Pirating statistics for Oscar-nominated films

Continuing the day’s cinematograph film theme, Waxy.org has an article, Pirating the 2010 Oscars, which shows statistics (and graphs) about the speed at which pirates have pirated Oscar-nominated films over the last few years.

Since 2003, I’ve tracked the online distribution of Oscar screeners, and every year, the piracy scene manages to release nearly every film by nomination day. Last year, all but three films were leaked in DVD quality by nomination day.

Incredibly, the tide may be turning. Fewer Oscar screeners leaked online this year — only 14 out of 34 nominated films, the lowest percentage ever. And they’re taking twice as long to leak — a median 21 days after theatrical release, up from 11 days the previous year.

  12:34am  •  Movies  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

iiNet wins piracy court case (Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd)

An important Australian case was decided today by the Federal Court. iiNet, Australia’s 3rd largest ISP behind Telstra and Optus, was sued by 34 parties – mostly movie industry companies. iiNet, like any ISP, had customers who were pirating movies (via BitTorrent). Australia’s Copyright Act has provisions which impose secondary liability on people who “authorise” the infringement of copyright. If iiNet was held to be guilty of authorising such infringement, they would be liable as if they had pirated the movies themselves. So, there was a lot on the line for iiNet. This was bet-the-company-level litigation (and, in some ways, bet-the-industry litigation).

In a typically lengthy 600+ paragraph judgment, the Court ruled in iiNet’s favour.  The SMH has a decent report on the case. I’m sure there are academics preparing blog posts which are far more erudite and analytical, but I have excerpted the main points from the summary of the judgment:

[The Issue] This proceeding raises the question whether an internet service provider or ISP authorises the infringement of copyright of its users or subscribers when they download cinematograph films in a manner which infringes copyright. In Australian copyright law, a person who authorises the infringement of copyright is treated as if they themselves infringed copyright directly.

[Reasoning] Firstly, in the law of authorisation, there is a distinction to be drawn between the provision of the ‘means’ of infringement compared to the provision of a precondition to infringement occurring. The decisions in Moorhouse, Jain, Metro, Cooper and Kazaa are each examples of cases in which the authorisers provided the ‘means’ of infringement. But, unlike those decisions, I find that the mere provision of access to the internet is not the ‘means’ of infringement. There does not appear to be any way to infringe the applicants’ copyright from the mere use of the internet. Rather, the ‘means’ by which the applicants’ copyright is infringed is an iiNet user’s use of the constituent parts of the BitTorrent system. iiNet has no control over the BitTorrent system and is not responsible for the operation of the BitTorrent system.

Secondly, I find that a scheme for notification, suspension and termination of customer accounts is not, in this instance, a relevant power to prevent copyright infringement pursuant to s 101(1A)(a) of the Copyright Act, nor in the circumstances of this case is it a reasonable step pursuant to s 101(1A)(c) of the Copyright Act. The reason for this finding is complicated and lengthy, and is not suitable for reduction to a short summary for present purposes so I shall refrain from attempting to do so.

Thirdly, I find that iiNet simply cannot be seen as sanctioning, approving or countenancing copyright infringement. The requisite element of favouring infringement on the evidence simply does not exist. The evidence establishes that iiNet has done no more than to provide an internet service to its users. This can be clearly contrasted with the respondents in the Cooper and Kazaa proceedings, in which the respondents intended copyright infringements to occur, and in circumstances where the website and software respectively were deliberately structured to achieve this result.

Notably, even if iiNet was entitled to the safe harbour protections (because it had the “three strikes” scheme of notification/suspension/termination in place), iiNet did not even need to rely on it because it wasn’t guilty of authorising infringement in the first place.

Big win for ISPs – had the judgment gone against iiNet, not only would they all been exposed to a huge amount of liability, but the burdens on them to ensure that this sort of thing didn’t happen again would be weighty indeed.

Two other paragraphs of note are (emphasis added):

This proceeding has attracted widespread interest both here in Australia and abroad, and both within the legal community and the general public. So much so that I understand this is the first Australian trial to be twittered or tweeted. I granted approval for this to occur in view of the public interest in the proceeding, and it seems rather fitting for a copyright trial involving the internet.

That this trial should have attracted such attention is unsurprising, given the subject matter. As far as I am aware, this trial, involving suit against an ISP claiming copyright infringement on its part due to alleged authorisation of the copyright infringement of its users or subscribers, is the first trial of its kind in the world to proceed to hearing and judgment.

This is, of course, a trial judgment, and the applicants may appeal.

  9:12pm  •  Law  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Lehman’s last weekend – from the Secretary of the Treasury’s viewpoint

An excerpt from Hank Paulson’s new book, On the Brink, recounts his weekend before Lehman went belly up:

He made it clear, without a hint of apology in his voice, that there was no way Barclays would buy Lehman. He offered no specifics, other than to say that we were asking the British government to take on too big a risk, and he was not willing to have us unload our problems on the British taxpayer.

It was shortly before 1 p.m. when Tim, (Security and Exchange Commission Chairman) Chris (Cox) and I addressed the CEOs again. I was completely candid. Barclays had dropped out, and we had no buyer for Lehman.

“The British screwed us,” I blurted out, more in frustration than anger. I’m sure the FSA had very good reasons for their stance, and it would have been more proper and responsible for me to have said we had been surprised and disappointed to learn of the UK regulator’s decision, but I was caught up in the emotion of the moment.

  7:45pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (1)  • 

The Chess Master and the Computer

Garry Kasparov wrote an article about the impact that computers have had on the world of chess. A lengthy but very interesting article:

Even more notable was how the advanced chess experiment continued. In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a “freestyle” chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers. Normally, “anti-cheating” algorithms are employed by online sites to prevent, or at least discourage, players from cheating with computer assistance. (I wonder if these detection algorithms, which employ diagnostic analysis of moves and calculate probabilities, are any less “intelligent” than the playing programs they detect.)

Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time.

From Kottke.

  7:40pm  •  Sports  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Video roundup

A few miscellaneous videos to entertain you.

View from a rocket booster on Discovery
Real-time footage from a camera mounted on Discovery’s rocket booster. The booster is jettisoned after about 90 seconds (by which time the rocket is maybe 30km high), and it floats back down to the ocean.

Sir Patrick Stewart talks about Twitter

I don’t tweet. I’ve never Twittered. And, it’s not that I’m resisting it, but, I see no reason to have it in my life. To reduce life to — how many? — 140… just seems to me to be a little bit simplistic.

But he has a laptop and an iPhone (which he notes is “an extension of whom I am”). And he loves emails. What a legend.

Stop motion flipbook-style video
Another one of those videos where you say, “That’s really cool, but how long did that take to make?!” There were over 6500 frames.

  9:11pm  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Monopoly, redesigned

Hasbro has redesigned the redesigned the Monopoly board. The board is now circular. It looks cool, but the deal breaker for me is that they’ve also gotten rid of cash. That’s right, Monopoly money is no more. Players get cards which they insert into an electronic bank account in the middle of the board (it looks like a calculator to me). Blah.

Where’s the fun in that? Gone is the tactic to cut backroom deals by waving fistfuls of notes in front of other people’s faces. Gone is the ability to chip in some cash so your ally can buy that fourth hotel. Gone is the psychological advantage of stacking your massive pile of cash up against your arch-rival’s dwindling reserves. And of course, gone is the ability to engage in daylight robbery of your opponents’ cash when their head is turned. Or even the bank’s.

  7:37pm  •  Miscellaneous  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

BRK.B

In 2004, when I was writing about Google’s then-upcoming IPO, I made the point that the absolute price of a stock has an effect on the liquidity of a stock – mainly due to psychological factors. I brought up the example of Berkshire Hathaway, which at that time was trading at almost $90,000 for its A shares and about $3,000 for its B shares. At those prices, I noted that Berkshire was less liquid than some of its comparably sized peers (ie, Berkshire shares were changing hands relatively infrequently). A reader disputed this proposition, so it’s interesting to now revisit it, given what has happened at Berkshire over the last couple of weeks.

Aside from the fact that it’s Warren Buffett’s company, Berkshire is an interesting company. Berkshire itself is a holding company, with many, many wholly- or majority-owned subsidiaries (a large insurance and reinsurance arm, utilities, apparel, retail, etc). It also holds significant stakes in numerous major corporations (Moody’s, Washington Post, Wells Fargo, Gillette, Coke, Goldman Sachs, GE, etc). Consequently, investing in Berkshire is akin to investing in a diversified mutual/managed fund – Buffett himself has 99% of his personal wealth in the form of Berkshire stock. Berkshire’s business lines produce a lot of cash (somewhere in the region of $8-10bn), and it’s Buffett’s job to figure out how to invest that money.

Berkshire’s common stock (“BRK”) is split up into two classes. Its Class A shares have been the highest priced shares on the NYSE for some time now, so Buffett decided to create Class B shares, to allow “the masses” to be able to invest in BRK. A B share has 1/30th the rights of an A share, with two other differences: B shares have proportionately less voting rights, and cannot be converted into A shares (whereas conversion in the opposite direction is true). Consequently, a B share is theoretically worth slightly less than 1/30th the price of an A share.

B shares, however, are now priced at about $75. The reason for the repricing is that they underwent a 50-for-1 stock split a couple weeks ago. Berkshire is notable for having never distributed a dividend, nor splitting its stock (both of which are factors which helped to drive those stocks’ prices to lofty heights). The reason for the recent split was only to support the mechanics of a proposed acquisition deal.

The immediate consequence of the split was to drive up the liquidity of the stock. Small-time investors could suddenly afford to buy a handful of BRK shares, and the trading volume of BRK.B spiked that week. The other consequence was that BRK could now be added to the S&P 500 index. Despite its market cap of about $200b, BRK was absent from the index due to its low liquidity. Because there are many funds out there which attempt to track the S&P, any change to the stocks comprising that index would necessitate at least some of those funds needing to add BRK to their portfolio. This in turn would drive up liquidity (and price) of the stock.

Granted, five days of trading history with the new Berkshire B shares doesn’t provide much of a window onto long-term return potential. Average daily trading volume in the Berkshire Hathaway B shares has soared though, from 41,000 shares traded to as high as 6.6 million shares traded — and that was just on Monday. In the past five days, approximately 50 million Berkshire Hathaway shares have been traded.

Consider this: the 50 million Berkshire Hathaway shares traded over the past five days represent what would have previously amounted to almost three-and-a-half years’ worth of trading volume for the Berkshire Hathaway B shares. (src)

Interestingly, many still regard that BRK is still undervalued post-split (Buffett thought they were undervalued pre-split).

Finally, another side effect of the split is that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will probably benefit nicely. Several years ago, Buffett pledged to donate about $30b to the Gates Foundation in the form of BRK stock, delivered over time. The Foundation currently holds about 78 million BRK.B shares, and because it is obligated to spend a certain amount of money by Buffett, the Foundation regularly sells its BRK shares on the market. The increased demand for BRK.B shares in the short-term should held the Foundation to unload stock at better prices. In the long-term, the increased liquidity of the stock should also enable the Foundation to more smoothly unload shares without jarring the market price as much.

  1:22am  •  Business & Finance  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Obama does play-by-play

Obama attends a Georgetown vs Duke basketball game and even takes a spot in the commentary box.

Seated in a cushioned folding chair mere feet from the basketball court, POTUS studiously remained dispassionate and impartial even as fans of the Georgetown University team all around him went absolutely berserk. Just to his left was a line of shirtless students smeared with gray and blue body paint, some wearing frenzied blue wigs and screaming like they were possessed. In response to a call that was apparently unfavorable to the Georgetown University team, one of the shirtless fans tried starting a cheer unfit for a family newspaper. But just as it started to get off the ground, a second shirtless student — no doubt a nerd — scolded, “Dude, the President of the United States is right there!” Which effectively killed that cheer.

  8:46pm  •  Sports  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

The most dictionary definitions

I always thought that the word “set” had the most definitions in the dictionary.  But it turns out that it depends on which dictionary you go to. “Run” has the most in some. “Turn” and “use” also have a lot of definitions. The top 10 list for the OED is here.

On the Urban Dictionary, the word with the most definitions is… “emo“.

  1:34am  •  Miscellaneous  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (2)  • 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Earlier tonight, I watched Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. There are a lot of old, classic movies I haven’t seen because, I must confess, I usually find older films boring and slow-paced. (I can hear my dad scoffing at this from 10,000km away.) This movie happily turned out to not be one of them.

The 1967 film is probably the first to tackle interracial marriage, after it was effectively legalized in the same year by a Supreme Court judgment. Sydney Poitier plays a 38-year old man who meets a 23-year old woman in Hawaii. Poitier is an extremely well-credentialed medical doctor, but of course he’s black and she’s white. Ten days later they decide they want to get married and fly into San Francisco to sound out her parents about the idea. Even though her parents are wealthy liberals who are outspoken proponents of racial equality, the first meeting obviously does not go down well.

The rest of the film is very entertaining and I was surprised to find that the dialog wasn’t naive at all, but quite engaging and believable. (And for some reason I didn’t think people were allowed to cuss someone out and call them a bitch in movies back in the 60s, but it refreshingly turns out that they were.) Although times have obviously moved on since then, the film still maintains its relevance. I can see this sort of situation occurring reasonably regularly in today’s world. However, lest you think I imply that no progress has been made, the outcome of the movie might have been but a fairy tale back in the 60s, it no longer is today.

The other thing is that the film is set in SF, and I really enjoyed seeing the backdrop of the Bay and the SF streets throughout the movie. The look and feel of the city hasn’t changed all that much actually, although it seems that they had some cool diners back then where waitresses would come out and serve you in the car park when you honked your horn.

  1:26am  •  Movies  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

… and that’s 12 years of blogging

I know that there are several active, continuously-running blogs out there that are older than mine, but I don’t really know how many there are, or indeed, what the oldest one is. So, I went out looking for them.

There are two issues I encountered with this. Firstly, the definition of a blog in the late 90s was hazy, so there are some websites that don’t fit today’s standard format that may or may not be regarded as blogs (at the least, they are precursors to blogs). Secondly, what makes a blog “continuously running” and “active”? If there’s a hiatus of 3 years in the middle, it’s not really an unbroken run. Or if there is one post every three months, is the blog actually active?

My first port of call was Wikipedia’s Blog entry. Apparently Justin Hall started blogging in 1994, but has since stopped. Writer Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor is also held up to be the oldest active blog. It appears to be still active today, but the design is stuck in the 90s and it’s hard to tell from the archives when his first post was. Scripting News is still running and has comprehensive archives. I then recalled visiting longstanding sites like Robot Wisdom, Peterme.com and Everything But Gaming. Robot Wisdom stopped publishing in its original form, and became something else. Peterme.com is still active. It only has archives back to March 2003, but I’m sure that it is much older than that – at least 1998. Then there were gaming sites like Blue’s News which used to cover lots of Quake-related news. (I am surprised to see is still running – it has archives back to mid-1996.) A Google search turned up this article, which claims that a few ZDNet writers used to keep an online diary (ie, a blog). However, it’s difficult to verify given that the archives aren’t really available. In any event, those writers aren’t keeping that diary anymore.

So it turns out that it’s not as easy as I thought as it would be to identify what the oldest active blogs online are.

I started compiling a list, but I didn’t get very far. My totally arbitrary criteria for what qualified included: the post archives are still available somewhere (even on archive.org), it’s updated multiple times a month, it exists on the web (as opposed to a .plan file… after all, a blog is a weblog), and posts originate on the blog (and aren’t transferred in from some other medium like a paper diary or news articles published elsewhere first).

I am sure that this list is far from complete, so drop me a note if you know of any others:

• Chaos Manor, Jerry Pournelle (mid-90s?)
• Blue’s News (mid-1996)
• Scripting News, Dave Winer (April 1997)
• Expect Nothing (started at shlonglor.com, then Everything But Gaming), Geoff Fraizer (late 1997)

Have you been reading Hear Ye! for a long time? Post a comment and let me know how long!

  1:14am  •  Internet  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (4)  • 

iPad impressions

At the risk of adding to what’s already been said on the net all day today, I join the crowd which is thinking, “Is that it?”

To be sure, the iPad is a very nice product. But, for all the incredible publicity the device received over the last several months, the expectation was set that the device wouldn’t just be “very nice” – that was a given – but it would be “magical and revolutionary”, as Apple’s own advertising copy trumpets. That it would be a game changer. It’s not a game changer. Therein lies the disappointment.

The iPad is a luxury device. It’s the middle-class family’s replacement for the Sunday morning paper at the dining table; the magazine on the coffee table next to your soy latté; the paperback novel next to the toilet; the remote control for the 60″ LCD TV; the photo album you hand over to friends when they come over after you get back from your trip to the Caymans; and the laptop you sit up in bed with, browsing through Facebook. It’s something you can chill out with on the couch, in front of the fireplace, by the poolside, standing in a queue, or sitting on a plane. Or of course in a big comfy armchair like the one Steve Jobs plonked himself in today.

"My precious!"

But it’s not a killer app. It’s not a must-have, in the same way that a computer, or a mobile phone is a must-have. It’s kind of like the Macbook Air. Neat in theory and if you have some spare cash, but ultimately a luxury.

The iPad is essentially an iPhone with a 10″ screen.  Without a camera, it doesn’t even have all the features an iPhone has (and you obviously can’t use it like a phone by holding it up to your ear).

A market killer?
Despite a claimed 10 hour movie-playing and 1 month standby battery life, this device was never truly going to compete with the Kindles and the Nooks. The color screen will be difficult to read outdoors, and be harsher on the eyes than e-ink is over long periods. I haven’t read this anywhere, but as is usual for Apple, I doubt the battery is replaceable. Over time, the battery life will degrade, and that will hamper the utility of the iPad for battery-intensive applications (my 18-month old Macbook Pro now barely gets 75 minutes on a full charge, down from 4 hours when new, and my 18-month old iPhone 3G needs to be charged daily if it’s used even a little bit during the day).

I doubt it will destroy the netbook market either. The iPad can’t at the moment handle Microsoft documents, which is what most of the working world uses. So it’s not so good for professionals who need mobility, but also something which runs a normal O/S. And as good as the on-screen keyboard may be, nothing beats the tactile feel of a real keyboard, even if it’s not full-sized. (What happened to those rumors of haptic feedback?) However, it might be good for a backpacker, or a transcontinental bicyclist, who wants something slim and light, with near-universal net connectivity.

Apple’s stock trended down during the iPad announcement, until the price was announced. The stock shot up, mainly because – as I’ve written before – the market expected a price range of $600-1000, and the price beat market expectations. Stock price is all about expectations. However, $500 is for the entry model, and $500 is still expensive when I can get a decent netbook for half that price. Add 3G and a bit of flash memory and you’re looking at something within sniffing distance of a Macbook.

People have been disappointed at the lack of features: no multitasking, no built-in SD card slot (you’ll need to buy Apple’s overpriced proprietary adapters for that), no camera, no Flash support (although Adobe says it will happen) and so on. Also, the relationship between Apple and AT&T appears to have solidified, rather than to have dissolved as was widely rumored. A $30 unlimited data plan is quite good though, given it provides universal net access. (If it permitted internet tethering, that would be a big drawcard for it, but as we know, AT&T outrageously doesn’t support tethering.) On the other hand, the iPhone SDK now allows apps to make voice calls over 3G, and not just WiFi, so we’re seeing a change now. Should at least take some of the heat off them as far as the FTC is concerned.

What about the name?
It’s pretty blah, and very similar to iPod. But we’ll get used to it. More interestingly (for lawyers at least), is the IP strategy that Apple used in connection with the iPad. It appears to own no iPad domain names – which implies to me that Apple regarded name secrecy was more important to it than IP protection. They don’t yet have a registered trademark for iPad, but they’re probably in the process of obtaining one. A search on the PTO’s website shows that the IPAD word mark has been registered in a variety of other classes, including class 25 (clothing) under a US subcategory including “Bras, Lingerie, Panties, Pads for Use in Bras”. So I guess the joke about MaxiPads isn’t that far off.

Speaking of MaxiPads, the iPad’s looks are questionable as well – the bezel is too big, and the 4:3 non-widescreen ratio makes it look squat. That said, I still think the iPad will be extremely fun to use and the UI is more than just simply pleasant.

Not that it won’t do well…
Let me get this clear: I will be surprised if the iPad flops. The device is sure to sell very well, and add another healthy channel of revenue for Apple. It just won’t be as important as the iPhone. However, I do have the feeling that we will see some very creative apps developed for the iPad that will make it a much more useful, cool, and valuable tool than a lot of people give it credit for today.

Paired with iTunes, iBooks, and other applications that content providers will eventually create, it will also be a great media library device (although there’s no video output jack).

Ok, so my overall verdict? If someone bought me one as a gift, I’d be over the moon. But I’d find it difficult to swallow the price and fork out $850+ (with 3G data) of my own to buy the top of the line model, whereas I didn’t hesitate to shell out for the iPhone, or even the high-end Macbook Pro.  (I wonder if this means that Macbooks will start to get equipped with A-GPS or 3G capabilities? My guess is that although Apple could go this way, it won’t because it might cannibalize its iPad market.)

  9:58pm  •  Consumer Electronics  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •