They're only threatening in Norway but they already mean business in Ireland: the Irish Recorded Music Association is suing two ISPs for not interfering with what their customers are doing and since they refuse to disconnect people the industry suspects of filesharing.

Is is election time in Germany - and the music industry has found some new friends - the conservatives. If blocking websites instead of shutting them down and prosecuting their operators wasn't enough, and if adding violent games to that block list still wasn't enough, here's the last straw: three strikes. Never mind that that part has been ruled unconstitutional in France and never mind that the EU parliament repeatedly voted overwhelmingly against a framework that would allow such legislation - we want to cut those dirty pirates off. Then there's only the matter of pressuring the highest court into submission so they don't dare to rule the same way like their French counterpart..

So the music industry has apparently discovered a new business model: if selling ringtones for outrageous prices (you're not allowed to sample your own CDs after all you dirty pirate) wasn't enough, now they claim that your ringtone is a public performance and you should be paying extra for it.

When it comes to piracy, the industry likes to say copyright infringement equals theft - even though the law clearly makes a difference. But then when it comes to reselling those things that are like stolen CDs, suddenly online and offline become two very different animals. Can they make up their minds already?

BDSup2Sub 3.9.4 contains a workaround for interleaved VobSub streams and adds tooltips for most GUI items.

The latest beta of neuron2's nVidia accelerated decoder tools now honors pulldown flags and fixes bugs in random access of MPEG program streams and TS streams.

BD Rebuilder 0.23.02 fixes a problem that could cause oversizing, uses the latest x264 build and contains some other minor fixes and corrections.

MakeMKV 1.4.4 supports multiangle Blu-ray discs, fixes MKV compatibility issues and improves handling of complex mpls files.

Once again, it's not the obvious suspects to make the first move in trying to abuse invasive government data collection for their own use - in Austria, it's not the music industry that demands access to the data gathered under the EU snooping directive, it's the Association of Austrian Newspapers. Wait a tick.. actually the music industry did come first.

In the wake of a record verdict for the music industry, at least some artists get that this whole thing has been blown way out of proportions.

Meanwhile, at Growlaw, they ask what if today's copyright law existed way back - how many of the world's literary masterpieces still have been written?

Is this what it takes for Blu-ray to really take off? Enter the $99 Blu-ray player. It's only profile 1.1 but what did you expect as long as 2.0 isn't mandatory?

1.9 million USD - that's the RIAA's latest favorite number. It's the amount of damages awarded to them in the retrial of the first P2P trial in the US. That amount comes from 80'000$ damages per song shared (24 in total). If you think that number is completely out of whack (and there's no way the defendant will ever to be able to pay it), you're not alone. The defense will appeal and one of the arguments is already known: they're going after the constitutionality of the statutory damages (damages that have no relation to the actual damages that the plaintiffs incurred - if we take $0.99 as the price of one song, 1.939 million people would have to download one of those 24 songs (and have no intention of paying for it if they couldn't get it for free) for the labels to lose that amount of money). Apparently, there's prior case law on just that topic - and if you think about it, 80'000 times the value of the content, and for something done without any financial motives, does seem just a little bit excessive. And on top of that, also this time around, the jury wasn't told the plaintiff needed to prove that dissemination actually took place (so that somebody actually downloaded those songs in the shared folder)

That didn't take long - didn't I say it's a matter of time until Germany's Internet block list is to be expanded beyond its original aim? It took one single day, ladies and gentlemen, though I'm a bit surprised that the first attempt wasn't made by the copyright industry - instead conservative German politicians want to block violent content. Unfortunately, since there are elections later this year (makes you think why we got the whole child porn agenda just now, doesn't it?) and since the teenager who ran amok and killed 15 people last March just happened to play a round of Counterstrike, politicians immediately forget common sense and look for an easy target to blame. After all, it's obvious and scientifically proven that playing Counterstrike will turn you into a killing machine, right ;) As horrible as it is to lose somebody in such a tragedy, there's no excuse to put blame where it doesn't belong - any psychologist worth his/her salt can tell you that such actions cannot be attributed to one single source - it's a combination of many factors that make up the whole.

The popular Popcornhour media streamer is coming out in a second generation model: the C200 is powered by the latest Sigma Designs chipset and handles pretty much every format you throw at it - including Blu-ray if you add a drive to the unit. The unit should launch in July (August in Europe), no price has been set and there's no information yet as to whether Blu-ray ISOs are also supported and about the region code capabilities of the unit. But make it play those ISOs and region free and my A100 is going to retire and I'll finally have a Blu-ray player in the living room.

Is Internet cutoffs without due process coming back to New Zealand copyright law? The government is looking at reworking the controversial section that was scratched shortly before the law went into effect. To do that, they're consulting multiple parties, but curiously absent are ISPs and any subscriber advocates - so effectively it'll come down to a choir championed by the copyright cartels singing Vive la France. How can any law be fair and balanced if you don't have all the interests at one table and they all have the same amount of influence?

Yesterday, the UK's "Digital Britain Report" has finally been revealed. It is all about expanding Internet access, higher speeds and another major section of interest: copyright law. As expected, there's no three strikes but instead ISPs should forward copyright notices from rights holders and there's the potential of technical measures against filesharing. On top of that, ISPs are supposed to keep records on file sharers, to be turned over to the industry when they intend to sue one (provided they get a court order)

Finally, under the guise of protecting the children, Germany is following such stand up nations like North Korea or China to censor the Internet. A secret list (and no oversight) of websites to be blocked is to be created and then all ISPs have to block access to those sites. The list of supposed to only contain child pornography, and those that pushed the agenda claim the law contains safeguards that would prevent sites containing other content to be added to the block list, but I bet you that within a month, we'll see the first attempt to include other kind of content - most likely sites that the copyright industry would like to see blocked (so on top of that list will be The Pirate Bay). And since the block is done on a DNS level, all you need to do is use an out of country DNS server to circumvent the measure - and even though the law contains some last minute additions that require that an attempt is first made to take the offending site offline, but since the whole thing is secret, we'll never know if this will really lead to more people who abuse children and put their "exploits" on the net will actually be brought to justice. And, to really show the law is more about pulling the curtain than to get that kind of content off the net is the fact that if a site is added to the list, the hosting company is not even informed (you'd think it's in everybody's interest to take down kiddie porn immediately).

Pro industry legislation that screws over the regular folks seem to be all the rage these days (and have been for a while) at least if technology and copyright is concerned. Here's one that's decidedly pro consumer and the industry will be screaming bloody murder about it: Eric Massa's Broadband Internet Fairness act, which would require regulatory approval of any usage based billing for broadband access. In other words, ISPs would have to justify to the FCC why they want to impose massive price hikes when cost per user when cost has consistently gone down over the past years (so making a case would prove rather difficult and hence expect fierce opposition by the pro cap lobby).

Japan just fell in line with other copyright industry friendly countries - the latest amendment to their copyright law makes downloading of content uploaded without the authors consent illegal, although enforcement is a bit tricky as the user needs to know that the files were illegally uploaded.

From the "I want my cake and eat it" department: if they're not busy calling traditional radio a form of piracy, they want the FCC to investigate those pirate stations for not participating in piracy (ehm, not playing the music of artists that support taxation of radio stations (that money would go to the labels of course.. no, I swear that has nothing to do with it, it's all about the artists)

So, the music industry is being decimated by piracy, or so goes the industry's favorite argument for stricter copyright law. Less money means less incentive for artists to create art is the argument. So, how come the number of albums released since Napster made online copyright infringement easy has more than doubled?

Besides cutting people off from the Internet without due process and suing their customers, the RIAA also loves the idea of ISPs blocking any content the industry doesn't approve of. So, their latest move comes in Norway where they are threatening to sue the largest ISP Telenor - you have 14 days to block the site or we'll enter your ship you dirty pirate enablers is the line they're using. Telenor's response: that would be like if the postal service opened all letters, read them and decided which ones to deliver - needless to say that this wouldn't be such a bad idea either.. so you can catch pirates using good old fashioned technology, too ;)

That's going to throw a wrench into the music industry's lawsuit machine in Italy - a recent ruling in Rome says that an IP address isn't sufficient to identify who was really sharing content.

Is Napster 2.0 (AKA flat fee subscription to download as much as you want) finally making an appearance 10 years after it should have? UK's Virgin Media is poised to launch just such a program later this year - so far they have Universal Music on board.

Finally, ars reports on the World Copyright Summit. The agenda in itself would indicate that they're really looking ahead, yet the "New Visions for Creative Industries" remain thin whereas the rest (you know, enforcing copyright and the likes) got all the attention.

BDSup2Sub 3.9.1 allows editing of imported DVD palettes, improves the color editing dialog and stores alpha cropping/minimum merge time and PGC palette export settings in the ini file.

And a correction regarding the news item from the 10th: there has yet to be a ruling as to whether the Pirate Bay judge was biased - the statement is only the opinion of the court that convicted the defendants.

BDSup2Sub 3.9.0 can import and export SUP/IFO, supports opening SUB/IDX files via SUB file, has store/next/previous buttons in the edit dialog, supports keyboard accelerators for most menus, exports target palette to PGCEdit format and the used sources are packed into the JAR file.

I'm sure you're all as sick and tired of hearing lobbyists whine about how downloads are killing this and that content industry - it's much harder to argue that people simply spend money elsewhere. That is, unless you come armed with a nice little graph like this one which just give you an idea that people are simply spending money elsewhere.

After the initial shock, the French government is charging ahead with their three strikes law - except that after the third strike you won't be cut off from the Internet after all since that was ruled unconstitutional. Instead of using the special tribunal where you're guilty until proven otherwise, they want to use "specialized judges" to have a final say. I wonder if that means those judges get their salary from the entertainment industry (properly laundered of course). Meanwhile, the opposition is asking that the whole law is scrapped.

Meanwhile, on a EU level, while the EU parliament has repeatedly voted against any three strikes legislation, the council of ministers is still not giving up on the idea (didn't I tell you they would ignore the elected representatives?) and want to bring up the whole stupid idea yet again.

Finally, ISPs that sell a lot more then they can handle in the UK serve as the best example why we need network neutrality - unlimited package that limits your downloads to 256kbit/s during peak hours? Geez. And remember that the last mile makes up more than 80% of the total cost - so once you get that fibre to your home, how much traffic you generate matters very little to your ISP - interconnects between POPs and uplink capability are easily expanded whenever necessary.

SupRip 1.16 improves handling of languages that have accents below letters.

Seeing is believing - that's the way I approach video quality - and according to their press release, so does German codec maker dicas who just announced that their encoding metrics for AVC content mean 30% less data rate at the same quality. I wonder if that's compared to x264 with the proper settings or to a certain encoder from that fruit company that managed to sell boatloads of phones purely on design and never mind the fact that the feature set lacks behind the rest of the industry by several generations (no it's not June 19th yet and yes I have not only one but two ;)

Shock and disbelief - but they remain undeterred. After all, the Constitutional Council only throw out 10% of the three strikes legislation. Or did they? Wasn't the whole thing about not having to go to a court of law and considering the accused guilty until proven otherwise. If you take that away, isn't the whole thing like a civil case on copyright infringement? And so, the "good little soldiers for the RIAA" (oops.. they say copyright but I I have an involuntary reflex that cuts right through the disguises ;) will keep on fighting on behalf of the industry.

Some time, it can be a good thing to live in Europe but not be part of the European Union. While the European Union passed extensive snooping laws that gave past dictators and despots to turn in their graves from envy, Norway is quite serious about online privacy - 3 weeks and then ISPs have to erase all data. How long do you think it'll take for the industry to find a good little Norwegian solder to bring forth a law to correct this "situation"?

MakeMKV 1.4.3 contains many stability improvements.

Zut alors! How dare they! Just when Sarkozy and his friends in the copyright industry thought they'd finally set a three strikes precedent, there comes the Constitutional Council and rules the whole thing unconstitutional - because no matter how you twist and turn it, the presumption of innocence still holds in France (and politicians around the world should remember that before they succumb to the talking points of high paid lobbyists). Though, they have their next attempt already on its way - it's called filtering. Under the guise of trying to stop child porn (as if there were many webhosts that wouldn't bend over backwards to get such content offline yesterday) and terrorism, it won't be long until filtering would be used to filter out content the government doesn't like - and seeing that the French government is fully into the industry's pocket, an attempt to extend filters to P2P and other things the industry doesn't like is inevitable. It's not like they're not busy trying to get access to the snooping archives ISPs keep on us already.

Finally, as the first ever P2P case to go to trial approaches its second iteration, the new defense has set their sights mighty high: not only are they aiming at a stop of the RIAA lawsuit campaign, but they've joined forces with "pay back all the money from that campaign" Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson.

DVDx 2.20 has two new MPEG-2 profiles, sets MPEG-2 GOP sizes to be compliant with DVD authoring software and contains a bunch of optimizations and bugfixes.

Then it seems I missed some of the DivX 7.2 changelog: The latest version of the converter supports MKV input, has native handling of MP4 and MOV files containing AVC video and AAC audio, supports pass-through of AC3 audio without an AC3 filter as well as pass through of MP3 and AAC audio tracks and combines multiple files into one for any profile. The latest web player has also been localized into all of the 8 officially supported languages and finally the new player offers an improved OVS user experience for device registration and there are new localizations as well.

Finally, one has to wonder how much it takes to be considered biased as a judge in Sweden. Apparently being member of a pro copyright group which works towards expanding copyright law isn't enough. I dare presume you get more balanced knowledge about copyright by visiting this site daily than participating in any organisation that works together with big content to strengthen copyright law - after all, I'm pro copyright as well (heck I earn my living creating things that are protected by copyright law so I'm the last person to want to see it abolished - but it has to make sense for all parties involved and the balanced approach has gone out the window a long time ago).

BD Rebuilder 0.22.20 has a hidden option to force movie-only encodes to Blu-ray format, changes default priority to idle and contains some other minor corrections and fixes.

MediaCoder 0.7.1 now ships with a CUDA accelerated video encoder and also supports CUDA accelerated scaling and deinterlacing.

DVDSubEdit 1.5022 has an option for saving sup files with the original PTS and shows a warning if you're editing a bitmap file and the automatic CLUT (color lookup table?) has two or more identical colors and there's an option to invert the current selection as well.

Arrrr! The pirates have set sail for the EU parliament as Sweden's Pirate Party captures its first seat. Unfortunately, it would take a gazillion more, along with some serious bribes to ministers to get a reasonable copyright agenda in Europe.

Epix is the latest online venture of Lionsgate, paramount and MGM. They'll offer 720p movie streaming for free, even for movies that aren't out on DVD yet.

Finally, the final version of the AACS license has been released - starting January 1st 2014, output resizing for analog output will definitely go into effect. Managed copy managed to survive but iirc it's optional on Blu-ray anyway so expect not to see it..

All of neuron2's NVidia based video indexing tools now support multiple input files.

MKVtoolnix 2.9.5 supports .mp3 and XVID FourCCs in QuickTime files, offers improved control over which tags get copied, includes chapters, global and track specific tracks in the output of mkvmerge's identification mode and there's a bunch of bugfixes, too.

Then there's Release Candidate 3 of VLC 1.0.0.

And then we have Billboard interviewing former head of the RIAA Hilary Rosen on the advent of Napster's 10th anniversary.

ProgDVB 6.06.5 has a new on screen display dialog for the channel list.

Chiming in to the current discussion in the UK is the head of Carphone Warehouse - an independent mobile phone retailer with its own broadband arm. He calls the content industry's attempts to have ISPs block what their subscribers are doing as naive an ineffective. Instead they should focus on education and providing services that allow consumers "to get content easily and cheaply". Unfortunately, politicians are more likely to listen to the overblown "loss numbers" presented by big content lobbyists and whomever pays them more.

I think that one slipped through the cracks: clark15b announced his very own TS/M2TS demuxer. It is open source and available on all platforms.

DGMPGDec 1.5.5 has an option to display HD content in full size, discards video data before the first sequence header and fixes a bug in PAT/PMT parsing.

What's more important - the right to privacy or content owner's ability to go after alleged infringers? That's the question a Swiss court had to answer after the Swiss Data Protection commissioner asked P2P data tracking outfit Logistep to cease and desist from tracking P2P sharers online and report their IP addresses to content owners. Now the Federal Administrative Court has ruled in favor of Logistep - according to the court, the right to privacy is outweighed by the public interest to go after alleged pirates. I'm not sure though if the public would've come to the same conclusion (even the Swiss parliament saw the futility for users to determine which content is legitimate and which isn't so when they passed the Swiss DMCA, they opted not to make P2P downloads illegal (uploads have always been and continue to be illegal though)

While big content would love three strikes legislation (and the EU parliaments clear ruling against the legality of such measures be damned), the UK government is still not convinced (maybe made a significant contribution towards lowering the budget deficit?). Rather, they prefer "technical solutions" which could mean filtering or throttling (as if throttling wasn't already being done - and it doesn't only affect illegitimate content)

DivX 7.2 fixes a few issues in the DivX player.

DumpHD 0.61 supports comments inside KEYDB files and wrong key detection has been improved as well.

Could this be the holy grail the content industry has been waiting for? Their efforts to make the government their enforcement arm have been welcomed with less than enthusiasm by the people that would have to do the actual enforcement, but this one could change things a bit: The state of Washington has just passed a bill that adds taxes to digital downloads. And the way the law it is written, it doesn't matter whether you obtain a digital product via official means or not - it is still taxable. So, if you download 1000 songs of a P2P network and don't pay any download tax, you're now cheating the IRS - and they're not known to take tax evasion lightly.

Not in our name - that's what hip hop band Advance Patrol is telling big content (who used the availability of their albums on The Pirate Bay as a reason to go after the site) and is making their latest album available for free - via The Pirate Bay.

Reverbnation is the latest site to experiment with new business models in the music business - their "Fair Share" program would allow free music downloads but pay participating musicians 50 cents per track download, paid for by branded messages within the digital cover art. Sounds interesting, I'm just wondering how I'd see that message playing the song via Winamp (I've yet to see any cover art.. and I don't care to see it). Also, the statement about songs been tracked has me wondering just how exactly they plan on doing that given that MP3 doesn't have a "phone home" feature. Watermarks?

BD Rebuilder 0.22.01 improves compatibility with standalone players by using different tsmuxer options and creating certain file folders if necessary, has an option to keep interlaced content interlaced, uses the MKV format as intermediate format, uses the latest x264 revision and fixes a few bugs.

AC3Filter 1.61b clears the DirectShow filter cache on install and uninstall, contains updated Slovak and Spanish translations and fixes two bugs.

Older news can be found here.

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