Author Archives: wunderbarb

Tax and recordable Blu Ray

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The French commission Albis defines the tax for each recordable media. This tax is supposed to compensate the private use. The tax is transferred to content owners.

The commission has announced the expected tax for recordable BluRay disc. It will be 12.40€ (about $15) for 100GB, 6.20€ for 50GB and 3.10€ for 25GB. This value has been extrapolated from taxes on other media such DVD RW.

This high levy may slow down the adoption of recordable BluRay in the French market. The most probable scenario is that many French customers will order it on Internet in other countries (without the tax).

Ideally, an economic analysis should drive the value of the tax. If the tax is too high, then other sources will become more interesting and the content owners will loose money. If the tax is at a price acceptable for customers, then they will use French suppliers and content owners will earn money.

India and content production

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I participated to a workshop on content protection organized by CCP and MPA at Convergence India 2009. It was interesting to check what the issues were in India.

The interest for content protection is rising. The other speakers were Rajiv DALAL (MPA India), Steve CHRISTIAN (Verimatrix), Sanjeev FERNANDES (NDS), Gautam GANDHI (Google India), Sanjiv KAINTH (IRDETO) and Vidar SANDVIK (CONAX). In other words, CA providers were very present at the workshop.

Rajiv gave some interesting information about India. All major US studios are investing in Indian production houses. It seems even that Will Smith will play in some Indian movies! And vice versa, Reliance is taking a foot in the US. Reliance purchase US theaters and invest in small US production houses. This may partly explain the rise of interest for content protection. US studios want to protect their financial investments.

Gautam explained the new strategy of YouTube. If a studio provides the reference movie, YouTube will filter its upload. This is a contract they have with Sony BMG India. Thus, Sony uses YouTube India to make electronic distribution in India. Surprisingly, it is still easy to find illegal copyrighted content on YouTube.

When discussing with the audience, the two main concerns seemed:

  • theater piracy and mainly analog theater.
  • Illegal rebroadcast of content. It seems that the pirates are well organized for crickett match (THE Indian sport). They prepare 12 STBs. they start with the first one. After a while, the broadcaster blacklists the STB (They use a visible watermark which carries a STB identifier, so called fingerprint) Then the “pirate” switches to the second STB…

When listening to all the speakers, I noted a problem. Every speaker used a different terminology for invisible watermark, session watermark, video fingerprint,… This is confusing. The industry should define a common vocabulary.

Phone and torrents

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The G1 is the first mobile phone with new operating system Android by Google. The site Android and Me launched a bounty. The challenge was to write a G1 application that would scan the barcode of an official DVD, identify the title and then request the possible torrents for this title by connecting to most important trackers sites such as The Pirate Bay, Mininova…

Alec Holmes was the first to produce a working application and claim the $90 bounty. Through this application, called Torrent Droid, it is possible to walk in a store, scan the title, select the preferred torrent and launch the download of the torrent!

The application itself is not a revolution in the world of piracy. It is another way to enter the target. Rather than typing in the title in your preferred search tool (Che, dedicated toolbar in the browser…) you scan the disc. This change nothing in the piracy world.

What is meaningful is that this application was chosen to illustrate some advantages of G1 and Android. It would be interesting to discover who is behind the site Android and Me.

Is the application illegal? Your opinion?

Film Piracy, Organized Crime and Terrorism

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The RAND corporation has published a heavy document entitled: “Film Piracy, Organized Crime and Terrorism”. This 162 page document is extremely well documented. Through published facts, it sheds some lights on the proven links between film piracy and organized crime (and even terrorist organizations) all over the world. It also shows some examples of legal authorities that are helping piracy. My preferred story is this Russian illegal replication DVD plant (pressing capabilities of 800,000 per month) which was closed after a first raid. It was sealed and put under surveillance by the police. Four months later, a new raid seized 55,000 new illegal DVDs (while the plant was supposed to be closed!)

Film piracy is an activity that has a low entry barrier, and low risk of heavy jail sentencing. It has even a better margin than drug selling (at least 3 times bigger).

This document is somewhat frightening. We are far from the student downloading a movie and distributing it to friends.

Of course, no technological answer can help in this case. The only thing we can do is to delay as much as possible the availability of bootlegs! But once available, technology is out of game.

The answer is obviously legal. The report is not very optimistic. Film piracy is still considered as victimless counterfeiting. This is not the case for pharmaceutical counterfeiting. Thus, it may not be the first priority of the authorities. The report expects that if public awareness of the links between film piracy and organized crime or terrorism would increase, then people would be less attracted by cheap illegal DVDs.

17-march:repaired the broken link to RAND document

DRM and games

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I often described the ruckus generated by DRM for games (see Game and DRM or Spore and the DRM fury). Yesterday, I discussed with some French game editors. Their position was rather negative. According to them, game protections are today too weak. The result is that soon patches are available on P2P to defeat the protections. The paradoxical outcome is that honest customers who purchased games suffer of the constraints imposed by the game protection (for instance, checking the presence of a physical disc in the drive…) whereas dishonest users have the game without the constraints.

Using game theory (see the DRM game)), the winning strategy would be to steal the game! Thus, to change the winning strategy, there seems to be two possible solutions:

  • Make more robust DRM
  • Make DRM that are transparent to the customers but not to the dishonest users

Currently, I do not see this trend.

SF: The Disc World

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The world is a disc carried by four elephants that stand on top of a huge turtle. Magic replaces technology. Humans interact with dwarfs, trolls, werewolves, vampires, and even a librarian orang-utang… For 25 years, Terry Pratchett has wrote a series of hilarious mad books.

If you spent (or even still spend) nights playing advanced Dungeon & Dragons, if you are hooked on “The Lord of Rings”, and also on Douglas Adams’s silly humour, then the Disc World is for you.

How did I discover Terry Pratchett? Through a collaborative project! Many years ago, we tried to set up a project with Philips about an European equivalent of TCG. The project leader decided that the project’s name would be: Ankh Morpok. Ankh Morpok is the main city of the Disc World. It was the first time, I heard about Terry Pratchett. The project was not accepted. Some years later, I found one of the title in my local library. It was an error, I got addicted.

My favorite characters:

  • Lord Vetinari, the patrician; The members of my team who claim that they could have guessed it
  • Death would always speaks in CAPITAL

I would recommend to French readers to read the books in English. I find it far funnier, although at the start you will have to get used to slang writing. But after a while, you get used to.

Be aware: Highly addictive books I warned you.

Olivier BOMSEL explains the economics of the graduated response

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Olivier BOMSEL, French economist, has always presented interesting views on the media industry. Thus, he has been invited to participate to the French commission Olivennes. The outcomes of this commission have given the basis for the French graduated response.

It was normal that Olivier justifies the outcomes. In Decreasing copyright enforcement costs: the scope of a graduated response, he explains why it is an economically rationale decision.

Section 3 is my preferred one. He explains why free riding on copyright content was an incentive for a strong roll-out of broadband. ISPs had no incentive to fight piracy. According to him, once broadband successfully deployed, a second phase starts. ISP search new revenues through paid distribution. Butt due to piracy, cost of content raised. ISP have now some incentives to fight piracy.

Section 4 explains the graduated response. The purpose is to increase the probability to be caught, thus through fear have a deterrent effect.

With the French case, he shows that the ISPs will bear the cost of this fight and not the content owners. One interesting application of the polluters pay principle.

This section is less convincing. Nevertheless, the paper is highly recommendable.