From the “Duh” department of journalism, Reuters whips up a little commentary on the latest CacheLogic report:

Traffic in the popular file-sharing network BitTorrent has fallen in the wake of a crackdown on piracy, but file sharers have merely shifted to another network, eDonkey, new data released on Monday showed.

Move along folks, nothing to see here. People like stealing music and movies, film at 11. I like how Reuters attempts to make eDonkey look hip and cool:

A study by the Cambridge-based Internet analysis firm CacheLogic found that eDonkey is now roughly on par with BitTorrent in the United States, China, Japan and Britain.

It is the dominant peer-to-peer file-sharing network in South Korea, which has the world’s highest percentage of high-speed Internet use, and also in Italy, Spain and Germany.

Anyone who is over the age of 16 and is not a certified geek has never used eDonkey. People feel like they need to wear a propeller beanie when they use it and while we here at BBB are perfectly comfortable with our geek status, we’d be very surprised if anyone who thought themselves “cool” would use it.

Wired has a cute interview with Jon Stewart and his producing partner:

Wired: Isn’t that going to pose a challenge to the traditional network model?

Stewart: But we’re not on a traditional network: We’re on the goofy, juvenile-delinquent network to begin with. We get an opportunity to produce this stuff because they make enough money selling beer that it’s worth their while to do it. I mean, we know that’s the game. I’m not suggesting we’re going to beam it out to the heavens, man, and whoever gets it, great. If they’re not making their money, we ain’t doing our show.

Stewart and company have an interesting approach to their internet fame. They choose to leave it unanalyzed. In fact they make a great analogy that their internet popularity is like the golden goose, if they try to dissect it then they will ruin it.

While they may play dumb during the interview and pretend they do not care it becomes clear that they are highly aware of the phenomenon and have taken steps to NOT stop the online trading of episodes. Take note future TV mavens, the Daily Show may just be on to something here…

At BBB we are usually disinclined to post what are essentially press releases when anyone releases a new feature/product but this new thing from Amazon made us sit up. Apparently Amazon has gone into the micropayments for literature world by initiating a service allowing short story authors to sell short works for 49 cents each. But the real interesting tidbit is the following:

No digital rights management software is needed to download and read Amazon Shorts.

Customers have three options for reading a piece:

-- View now: Takes customers to a Web page to read or print out the Amazon Short.

-- Download: Initiates the download of a PDF file.

-- E-mail: Sends the entire Amazon Short in a plain-text message to the specified e-mail address.

Kudos to Amazon for creating a system to help authors profit from short works and not fear “piracy.” Copyright holders of Books are notoriously frightened of the internet and have even gotten Google to delay their massive library scanning project. The ridiculousness is that the internet has actually saved the book marketplace from almost total obscurity and Amazon realizes that by not putting locks on the content they can promote the service more.

Has Bezos got a few more tricks up his sleeve?

Today is Public Service Announcement* day at BBB. We’d like to explain to those of you who make tech gadgets that there are people out there who will - *gasp* - modify your product after they purchase it. Yes, putting little software locks and disabling features isn’t going to stop them. There are millions of people out there that are smarter than those cut-rate engineers you hired in some godforsaken south-east Asian country.

Sony Computer Entertainment America said in an e-mailed statement that hacking or the operation of “homebrew” software programs may damage the PSP, and void the warranty.

The PSP boasts a high-resolution viewing screen and has been in the sights of technology enthusiasts and software programmers, who want to use it to run copies of everything from games and music to e-books to movies.

No one is convinced that running software on their PSP is going to make it catch on fire. Sony, people are going to hack your pretty little toy and you should just get used to it. You don’t want to get into an arms race with these people. We all know where this inevitably leads. It gets really ugly: they hack past your protection, you issue another update patch and pretty soon you’ll find yourself stumbling out of some crackwhore’s bed at 4am wondering what that strange rash on your software department is.

Please Sony, THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

*<small>This is not actually a PSA but we’re hoping no one reads the fine print.</small>

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that some students at U. of Texas-Austin have developed software allowing people to stream shows off of their computers:

The software, called Alluvium, uses peer-to-peer technology to let people stream video to multiple users nonstop—even without high-speed Internet connections. It’s not just for tech enthusiasts and struggling artists, says Joseph T. Lopez, a graduate student who co-founded the software project.

The program specializes in “swarmcasting,” says Mr. Lopez. Much like BitTorrent, the file-swapping program popular with movie downloaders, the swarmcasting program breaks video files into small pieces, so that a computer user can download component parts simultaneously from any other machines that are storing or streaming the files.

But unlike BitTorrent, Alluvium—which was designed by Brandon Wiley, also a graduate student at Austin—orders those component parts before downloading them. Users of the software can simulate the experience of watching live TV, by streaming video as they finish downloading it.

The idea here is that because the focus is on streaming video rather than downloading it, they will be able to avoid the copyright infringement pitfalls that have befallen other p2p networks. Unfortunately for them, this very technical argument will be lost on the copyright regime enforcers.

Engadget has a column on the official death of one of our favorite products, DVD Decrypter:

The scene – as I imagine it – was straight from the movie Brazil: in the dead of night lawyers from “a certain company” cut holes in the floor of the apartment above the “offender’s” flat. Quickly, these men in black repelled down ropes, tasered the unsuspecting software developer, and presented him with legally-binding contracts. In their ever-so-subtle way, they explained that the software developer had two options a) sign over his life’s work now or b) fight the good fight, go broke, go to jail, and *then* sign over his life’s work. Not surprisingly, DVD Decrypter’s author chose option a.

For those unaware, DVD Decrypter was a DVD archiving program that had garnered the respect of novices and hardcore users alike. Simple to use yet full-featured, DVD Decrypter laid the groundwork for those among us who like to do such things as create our own media servers or watch our DVDs on our Smartphones, PDAs, etc. It was a great program whose uses were far greater than the assumed nefarious purpose of distributing DVDs over the Internet.

As the MPAA struggles with trying to put the digital Genie back into the proverbial bottle we’d like to point out that everything that this proprietary product does is still available, for FREE, from open source software on the net. While it will be easy to shut down people who sell such software they better start planning how to live in a post-Copyright control world.

The New York Times has an amusing article about Akimbo, a new product that promises to do to internet TV what Tivo did to regular TV. Only that the Akimbo completely sucks ass:

Unfortunately, Akimbo can offer only what the networks and cable channels are willing to contribute. And these days, just hearing the phrase “Internet downloads” generally sends television executives into paranoid fits. As a result, the Akimbo library is so puny and overpriced that the enterprise is interesting only as a “what not to do” case study.

Please people, wake up. This is getting pathetic. Last week we were reporting how the Brits are even ahead of us. Pretty soon we’re going to see articles how people starving to death in Somalia are watching pirated episodes of “Desperate Housewives” (pun intended?) while waiting in U.N. food lines. We cannot let this happen.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and we here at BBB always assume that you are) the hottest rumor on the internet this weekend is Steve Job’s supposed Monday announcement. Tomorrow morning (if the Wall Street Journal, Cnet News.com and Wired are correct) Steve will announce that Apple will start moving its computers to Intel processors.

I guess Apple will move to Intel, and they’re relying on a fast, seamless emulator to do it.

But it’s really about Hollywood: Apple’s looking to transform the movie industry the same way the iPod and iTunes changed the music business.

Our experts disagree with all the hoopla. First, these “apple will ditch IBM for Intel” stories crop up every couple of years as Apple tries to scare IBM during their contract negotiations. Secondly, while there was an opportunity to switch to Intel back when Mac OS X first came out, the amount of rewriting for all software developers would be a huge burden.

There is a slight chance that Steve will announce a new low-end line of computers (like the mac mini) that will use intel processors to reduce cost and that would make sense. Otherwise, not using Intel chips is one of Apple’s biggest advantages:

MacDailyNews has an editorial which summarizes reports from various research groups that analyzed the number of computer users affected by viruses. The conclusion was that 16 percent of all computer users are not affected by viruses because they use Macs. The lack of viruses on a Mac is commonly known, but the interesting thing is the fact that the results finally provide the first set of conclusive numbers which illustrate the Macintosh’s install-base. So far only “market-share” statistics are commonly published for the public and do not convey install base.

According to Wired the big switch is motivated by Hollywood. How does this happen? Apparently its because Intel is including super-secret digital rights management in its new Pentium D chips to prevent copyright infringement.

But we here at BBB are going to let you in on a little-known secret: the new DRM is bunk. According to engineering specs just released (that only geeky nerds like us read) there is no underlying DRM included in the new chipsets so that whole line of reasoning is BS.

The Inquirer has an official statement from Intel claiming the Computerworld Today Australia story from May 27th was incorrect, and the Pentium D and the 945 chipsets do not have unannounced DRM technology embedded in them. The statement says Intel products support or will support several copy protection schemes such as Macrovision, DTCP-IP, COPP, HDCP, CGMS-A, and others. The statement concludes: ‘While Intel continues to work with the industry to support other content protection technologies, we have not added any unannounced DRM technologies in either the Pentium D processor or the Intel 945 Express Chipset family.’

Stay tuned here to see what develops tomorrow.

One of the few weaknesses of BitTorrent is that it is sometimes hard to find seeds. Bram has decided that his new startup’s first project will be just that:

Whiz kid inventor Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen’s popular BitTorrent protocol.

The new search engine, which essentially is an agreement with AskJeeves, will go live in 2 weeks. This is an interesting move for Bram. Firstly, by building a BitTorrent search engine he is clearly aiming to solve one of the few oversights in his product and establish his new startup company as a major contender in the P2P arena. However, Bram has always walked a fine line to avoid invoking the wrath of the MPAA/RIAA/Copyright Cabals.

From a legalistic standpoint, search engines are more protected than the “tracker” sites which were summarily shutdown by the MPAA earlier this year (which we reported here along with the hilarious screenshots). Still, we worry that such a search engine will provoke exactly the kind of response that Bram has so skillfully avoided for so long. Good luck dude. You’ll need it.

BoingBoing editor and world renowned author Cory Doctorow has published some of his notes from the recent Emerging Tech conference in San Diego. Of particular interest to BBB readers are his notes on “Emerging Massive Media”:

Here are my notes from Paula Le Dieu’s Emerging Massive Media, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Paula is the outgoing head of the BBC’s Creative Archive project, which will turn all the material in the BBC’s archive into stuff that can be remixed and reused by Britons. She’s now taken on the gig of running the International Creative Commons, though she will still be working on the Archive.

“Audiences are acquiring media under their own terms, or more frighteningly for the incumbents, acquiring it from their own suppliers on the networks. Broadcasters broadcast to active, self-commissioning audiences, who decided on their own the what where when and how.

Prosumers are becoming the mass media—but what about the massive media? How do they compete with their audiences for attention?

For many massive media orgs, the competition is viewed as heavily weighed in their favor. Every time Wikipedia trounces yet another massive media org (e.g. the NYT yesterday) it creates ripples of doubt in the massive orgs.

Last year Joi Ito gave a keynote at a TV con, to international TV execs: he said: “Re DRM: you will win. You will convince your audiences not to use your content.” When Patrick Kennedy VP of Sony Digital Networks said, “Get your stuff out there any way you can, youngsters don’t even know who you are anymore. Worry about the business model later.” Massive media orgs aren’t comfortable anymore.”

That Joi Ito quote is a keeper.

The lines have been drawn and the two sides clearly demarcated. So why is it that the industries working so hard to prevent copying are their own worst enemies?

He points out that last year alone 684 million mobile phones were sold. If handset makers had put anti-piracy protection software in those phones, the $684 million in royalties would have exceeded total digital music sales on the Web last year.

[...snip...]

They are reluctant to sound too harsh, however, because the irony is that they desperately need the OMA’s anti-piracy technology which is the first open standard that can be used by all electronics goods makers. Other technologies are owned and controlled by individual companies such as Apple for its iTunes Music Store and Microsoft.

Too many companies, using too many standards, and charging too much money. If it sounds like a recipe for disaster that is because it already is. Look how much these “anti-copying” technologies have helped the music biz. Bittorrent already accounts for nearly one third of all internet traffic. Movies and TV are next.

Warner Brothers has opened a brave new front in the war against piracy in China:

Basic DVDs, to be available shortly after a film’s theatrical release, will sell in China for as little as 22 yuan ($2.65), the company said. That’s still more than the pirated versions readily available in China for 8 yuan ($1).

Warner’s basic versions will not carry any DVD extras such as directors’ interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, the company said. But versions with more features will be available a bit later for 28 yuan ($3.38).

According to the industry, theft in China of copyrights and patents cost Western companies an estimated $16 billion in lost sales each year. Despite sporadic arrests, counterfeit books, DVDs and music are easily available on almost every city street and even in shops.

We’d like to meet the brilliant person who made this decision. We will eagerly await to see the results. WB is doing a lot of expansion into China and may reap some huge rewards.

“You crossed the line,” Judge Harry Edwards told a FCC lawyer during arguments before a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.

“Selling televisions is not what the FCC is in the business of.”

Tears almost came to our eyes. We have always been amused by people claiming that TVs, VCRs and other electronic devices should be able to tell us when we can or cannot watch a certain show. As loyal BBB readers know, any “broadcast flag” would be immediately bypassed by a 12 year-old in Finland and negate the argument put forward by the quivering TV execs.

TV is dead. Get over it.

It’s not very often when you see a corporate PR flunky who knows more about technology than a tech journalist. But that’s exactly what happened over at Reuters. They published an article about how users had defeated the Digital Rights Management on Napster’s new service within “days” of its launch.

What the Reuters reporter didn’t realize is that the same technique has existed for decades and is not specific to any service. It’s called “the analog hole” and is ultimately the biggest problem in copyright protection (as Valenti always lamented). The PR flunky pointed this out when quoted in the article:

“The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card,” she said.

While most people rail against piracy because of copyright infringement the real danger lurks elsewhere. Soon the need for all sorts of distribution will be completely eliminated as evidenced by this grammy anecdote:

Jazz composer Maria Schneider took home a Grammy on Sunday for her album “Concert in the Garden,” without selling a single copy in a record store.

Schneider, 44, financed her Grammy-winning album through a Internet-based music delivery service called ArtistShare that opens the financing of production to dedicated fans…

“This record cost $87,000 to make. I already made my money back,” she said. “I’m not splitting the profits with the distributor, the record store and the record company. It’s working so well for me.”

Sometime an idea so horribly bad comes along that you wonder how even a committee of incompetent bureaucrats could come up with it (and I’m not referring to the name change of the Angels baseball team).

Without much further ado let us introduce ”Parent Scan.” This nifty application will seek out every single file trading service, music and movie file on the computer it is installed on. It was designed as the 21st century way for parents to “search Billy’s room for pot and/or porn.” I can understand that many parents might feel daunted by the task of having to search a child’s computer for illegal activity but there is one glaring problem with this rent-a-cop provided by our friends at the MPAA: it cannot distinguish between legal and illegal files.

Case in point, the 1359 music files it found on our test system are all legal files created from the owner’s CD collection.

How do you determine which files are legal and which aren’t?

Parent File Scan offers that “You must clarify this question for yourself.”

How? By “discussing with the persons who have used the computer where the music and video files are found.”

Father: Billy, can you tell me which of these 1,359 music files were illegally downloaded from the internets so that I can immediately report you to the nearest MPAA attack squad?

Billy: Can’t we just go back to awkward discussions about where-babies-come-from and that time I caught you smoking a joint?

We know that many readers were shocked by our last post that there are companies out there offering legal streams of new studio release features. With impeccable timing CinemaNow announced that they have now signed deals with 6 out of the 7 major studios:

Online movie provider CinemaNow on Tuesday said NBC Universal has agreed to offer its films to CinemaNow subscribers giving the Internet service content from one more major studio as it continues to expand.

CinemaNow allows clients to legally download films and television shows for a fee, and it now has six of Hollywood’s seven major film and TV studios as content providers. It lacks only Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc .

The CEO goes on to claim that he expects 100% growth by the end of 2005. Someone should explain to him that two times any small number is still a pretty small number. These precentages sound great because its impossible to find out about any hard numbers in their actual revenue.

Now we could go on about why CinemaNow and their main competitor Movielink haven’t gotten anywhere very fast but Damian over at Media Thinking has said it far more succinctly than we ever could:

Why Movielink and CinemaNow don’t matter

I’m really not clear on why so much press is given to the internet-based video-on-demand (VOD) services - it’s pretty clear that they are going nowhere fast.

1. Broadband pentration, while increasing, is still a small portion of the internet population.

2. Given that the music services have had trouble signing up people, I can’t see why Movielink is going to do that much better.

3. Who wants to watch movies on their computer? I consider myself a computer person, but I’ve never wanted to watch a movie on my computer. If it’s supposed to appeal to the traveling executive, then they’ll likely just rent a DVD and play that in their laptop - who’s going to wait 2 hours to download the movie?

Unlike Damian we here at BBB watch movies on our computers all the time. But then again our motto is “we live in the future so that you don’t have to.” In your future we don’t see much Pay-Per-View on your desktop.

Back in 1993 it was “multimedia CD-ROMs” that was going to revolutionize Hollywood and then in ‘96 the “Internet” was going to revolutionize Hollywood. In the ashes of the dotcom bubble it was videogames once again and now like clockwork the pendulum has swung back to the “Internet” meme.

Perhaps some of you saw the LA Times piece on Yahoo’s new Santa Monica lease for a 1,000 employee campus.

Yahoo’s headquarters will remain in Northern California, but the vast expansion in Santa Monica will split the company’s center of gravity between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Yahoo’s newly formed media group, headed by former ABC television network Chairman Lloyd Braun, will be based in Yahoo Center.

That will allow executives to rub elbows with Hollywood deal makers without the hassle of flying in from Northern California, said investment banker Gary Adelson.

Sometimes I wonder if the journalists are cackling over such thinly disguised puff pieces. They probably had a Kazaa window open downloading the studio pre-release du jour as they typed it up. Yahoo’s desire to snag a piece of the entertainment industry action is nothing new as they already have a large westside office. The timing of this release comes just after the announcement that Yahoo and Google have both released new TV/Video search tools and it makes one wonder why we haven’t gone down this road before.

One hint kids: it contains the words “copy” and “right.” Those are the only hints you’re going to get. Good luck.

I wonder what CinemaNow and Movielink think of all this. After all they are owned or have deals with all the major studios. What’s that you say? You’ve never heard of or used them? It’s totally the wave of tomorrow (I tried to keep a straight face while typing that but failed miserably).

Everyone is probably thinking that the crew over here at BigBrainBoy are Google fanatics (which we’ll grudgingly admit we are). Be that as it may, the new Google video search is an interesting approach to TV. However, Google was not the first to embark on such a project. Just last month Yahoo! had already launched its video search.

Google’s video searches are basically digging through TV transcripts of programs and as of now no streaming video of any kind is provided. This is not because the technology isn’t available: once again its litigation killing off innovation as this CNET article points out:

For now, people will not be able to watch the video clip, nor will the Web pages contain the company’s signature text advertising. But Google expects to add video playback down the road, after ironing out the complexities of broadcasting rights and business models with various content owners.

Yahoo’s search also includes movies found on the net which can be watched online. So go ahead and look for your favorite clips, just be sure to notice the little gray warning under every link in the Yahoo! search: “This video may be subject to copyright.” Oh no! I wouldn’t dream of clicking on that Spiderman 2 link you just showed me…

Jacob over at Yankee Fog has a fascinating entry on the DVD screeners distributed by the studios for the BAFTA awards in the UK. He provides pretty strong evidence that people who do not distribute screeners (ostensibly to prevent piracy) and those who use overbearing watermarking techniques suffer in awards voting:

Let’s take a look at the strange case of Hero versus House of Flying Daggers. The films were made several years apart, but thanks to their British release schedules, they were both eligible for this year’s BAFTAs. Both films were fantastic, but I think most people would agree with me that Hero was the better of the two. Yet after the first round of voting, House of Flying Daggers ended up shortlisted in 13 categories, including Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actress--all categories that Hero was left out of. In fact, Hero was shortlisted in only 6 categories. And after the second round of voting, House of Flying Daggers ended up with 9 nominations, and Hero was left without any. Meanwhile, Million Dollar Baby--one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the year--was shortlisted in only two categories, and ended up without a single BAFTA nomination.

How do I explain this mystery? By pointing out that BAFTA members received screener DVDs of House of Flying Daggers, and not of Hero or Million Dollar Baby. If people don’t see your film, they can’t vote for it; it’s as simple as that. Now, I cannot and do not speak for BAFTA, and maybe my fellow voting members consider House of Flying Daggers to be a better written, directed, acted, edited, shot, scored, costumed, and set-designed film than the other two. But I don’t think so.

Ultimately Jacob comes up with a maxim that everyone in the industry should remember: as soon as you treat every single person who wants to watch your film as a potential criminal you can be sure that the film industry is on its way to suffering like the music industry…