous jump in network traffic, proving to ISPs that network gaming is not just a passing fad or craze.

Additionally, Sandvine saw an astounding 140% internet traffic increase following Apple's release of iTunes7 which enabled users to download full length feature films directly to their video iPods. This once again should show network providers that they need to better suit their networks to handle this type of traffic as it is clear that these are things the consumer wants and needs.

Dave Caputo, CEO of Sandvine said, "The effect Gears of War and other games are having on networks indicates to service providers that online gaming is not just a craze. Their networks must be equipped to protect this increasingly valuable traffic from the effects of a best-effort network. Other multimedia applications like video downloads onto iPods are increasingly becoming popular, so service providers need to identify these trends early in order to proactively ensure there is adequate capacity to support the extra bandwidth usage."

Java based P2P client Azureus recently released its newest version, 3.0, thanks in part to its own adventure into venture capital financing. Funding was raised in partnership with Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, BV Capital and CNET chairman Jarl Mohn.

These efforts have not been all for naught with Azureus, being one of the more popular downloaded P2P applications. Some of the 130 million people who've downloaded the client will be able to treat themselves to the upgraded 3.0 version, dubbed Zudeo. Zudeo is geared towards digital media sharing and can allow publishers to distribute HD and DVD quality media at no cost.

"Today, content owners and publishers can use Zudeo to freely promote and distribute their digital creations, without length or quality limitations," said Azureus CEO, Gilles BianRosa. "Furthermore, content creators and publishers can use our social networking tools to expose their content throughout the Web, including blogs and social networks."

Source:
DMW

Sony's newest console, the PS3 hasn't even been out for a month yet and already a group most people in the "scene" should know of has come incredibly close to unlocking its true potential.

Team Xecuter has been one of the biggest threats to Microsoft and Sony alike with modifications that enabled hard drive loading of your game backups. In a recent post on their website, they've revealed that they have connected a 750Gb hard drive to the PS3 and have successfully been able to pass data back and forth from it. Their newest development dubbed the Hyperdrive features the ability to connect any 3.5" SATA hard drive to your PS3 and they're currently working on an IDE solution. Additionally, it has USB 2.0 support for dumping data to and from the hard drive.

Upon connecting the drive, they have been able to get the PS3 to recognize it, format the drive to it's standards and store all the settings internally to the PS3 and not the hard drive.

What all this means is that its quite possible that Blu-Ray dumps to an external hard drive may not be too far off. Larger drives would be needed since games such as Resistance: Fall of Man have been seen taking up some 16Gb worth of data. It's an exciting time to see what these folks develop in the future. Could we see legitimate PS3 backups gracing the hard drives of the masses soon? Only time will tell.

In a totally unorthodox move in the video game market, console underdog Nintendo introduced it's Wii to Japanese consumers almost two weeks after it's successful American launch. The famous electronics store, Yodobashi Camera in the Machida district in Tokyo opened at 7:30am, 2.5 hours earlier than normal in anticipation of the Nintendo launch. By 8am they had already posted signs saying they were sold out for the day.

Some eager consumers said they had been waiting in line since 6:30am the earlier day. Although this length of time waiting for a product launch pales in comparison to how long US comsumers were waiting in line for Nintendo's competitor, the Sony PS3.

Nintendo shipped 400,000 units to Japan which quickly sold out everywhere. This is in contrast to the 600,000 units sent to the United States which were said to be all accounted for in eight days. Nintendo remains hopeful that it will meet it's goal of reaching 4 million by the end of this year.

Instead of going head-to-head with the technical marvel of rival companies Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo decided to go for a fun-for-all approach. After taking a back seat to Sony with the introduction of the Playstation in 1994, Nintendo executives began looking at the 20 billion dollar video game market a bit differently. They look to achieve a healthy market share with their innovative controller and unique gameplay.

A recent bill that was up in California legistation which would have banned the ability for companies to use "pretexting" practices to obtain your private information was recently overturned by everyone's favorite industry association, the MPAA.

The bill, SB1666 was presented before California Committees and would essentially stop the ability of companies to use false or fraudulent statements about themselves in order to obtain information such as your home phone number, address, even social security number. The bill had been gaining major approval through the Senate with a unanimous 30-0 approval vote and was set to become a law when our friends at the MPAA stated that their organization requires the ability to disguise themselves in efforts to stop illegally downloaded content.

Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse stated "The MPAA has a tremendous amount of clout and they told legislators, 'We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading.'"

This resistance in the Senate proved a good move for the MPAA as the bill was shot down earlier in the year. Legislative records clearly show that it was the MPAA's lobbyists who paid certain dues to make sure the bill did not pass. As a result California revised the original bill and passed a much more anorexic bill that only barred organizations from obtaining your phone records, and nothing else.