DRM

Blu-ray price hike.


According to an article at the SMH, the price of Blu-ray players has gone up 5% since the announcement that Blu-ray won the format wars.

To be perfectly honest, I’m surprised it isn’t the discs themselves not only for royalties for other companies to make, but also for the movies they come out on (ie, hikes on two seperate fronts).

This hike in players isn’t surprising. No more competition from another format, so manufacturers can afford to charge more for the product now as they’re only competing against other manufacturers of the same format.

Source: SMH.

You can’t help but laugh.


Sony, infamous for their proprietry formats, DRM, rootkits, and coming down VERY hard on anyone who doesn’t use their products exactly the way they demand (including plugging a PS3 in to a powerboard), have been caught out as being the hypocrits you’d expect them to be.

PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, received a call from a Sony BMG IT employee for support. After Sony BMG supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration, one of PointDev’s products, the software maker was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG’s assets. The subsequent raid revealed that software was illegally installed on four of Sony BMG’s servers. The Business Software Alliance, however, believes that up to 47 percent of the software installed on Sony BMG’s computers could be pirated.

Comedy gold I tells ya.

Source: Ars Technica.

Comcast pretending to do the right thing.


In case you’re not aware, comcast were caught out last year cancelling all bittorrent traffic. Their method for doing so was by illegally injecting their own data in to all torrent traffic on their network. The data they injected ended all torrent downloads as though no more data was available even though it was. It is not known how long they were doing this for before they got caught red handed.

Comcast, under federal inquiry over its throttling of BitTorrent traffic, said Thursday it will deploy a so-called “agnostic” approach to traffic management and treat all data equally by year’s end.


So it takes an entire year to flick a switch and turn off an illegal data injector?

Comcast said it was working with BitTorrent Inc. of San Francisco, to develop a neutral, traffic management protocol, and said government intervention was unnecessary.


They have to work with the creators of bittorrent to figure out how to stop themselves from purposefully interfering with a protocols data?

This is all a load of shit, it makes you wonder what new dodgy deeds they are planning. I feel sorry for those in the US, generally you’re limited in ISP options depending on where you live so some people have no choice but dial-up or comcast.

Source: Threat Level.

Blu-ray made usable.


The next-gen DVD war was won unfortunately by sony, a company renowned for proprietary formats, not playing well with other products/companies, and rootkits.

Fortunately, the good people at SlySoft have worked their magic and made the Blu-ray format usable.

Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group will have to revise his statement from July, 2007 regarding BD+: “BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won’t likely be breached for 10 years”. It is worth mentioning that since he made that statement only eight months have gone by.

Source: BoingBoing.

Australian Racketeering Industry Assosication strikes again.


The ARIA/RIAA are getting one step closer to their greatest wish – a world without music. The latest method is by increasing the amount pubs and clubs have to pay for music. But it’s ok, it’s not much. They only want it to go from 7c per song per person ($1.05/hour/person) to $1.05 per song per person ($15.75/hour/person) over 4 years, a mere 1400% increase. They initially sought $2.32 per song per person ($34.80/hour/person).

Honestly, if anybody here still listens to any bands who are represented by an ARIA/RIAA affiliated company, you’re a fucking moron. That’s all there is to it.

Source: SMH.

MPAA at it again.

The extortionist monopoly known as the MPAA are at it again. It appears that their latest tool to fight intellectual property theft and copyright violations … violates copyright. It is based on the Xubuntu OS which is licensed under the GPL. This means any software distributed using this software must have its code also made freely available under the GPL, which the MPAA have refused to do.

Whoops?

Source: Boingboing.