Content People: Prepare to Be Boarded. Arrrrr!

12/29/2004 - 02:32 PM >> Copyfight, Tech & Society, Tech Trends

Wired News has a five page(!) article on Bram Cohen and BitTorrent. But what at first seemed to be an homage to Bram the brainy coder turned into a speculation on the future of TV and film. In fact, if there was ever a perfect article that represented the interests of this blog: this is it. It involves the death of TV as we know it, radical changes in film distribution, radical change in copyright and piracy and even quotes Jeff Jarvis.

Cohen knows the havoc he has wrought. In November, he spoke at a Los Angeles awards show and conference organized by Billboard, the weekly paper of the music business. After hobnobbing with “content people” from the record and movie industries, he realized that “the content people have no clue. I mean, no clue. The cost of bandwidth is going down to nothing. And the size of hard drives is getting so big, and they’re so cheap, that pretty soon you’ll have every song you own on one hard drive. The content distribution industry is going to evaporate.” Cohen said as much at the conference’s panel discussion on file-sharing. The audience sat in a stunned silence, their mouths agape at Cohen’s audacity.

The above quote is one of many gems to be found in the article and its author Clive Thompson seems to usually “get it” right.

Stop whatever you are doing and read this artcile now.

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Shiny Discs Are Almost Extinct

12/28/2004 - 05:03 PM >> Future Formats, Tech Trends

Despite the success of optical disc formats like CD and DVD the future points towards devices that incorporate Hard Disk Drives (note the difference in spelling ‘disc’ and ‘disk’. This touches on the topic of convergence that I wrote on in my last post. Why load in a movie one-at-a-time if you can just preload your DVD jukebox with 100 movies?

If you think that 10 years from now people will be storing their movies and music on little shiny discs then you must not have noticed how cheap Hard Drives have become. Today you can buy a 250GB drive for $120. If you needed any more evidence that the future is tied up in Hard Drives, Apple has just applied for a patent to protect iPod drives from falling on the ground.

“The portable-computing device protects its disk drive by monitoring for such accelerations and operating to avoid usage of the disk drive during periods of acceleration,” Apple said in the patent application, which was published Dec. 16. “Through such protection, the likelihood of damage to the disk drive or loss of data stored on the disk drive is able to be substantially reduced.”

Removing the weaknesses of spinning media (and moving parts) is one of the last hurdles towards ubiquitous hard drives in all portable devices. Flash memory drives solve this problem by having no moving parts at all (like the CompactFlash and Memory Stick drives in digital cameras) but are much more expensive than standard issue computer hard drives.

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Is the Future of Television Found in Silicon?

12/28/2004 - 10:10 AM >> Death of TV, Tech Trends

Perhaps during the Christmas shopping season you stopped to drool over one of the many flat-panel TVs that seemed to be ubiquitous this shopping season. Of course the reason that you were drooling instead of buying is quite simple. Who wants to pay $10,000 for a TV? The question becomes especially relevant when it seems more than ever that TVs are becoming more like computers: the technology changes so fast that in less than a year you will be left with an obsolete model.

It used to be that a TV was the one piece of consumer electronics that was the inverse opposite of computers. They were relatively cheap and that small investment could last five or ten years (sometimes even longer). Since the 1960’s when Japanese manufacturers dominated the TV manufacturing industry, TVs needing service has become something of the past. You turned it on and it just worked. Now wouldn’t it be nice if your computer worked like that?

Then came the 90’s and Convergence was the buzzword. Since everything was having microprocessors emedded in them anyways, why not make them full-blown PCs? Even to this day convergence is a holy grail for many different kind of companies despite the fact that with only a paltry number of exceptions, convergence devices are complete failures. If you make your device do more than one thing you introduce a lot of complexity and if anything even minor goes wrong, the device stops working. Take one of those printer/fax/scanner/photocopier machines that are so popular. If one day your printer stops working (and who hasn’t had a printer problem?) you have not only lost your printer, but your fax machine/scanner/photocopier is out of order as well.

The biggest beneficiaries of all this convergence are traditional computer firms since they can get their high-tech tentacles snaking into all sorts of devices that normally would be the domain of the consumer electronics firms. Apple’s iPod is a good example of a traditional computer company invading and completely overtaking a category dominated by Sony’s walkman. What we don’t hear about very often is the failure of convergence which is why this article today on the myriad failures by silicon chip manufacturers to break into the TV biz was interesting.

It reads like a VIP list of failures—Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Intel, and Philips. Each of these technology powerhouses tried to conquer a promising technology for making thin, big-screen televisions—called LCoS, or liquid crystal on silicon—only to back out in defeat.

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What Pirated Chinese DVDs Mean for Your Future

12/24/2004 - 03:02 PM >> Copyfight, Tech & Society

Boing Boing has a great posting on DVD cover art for pirated DVDs in China. What is most fascinating to me is how the economics and social acceptance of pirated DVDs has become so widespread. According to some Chinese nationals that I have chatted with, DVD sales are on nearly every street and the discs are of “professional” quality for a little less than a dollar each!

Essentially the DVDs are straight rips of the American films with Chinese subtitles added. Since English is not the native language of the people involved, the inevitable typo or mistranslation crops up like this “Here comes the brine.” With such a good product available for such a good price, what can the entertainment industry even do to challenge this situation?

I ask this question because recently the MPAA has become obsessed with shutting down internet filetrading. I believe that trading movies and music online is indefensible. According to our current version of copyright law it is illegal and no amount of debate can change that. However, since the invention of recordable media there have been people willing to rip it off for profit or for the mere enjoyment of sharing something with their friends.

However, the MPAA is misguided if they think that the greatest threat to major film studios are crappy quality, low-res Divx files shot of a shaky digicam in a theater. One day soon, hard drives will become so cheap that people can swap entire studio back-catalogs on a chip the size of a stamp that costs nearly nothing. This is the kind of piracy we are looking at when we talk about places like China. DVD technology has made it economically feasible to sell identical quality movies at a ridiculously low price without the loss in time and quality that piratng over the internet presents. Perhaps the Asian mafiosos that dominate the piracy industry don’t have a large foothold in North America but with the price of storage dropping like a rock they won’t be needed.

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MPAA is learning a BitTorrent Lesson

12/15/2004 - 09:52 AM >> Copyfight

You’ve probably already seen the headlines swamping your inbox, news sites and RSS feeds: ”Hollywood wants BitTorrent Dead“ or some other similar sensationalistic tease. On closer examination it appears that Dan Glickman (the new head of the MPAA) has wised up in regards to P2P and copyright issues over his predecessor Jack Valenti.

MPAA anti-piracy chief John Malcolm said the trade organization’s actions were not aimed at criminalizing P2P technology itself, citing “legal torrent” services that specialize in public-domain material as examples of the technology’s non-infringing potential.

Part of this change in tone has to do with the relentless campaigns by Bram Cohen and sites like Legal Torrents that demonstrate BitTorrent’s utility in downloading large files regardless of their copyright status. But the MPAA’s approach also reveals that they’ve learned some technological lessons as well. Instead of suing individual file sharers they are instead suing “tracker servers” which do not (usually) in themselves hold any copyrighted files.

I’m afraid that this approach reveals the one achilles heel of BitTorrent. Suing the tracker servers (or merely intimidating ISPs into shutting them down) will eventually crush BitTorrent trading. It’s also important to note that eDonkey and DirectConnect servers were also targeted.

So what happens now? Will people abandon these protocols and move onto new uncharted P2P lands? Is it possible to code a P2P protocol that doesn’t require indexing of some kind? It is going to take a while before any new technology can replace BT, eD or DC but most of the noise will come from those who felt that they were immune from the MPAA’s attacks. BitTorrent will live on as a useful protocol for distributing Linux ISOs and other legal content but DirectConnect will almost certainly die out considering its focus on almost exclusively trading copyrighted content.

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