With the recent announcement that Britain’s largest cable Internet Service Provider Virgin Media will start warning its customers, or better the part they suspect to download files without having the proper rights to do so, that they will face prosecution if they do not stop the behavior. Virgin Media calls it educating their customers during a ten week trial campaign but their letters will apparently be accompanied by letters from the British Phonographic Industry that threatens disconnection and court appearance.

Now the interesting question that arises is why they would want to educate their customers. My first assumption would be that they, as a cable provider, want to reduce the average bandwidth usage of their customers in an effort to maximize the profits from their infrastructure. Usually filesharers have a much higher bandwidth demand than the usual Internet user with the exception of video portal junkies maybe.

Reducing the amount of filesharers that are their customers would definitely reduce the bandwidth bill of the ISP. Cable is a shared connection as well which could increase the speed of all customers as well.

continue reading "Why some ISPs turn against their own customers"

Paramount apparently decided that it would be a great idea to deter and track piracy by silencing random parts of the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This seems to be a sort of watermarking technique to be able to identify the cinema the copy of the movie was made.. if the guys who copy the movie are stupid enough to use the same sound source.

This is another classic case where the industry is punishing their legit customers and not the ones who copy and download the media. It’s the same case with copy protections and DRM. The only ones who have to cope with those things are the customers who purchase the products, never heard of any copy protections or DRM in movies, games or music that were available in P2P networks.

The commenters at Boing-Boing write about 3-6 random sound drops for a few seconds. Now that would really make me angry and I would definitely ask for a refund on my way out. What’s their next ingenious move, blank out a few scenes ? The cinemas themselves do not seem to have a say in the matter.

continue reading "Fight Piracy by silencing part of a movie ?"

Can you please hand over all electronic devices that you carry with you, Sir ? I need to check them thoroughly for copyright infringing material, terrorist activity and pornography. Is that a video of you and your wife, wow that looks hot. Is that the new song of Madonna ? Do you have a receipt for it ? No ? Well then we have to destroy the device and you have to pay a fine. This way please, Sir.

I’m feeling like the protagonist in Orwell’s 1984 only that we do not have a though police yet. The so called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was leaked to the Wikileaks website yesterday which would expand the role of Canadian border guards to search electronic devices for copyright infringing material. This includes searching notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones and mp3 player. I’m not yet sure how someone would be able to judge if a song was copied from an illegal source or legal source to the mp3 player but those that proposed this agreement surely think that this would be possible.

This new agreement is not practicable at all. Besides the problem of identifying copyright infringements in the first place this would also mean a serious delay for everyone travelling to Canada carrying an electronic device. I find it unbelievable that the music and movie industry is pressuring politicians into making such laws and that politicians are giving in to these demands.

continue reading "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement"

I don’t own an iPod or any other music player so this post is not really something I’ve tried out yet. First it was Amazon, then iTunes, and now Napster. What am I referring to? DRM-free music of course.

Everyone who’s ever experienced music with DRM knows just how frustrating things can get. You buy a great new song and then realize you are bound by really dumb restrictions. That too on something you paid good money for. Still, the DRM wall is collapsing slowly but surely thanks to music stores willing to offer DRM-free music.

Back to Napster. The store has two main listening options. You can either opt for a monthly listening subscription which works out cheaper or download individual songs for 99 cents. Oh yeah, you can also download a full album for $9.95. Apart from being DRM-free, the songs are encoded at a reasonably high quality bitrate of 256 kbps and come with album art.

continue reading "Napster Goes DRM-Free"

Mobile phone giant Nokia is looking for a foothold into the music distribution business. To that end, Nokia has introduced an online music service called the Nokia Music Store in Australia. Their aim is to provide a service that will take on Apple’s iTunes and win.

There’s nothing wrong in wanting to beat iTunes. However, the way Nokia is going about things, you’d think they were trying to scare away all their customers. It’s a case of how do I frighten thee? Let me count the ways.

Let’s start by getting to the site. I accessed the site using Firefox and was told that the music store does not support the browser. You can only get to the site using IE6 or higher. That’s strike one. To transfer the music to your phone, you need to have Windows XP or Vista. That’s strike two since it shuts out all the Linux and Mac users.

continue reading "The Trouble with Nokia’s Music Service"