Sony copy protection taking heat again
Reports continue to filter in about DVDs that refuse to
play on standard players from Toshiba, LG, Pioneer,
Sony, and others. The culprit is titles that utilize
Sony's
ARccOS
copy protection scheme, such as Disney's "Pirates of
the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest," The Weinstein
Company's "Lucky Number Slevin," and Sony's "Casino
Royale," "The Holiday," and "Stranger Than Fiction."
ARccOS artificially scrambles sectors on the disc in an
attempt to keep users from ripping the disc to a drive.
Many older (or less sophisticated) players simply skip
these corrupted areas as unreadable and continue on.
Computers -- and unfortunately, some newer players --
try to perform error correction on these areas and fail
playback. When contacted, Sony seems to deny the
problem, much like Microsoft and the 360 disc
scratching, and simply passes the buck onto the player
manufacturers to upgrade their firmware. Meanwhile,
many users have simply downloaded programs to bypass
the protection and make copies without the "defect."
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Apple unveils Final Cut Studio 2
“Final Cut Studio 2 was specifically designed to enable the rapidly growing community of over 800,000 Final Cut editors worldwide to animate, mix, grade and deliver their work as a natural extension of the editorial process,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Product Marketing. “Final Cut Studio 2 is the most powerful production suite on the planet.”
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Apple Introduces Final Cut Server
“Final Cut Server’s powerful media asset management capabilities simplify managing the thousands of assets that make up a typical edit,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Product Marketing. “And Final Cut Server’s sophisticated workflow automation tools ensure projects flow smoothly through an organization, enabling everyone to be more productive.”
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Apple will ship Leopard in October
iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can't wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most
sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price -- we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac O (R) X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones.
Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music
“We
are going to give iTunes customers a choice—the current
versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or
new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even
higher audio quality and the security of
interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve
Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think our customers are going to
love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the
songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this
year.”
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Viacom Strikes Google, YouTube with Lawsuit
However there are far fewer instances of what Viacom calls infringing material lately, as YouTube responded to an October demand to remove various Comedy Central clips. The heat was turned up in February, when Viacom once again demanded that YouTube remove over 100,000 video clips.
These demands punctuated throughout the Viacom/YouTube negotiation process. Seemingly frustrated at YouTube's progress, Viacom stunningly backed out of any possible distribution deal and instead opted to sign on with the lesser known "Joost."
"After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users," Viacom said in a statement. "Filtering tools promised repeatedly by YouTube and Google have not been put in place, and they continue to host and stream vast amounts of unauthorized video."
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Dell says all aboard for Linux PCs
According to Dell, the company's decision to move forward has been a direct result from requests posted by users to its new interactive website Dell IdeaStorm, which was launched on February 16. Apparently Dell has received a plethora of requests from users for desktops and notebooks loaded with pre-installed Linux distributions and the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org.
Dell states that a problem for the company has been which Linux distribution to run with.
"As this community knows, there is no single customer preference for a distribution of Linux," Dell stated on IdeaStorm. "In the last week, the IdeaStorm community suggested more than half a dozen distributions. We don't want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another."
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BitTorrent Entertainment Network
But things weren’t always that way for the BitTorrent protocol. When the ball first started rolling for Bram Cohen, the CEO of BitTorrent, Inc., the BitTorrent community had its fair share of growing pains. When BitTorrent was first released in late 2002, it was released in a P2P environment dominated by FastTrack (Kazaa) and eDonkey2000. However the BitTorrent protocol had a distinct advantage.
Around that time, broadband penetration in the United States was just beginning to pick up steam. With faster connections, the marvel of downloading at 5 kb/seconds lost its luster and instead the Internet community began demanding more speed and faster transfers. Along with that demand came ever-growing file sizes: 700 megabyte XviDs, 800 megabyte ISOs, and 4.4 gigabyte DVD-Rips. Although the largest P2P network at the time, FastTrack, did have the ability to share large files, it did so very poorly. FastTrack was designed to transfer small MP3 files, not large movie and program files.
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CompUSA to Close 100 Stores
The
changes to the company include phasing out several
senior executives and closing some stores and regional
offices around the United States. CompUSA isn't saying
exactly how many stores will be shuttered, but
The
Consumerist claims an
anonymous insider said that 100 of the 229 stores are
on the list.
If so, that could translate into bad news for
prospective Mac buyers that don't have an Apple Store
or Authorized Apple Reseller in their area. Apple's
"store within a store" deal with CompUSA has placed
Apple employees in many of the retailer's locations
offering an alternative location to get hands-on time
with Macs and make purchases with the help of
Apple-trained staff.
CompUSA executives are taking the restructuring path to
help bring expenses back under control and to improve
the company's position in relation to competitors like
Best Buy, Circuit City, and Wal-Mart. There is no word
on when store locations may start shutting
down.
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Adobe ships Photoshop Lightroom 1.0
02/18/2007 21:59 |
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To Steve Jobs and the Digital Entertainment Industry
There are four key points that I would like to make in response to your letter.
• DRM is broader than just music – While your thoughts are seemingly directed solely to the music industry, the fact is that DRM also has a broad impact across many different forms of content and across many media devices. Therefore, the discussion should not be limited to just music. It is critical that as all forms of content move from physical to electronic there is an opportunity for DRM to be an important enabler across all content, including movies, games and software, as well as music.
• DRM increases not decreases consumer value – I believe that most piracy occurs because the technology available today has not yet been widely deployed to make DRM-protected legitimate content as easily accessible and convenient as unprotected illegitimate content is to consumers. The solution is to accelerate the deployment of convenient DRM-protected distribution channels—not to abandon them. Without a reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay consumers in receiving premium content in the home, in the way they want it. For example, DRM is uniquely suitable for metering usage rights, so that consumers who don't want to own content, such as a movie, can "rent" it. Similarly, consumers who want to consume content on only a single device can pay less than those who want to use it across all of their entertainment areas – vacation homes, cars, different devices and remotely. Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a "one size fits all" situation that will increase costs for many of them.
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The Pirate Bay Introduces Oscartorrents
02/14/2007 20:46 |
Permalink
Oscartorrents.com is a torrent site completely dedicated to Oscar contending movies. The site's left column is broken down into the typical Oscar categories - Best Movie, Best Actor in a leading Role, Best Actress in a Leading Role - with the corresponding torrent files linked with each section.
The movie industry has been particularly aggressive against piracy involving Oscar-contending films, and this move by The Pirate Bay appears to be very provocative. However, the site has some interactive features for the community, such as the ability to vote on a film's merits.
Oscartorrents.com almost has an authorized movie/music store feel - save for the anti-establishment literature on the front page. Each torrent has a commercial screen shot with a description of each torrent offered. The site also challenges the movie industry to the time-honored, "can't beat em' join em' " adage.
"To all intellectual property landlords: we are aware that OscarTorrents might annoy you -- but contain your righteous indignation for a while, and think: we're only linking to torrents that already exist. Face it: your membrane has burst, and it wasn't us who burst it. Your precious bodily fluids are escaping.
"You haven't beaten us, so why not join us?"
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Google e-mail out of beta
"It's a pretty momentous time for Gmail," said Keith Coleman, Google's product manager for the service.
Although it will no longer require invitations to sign up, Gmail is retaining its "beta," or test, status, signaling that Google still considers the service to be a work in progress.
Making Gmail more widely available is important to Google because other key products like instant messaging and calendar management are tied into the e-mail service, company co-founder Sergey Brin said an interview. "It has become a real cornerstone for us."
Because Gmail users often remain logged into Google's Web site while they conduct online searches, the service also helps the company's engineers learn more about individual preferences — knowledge that can help deliver more relevant search results and foster more loyalty.
The decision to lift all invitation requirements on Gmail signals Google finally believes it has adequate computing capacity to accommodate the generous amount of free storage provided by the e-mail service after investing heavily in additional data centers. Gmail offers each account at least 2.8 gigabytes of storage — enough to fill about 1.4 million pages.
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Blu-ray outpaces HD DVD
Sony plans to declare Blu-ray winner in high-def format
war
Two
movies on Blu-ray Disc were sold for every one sold on
the HD DVD format during January, according to studio
sources.
Blu-ray backers attributed the gains to the fact that more titles were released on Blu-ray than on HD DVD during the month and to quick consumer adoption of Sony’s Blu-ray-enabled PlayStation 3 videogame machine. More than 1 million U.S. homes now have Blu-ray players, including set-top boxes and PS3s.
“I think finally everything that we knew going into this format has started to happen,” said Sony Pictures Home Entertainment worldwide president David Bishop. “We have a critical mass of content, we have the biggest mass of consumer electronics companies in the world supporting this format. That has moved Blu-ray into the forefront.”
Sony is so confident that Bishop said the studio plans to begin marketing the format to consumers as the winner of the format war.
“The message that we’re going to put out to the consumer now is, now it is safe to make a choice,” he said. “No more fence-sitting is needed.”
In fact, HD DVD sales are continuing at a steady pace, they just haven’t grown as fast as Blu-ray.Twenty-five Blu-ray movies were released in January, compared to 11 titles on HD DVD.
Also, the top titles on Blu-ray outsold those on HD DVD during the first three weeks of January. Lionsgate’s Crank sold 7,500 units on Blu-ray, compared to HD DVD’s top seller for the period, Warner Home Video’s Batman Begins, which sold through 4,100 units, according to studio sources.
However, it’s hard to get an even comparison as not all movies are available on both formats. Crank was a new release and wasn’t available on HD DVD, and Batman Begins has been available on HD DVD since November.
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Blu-ray backers attributed the gains to the fact that more titles were released on Blu-ray than on HD DVD during the month and to quick consumer adoption of Sony’s Blu-ray-enabled PlayStation 3 videogame machine. More than 1 million U.S. homes now have Blu-ray players, including set-top boxes and PS3s.
“I think finally everything that we knew going into this format has started to happen,” said Sony Pictures Home Entertainment worldwide president David Bishop. “We have a critical mass of content, we have the biggest mass of consumer electronics companies in the world supporting this format. That has moved Blu-ray into the forefront.”
Sony is so confident that Bishop said the studio plans to begin marketing the format to consumers as the winner of the format war.
“The message that we’re going to put out to the consumer now is, now it is safe to make a choice,” he said. “No more fence-sitting is needed.”
In fact, HD DVD sales are continuing at a steady pace, they just haven’t grown as fast as Blu-ray.Twenty-five Blu-ray movies were released in January, compared to 11 titles on HD DVD.
Also, the top titles on Blu-ray outsold those on HD DVD during the first three weeks of January. Lionsgate’s Crank sold 7,500 units on Blu-ray, compared to HD DVD’s top seller for the period, Warner Home Video’s Batman Begins, which sold through 4,100 units, according to studio sources.
However, it’s hard to get an even comparison as not all movies are available on both formats. Crank was a new release and wasn’t available on HD DVD, and Batman Begins has been available on HD DVD since November.
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Yahoo Music, SanDisk chiefs urge labels to 'ditch DRM'
The boss of Yahoo Music says that MP3 tracks sell much
better than DRM-laden
music
A
senior Yahoo chief has spoken out in favour of Apple
CEO Steve Jobs' call for major labels to abandon
digital rights technology (DRM).
Dave Goldberg, head of Yahoo Music, says that tracks sold through his service in MP3 format sell much faster than rights-protected tunes.
Silicon Valley Watcher reports that Goldberg believes DRM is confusing for consumers, also that the company has experimented by making music available free of DRM, and tracks sold in this way see more sales.
Goldberg is also heavily critical of the DRM system Microsoft licenses for a fee, saying it "doesn't work half the time".
The Yahoo boss believes that removing DRM would provide a boost to interoperability and widen the range of music services and devices available to consumers.
The Yahoo chief's thoughts were echoed by SanDisk founder and CEO Eli Harari, who wrote: "Proprietary systems aren’t acceptable to consumers. In recent months, there has been a rising chorus of complaints in Europe about the anti-competitive nature of closed formats that tie music purchased from one company to that company’s devices, and tie that company’s devices to its music service."
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Dave Goldberg, head of Yahoo Music, says that tracks sold through his service in MP3 format sell much faster than rights-protected tunes.
Silicon Valley Watcher reports that Goldberg believes DRM is confusing for consumers, also that the company has experimented by making music available free of DRM, and tracks sold in this way see more sales.
Goldberg is also heavily critical of the DRM system Microsoft licenses for a fee, saying it "doesn't work half the time".
The Yahoo boss believes that removing DRM would provide a boost to interoperability and widen the range of music services and devices available to consumers.
The Yahoo chief's thoughts were echoed by SanDisk founder and CEO Eli Harari, who wrote: "Proprietary systems aren’t acceptable to consumers. In recent months, there has been a rising chorus of complaints in Europe about the anti-competitive nature of closed formats that tie music purchased from one company to that company’s devices, and tie that company’s devices to its music service."
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Pirates of the Multiplex
Under U.S. pressure, Swedish authorities are going
after the popular Pirate Bay Web site for illegal
distribution of video files. But if Hollywood wants to
stop online pirates—who cost the industry some $7
billion in 2005—it needs to join them, not beat
them.
I
was a reluctant convert, to say the least. When I got
the call from my old friend Richard back in late 2005,
he sounded far too enthusiastic about the latest
Internet gimmick that was going to "change my life."
Richard, you see, is prone to great enthusiasms, and I
was not particularly disposed to listen to his ravings
about some Web site called
UKNova,
which supposedly let him download all kinds of amazing
British TV shows completely free of charge.
I relented and signed up for UKNova membership. The site functions as a "torrent tracker," a skeletal database that allows users to locate and share digital files with other users. Unlike some previous peer-to-peer content-sharing programs, the files are not located on a Web site or taken from any single source; they're shared among members in the form of tiny digital fragments that are eventually reconstituted, like a completed jigsaw puzzle, as a single file on your desktop. The operation—which incidentally makes it difficult to sue members of a site like UKNova—is enabled by an ingenious little software application called BitTorrent, a paradigmatic advance in file sharing that has engendered many variants since its 2002 advent.
Loath as I am to admit it, UKNova did change my life—at least as far as my viewing habits are concerned. After downloading free BitTorrent software, I could use UKNova to procure—slowly at first—television shows that would have hitherto obliged me to beg British friends and relatives to record them for me on VHS (remember tapes?) and send via airmail. The unalloyed thrill of watching all this downloaded Brit-TV stuff easily outweighed the nagging shame of staring at a computer screen for hours on end.
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I relented and signed up for UKNova membership. The site functions as a "torrent tracker," a skeletal database that allows users to locate and share digital files with other users. Unlike some previous peer-to-peer content-sharing programs, the files are not located on a Web site or taken from any single source; they're shared among members in the form of tiny digital fragments that are eventually reconstituted, like a completed jigsaw puzzle, as a single file on your desktop. The operation—which incidentally makes it difficult to sue members of a site like UKNova—is enabled by an ingenious little software application called BitTorrent, a paradigmatic advance in file sharing that has engendered many variants since its 2002 advent.
Loath as I am to admit it, UKNova did change my life—at least as far as my viewing habits are concerned. After downloading free BitTorrent software, I could use UKNova to procure—slowly at first—television shows that would have hitherto obliged me to beg British friends and relatives to record them for me on VHS (remember tapes?) and send via airmail. The unalloyed thrill of watching all this downloaded Brit-TV stuff easily outweighed the nagging shame of staring at a computer screen for hours on end.
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Interview with muslix64, Developer of BackupHDDVD
Although Hollywood has constructed enough DRM architecture to rival the Pyramid of Giza, it has long been suspected that it would be only a matter of time before HD DVD and Blu-ray content protection were compromised. Convinced the golden DRM egg had been laid, it seemed that nothing could penetrate the great AACS wall. And to this day, that great wall still stands.
But why crash through the main gates of Constantinople when you can just pick the lock of a long forgotten rear entrance?
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AACS Attack: a Clear and Present Danger to DRM
The
overwhelmingly successful attack against HD DVD and
Blu-ray represents several well-entrenched facets of
the online community. Perhaps most important is the
inherent cooperation that manifests itself against a
seemingly common enemy - DRM (Digital Rights
Management.) Attached to this cooperation are the vast
resources of the online community: primarily its
virtually unlimited supply of talent, intellect, and
most importantly, its rapid response to a commonly
perceived threat.
It therefore comes as little surprise that muslix64's exploit of AACS, an attack that merely involves circumventing the copy-protection mechanism, has been downplayed extensively. According to AACS spokesman Michael Ayers, because of the current technology requirements necessary to obtain, download, and play an exploited high definition movie, the threat is currently limited in nature.
"The large size of the files and the high cost of writable hi-def discs make large-scale copying of high-definition DVDs impractical, but the attacks on the new format echo the early days of illegal trafficking in music files," Ayers said on Thursday.
“Impractical” is a strong word to describe the motivation of the file-sharing community. On AACS' homepage, which interestingly enough is splashed with a logo that reads "Share the vision", the attack is further downplayed in a statement released yesterday.
"AACS LA has confirmed that AACS Title Keys have appeared on public web sites without authorization. Such unauthorized disclosures indicate an attack on one or more players sold by AACS licensees. This development is limited to the compromise of specific implementations, and does not represent an attack on the AACS system itself, nor is it exclusive to any particular format."
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It therefore comes as little surprise that muslix64's exploit of AACS, an attack that merely involves circumventing the copy-protection mechanism, has been downplayed extensively. According to AACS spokesman Michael Ayers, because of the current technology requirements necessary to obtain, download, and play an exploited high definition movie, the threat is currently limited in nature.
"The large size of the files and the high cost of writable hi-def discs make large-scale copying of high-definition DVDs impractical, but the attacks on the new format echo the early days of illegal trafficking in music files," Ayers said on Thursday.
“Impractical” is a strong word to describe the motivation of the file-sharing community. On AACS' homepage, which interestingly enough is splashed with a logo that reads "Share the vision", the attack is further downplayed in a statement released yesterday.
"AACS LA has confirmed that AACS Title Keys have appeared on public web sites without authorization. Such unauthorized disclosures indicate an attack on one or more players sold by AACS licensees. This development is limited to the compromise of specific implementations, and does not represent an attack on the AACS system itself, nor is it exclusive to any particular format."
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