Despite years of debates over the morality, prevalence and impact of mass online copyright infringement, actual hard numbers, backed by statistically rigorous methods, are almost impossible to find.  Most of what passes as “knowledge” about piracy is based far more on pre-conceived notions and anecdotal evidence.  And that really should not surprise, since the fundamental questions [...]

When analyzing the anti-infringement activities of the content owning industries (RIAA, MPAA, etc.) it is often far more interesting to focus on the results of what they do, rather than the rhetoric they employ.  While Hollywood executives love to harshly criticize unauthorized distribution of their movies, very frequently they do things that in fact contribute [...]

The Hollywood film industry, or at least its official representatives in the MPAA, likes to talk tough about efforts to combat movie piracy on the internet.  They rabidly support DRM systems to supposedly keep their content locked-down (CSS, AACS, etc.), they push hard for new laws to control how video moves around online (like ACTA [...]

A provocative headline can generate a lot of readers and a lively debate, but it can also do a poor job of indicating what an article is actually about. A recent example is Paul Boutin’s quite inflammatory article in the December edition of Wired, now available online, entitled rather ambitiously, “The Age of Music Piracy [...]

One of the frustrating issues for analysts of the file-sharing phenomenom is that so much of what we know, or think we know, about it rests not on any real numbers but on our beliefs and suppositions.  Statistics thrown around by the rights-holding organizations like the MPAA, the RIAA or the BSA are notoriously unreliable, [...]

Not long ago I wrote a piece discussing the possibility of Google doing something pretty revolutionary in the video space. Having recently purchased the video codec company On2, there developed a lot of hope among open source proponents that the search giant would take On2′s technology and release it to the public as open source [...]

Right now, the landscape for Internet video is relatively stable, with the vast bulk of online video sites (including the market leaders YouTube and Hulu) providing their streams via the Flash plug-in and usually containing H.264 encoded video.  Video shared on P2P networks is a different story of course, primarily MPEG-4 ASP in .avi or [...]

My last piece for Zeropaid looked at the recently announced iPad specifically as a video device.  Does Apple’s latest gadget have the potential to be a game changer in the video arena, as it may have in the mobile and publishing fields?  I have some serious doubts based on what we know about the iPad’s [...]

In the unlikely case you were somehow unaware of the big news from yesterday, Apple announced the iPad, a new device (and category) somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop that will either revolutionize the entire computing space, or will flop miserably (depending on which analyst you read).  So much has been tweeted, facebooked, blogged, [...]

While CES is primarily a occasion to see new gadgets and new software, it is also a gathering of hundreds of thousands of technology enthusiasts, both professional and hobbyist.  Visitors come from all over the US and the world, and it can often make for some great conversations about the devices we love (and sometimes [...]

CES 2010 is drawing rapidly to a close, and I’ve got tons of big things to write about, but right now I wanted to share some more cool gadgets I saw in Las Vegas.  Even in years like this one that are somewhat down in the innovation department, there are always some shiny new toys [...]

One of the major problems with covering a trade show the size and scale of CES is that you spend so much time running around trying to see everything, that is almost impossible to sit down and actually write about what you’ve seen.  Nevertheless, I wanted to share a few things that are popping up [...]

While the year, and the decade, may just be starting out, things are already heating up quickly in the electronics and technology worlds.  With the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) trade conference beginning tomorrow in Las Vegas, a flood of new devices, gadgets and services will be announced, released or just rumored.  The big trends we [...]

In yet another of the seemingly endless stream of new products coming from Google this year, this week has seen the confirmation of rumors that the search engine giant is about to get more directly involved in the mobile phone space.  Google has already made a major step into thesmart-phone world through its creation of [...]

For long-time observers of video piracy, the traditional end of the year awards season provides a very interesting peek into the interplay between the movie industry and the file-sharing scene.  Even as studio executives continue to push onerous DRM schemes on end users, the reality is that most commercial films find their way online well [...]

Have you made the jump to Blu-Ray?  The next generation disc format, the “successor” to DVD, has now been on the market for three years, promising High Definition visuals and improved audio quality, along with networked capabilities for increased viewer interactivity.  The initial launch was rather lackluster, hampered as it was by initial competition from [...]

There has been a bit of an uproar about a recent quote by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.  While talking to CNBC, Schmidt remarked that, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality [...]

Many recent articles on file-trading and the P2P community have noted that the Napster phenomenon occurred ten years ago, marking a decade of joy for down-loaders and despair for the big content companies.  Less noticed is that 2009 is also the tenth anniversary of another bit of crucial P2P technology, the DeCSS decrypting tool.  Publicly [...]

Science fiction author, blogger extraordinaire, and digital rights champion Cory Doctorow has an essay up at the Guardian site that explores in detail a point we have discussed here previously, and that is what the relationship is between streaming and downloading content, and what are the possible ramifications of a trend that emphasizes streaming over [...]

As anyone with an Internet connection has probably heard, Google took the first public wraps off of it’s long-awaited Chrome OS last month, giving a short demonstration, and even releasing the source code for the Open Source version of the OS, called Chromium.  Bootable versions quickly appeared, first on gdgt and then a “diet” version [...]