The extremely interesting year of 2006 is coming to an end, and the games industry has given us a lot to smile about, but also a lot to frown about. The year was definitely the year of consoles, both home consoles and hand-helds.
2006 started off with bold estimates of 7 million PS3 shipping in the first 90 days and record-breaking DS became the fastest selling video game machine in Japan. Few weeks later the rumors around PS3 launch delays became public, as Sony announced their trouble getting hardware.
In March, the journey of PSOne ended, the production was shut down after over 100 million units sold, and the original PS3 worldwide launch was announced. Revolution changed its name to at first controversial Wii and the E3, or Electronic Entertainment Expo, was held the last time as an expo.
The end of first half of 2006 introduced us to a few innocent lawsuits, that started a boom. The second half however wasn't all about law and order, analysts predicted every single scenario that could ever happen during the next-gen console war during 2006.
"Eyes to Live", Xbox 360 Live Vision launched in September and Sony announced the disappointing European PS3 delay. In October, Nintendo reported a $459.5 million profit for the first half and Microsoft Entertainment and Devices Division reported a $96 million loss for the first quarter.
In the first seven days, 600,000 Wiis were sold in the US, 400,000 in Japan the first thing in the morning, and 325,000 in Europe in less than two days. G4tv.com has now reported the sales figures for the first five weeks, a whopping 3.19 million Wiis changed owners and the triumph of Nintendo seems to go on.
Eight days ago Sony announced a million milestone for PS3, while Wii had earlier surpassed the two million mark. The pace hasn't slowed down, Wii is quickly catching on Xbox 360, which is currently enjoying the market share lead, due to year lead over PS3 and Wii. The current statistics at VGCharts.org show the Xbox 360 leading the market share of next-gen consoles with 7.90 million sold, Wii is second with 3.54 million, and PS3 waiting to launch in Europe with 1.21 million units.
Hollywood movie studios have won a lawsuit in China over the unlawful posting of copyrighted movie clips on the Internet, according to the Motion Picture Association (MPA).
The MPA said in a statement that a unit of Sohu.com Inc., the company behind some of China's most popular Web portals, was defeated in a copyright infringement lawsuit after it posted digital files of motion pictures such as the Lord of the Rings, Dawn of the Dead and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for downloading.
The MPA - international counterpart of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) - believe that major global movie studios lost about $2.3 billion to Internet piracy in 2005.
Sohu.com has been ordered to pay damages & costs totalling 1.1 million yuan ($139,000) by The Beijing First Intermediate People's Court, the group added. When contacted by telephone, a spokesman for Sohu.com denied knowledge of the suit, however official newspapers in Beijing also confirmed the court judgement.
In all its efforts to corner the market in next generation digital distribution, Redmond's own Microsoft seems to have possibly choked its new flagship Windows Vista too much with copyright protection. In a recent article submitted by Peter Gutmann, a medical imaging specialist, the author argues that Microsoft has made its newest OS far too cumbersome for the mass market and will eventually lead to the demise of its own DRM practices. Mr. Gutmann states that the way in which Microsoft has locked down Vista in hopes to keep copyright infringement of the latest HD-DVD and Blu-Ray technologies to a minimum will only succeed in forcing users to buy faster hardware to cope with the degraded performance of Vista.
Vista has proven to be a fast OS, when its spec'd with the latest and greatest hardware, but to the average consumer, it proves to be far too bulky of an interface to run even as efficient as the version its replacing (Windows XP). Gutmann states that the Vista Content Protection specs could "very well constitute the longest suicide note in history". He further goes on to say that the efforts to force users into faster hardware to cope with the security of Vista will have a detrimental effect on the PC market as a whole; both hardware and software.
Once again, it is the time of the year when AfterDawn.com team would like to wish all our users, moderators, associates and employees very, very merry Christmas and happy holidays!
It is time for us to take a short break with news and site updates, but we'll be back after holidays.
Nintendo has released a free beta of upcoming browser for Wii. The Opera powered browser can be downloaded from the Shop Channel, Wii Software section. Both the beta version and the full version of Internet Channel that will be released in March 2007, are free, but if you'll wait until July 07 to get it, it'll cost you 500 Wii Points ($5).
The Opera browser includes favourites and zoom features, and the point-and-click interface is controlled by "Wiimote" using the A-button to click and B-button to scroll. The browser is flash enabled so you can view YouTube and such content as well.
The class action lawsuit filed earlier this week, concerning the broken Wii wrist straps was condemned by Nintendo. The Japanese company found the lawsuit meaningless and has now come forward with an official statement:
"We believe the lawsuit to be completely without merit. Nintendo has a long tradition of delivering high-quality products and excellent customer service, and we take all reports from our customers seriously.
At the time we became aware of the lawsuit, we had already taken appropriate steps to reinforce with consumers the proper use of the Wii Remote and had made stronger replacement wrist straps available. This suit has had no effect on those efforts."
American law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of Wii owners against Nintendo of America claiming that the defective "Wiimotes" are contradicting with the warranty of Wii. The class action lawsuit didn't quite get an echo, as not only Nintendo seems to find it ridiculous, but Wii users as well.
The much debated Wii wrist straps have spawned another shadow on Nintendo. A US law firm, Green Welling LLP, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington on behalf of Wii owners against Nintendo of America.
The class action lawsuit seeks justice for Wii owners who have broken their wrist straps while using the "Wiimote" as instructed, and tries to discontinue Nintedo's "unfair or deceptive business practices" and make them "provide a refund to the purchaser or to replace the defective Wii remote."
Nintendo has already promised to replace all broken wrist straps and provide new enhanced and less vulnerable straps to customers. The Japanese company is not concerned about the lawsuit and believes it won't go anywhere.
United States Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan has released a statement saying the 24 year old defendant Scott R. McCausland, one of three who operated a P2P network known as Elite Torrents has been sentenced to five months jail time and five months house arrest for providing illegal copyrighted material for download.
Part of a government agency sting operation codenamed D-Elite, the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigated and shut down their main website which was found to be a portal for file sharing copyrighted materials. The homepage of Elite Torrents was replaced with a message stating, "This Site Has Been Permanently Shut Down by the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)". Within the first week, more than half a million page hits read that welcome message.
Elite Torrents had been known to be a valuable source of pre-release software, movies and games and was even noted for having the Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith movie some six hours before the first theatrical viewing. Consequently, the file they provided was downloaded over 10,000 times in the next 24 hours. United States District Judge Sean J. McLaughlin did not look upon this lightly and stated that online pirates, "are not modern day Robin Hood’s, but rather common thieves motivated solely by the desire to get something for nothing."
Music entertainment giants Sony BMG Entertainment will pay the sum of $1.5 million in addition to thousands of consumer refunds to settle out of court. A lawsuit brought up in California and Texas courts was filed over Sony putting DRM and anti-piracy software on their music CDs which would then become installed on the consumer's computer. This was not only hidden from the consumer but was found to open a huge back door security hole in the user's machine. When this was brought up to the people at Sony BMG, their removal tactics at the time caused damage to the computers they had infected.
The two types of copy-protection software that were loaded on consumer's computers are known as MediaMax and XCP.
The two settlements state that California and Texas will each receive $750,000 in civil penalties and costs. Additionally, Sony BMG agreed to reimburse consumers who had their computers damaged when attempting to uninstall this malicious software. Although this sounds noble in effort, Sony has agreed that anyone who files a claim can receive a ratehr generous sum ranging between $25 and $175 in refunds. I, personally am not sure who at Sony BMG did market research on average repair costs, but this seems a tad low.
A privately owned and operated organization out of Silicon Valley began testing its latest tool in the ever mounting crusade to abolish copyright infringement on the Internet. Attributor Corporation of Redwood City, California developed a tool that can scan the entire contents of the publicly accessable Internet for misuse of copyrighted audio, video, images and even text.
Media companies have been fighting what some may seem a losing battle against copyright infringement and have invested billions in protecting their intellectual property. Attributor Corporation, which was founded a year ago had remained in the shadows until now; ready to swoop in like a guardian angel to those looking to protect their assets. Technology such as this could prove to be a welcomed tool in their arsenal to compliment current DRM practices.
The co-founders of the company, which are ex Yahoo executives, claim to have come up with a proprietary technology that is able to comb large chunks of data from the Internet and scan them thoroughly for any content flagged as licensed to another party. With their practices in their current state, although not deployed, could retrieve some 10 billion web sites by the end of this month.
Electronics firm Toshiba announced today that it has launched its HD-E1 High Definition DVD system to European audiences in hopes to sway them against rivals supporting the Blu-Ray format.
Toshiba forcasts some 500,000 HD-DVD sales worldwide by the time March 2007 rolls around with its most recent launch. This, in part is a strategy to gain the market share against companies struggling with Blu-Ray production. Companies such as Sony, Panasonic and Samsung in cooperation with quite a few movie studios have been chomping at the bit to get their own product on store shelves, but blue laser production has been slow due to defective parts in the assembly line.
The HD-E1 plans to retail for a scant £450. Scant in comparison to their rival's product which weighs in at almost double that amount. A more feature intensive system is set to launch later in January 2007 to the tune of £649.
The founders of the Internet phone service, Skype, are working on a broadband TV service. The Financial Times reported that the service is expected to roll out next year and is already being tested by about 6,000 people. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have invested money from the sale of Skype to eBay into the service, dubbed The Venice Project.
According to Friis, the peer to peer technology at the heart of the service would make it possible to offer the service to tens of millions of people while also protecting the content. "The overall picture is that this is happening. Video is moving online, and people have to find strategies for that," Friis said in an interview.
According to the Financial Times, the service properly displayed high-quality, full screen video on a computer monitor.
Phil Harrison, Sony's President of Worldwide Studios, has made a bold statement that no game in the future will use the full capability of Playstation 3. The topic that is commonly used to brag the newest and most advanced game on the market, has been turned upside down, Harrison claims that the current generation of PS3 games use barely half of the consoles potential.
"Nobody will ever use 100 percent of its capability," said Phil Harrison in an interview on MTV, referring to firmware upgrades and diverse use of Sixaxis controller. He is also worried that the PS3 games are categorized as "video games", while Sony wants fun games with serious content, "I fervently believe that the biggest challenge we face is that our industry is referred to as 'video games,' and games are supposed to be fun. Games should deal with fear, should deal with comedy and with death. They should deal with peril, with drug offenses."
The author of the popular Japanese P2P software Winny has been convicted and fined by a Kyoto district court. Isamu Kaneko, a researcher at Tokyo University, was arrested all the way back in May 2004. The Winny software has been used to distribute copyrighted material and had over half a million users earlier this year. This week, a court found Kaneko guilty of enabling copyright infringement, and fined him ¥1.5m.
"The ruling will stop the development of information technology in Japan. Programmers will no longer be willing to develop new technologies," the League for Software Engineers director told the Daily Yomiuri newspaper. The verdict has been appealed and the case will now move to a higher court.
In the United States, the supreme court ruled in the Grokster case that developers/operators of software/services who induce copyright infringement may be found liable for the acts of infringement. However, U.S. courts have yet to prosecute software developers that the supreme court ruling would apply to.
Known for its flash memory and MP3 players that hit the market with most of the functionality of the market leading competitors yet at cheaper prices, SanDisk is the target for a recent lawsuit and injunction by the Italian company Sisvel S.p.a.
With the injuction submitted to a Berlin court, Sisvel were granted seizure of SanDisk products at a recent trade show. German authorities raided the 2006 IFA trade show and took control of any and all SanDisk MP3 products on display as well as advertising materials. The grounds for this seizure come by the fact that Sisvel believes SanDisk had not secured the proper patents for its MP3 playback on their devices. According to a Sisvel representative, the Berlin District Court ruled the seizure legitimate and warranted even though no ruling has come about stating that any actual patent infringement has been committed. As backwards as this may sound, this potentially could open the door to future devices in that more companies may be obligated to obtain patent licenses for anything with Sisvel's MP3 audio playback.
Many consumers may not know of Sisvel, but they have obtained many of the patents for various forms of audio playback. They claim that their patents are essential for all forms of MP3 playback and have convinced many hardware giants including Apple and Microsoft to purchase them. SanDisk claims that its players do not infringe on their territory in anyway and holds fast to their claim that they owe Sisvel nothing and will not pay them anything.
Nintendo has promised to compensate broken Wii wrist straps, which has already become an Internet phenomenon, by replacing all the broken straps for free. The company has received a surge of complaints from customers who have broken not only their "Wiimote" wrist straps, but various home entertainment devices as well.
Despite the obvious disclaimers in the manuals of Wii and games, people have been successfully breaking their Wii Remote wrist straps causing the controller to go airborne, breaking TVs, windows, etc. The angry customers have addressed complaints toward Nintendo. Now the company has promised to replace the broken wrist straps and add new, less vulnerable straps to consoles on production.
Nintendo recommends that people wanting a wrist strap replacement should visit Nintendo website and seek country specific information.
The popular Swedish BitTorrenttracker, The Pirate Bay, has blocked subscribers to ISP Perspektiv from using the site in response to the ISP blocking its subscribers' access to AllOfMP3.com. The intentions you would guess, is to encourage subscribers to switch to a different ISP. "After careful consideration we have, for the first time ever, decided to block an ISP because of their management," said a statement from Piratebay.
AllofMP3.com offers digital music downloads for a fraction of the price that other stores such as iTunes charge. The company has been called illegal by the US and European record industry but it claims it complies with Russian copyright law. The Pirate Bay believes that Perspektiv is fulfilling the interests of media companies over those of its subscribers.
"As one of the larges websites in Sweden we will not sit silently and watch some of our basic rights be restricted," said the Piratebay statement. "If we want a working and good society even on the internet we must stand up for one another and show courage when it is needed."
Six men has been handed jail sentences for piracy offenses in the United Kingdom. The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) claims that an internet piracy ring that specialized in the production and sale of counterfeit DVDs has been broken up. The "Pir8" web forums apparently facilitated the selling of pirate material to over 13,000 users.
FACT prosecuted the case which followed a three year investigation and prosecution by FACT into the group. Assistance in the investigation was given by the BPI (the record industry trade body) Anti-Piracy Unit. Here is the list of the men aged 21 to 37 with their Pir8 nicknames and sentences.
Lee Richard Bennett ('Mack'), from South Normington, Derbyshire, and the owner of the PIR8 site was sentenced to four years imprisonment.
Barry Jarvis ('Leafy'), from Johnstown, Wrexham, the website administrator, was sentenced to one year's imprisonment.
Kevin Bowles ('Taz'), from Doncaster, but living in Darlington at the time of the offences received a one year jail sentence.
Robert Chester ('Killalot'), from Eastbourne, Sussex, also a received one year jail sentence.
Jason Morgan ('Monkfish'),from Lanchester, Co. Durham and Christopher Pomroy ('Trinity'), from Stretford, Greater Manchester were sentenced to six months' imprisonment.
Nintendo announced the Wii European launch figures, 325,000 consoles were shipped in the first wave all over Europe, and during the weekend, or two days, every single Wii had been sold, which made it the fastest selling home console in history.
The first fanatics formed queues three days before the launch date to get their very own Wii, and after the weekend there are still many who await replenishment to their local retailers. Nintendo's own The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was sold with three out of four consoles, a total of 240,000 copies, and 50 percent of Wii buyers also bought Wii Play, which includes a Wii Remote.
Nintendo is assuring that tons of consoles will be shipped before Christmas and 2007, "For those who were unable to buy Wii during the launch weekend, rest assured more stock is already on its way and we are doing everything possible to ensure that a steady supply of Wii units is shipped to stores across Europe throughout December and into 2007,” said Marketing Director for Nintendo Europe, Laurent Fischer.
Not only Wii sold on a record-breaking pace, Nintendo DS sold more than 515,000 units in Europe during last week, bringing the handheld's European sales to 8,5 million units.
Software giant, Microsoft has officially released it's project XNA Game Studio Express for developmental purposes on the Xbox 360 console. Their hope is to find budding, undiscovered talent in amateur game developers that can produce homebrew games for the Xbox 360. Originally announced back in August, the product has become live and is free for download.
While free sounds great, you'd do little with the source code as you can't publish it anywhere without subscribing to the $99 yearly subscription fee that grants you access to sample code and the ability to upload your projects. Microsoft hopes that new developers will turn to this service for help with white papers and game assets put up not only by Microsoft themselves but also third-party developers. Additionally, it appears that in order to allow your project to be consumed by the masses, you'll also need to partake in their $49 four month subscription that allows your finished games to be downloaded via Xbox Live.
XNA Game Studio Express will function on any PC running Windows XP and uses the coding standards for Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and Microsoft.s .NET Compact Framework.
Microsoft states that downloaders will need to have an Xbox fitted with a hard drive and hints that potential downloaders may also need to subscribe to the XNA Creators Club. Reason being is the downloads will require compiling of source code in an Xbox 360 format. They stress that the intent is for non-commercial means, however the XNA project can be used to produce commercially available Windows content. Additionally, they warned that these XNA created games will not be able to be transferred via memory card, CD or DVD at this time.
It seems to be common place anymore for one company to scream copyright infringement over another because of the most minute details in their own intellectual properties. Almost daily we hear about a lawsuit being issued because someone came increasingly close to a successful product strategy. However, I'm not too sure the judges were prepared when they heard the case over Apple's newest gripe.
There's a British company by the name of LoveHoney who has caused quite a bit of stir within Apple's ranks over their flagship product, the iPod. While ingenius accessories for the famed iPod are nothing out of the ordinary, LoveHoney had successfully created some time ago the iBuzz. The whole point of the iBuzz is so that a couple or even a solo artist can pleasure themselves all the while keeping beat with the tempo of whatever is playing on the iPod.
One would think that this possibly morally objective accessory would be Apple's biggest gripe, however that doesn't seem to be the case. Apple is more upset by the fact that on LoveHoney's website, they portrayed a silouette of a woman in the midst of said pleasure in true iPod form. The famous neon colored backgrounds with a shadowed person carrying an iPod in perfect clarity has been a symbol of iPod since it came into the mainstream. Apple is suing LoveHoney, not for what the portrayal was, but merely for the fact that they used their advertisement scheme as their own.
Even though it already has some of the toughest laws in Europe that address video game violence, Germany could soon get even tougher and even completely ban some game titles. A group of German politicians have drawn up legislation that apparently could see developers and retailers penalized with prison sentences of up to 12 months. The bill, which was presented by the states of Bavaria and Lower Saxony will be debated next year.
It refers specifically to games that feature "cruel violence". This comes after a school shooting in the last month in the town of Emsdetten, where an 18 year old injured 11 people before shooting himself. The local media emphasized the point that he was an avid player of Counter Strike. A survey taken after the shooting found that 72% of respondents attributed such crimes to video game violence and 59% were in favor of a ban.
"We have among the most drastic censorship rules for games. Now we are being labelled as a breeding ground for unstable, dysfunctional and violent youngsters."Deutsche E-Sport Bund boss Frank Sliwka said. After a seperate shooting in 2003, Germany introduced rules that restricted depictions of violence against human-like characters. For example, some German versions of games feature green blood to appear less gorey.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed thousands of lawsuits against file sharers in the United States claiming that the individuals infringed copyright by sharing music on P2P networks. The trade group has long stated that uploaders on P2P networks are acting as "distributors" but it wasn't until October that this claim was confirmed by a federal judge.
Judge Ann Aiken found that users of P2P software who make illegal files available for download (add to shared folders) are doing the equivalent of distributing the files which justifies a basis for a copyright infringement claim. This revelation came in the case, Elektra v. Perez. This case started like most others with information from MediaSentry resulting in a lawsuit against Dave Perez for illegally sharing music.
Perez denied the accusation of sharing files illegally and said even if he was responsible for the "perez@kazaa" account, simply having the files in a shared directory does not justify a claim of infringement. In this case, and some others, the defendant claimed that distribution does not occur until somebody actually downloads a shared file and that the RIAA should have to prove that distribution ever took place.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has put itself on the war path with a huge part of the music industry by seeking that a panel of copyright judges lower the rate its members pay music publishers and songwriters in royalties. The trade group that has filed thousands of lawsuits against file sharers in the United States portrays itself as a protector of artists' livelihood.
The RIAA claims the the current rate is "out of touch with reality" and believes it is time for the government to step in. The rate hasn't been adjusted by government since 1981, leaving the music publishers, songwriters and the labels to strike their own deals. As part of reasoning behind the action, the trade group claims that the music industry has undergone fundamental changes.
"While record companies and music publishers were able to agree on royalty rates during that 25-year period, the assumptions on which those decisions were based have changed beyond recognition," the RIAA said. The group said that during the period of time when piracy was "devastating" the record industry, revenue for music publishers rose with the emergence and success of innovative services such as mobile phone ringtone services.
Fox, Viacom Inc., CBS Corp. and NBC Universal are reportedly in talks about creating a video service that would in some ways, rival YouTube's dominating position. The Wall Street Journal cites information from individuals close to the situation that suggests the four might launch a service that would offer content from their television networks. The networks seek to cut into the fast-growing market for video-based advertising online.
YouTube, which was acquired by Google in November for $1.65 billion boasts over 100 million daily views. It has become a resource for digital video enthusiasts to upload and share their homemade content with the world. Of course, as can be expected, the most popular content on the service is often pirated content from TV.
CBS and NBC have struck deals with YouTube while other companies have threatened legal action. Experts warn that services like YouTube will inevitably face numerous copyright infringement lawsuits if users continue to disregard the rules and copyright laws while uploading content.
The official European launch of Nintendo's Wii console took place at the HMV store in Oxford Street, London. In the UK, within 12 hours of the launch, 50,000 units (or more than one unit per second) were sold. "The demand has just been unprecedented," Nintendo UK boss David Yarnton said. "We are delighted with the amazing response to Wii and that people of all ages and gaming experience are embracing the way that we are turning the industry on its head."
The console retails for an estimated €250 (approx. $332) and £179 (approx. $351) in the UK. In the United States, Nintendo sold 600,000 units in its first week and in Japan, 400,000 consoles changed owners the first day. "We're well on track to ship four million consoles by the end of the year, and by the end of our financial year in March we'll be on track for six million." Yarnton commented.
HMV's head of games, Tim Ellis, said demand for the console far exceeds the supply. He said the store had 1200 phone calls the previous day about the Wii with 75% of callers inquiring about purchasing a Wii console despite having failed to pre-order earlier. "So we could have taken another thousand orders today. It's just bedlam, really," he said.
Bram Cohen of BitTorrent Inc. has announced that the company has acquired the increasingly popular µTorrent client. The announcement was made on µTorrent's official site by Bram and Ludvig (Ludde) Strigeus, the writer of µTorrent.
Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and µTorrent AB have decided to join forces. BitTorrent has acquired µTorrent as it recognized the merits of µTorrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together µTorrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent's expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.
What does this mean for the µTorrent community? Not much, at least not at first. The intention is to maintain the website as it is, and keep the forums and community active. Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.
The existent µTorrent and BitTorrent communities are immensely valuable to us, which is why we are announcing this here first to make sure you're all the first to know about the news. The plan is to continue to foster the health and growth of the community that has been critical to the success of µTorrent. Thank you in advance for your support.
A proven Christmas smash hit, Nintendo Wii arrives in Europe tomorrow, December 8. The imminent success of the console is expected to continue on the European soil with pre-orders selling out in record times. The console retails for an estimated 250€ (approx. $332) and £179 (approx. $351) in the UK and includes Wii Remote and Nunchuk, Stereo AV Cable, the sensor bar, and Wii Sports.
In the United States Wii sold 600,000 units in its first week, in Japan 400,000 consoles changed owners the first day, and considering the fact that the pre-order at Amazon.co.uk were booked in seven minutes making it the fastest-selling pre-order ever listed, the demand will quite surely exceed the supply also in Europe. Some of the retailers will open their doors midnight tonight to cope with the customer traffic.
Nintendo tries to respond the demand by shipping more than 4 million consoles worldwide by the end of the year accompanied with 24 games plus an additional 36 Virtual Console games. The games include already hundreds and hundreds of thousands sold Nintendo title The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess as well as Red Steel and Rayman Raving Rabbids from Ubisoft, Call of Duty 3 from Activision, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz from SEGA and Need for Speed Carbon from EA.
The British government commissioned a report entitled The Gowers Report which serves to modernize current copyright infringement laws to match the changes seen by the advent of the Internet.
The report states there should be new practices followed against copyright infringement, it does stand by the consumer in stating that the consumer should be able to move, alter or modify their purchased music for their own personal needs how they see fit; such as from CD to MP3. In addition, it recommends that the copyright protection statute of limitations currently set to 50 years, be extended. They'd like to see intellectual properties protected for a proposed 95 years. With copyright protection only at 50 years, works that were released from the UK in the 1950's would soon be open to the general public to do with what they wish. Apparently the music industry is interested in still making a profit after that much time as passed.
The report also brings up the point of punishment. They'd like to see the punishment for people who deliver and distribute intellectual propterty such as music or films on the Internet to be just as harsh as the bootleggers who make hard copies and sell them on the street. Currently, Internet related distribution faces up to 2 years in prison, while selling hard copies warrants 10 years. The reports calls for these two crimes to be looked at equally and punished evenly.
If you were one of the lucky few to actually obtain a PS3 and are not hording it on the likes of Ebay, you can treat yourself to the latest firmware update from Sony; version 1.3.
Sony released the update to add different features that would come in handy. These features include the ability to backup your SD cards, USB flash drives or memory sticks directly on the PS3 hard drive. Another welcomed addition is the inclusion of HDD formatting. If you happen to put something on the PS3 that makes it do crazy things, you can bring it back to factory defaults like nothing ever happened. Of course, just like any reformatting option, it'd completely erase anything extra that you placed on the drive.
What you will not see in this update is the promised fix to the 1080i resolution bug that has affected the launch devices. Earlier, Sony had released a statement saying that they would fix the bug in the firmware that did not allow it to properly display 1080i resolution, but instead bump it down to 480p. Instead of fixing this issue, they merely changed the heirarchy of display preferences so that 1080i was near the bottom of the list. Sony has since retracted its statement in that they will fix the problem. Future updates will tell whether or not they will address this problem.
A letter recently was sent to CEO Chad Hurley or YouTube by the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC), in protest of their continued failure to proactively remove copyrighted materials from their website. JASRAC's main complaint in the matter was that YouTube has no policy in place to monitor content put onto the site by users and will not remove said copyrighted material until there is a formal complaint or threat of lawsuit issued to them.
One snippet from the offical letter sent by JASRAC and 22 other Japanese companies stated, "Taking into account the current status of your service, we believe that your company should not just wait for rights owners to take the 'Notice and Take down' procedures but should bear the responsibility to prevent, in advance, copyright infringements such as illegal uploads and distributions, or to avoid those infringements".
This new protest comes just a month and a half after YouTube was forced to remove some 29,549 files that infringed on the copyrights of 23 Japanese media companies. Neither this complaint or YouTubes removal of the files stopped users from consistantly uploading copyrighted material to the website for public consumption.
Analytical network equipment provider, Sandvine released a statement recently citing that ISPs should proactively be on the lookout for increased online gaming and online video downloading in the very near future.
In recent studies, Sandvine saw an increase of 80% of traffic for the Xbox Live servers just following the release of several highly anticipated game titles. One of the latest releases, Gears of War gave Xbox Live a tremendous jump in network traffic, proving to ISPs that network gaming is not just a passing fad or craze.
Additionally, Sandvine saw an astounding 140% internet traffic increase following Apple's release of iTunes7 which enabled users to download full length feature films directly to their video iPods. This once again should show network providers that they need to better suit their networks to handle this type of traffic as it is clear that these are things the consumer wants and needs.
Dave Caputo, CEO of Sandvine said, "The effect Gears of War and other games are having on networks indicates to service providers that online gaming is not just a craze. Their networks must be equipped to protect this increasingly valuable traffic from the effects of a best-effort network. Other multimedia applications like video downloads onto iPods are increasingly becoming popular, so service providers need to identify these trends early in order to proactively ensure there is adequate capacity to support the extra bandwidth usage."
Java based P2P client Azureus recently released its newest version, 3.0, thanks in part to its own adventure into venture capital financing. Funding was raised in partnership with Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, BV Capital and CNET chairman Jarl Mohn.
These efforts have not been all for naught with Azureus, being one of the more popular downloaded P2P applications. Some of the 130 million people who've downloaded the client will be able to treat themselves to the upgraded 3.0 version, dubbed Zudeo. Zudeo is geared towards digital media sharing and can allow publishers to distribute HD and DVD quality media at no cost.
"Today, content owners and publishers can use Zudeo to freely promote and distribute their digital creations, without length or quality limitations," said Azureus CEO, Gilles BianRosa. "Furthermore, content creators and publishers can use our social networking tools to expose their content throughout the Web, including blogs and social networks."
The launch of the PlayStation 3 (PS3) console in the U.S. had a well-publicized dark side with the media reporting armed robbery and gun shot wounds among other horrible incidents. It's easy for people to get very angry about this senseless violence and to crave justice on those who commit these acts. One such attack was on a student who waited at Wal-Mart for three days to buy two consoles. He was beaten and robbed by four men.
One man was arrested on Friday in connection with the robbery and Police intended to arrest Peyton Strickland of Wilmington, North Carolina. While serving a search warrant at the 18 year old's apartment, Police shot and killed the man along with his German shepherd. A roommate claims that he was shot while going to answer a knock at the door and that he was unarmed.
The sheriff's deputies had been called in to help the University police serve the warrants because of safety concerns. "No one's above the law. If there's any criminal conduct that can be established, I'm not going to hesitate to treat them as any other defendant," County District Attorney Ben David said.
It is sad and regrettable to have to read about these things towering over the launch of the PS3, Wii and the Xbox 360 last year.
Los Angeles man, Johnny Ray Gasca, was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for using a video camcorder in a movie theatre.
Gasca was arrested in September, 2002 when he was found carrying an expensive recording equipment in a large leather bag during the private screening of "The Core". After the arrest, he fled the custody for 15 months.
U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson found Gasca guilty of three misdemeanor counts of copyright infrinhement.
Sony's newest console, the PS3 hasn't even been out for a month yet and already a group most people in the "scene" should know of has come incredibly close to unlocking its true potential.
Team Xecuter has been one of the biggest threats to Microsoft and Sony alike with modifications that enabled hard drive loading of your game backups. In a recent post on their website, they've revealed that they have connected a 750Gb hard drive to the PS3 and have successfully been able to pass data back and forth from it. Their newest development dubbed the Hyperdrive features the ability to connect any 3.5" SATA hard drive to your PS3 and they're currently working on an IDE solution. Additionally, it has USB 2.0 support for dumping data to and from the hard drive.
Upon connecting the drive, they have been able to get the PS3 to recognize it, format the drive to it's standards and store all the settings internally to the PS3 and not the hard drive.
What all this means is that its quite possible that Blu-Ray dumps to an external hard drive may not be too far off. Larger drives would be needed since games such as Resistance: Fall of Man have been seen taking up some 16Gb worth of data. It's an exciting time to see what these folks develop in the future. Could we see legitimate PS3 backups gracing the hard drives of the masses soon? Only time will tell.
In a totally unorthodox move in the video game market, console underdog Nintendo introduced it's Wii to Japanese consumers almost two weeks after it's successful American launch. The famous electronics store, Yodobashi Camera in the Machida district in Tokyo opened at 7:30am, 2.5 hours earlier than normal in anticipation of the Nintendo launch. By 8am they had already posted signs saying they were sold out for the day.
Some eager consumers said they had been waiting in line since 6:30am the earlier day. Although this length of time waiting for a product launch pales in comparison to how long US comsumers were waiting in line for Nintendo's competitor, the Sony PS3.
Nintendo shipped 400,000 units to Japan which quickly sold out everywhere. This is in contrast to the 600,000 units sent to the United States which were said to be all accounted for in eight days. Nintendo remains hopeful that it will meet it's goal of reaching 4 million by the end of this year.
Instead of going head-to-head with the technical marvel of rival companies Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo decided to go for a fun-for-all approach. After taking a back seat to Sony with the introduction of the Playstation in 1994, Nintendo executives began looking at the 20 billion dollar video game market a bit differently. They look to achieve a healthy market share with their innovative controller and unique gameplay.
A recent bill that was up in California legistation which would have banned the ability for companies to use "pretexting" practices to obtain your private information was recently overturned by everyone's favorite industry association, the MPAA.
The bill, SB1666 was presented before California Committees and would essentially stop the ability of companies to use false or fraudulent statements about themselves in order to obtain information such as your home phone number, address, even social security number. The bill had been gaining major approval through the Senate with a unanimous 30-0 approval vote and was set to become a law when our friends at the MPAA stated that their organization requires the ability to disguise themselves in efforts to stop illegally downloaded content.
Lenny Goldberg, a lobbyist for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse stated "The MPAA has a tremendous amount of clout and they told legislators, 'We need to pose as someone other than who we are to stop illegal downloading.'"
This resistance in the Senate proved a good move for the MPAA as the bill was shot down earlier in the year. Legislative records clearly show that it was the MPAA's lobbyists who paid certain dues to make sure the bill did not pass. As a result California revised the original bill and passed a much more anorexic bill that only barred organizations from obtaining your phone records, and nothing else.
As insane as the idea might be, 3DLabs has announced the world's first media processor for phones and PDAs that is capable of 720presolutionAVC/H.264 video playback.
The chip is 3DLabs' first product after it announced to split off from Creative who has owned the company for the last four years. Chip is called DMS-02 and it is a multi-core, ARM-based array of floating point processors.
Company's obvious target market is the expanding portable video player market and the chip is obviously capable of decoding also "standard" resolution videos. For those not familiar with the HDTV acronyms. 720p stands for progressive 1280x720 resolution which means that the video has three times more pixels(or "details") than a regular TV or DVD clip.
The extremely interesting year of 2006 is coming to an end, and the games industry has given us a lot to smile about, but also a lot to frown about. The year was definitely the year of consoles, both home consoles and hand-helds.
In the first seven days, 600,000 Wiis were sold in the US, 400,000 in Japan the first thing in the morning, and 325,000 in Europe in less than two days. G4tv.com has now reported the sales figures for the first five weeks, a whopping 3.19 million Wiis changed owners and the triumph of Nintendo seems to go on.
Hollywood movie studios have won a lawsuit in China over the unlawful posting of copyrighted movie clips on the Internet, according to the Motion Picture Association (MPA).
