Month: July 2015

The inflight entertainment on United Airlines flights may require users to install potentially insecure DRM on their laptops.

Most airlines limit inflight entertainment to seatback devices, but on flights without such devices, or if passengers prefer to use their own devices, United Airlines offers them the ability watch a pre-selected list of movies and TV shows on their laptop.

But to the dismay of tech entrepreneur Brian Fitzpatrick, a passenger on a recent United flight, passengers choosing to use their own laptop has to install a third party DRM plug-in first before they are allowed to watch movies such as "Gone Girl" and "Big Hero 6".

As Techdirt investigates, the Panasonic Marlin DRM plug-in required by United is coded using the NPAPI architecture, support of which was phased out in Google's Chrome browser in 2014 because "NPAPI's 90s-era architecture has become a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity".

In addition, passengers have to install the Flash plugin in order to watch the movie. Recently discovered vulnerabilities in the Flash plugin has forced browser makers to drop default support for the plug-in.

The DRM requirement for the inflight entertainment most likely comes at the behest of Hollywood studios, who insists on the implementation of technical measures to protect their content, regardless of how unlikely it is for passengers on a flight to steal movies via the inflight entertainment system.

Weekly Blu-ray revenue has fallen to its lowest level since September 2010, according to the latest figures released by Home Media Magazine for the US market.

The revenue figures for the week ending the 11th July 2015 was only $17.36 million, and one has to go back to September 2010 to find a lower figure for Blu-ray sales. 

While weekly Blu-ray revenue is largely determined by that week and recent week's release slate, and the first and second week in July is usually a low point for sales due to Independence Day closures, the Blu-ray revenue figures were still lower than similar "Fourth of July" weeks in the recent past.

The revenue figure was also significantly below the 2015 average, which before the record low week, was at $32.56 million. The 2014 average, up to the same point in the year, was at a higher $38.69 million. 

Notable new releases for the week included the Arnold Schwarzenegger film 'Maggie' and 'Woman in Gold', the former is estimated to have earned less than $200,000 at the US domestic box office.

Weekly Blu-ray market share, the share of Blu-ray sales compared to total disc (Blu-ray and DVD) revenue, also fell to the lowest level since August 2013.

Blu-ray beat te Toshiba's HD DVD format in a much publicized format war to become the de facto HD disc format, but even the format's biggest backer, Sony, has revealed doubt about the format's future. More recently, prominent Blu-ray producers have also blamed studios for poorly marketing and failing to support the format.

The results and analysis for Blu-ray (and DVD) sales for the week ending 11th July 2015 is in. A very bad week for Blu-ray, as revenue falls to the lowest level since September 2010. Maggie was the best selling new release for the week.

You can read the rest of the stats and analysis here

Google has applied some kind of penalty to Torrent website KickassTorrents (KAT) to make it completely disappear from its index, a situation that now means scam sites pretending to be the torrent indexer now tops popular search terms.

Google algorithm, which determines how high sites will rank in search results, has long been demoting piracy related results (based on the number of DMCA requests each site receives). However, the demotion penalty is only meant to lower the position of the site's pages in search result, it was never meant to complete remove results.

The KAT team told TorrentFreak that they've been aware of the penalty for some time, but things apparently have escalated recently.

"It's already about five or six months since we started to experience some kind of penalty from Google. The issue is that we were not performing any SEOactivities at all," KAT says.

The removal of all official KAT results from Google now means that unofficial and unaffiliated results now occupy to the top positions for all KAT related keywords. Depending on your location, the top spot for the keyword "kickasstorrents" is now occupied by either kickasstorrents.pw or kickasstorrents.eu. The former serves adult advertising over what appears to be a copy of the KAT site, while the later promotes an unrelated download that may be malware.

The KAT team is still investigation the possible cause of the penalty, and urges users to visit the official Facebook and Twitter to find information on the latest official domain name for the site.

One of the most popular digital image formats, JPEG, may soon have DRM added to it. 

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), responsible for managing still image coding standards, has signaled it is investigating the possibility of adding a DRM standard to JPEG files.

The DRM standard would allow authors to limit access to JPEG files by user, number of views or downloads, location and other criteria.

While the addition of DRM to a previously DRM-free format could lead to a backlash from Internet users, especially if the DRM is used for commercial purposes such as preventing copying or to enforce a payment system for viewing images, the JPEG committee however says the addition would be for privacy and security reasons mainly.

The group states that:

"The JPEG committee investigates solutions to assure privacy and security when sharing photos on social networks, (stock) photography databases, etc. JPEG Privacy & Security will provide new functionality to JPEG encoded images such as ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual rights, while maintaining backwards and forward compatibility to existing JPEG legacy solutions."

One potential non commercial application for access control could be to prevent unauthorized viewing of private images, such as images shared on social media. It can also be used to prevent surveillance by government agencies.

Top DVD and Blu-ray producers have attacked movie studios for poorly managing the Blu-ray format, and warns that if lessons are not learnt, the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc format may be doomed as well.

Speaking at the San Diego Comic-Con, a panelist of people responsible for creating Blu-ray movies, including Star Trek: TNG's Robert Meyer Burnett, Blade Runner: The Final Cut's Charles de Lauzirika and The Hunger Games's Cliff Stephenson, say that studios seem ready and willing to abandon the Blu-ray format in favor of the new kids on the block, digital distribution and the yet unreleased 4K Ultra HD disc format.

They say the main problem stems from the fact that the success of DVD altered the industry's perception about home video, turning what was a collector's product into a mainstream one. The studios then took that expectation forward to Blu-ray, which has failed to achieve the same level of success.

"DVD got really successful, far more successful than anybody knew it would be," said Stephenson, who also produced the Hannibal box sets. "It turned people from collectors to consumers. They bought stuff just to buy stuff and that boosted all the sales numbers. Then you go to Blu-ray which became much more collector driven, so the people who didn’t want to buy every single title weren’t buying every single title, so the studios looked at that as not as successful, when the reality is it’s as successful as Laserdisc was 20 years ago, even more so."

The reason why Blu-ray could not meet studio expectations, Burnett explains, is because the "general population" did not really care about what the main advantages offered by Blu-ray, essentially superior picture and audio quality.

"You have to have a decent home theater system to really appreciate the Blu-ray format," Burnett said. "And most people really don’t get it. You have to really be a discerning viewer to get something out of Blu-ray. My mother couldn’t care less, and my mother is the general population. She just wants to put something on and be able to see it. If we talk about the nuances of the transfer my mother doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. So to go to Ultra 4K? Who’s going to care about that?"

And this is why studios should readjust their expectations of 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, and should not expect it to be the "new DVD", in terms of revenue.

"Blu-ray should never have been marketed as a mass product,” Stephenson explained. "It should have been more of a collector format that could support the numbers that it would ultimately do because as all of us can attest, we would pay."

Apart from not understanding what consumers wanted, the moderator of the panel, Bill Hunt of TheDigitalBits.com, also criticized studios for being too greedy when it comes to "double dipping", or making consumers purchase the same content over and over again.

"If you were loyal and bought each season, you paid a premium but you didn’t get the bonus disc that came in the boxed set. So a lot of people learned, ‘well, I'll just wait.’ And by the way we'll wait and we’ll get it cheaper and we'll wait until Black Friday and we'll get it even cheaper. And it’s a vicious cycle because the sales aren’t there," said Hunt.

Stephenson also chimed in, saying the inconsistency and lack of commitment by studios have also dented consumer enthusiasm in Blu-ray.

"Then they’ll release something random, like Sony will put out Troop Beverly Hills," Stephenson said. "I don't get what the logic is."

"The other problem with these boxed sets that everyone's been talking about, is that they’ll start something and then they'll end it," Stephenson said, perhaps referencing the recent decision by Fox Home Entertainment to stop releasing The Simpsons box sets half way through the available seasons. "So everybody feels burned because you bought into this thing, and I think they haven't done a very good job of supporting the format that they created."

As for the future of packaged media, most of the panel agreed that it is not the end for discs, and that it will be always around as a niche product.

"I find it impossible to believe that the people who were buying movies 20 years ago suddenly stopped buying movies," Stephenson said. "I think they’re there. I think it’s the studio expectations that have shifted and that once those sort of get realigned and the resources are funneled in the right direction, I think the ship will right itself. The problem is they can’t make the mistakes with 4K that they made with Blu-ray. Hopefully they’ll make all new mistakes, but it’s like there’s things that they can learn and there’s ways to make it successful."

CloudFlare has won a victory against the RIAA for what the content delivery network claims is a over-broad attempt at censorship.

Last year, the RIAA sued music streaming site Grooveshark and the two parties settled, with Grooveshark agreeing to shut down. Soon after, sites using the now defunct Grooveshark's branding appeared, trying to take advantage of the disappearance of one of the biggest music sites.

It was due to this that the RIAA sued CloudFlare, and other service providers, to try and shut down Grooveshark related websites.

To make it easier for themselves in future, and to avoid having to play an endless game of "whack-a-mole", the RIAA deliberately made their injunction against CloudFlare and others broad - by asking for any accounts and domain names featuring the term "grooveshark" to be blocked.

While the RIAA's injunction was granted by the courts, service providers fought back, arguing that censorship based on a single keyword, without even examining whether the site in question was breaking the law or not, was overly broad. CloudFlare argues that this kind of broad censorship ban will impact legitimate websites, and could limit free speech rights.

And CloudFlare's fear was justified, as the content delivery network was legally forced to follow the RIAA's initial injunction, and shut down many sites before the court could hear their arguments, including sites that were totally legitimate. One site that was shut down was groovesharkcensorship.cf, a single page site that was set up to protest the RIAA's censorship attempts - in one fell swoop, the RIAA not only managed to shut down piracy sites, but also sites that were exercising their free speech rights to criticise the music industry's copyright lobby.

The RIAA defended their actions, and instead said the responsibility to determine whether a site was infringing was the responsibility of CloudFlare, despite the RIAA being the only one capable of determining whether their own content has been infringed or not.

Fortunately for CloudFlare, District Court Judge Alison Nathan agreed that the RIAA's initial injunction was too broad, and instead, has ordered the RIAA to first identify specific sites that are infringing before asking CloudFlare to remove them (something that CloudFlare has said they are more than willing to accommodate). 

Judge Nathan did also order CloudFlare to close down any sites that it knew, without a doubt, that was infringing, but put the onus firmly on the RIAA to identify and inform CloudFlare about any potentially infringing sites.