Month: December 2016

Call of Duty war 2016 besser als in den Jahren davor, Uncharted 4 ebenso klasse wie Civilization. Die ganz großen Bestseller waren neben Pokémon Go aber eine kleine Handvoll anderer Titel - die vorher kaum jemand auf der Agenda hatte. (Games, Steam)

Merkwürdiges ist 2016 in der Technikwelt vorgegangen und auch in unserem Studio. Unser Best-of und die lustigsten Outtakes mit Golem.de-Redakteuren im Video. (Golem-Wochenrückblick, Internet)

Providing a legal alternative top piracy has been Spotify's goal all along, according to the company's General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez.

In an interview with the Journal on Sports and Entertainment Law, Gutierrez confirmed what many had known all along, that Spotify based their core business model on attracting and monetizing pirates.

"One of the things that inspired the creation of Spotify and is part of the DNA of the company from the day it launched (and remember the service was launched for the first time around 8 years ago) was addressing one of the biggest questions that everyone in the music industry had at the time - how would one tackle and combat online piracy in music?" Gutierrez says.

"Spotify was determined from the very beginning to provide a fully licensed, legal alternative for online music consumption that people would prefer over piracy."

Spotify's freemium model has been a hit with pirates, and it has helped to reduce the piracy rate in some regions by as much as 80 percent. However, not all are happy with Spotify.

Many in the music industry complain that Spotify's solution to piracy simply replaced one type of lost revenue with another, suggesting that Spotify simply does not pay enough to artists. Spotify has countered these criticism by pointing out that labels and artists would have received nothing from the previous alternative, piracy, and that Spotify should be compared more to other promotional platforms such as radio, as opposed to sell through platforms like CDs and digital downloads.

Spotify's Gutierrez also correctly points out that since Spotify's introduction, the music industry has reversed the trend of revenue losses, thanks to revenue from streaming music.

"If you look at what has happened since the launch of the Spotify service, we have been incredibly successful on that score. Figures coming out the music industry show that after 15 years of revenue losses in music industry, the music industry is once again growing thanks to music streaming," notes Gutierrez.

Gutierrez is also confident that more and more former pirates will start to pay for the premium version of Spotify, which removes ads and the limitations associated with the free account.

[via The Journal on Sports and Entertainment Law, TorrentFreak]

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As 2016 draws to a close, so do some of the more ambitious mobile tech projects of recent years. Cyanogen OS is dead. Pebble is dying a slow death and wearables aren’t necessarily the hot commodity some had hoped.

This was also the year that I launched the LPX podcast, featuring interviews with people like:

• Jim Hall: founder of freeDOS
• Brooke Binkowski: managing editor of Snopes
• Michael Mrozek: developer of the DragonBox Pyra handheld computer

But as we get ready to greet 2017 with new chips, smartwatches, phones, tablets, notebooks, desktops, and more… let’s take a look back at some of the most popular topics we covered in 2016.

Continue reading Most popular Liliputing articles of 2016 at Liliputing.

Day in and day out copyright holders are bombarding Google with DMCA takedown notices, pointing out links to pirated content.

The majority of these requests are sent by the music and film industries, targeting hundreds of thousands of different websites.

In recent years the volume of takedown notices has increased spectacularly and in 2016 new records were shattered again.

Over the past 12 months, rightsholders asked Google to remove more than a billion links to allegedly infringing content, nearly twice as much as the 558 million it received last year.

Thanks to a new update to Google’s Transparency Report we now know for the first time how many of these were actually deleted. According to Google’s records, 89.8 percent of the requests were, resulting in 914 million removals.

Looking at the number of sites that are highlighted we see that it’s not just a few usual suspects that are causing problems. In total, rightsholders targeted content on 351,000 different websites.

Google takedown requests (past 12 months to December 29)

There is a great variety of copyright holders too. The UK music industry group BPI is at the forefront as usual, with more than 80 million requests, but Fox, NBC Universal, HBO and Microsoft are also among the top senders.

While the number of notices has steadily increased over the past several years, there are some early signs that they may level off in 2017. Over the past six months, the overall volume hasn’t increased, with the number of weekly takedowns hovering around 20 million.

Still, it’s clear that the major rightsholder groups and Google have different views on the DMCA takedown procedure and how to move forward.

The MPAA, RIAA, and other industry groups are calling for extensive revisions and don’t want Google and others to “hide” behind their safe harbor protections. Among other things, they want a ‘notice-and-stay-down‘ policy to ensure that, once deleted, content doesn’t pop up elsewhere.

Google, however, sees this an unworkable solution and believes that the current system is capable of dealing with infringing content.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon line of laptops have a reputation as thin, light, and powerful notebook computers. Now the company has launched a new model that’s even more compact… and more powerful.

Earlier this month we reported on leaked details about Lenovo’s 2017 ThinkPad X1 Carbon. It turns out, Lenovo didn’t wait until 2017 to launch it.

The new notebook is up for order from Lenovo.com.

Lenovo says the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon is 8 percent smaller than its predecessor, measuring 0.62 inches thick and weighing about 2.51 pounds.

Continue reading Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X1 Carbon features slim bezels, Thunderbolt 3, Kaby Lake at Liliputing.

Zotac is the latest PC hardware company set to launch an external graphics dock that allows you to add a desktop-class graphics card to just about any laptop or desktop computer that has a Thunderbolt 3/USB Type-C port.

The company plans to showcase the device at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Zotac will also reveal new ZBOX mini PCs.

There aren’t a lot of details about Zotac’s new products yet, but the new mini PCs are expected to include Intel Kaby Lake processors, Thunderbolt 3 ports, and some models may support Intel vPro features and/or NVIDIA GeForce graphics.

Continue reading Zotac teases external graphics dock, new mini PCs ahead of CES at Liliputing.

Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) is bringing four tiny desktop computers to the Consumer Electronics Show next week.

One is the ECS Liva Z fanless mini PC with an Intel Apollo Lake processor, which we first heard about in November. But there will also be three other models, including several variations in the Z series.

Liva Z

This computer features a 10 watt, quad-core Intel Apollo Lake processor, support for 4K displays, and support for Windows 10.

Continue reading ECS to show four new mini PCs at CES at Liliputing.

This summer US chip maker Qualcomm sued Chinese phone maker Meizu, claiming the company’s devices infringed on Qaulcomm’s patents for cellular communications.

Now the two companies have reached a settlement, with Meizu agreeing to pay Qualcomm patent fees.

The deal gives Meizu the right to sell phones around the world that use Qualcomm’s patented technology for 3G and 4G LTE modems.

As Bloomberg notes, the case is important not only because of what it means for the two companies involved, but also because it shows that a major US company was able to win an intellectual property case in China, a country that hasn’t always been known for rigorously protecting intellectual property, but where there there are more than a billion cellphones in use.

Continue reading Qualcomm and Meizu settle patent case at Liliputing.