News written by Matti Robinson (January, 2008)

Today was the first day in court for the lawsuit against Pirate Bay. The prosecutor set charges for four persons responsible for Pirate Bay's activities. Three of the accused, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde, are known Pirate Bay activists and the fourth is a businessman Carl Lundström who formerly owned the company Rix Port 80 which provided Internet Bandwidth for the use of Pirate Bay.

The prosecutions for aiding in copyright infringement cover the illegal distribution of 20 music pieces, nine movies and four video games. The prosecutor demanded that the individuals involved would have to pay 1,2 million SEK (approx. 187 500 USD) and turn over their computers to the government. Prosecutor Roswall is going to use representatives of IFPI and Swedish anti-piracy camp Antipiratbyrån as witnesses and the email conversations of the quartet will serve as one evidence.

Pirate Bay has a strict stand about the lawsuit. They consider it being a political persecution where Hollywood lobbyist are in the driving seat rather than the correct Swedish authorities. According to a Swedish site E24.se and their poll, the people are behind Pirate Bay. 89 percent answered that they consider the lawsuit being "wrong and disgraceful way to try to end file sharing" and only 6 percent are on the prosecutor's side.

According to Gene Munster, an Apple analyst from investment bank Piper Jaffray, the leading MP3 player manufacturer is likely to bring new cheaper iPods that would be like the recently released iPod Touch in terms of multi-touch display and wireless Internet connectivity. In the report released last Monday Munster goes through Apple's last year's fourth quarter and it being the less growth producing time in the history of iPod. Munster therefore presents that introducing new, cheaper and innovative portable MP3 players would be the way to improve growth.

"In order to achieve this level of year-over-year iPod growth, we are expecting Apple to introduce cheaper, innovative iPods with Wi-Fi and multi-touch technology," analyst wrote.

He added that even though the broader market was slowing down the sales growth in MP3 players, Apple has maintained to keep the dominant lead in market share. The segment's dollar share has also grown from 71 percent in 2004 to 84 in 2007, and the most recent update a month after the iPod Touch was released it shot up to 90 percent.

Norsk rikskringkasting (NRK), the Norway's national broadcasting company, has made one of their most popular TV shows available via BitTorrent. The series called Nordkalotten 365 follows a hiker, Lars Monsen, through his year-round trip in the north of Scandinavia. The first two episodes are online, and the rest of the episodes follow as they are encoded.

Nordkalotten 365 had an average of nearly a million viewers through traditional broadcast, which makes it a rather popular in a country with the population of roughly 4,5 million. The show was downloaded more than 8 000 times in the first 24 hours after the BitTorrent release, and NRK received lot of positive feedback which might encourage the company to release other series via Internet as well.

The episodes are in MP4 file format without DRM protection, and are encoded with MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (bitrate 3 Mbit/s) using the Resolution 1024x576 at 25 fps.

During the first two weeks of January, IFPI organized 335 raids in Brazil targeted on Internet cafes. In the announcement by IFPI yesterday the mission was called a success with more than 2,000 computers seized and over one million illegal audio tracks found. However, during the operation only one arrest was made by the 600 Special Ops police officers involved.

Most of the raids were conducted in the Sao Paolo area with the help of Associacao Anti-pirateria de Cinema e Musica (APCM) - Brazil's movie and music anti-piracy lobbyists. To justify the raids on Internet cafes, the IFPI claims that 20 percent of Brazilians visit Internet cafes to download illegal content and sometimes burn the files to discs.

IFPI also considers Brazil to be one of the largest black markets for entertainment media in the world with an estimate of almost 50 percent of CDs and DVDs sold are Bootlegs.

The past eight years has been a struggle between the music industry and P2P downloads. Since Napster launched in 1999 and brought the peer-to-peer downloads to the mainstream, the International Federation of Phonographic Industry, more commonly known as IFPI, has been trying to stop the P2P revolution. Despite some radical acts to regain momentum for legit music downloads the recording industry is suffering a spiral downwards.

Digital sales have grown immensely and iTunes alone has sold more than 3 billion songs since the 2003 it launched. However, to put it in perspective the same amount of songs are being transferred each quarter of a year in P2P networks, and that doesn't include the downloads from the likes of BitTorrent and Usenet, reports Slyck News.

During last year, Internet Service Providers (ISP) have been under pressure. Even with the "get out of jail free"-card of DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which protects the ISPs from being responsible for the illegal traffic in their networks, some companies including US giant AT&T have voluntarily started to control their network traffic. The same goes for some European countries, one of which is France.

According to the NPD Group's latest report, Blu-ray players have taken a massive leap in market share. In december Blu-ray players held 60 percent of the high-definition player market, the week after HD DVD camp Blu-ray finished with a huge lead of 93 percent, making this year's market share approximately 70-30 for Blu-ray.

Even though the study only spans one week, the difference is huge. To make it even more devastating the recent price drop of HD DVD didn't seem to help them regain momentum. The movie sales has also been in favor of Blu-ray, the top ten high-definition movies sold in week 2 were all Blu-ray, and Blu-ray took 85 percent of the total sales.


Market share of HD players

Rumors that Apple and some movie studios were working on movie rentals that would include digital copies compatible with iPods is seeming to come true, at least on some scale.

According to The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW.com) a reader has received a copy of the upcoming Family Guy Blue Harvest DVD including a "Fox Digital copy" ahead of schedule. The DVD is set to release January 15th, the same day MacWorld Expo fires up, coincidence?

Inserting the DVD into the computer would bring up a window with a text, "This Fox Digital copy file requires iTunes version 7.6 or newer," the newest version being 7.5 as this is written. The copy came also with a serial number which seems to be required to access the digital copy.

Act surprised if next week Apple announces upgrade for iTunes and iPod/iPhone compatible digital copies for upcoming movies and TV shows.

Source:
TUAW.com

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According to BetaNews, after the Blu-ray press conference at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Warner Bros. President Ron Sanders answered a question everyone has been wondering, whether Warner violated their contract to support HD DVD or not. The answer was, "We did not violate any contract."

We recently reported that one of the six big movie studios, Warner Bros., has abandoned the HD DVD high-definition format, and shifted towards Sony's Blu-ray. Shortly after the whole HD DVD camp expressed their disappointments and Toshiba even hinted that Warner broke the contract. Warner's Ron Sanders however isn't concerned about the situation, responding that Toshiba might be upset and could even file a lawsuit, but wouldn't have anything to accuse Warner of.

"Clearly, [Toshiba and the HD DVD Promotional Group] have reason to be upset... But we fulfilled our obligations to them. That's why we will continue to provide movies in the HD DVD format through May rather than stopping now. They very well could file a lawsuit, but we have done everything that was required of us. We did not violate any contract," said Sanders.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the Japanese industry giant behind Panasonic, announced at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that it will launch Internet-ready plasma televisions that support Youtube videos and Google web albums. The rival Sony responded with its own announcement that they will also bring Internet video to upcoming TVs. Sony's new brand of TVs will feature content from AOL, Yahoo, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Sony BMG Music.

"This is the first time mainstream consumers will be able to easily enjoy YouTube videos from the living room with the enhanced quality of a fully integrated Widescreen TV experience," said Matsushita.

Sony Electronics senior vice president Randy Waynick also saw Internet video a big part of future televisions as he stated, "Internet video will clearly be the next step in the evolution of high-definition television, giving users more control over the content they view."

In addition Sony Pictures Television announced that it will add content to YouTube, the videos will be separated to several new channels, first of which is called Minisode Network which offers five-minute versions of TV shows.

Sony has announced the VoIP application Skype and Go!Explore GPS receiver and software for PlayStation Portable. The announcement took place at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2008 roughly a week after Sony released details on the new features at their CES 2008 site.

Skype will be free of cost and will be a part of the next Firmware upgrade which is destined to be released in late January. Unfortunately Skype will only work in the new PSP Slim & Lite version, and the first generation PSP users will not be making any VoIP calls, at least for now. The PSP Skype will supports the SkypeOut and SkypeIn features that require purchase of Skype credit.

To use Skype, PSP users need a memory card, a compatible microphone, and a connection to Internet.

Go!Explore GPS receiver and software, released in Japan more than a year ago, are finally coming to Europe and the North America. The use of the GPS will not only be limited to navigation, but the location information can also be used in games as well. Sony hasn't yet announced the price point for the Go!Explore, but the price of approx. $37 (6000 yen) in Japan would suggest a price around $40.