Hollywood's Next DRM Failure in the Making

Later this week several Hollywood-related companies will announce a new digital media distribution system that's suppose to ignite digital downloads of movies (and possible other digital content). They call it DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem). The key-feature being 'portability'.

This time a name without 'protection' or 'rights' in its name, but the result is much the same.
In the 'old' days DRM was implemented by protecting the resource with a key, and if you had the proper 'key' on your device the content was playable. Downside was that playback was mainly limited to only one device, or it was OS/player dependent (Windows -> Windows Media Player, or Apple iTunes, OSX -> Itunes).

If you wanted it to play on another device you had a problem, since you lacked the proper key to 'unlock' the digital content. Thankfully Apple has lot's of DRM-free mp3's in it's iTunes store, but not everything (like the movies / TV Shows) is DRM free, or watchable on lots of devices.

Star Trek 2009 - Most Pirated Movie in 2009

According to the TorrentFreak website, the latest Star Trek movie is the most downloaded movie in 2009.

I must admit that I participated in getting this movie on number 1 on this chart.... BUT, I also saw this movie in the opening weekend in the theater, and I own the movie on a Blu-Ray disc.

Since I don't have the capabilities to rip the movie myself, I downloaded the ripped version. No nag screens and other crap on the downloaded version, so I prefer to watch the ripped/downloaded version over the original Blu-Ray disc (also see this posting) on my Popcorn Hour media player.

So being the most downloaded movie doesn't necessarily mean most pirated (in my opinion).

Sure, there still are lots of people who'll pirate anything they get their hands on, but that doesn't mean that they would even think about going to the cinema or buy the disc. The studios wouldn't make money of them anyway.

But hé, that's just my humble opinion........

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Willem and filed under Copyrights, Internet, Movies, Personal and tagged Star Trek bittorrent download movies pirated.

Buma/Stemra Changes Licensing Fees 2010

The all knowing, and all wise Dutch music copyright organisation BUMA/Stemra (BS, and yes, pun intended) decides to charge €130 (for copyright infringement) euros per embedded copyrighted file (do your own math). You are allowed 6 embedding violations/files for €130,00 (original pdf).
No need to mention that this caused a massive uproar in the (worldwide) blogosphere, news and politics.

Copyrighted Photos

It's very frustrating if people 'steal' your images when you're a photographer. It's annoying if they 'borrow' them (hotlinking, use them in other websited), and it's downright evil if they are using them for generating money [1, 2, 3].

Anyway, on a 'local' forum, some of the members found out that Hyves.net members (you need to be a Hyves member to view this) were using copyrighted photos. Other 'Hivers' can use these images to create collages, or use them to 'pimp' their personal pages (yuk!!).
Some of the original images still showed the copyright info, while other photos were modified to remove the copyright text (deliberate copyright infringement if you ask me).

The 'fun' part is that people who use these images get mad if you ask them to remove the image due to copyright infringement. The general consensus seems that everything you put up on the Internet is up for grabs.

So, if you don't want others to (mis)use your photos don't put them online. If you have to put them online, make sure other people can't remove the copyright info without 'destroying' the photo (e.g. humongous watermark across the photo). Or just put very small versions of the photos online.

Posted on November 5, 2008 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Copyrights, Photography and tagged copyright hyves.net watermark.

More on the HD-DVD Key

The MPAA will have serious problems removing the key from the Internet. Even Google has received a letter to remove the links from their databases. Somehow, these retards have the idea that you can copyright a number. As the word spread yesterday the articles started showing up on Digg.com. Digg.com is a popular website where you can submit 'news', and others may rate it and comment on it. Within minutes the stories about this key got thousands of 'diggs'. This resulted in the fact that the moderators on Digg removed the posts. Result: Mass uproar. Kevin Rose (the Digg founder) wrote the following on his Digg blog:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

I think that's the right attitude towards this. Hopefully, the MPAA will come to its senses (not likely), and stops harrassing the consumers with their lame-ass copy-protection. It would even be better to abandon the 'turn every consumer into a criminal' DMCA bill completely, but that's another story.... Just to be sure you got the right key:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0