Well , if preemptive hacking is something that France both thinks it is legal and advisable and something that should be done ...
Doesn't that mean that hackers would be justified in preemtive hacking everything French? I mean, apparently ( according to some nutjobs atleast ) preemptive hacking is legal and there is ample proof that France intends to hack them ... ;)
While I raise a toast for Nintendo and Microsoft doing the right thing at this point, it is somewhat rich to see this two companies to poke at anyone for being protectionist beyond any reasonable measure ... Microsoft has it's flagship software locked to a particular chip manufacturer architecture for #reasons ( just for starters ) and better not start talking about Nintendo, to not make a wall of text :/
Well, I'm not much of a commenter, but as i think I can drop something in this one, let me chime in ...
First of all, let me drop some assumptions. Given the nationality of most of the researchers and of one of the institutions involved, I'll make a leap of faith and assume that the country where the study was made was Portugal and that the multinational that oh so kindly helped them was Altice ( that bought the ex-state telecom operator a couple of years ago and is strong arming the governement to allow them to buy one of the biggest media conglemerates in here, but that is besides the point ;) )
If ( and it is a somewhat big if ) my assumptions above are true, the service they offered is most likely this one here or something on the same vein ... and if you compare this with Netflix USA ( not Netflix Portugal, mind that :P ), it is not hard to see from where the 12% figure came out.
What you can't see from the link above, OFC is the clunkiness of the service offered in the TV ( most likely where most of the people involved in the study tried to use the service ), that is miles behind anything resembling the convenience Netflix or even your straight out of the net torrent search engine ( mandatory on screen keyboard to be used with a remote and a rather iffy search function are some of the "features" offered ). Pretending that people don't factor convenience in their economical decisions is ... well, stupid. This not mentioning that, while not directly stated in the Abstract, the wording used strongly suggests that the people studied also had a TV bundle ( aka, the people studied already had a TV + Net service ), that is NOT directly comparable with Netflix only...
Other thing to consider, and again assuming the study was made in Portugal, is that: 1) there are few ISP in here ( in reality, after all smoke and mirrors are removed, there should be 4 or 5 real providers) and 2) they pretty much remote control the governemental entity that, among other things, controls the very UK-like blacklist of sites that ISP should not give access to ( BTW techdirt should someday make ( if there isn't one in the archives already ) a article about the Portuguese site blacklist situation, that nowadays is not public ... after the publication of it increased the interest and traffic to the blacklisted sites ... ). As you can imagine, torrent search engines are high in the blacklist ( and in fact the above mentioned Altice goes above and beyond in the case of Pirate Bay and simply delivers a 404 error if you try to go there using their services, instead of the legalese warning they put in other blocked sites ). In other words, people that use torrent services in Portugal ( not necessarily ilegally, mind that ... P2P is not illegal here per se ,other glaring flaw of the study, if the lack of distinction on types of P2P traffic was not made as the Abstract suggests ) are people that atleast know how to use a proxy server or a VPN to fetch the torrent files from torrent search engines ... definitely not your average consumer that just wants to see [insert blockbuster of the week].
In other words ( again assuming the study was made in Portugal to Altice costumers. Caveat emptor ):
1) The study uses a population that, while fit for the study itself, is NOT representative of the general consumer anywhere, and , because of that, very inapt for comparisons with a hipotetical Netflix service ( that, let me point again, the Netflix they talk about in the abstract is Netflix USA most likely, that is not a legal option in Portugal ... Netflix Portugal is heavily gutted down due to copyright hoarding from TV providers :/ ).
2) The service provided was, in the study own admission, 24% ( 12% divided by 50% is 0,24 ) of the value of Netflix USA to the population in study. ( as a side note, and without any add ons, that puts the " value" of the service for this population at 24% of 8€ ( basic package fee of Netflix in Portugal ), a little less than 2€ ... ))
3) If the service is the one I posted above, the TV interface is clunky and dificult to use and is somewhat hard to search into. Less value then.
... and even then, the study shows a increase of TV usage. Like the author says, this is a story of success : even in the baseline case ( hardened torrenting population, bad option provided, iffy baseline ) reducing the barriers to movie acess increases TV viewing time. The fact that the headlines say otherwise is ... well, let's not call names to our esteemed reporters :/
P.S I'm somewhat confused of where the 3.25$ ( roughly 2.75€ ) number comes from, but again , only read the Abstract. That said, like I pointed above, if we use their population valuing of the service, their offer was worth at most 2€ if we compare with the price Netflix uses, most likely even less ...
Also, the torrenting volume tracking is meaningless for this study subject, because ( unless they did scan what was being torrented, something that is very illegal without explicit consent of all parts involved or judicial mandate ( in Portugal , atleast ) ) there isn't any indication that the material torrented at any point was copyrighted audiovisual content or, even worse , that there should be a inverse correlation between VOD usage and torrenting volume ... as far as the authors know without breaking laws, the population in study could be torrenting high quality scans of the Gutenberg Bible ( as non copyright as copyright can be ) and they reduced their torrenting volume because they were watching more movies and had no time to read :P
Seriously, I don't understand why companies keep pushing this kind of trademark claims on expressions, since they never work in protecting the brand of their revenue. Let me just give a example ...
In the 90's the then novel mobile branch of the Statal phone company of Portugal, then called TMN, got a trademark on the portmanteau "telemovel" ( that in portuguese is a contraction of "mobile phone" ) to suposedely protect their brand in the wake of market opening to new brands. The issue was that the term became so popular that actually became the acepted term in ( European ) Portuguese for mobile phone and TMN got stuck in a situation were their trademark on the word was unenforceable in all pratical ways. So they ended never enforcing it and let the claim on the word drop silently ...
What I mean to say is that IMHO this kind of trademarks is a bad deal for the companies in general: either their trademark word becomes sucessful and they can't really enforce their trademark without major hassles and lawyering fees or the claim is easily enforceable because the term never picked up and so there is little to protect. It is loss-loss situation for everyone ... except for the lawyering people that leech in between :/
Well, to be honest, I see all of this crusade against adblockers as a display of arrogance by the part of the sites. Think about it: not even the TV networks or the newspapers, that also live on adverts, demand ( not ask ) you to see their ads before seeing their content ( not that they would do it if they thought they could get away with that ) ...
To be it is simple: if a site demands that I drop my computer defenses against crapware to see their ads, that only means they value more the ads than the viewers, and so I treat them with the exact same respect they show to me...
Really, check it out. It is with a 40% discount in almost all the DLC !
Seriously, if you drop the Steam promotion the whole collection would cost 5000+ $ ... Given that you can actually buy a real used locomotive by 25.000$, it seems a tad excessive , I guess .
Well, let's see. First of all, you would have to define what a Batmobile is ;)
The issue is that the appeal court definition of Batmobile is quite holed, since it lefts out some of the actual Batmobiles ( say, not all of the Batmobiles had jet engines ) and if you pick all that is common to all of them, you get ... well, a high tech for the time slightly bat-flavoured car. A Lamborghini Murcielago is a high tech for the time bat-flavoured car ( just ask the designer ;) ), so ...
Well, this is without the crazyness of trying to propel a stage prop to a character considered. So next, maybe Anakin lightsaber will be one too ( seriously, it would have better standing to it according with this Appeal court rulling, since atleast it is a very easy to define object, unlike the Batmobile ) ?
In case no one noticed, Lamborghini has a nice recent ( definitely more recent than Batman and his car ) model called Murcielago aka Bat. And if being a car with bat-ness and high tech are the only prereqs for a car to be a Batmobile, well, then Lamborghini is infringing BIG time :P
On the post: French Defense Secretary Says Country Is Willing To Fire First In Cyber Wars
About shooting first ...
Doesn't that mean that hackers would be justified in preemtive hacking everything French? I mean, apparently ( according to some nutjobs atleast ) preemptive hacking is legal and there is ample proof that France intends to hack them ... ;)
On the post: Microsoft And Nintendo Team Up To Troll Playstation In Ads For Not Giving Gamers What They Want
Something about pots and kettles ...
On the post: No Shit: Groundbreaking Study Shows That Giving People 12% Of The Video Content They Want Doesn't Magically Stop Piracy
Let put some holes in this study ....
Well, I'm not much of a commenter, but as i think I can drop something in this one, let me chime in ...
First of all, let me drop some assumptions. Given the nationality of most of the researchers and of one of the institutions involved, I'll make a leap of faith and assume that the country where the study was made was Portugal and that the multinational that oh so kindly helped them was Altice ( that bought the ex-state telecom operator a couple of years ago and is strong arming the governement to allow them to buy one of the biggest media conglemerates in here, but that is besides the point ;) )
If ( and it is a somewhat big if ) my assumptions above are true, the service they offered is most likely this one here or something on the same vein ... and if you compare this with Netflix USA ( not Netflix Portugal, mind that :P ), it is not hard to see from where the 12% figure came out.
What you can't see from the link above, OFC is the clunkiness of the service offered in the TV ( most likely where most of the people involved in the study tried to use the service ), that is miles behind anything resembling the convenience Netflix or even your straight out of the net torrent search engine ( mandatory on screen keyboard to be used with a remote and a rather iffy search function are some of the "features" offered ). Pretending that people don't factor convenience in their economical decisions is ... well, stupid. This not mentioning that, while not directly stated in the Abstract, the wording used strongly suggests that the people studied also had a TV bundle ( aka, the people studied already had a TV + Net service ), that is NOT directly comparable with Netflix only...
Other thing to consider, and again assuming the study was made in Portugal, is that: 1) there are few ISP in here ( in reality, after all smoke and mirrors are removed, there should be 4 or 5 real providers) and 2) they pretty much remote control the governemental entity that, among other things, controls the very UK-like blacklist of sites that ISP should not give access to ( BTW techdirt should someday make ( if there isn't one in the archives already ) a article about the Portuguese site blacklist situation, that nowadays is not public ... after the publication of it increased the interest and traffic to the blacklisted sites ... ). As you can imagine, torrent search engines are high in the blacklist ( and in fact the above mentioned Altice goes above and beyond in the case of Pirate Bay and simply delivers a 404 error if you try to go there using their services, instead of the legalese warning they put in other blocked sites ). In other words, people that use torrent services in Portugal ( not necessarily ilegally, mind that ... P2P is not illegal here per se ,other glaring flaw of the study, if the lack of distinction on types of P2P traffic was not made as the Abstract suggests ) are people that atleast know how to use a proxy server or a VPN to fetch the torrent files from torrent search engines ... definitely not your average consumer that just wants to see [insert blockbuster of the week].
In other words ( again assuming the study was made in Portugal to Altice costumers. Caveat emptor ):
1) The study uses a population that, while fit for the study itself, is NOT representative of the general consumer anywhere, and , because of that, very inapt for comparisons with a hipotetical Netflix service ( that, let me point again, the Netflix they talk about in the abstract is Netflix USA most likely, that is not a legal option in Portugal ... Netflix Portugal is heavily gutted down due to copyright hoarding from TV providers :/ ).
2) The service provided was, in the study own admission, 24% ( 12% divided by 50% is 0,24 ) of the value of Netflix USA to the population in study. ( as a side note, and without any add ons, that puts the " value" of the service for this population at 24% of 8€ ( basic package fee of Netflix in Portugal ), a little less than 2€ ... ))
3) If the service is the one I posted above, the TV interface is clunky and dificult to use and is somewhat hard to search into. Less value then.
... and even then, the study shows a increase of TV usage. Like the author says, this is a story of success : even in the baseline case ( hardened torrenting population, bad option provided, iffy baseline ) reducing the barriers to movie acess increases TV viewing time. The fact that the headlines say otherwise is ... well, let's not call names to our esteemed reporters :/
P.S I'm somewhat confused of where the 3.25$ ( roughly 2.75€ ) number comes from, but again , only read the Abstract. That said, like I pointed above, if we use their population valuing of the service, their offer was worth at most 2€ if we compare with the price Netflix uses, most likely even less ...
Also, the torrenting volume tracking is meaningless for this study subject, because ( unless they did scan what was being torrented, something that is very illegal without explicit consent of all parts involved or judicial mandate ( in Portugal , atleast ) ) there isn't any indication that the material torrented at any point was copyrighted audiovisual content or, even worse , that there should be a inverse correlation between VOD usage and torrenting volume ... as far as the authors know without breaking laws, the population in study could be torrenting high quality scans of the Gutenberg Bible ( as non copyright as copyright can be ) and they reduced their torrenting volume because they were watching more movies and had no time to read :P
On the post: Bandai Namco Is Apparently Looking To Trademark The Term 'Finishing Move'
I really don't understand ...
In the 90's the then novel mobile branch of the Statal phone company of Portugal, then called TMN, got a trademark on the portmanteau "telemovel" ( that in portuguese is a contraction of "mobile phone" ) to suposedely protect their brand in the wake of market opening to new brands. The issue was that the term became so popular that actually became the acepted term in ( European ) Portuguese for mobile phone and TMN got stuck in a situation were their trademark on the word was unenforceable in all pratical ways. So they ended never enforcing it and let the claim on the word drop silently ...
What I mean to say is that IMHO this kind of trademarks is a bad deal for the companies in general: either their trademark word becomes sucessful and they can't really enforce their trademark without major hassles and lawyering fees or the claim is easily enforceable because the term never picked up and so there is little to protect. It is loss-loss situation for everyone ... except for the lawyering people that leech in between :/
On the post: Why Are People Using Ad Blockers? Ads Can Eat Up To 79% Of Mobile Data Allotments
The arrogance of some people ...
To be it is simple: if a site demands that I drop my computer defenses against crapware to see their ads, that only means they value more the ads than the viewers, and so I treat them with the exact same respect they show to me...
On the post: Judge In Nutty PETA Monkey Copyright Trial Skeptical Of PETA's Argument, But Let's Them Try Again
Well, better read it now ...
On the post: NBC's Ingenious Solution To Ad Skipping And Low Ratings: More Embarrassingly Unfunny Product Placement
Genius move
Solution: Put the ads inside the shows. People will never, ever, skip the entire show because they discover the thing is a huge infomercial, right? :D
On the post: Train Simulator 2016 And How We've Reached The Crest Of The Dumb DLC Wave
It is a bargain !
Seriously, if you drop the Steam promotion the whole collection would cost 5000+ $ ... Given that you can actually buy a real used locomotive by 25.000$, it seems a tad excessive , I guess .
On the post: Appeals Court Says The Batmobile Is A 'Character' Covered By Copyright
Re: Re: Should someone phone Lamborghini?
The issue is that the appeal court definition of Batmobile is quite holed, since it lefts out some of the actual Batmobiles ( say, not all of the Batmobiles had jet engines ) and if you pick all that is common to all of them, you get ... well, a high tech for the time slightly bat-flavoured car. A Lamborghini Murcielago is a high tech for the time bat-flavoured car ( just ask the designer ;) ), so ...
Well, this is without the crazyness of trying to propel a stage prop to a character considered. So next, maybe Anakin lightsaber will be one too ( seriously, it would have better standing to it according with this Appeal court rulling, since atleast it is a very easy to define object, unlike the Batmobile ) ?
On the post: Appeals Court Says The Batmobile Is A 'Character' Covered By Copyright
Should someone phone Lamborghini?
Next >>