At issue is a Finnish EU copyright directive which came into force in 2006 which criminalizes the act of merely talking about circumventing DRM. Mikko Rauhala had started a web discussion forum to also talk about the downfalls of the directive as well.

EDRI has more details:

However the Police started its investigation with the public prosecutor who was supported strongly by the Finnish Anti-Piracy Association which arranged the “expert” testimonies for the prosecutor. Soon thereafter, the case was referred to the Helsinki District Court which decided in Rauhala’s favor; that CSS was not a type of protection measure covered by the Directive and therefore the ban did not apply. The district attorney appealed to the Helsinki Appellate Court, which stated that Mr. Rauhala was guilty of illegally circumventing a technological protection measure and of providing an illegal service for the circumvention of protection measures. The Supreme Court of Finland denied Mr. Rauhala’s application.

Since all of the court decisions that were involved in the case wouldn’t touch freedom of expression as defined in the Finnish constitution, Rauhala had to take his case to European Court of Human Rights.

Given that this is a free speech issue, it’s extremely difficult to see what the Finnish authorities hope to accomplish here. If the mere act of talking about a DRM is banned, people will simply move to a website hosted and operated outside of the borders of Finland – not to mention using proxies to cover their trails in the process. Any punishment Rauhala would face is not immediately clear in this or other past reports.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

There is word recently on TehSkeen that a software tool has been developed for the Nintendo Wii that allows gamers to play back-up copies of Nintendo Wii games. The claims were backed up by video that was reposted on YouTube:

If one is skeptical about the mere screen capture of what is going on, a video of someone physically entering the disc into the system and doing the same thing (albeit, with a lower quality) is here:

Additional information is available on TehSkeen. Here’s a sample:

It’s time for another exclusive video from TehSkeen. This time our feature presentation is a demonstration of the work in progress Nintendo Wii Backup Loader coded by the infamous and often controversial hacking guru Waninkoko. Yeah, read the first sentence again if you’re at a loss for words.

The ISO Loader works like this. You create a legal backup of a game you own, convert the ISO file with a special program then burn it. After this, you copy over the ISO Loader to the Homebrew Channel and run it. It will boot the legal backup. Pretty simple. Oh, and no modchip is required. However, it does require you to have Waninkoko’s Custom IOS installed.

This is a unprecedented moment in Nintendo Wii hacking history as is probably going to cause a massive movement in the scene. Too bad Nintendo didn’t take Bushing’s advice on blocking the method of doing this. Maybe they will now? Of course, this sort of thing isn’t condoned by the “general” homebrew scene and when it’s released will ultimately lead to some turmoil.

TehSkeen doesn’t support piracy. We don’t index releases, we don’t spread torrents, we don’t run contests to dump VC/Wiiware games. Heck, we don’t host any tools to inject WAD files with. Waninkoko’s motivation for creating the ISO Loader is unknown, but it is illegal and morally wrong to use it for booting illegal copies of games you don’t own.

The last paragraph has pretty much been a staple disclaimer for any kind of console video-game backups. It dates clear back to when NES emulators for the PC were programmed and dumping the information off of the cartridge into ROM files were the standard ways to make backup copies of legitimately paid for games. One of the more infamous disclaimers was basically (paraphrased as there is frequent variations of this particular one) ‘if you do not legitimately own the game for the respective ROM, you must delete the ROM within 24 hours.’

While some are arguing that this is merely fair use and an extension of the practice of backing up PC games, people like the reporter from GIzmondo have quickly called the news as “the Holy Grail of Wii piracy”

Is there cause for concern over the possibility that Nintendo would do everything in its power to stop such technology? Nintendo has already legally pursued companies importing R4 chips for the Nintendo DS in Japan just two months ago. It’s unclear whether or not they would go after a non-profit entity though.

Whichever side a person is on, those who watch what is going on with Nintendo Wii hacking have almost unanimously agreed that what has happened will have a huge impact for Nintendo Wii fans. It is pretty much only the beginning of things to come, but what they are is, naturally, yet to be seen.

It may be a first in Europe. There is a new effort to combat piracy (it appears to be geared towards physical piracy) but what is being demanded may prove to be very controversial. All this is according to a fresh report off of the Irish Examiner.

While there are relatively few who support physical piracy, there’s also relatively few who would support circumventing the need to obtain a warrant whenever a crime is suspected to be taking place. It’s a recipe for heated debate if anything else.

The report says that 76,569 unauthorized DVDs were seized last year with 62,724 unauthorized DVDs already seized this year. While this suggests that current laws are already sufficient in stopping physical piracy operations, it apparently isn’t enough for the Justice Minister. From the report:

Harsh penalties for land or property owners who allow pirated material to be sold on their sites are also recommended.

Launching the inter-departmental committee report, Mr Ahern said the extent and sophistication of DVD piracy had grown hugely in recent years and was now operating on a quasi-industrial scale.

“There seems to be a casual assumption that the only victims of this type of crime are faceless international corporations, or millionaire movie stars. That is not the case.

“Ordinary employment and business livelihoods are threatened right here in Ireland, whether it is in the production of films, or their sale or distribution in cinemas and retail outlets,” he said.

While we are not familiar with what the stigma in Ireland would be whenever a political figure wants to eliminate the requirement of getting a warrant for anything, the idea is a complete culture shock to North Americans. This was clearly demonstrated by the fierce ongoing debates surrounding the warrantless wiretapping done by AT&T.

The casual observer will likely note that moves such as this has the potential to put a country onto a slippery slope towards unprecedented and frequently undesired police powers.

While potentially a very disturbing development, such a move happened a few months ago in the United States where the Motion Picture Association of America argued that evidence is not needed to convict someone of unauthorized file-sharing.

This latest move is quite a notable development in a country where the last controversy has been the long-running data breach controversy.

It’s almost a cliché all on it’s own. China is a major hotbed for piracy. Of course, a number of these accusations come from major anti-piracy organizations like the MPA (Motion Picture Association) which says:

Illegal motion picture and television piracy is a thriving international enterprise. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) estimates that its member companies lose approximately US$1.2 billion each year in potential revenue in the Asia-Pacific region alone, and US$6.1 billion globally. In many countries, MPA member company losses are far outstripped by production, theatrical exhibition, home video distribution losses to local industry, as well as losses to governments in uncollected tax revenues. Consumer spending losses on filmed entertainment worldwide are estimated at US$18.2 billion.

If you follow the press releases of the Motion Picture Association, you’d think that it’s a miracle that any sort of entertainment industry even exists over in China because of widespread piracy. Recently released figures suggest that China’s online video game industry is not only surviving, but thriving and growing. With this thought, perhaps the other cliché of the Chinese economy growing at an incredible rate might be more fitting.

The report comes from a media outlet in Taiwan called Digitimes. The report says that the Chinese video game industry has “generated total revenue of 4.43 billion yuan (US$637 million) during the second quarter of 2008, rising by 11.2% on quarter and 65.9% on year, according to China-based consulting company Analysys International.”

Not bad for one quarter. So how does the US gaming market compare? According to an ESA report:

The computer and video game industry’s value added to U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2006 was $3.8 billion

It might be poor economics/math, but if one were to divide that number by 4, you would get $950 million USD per quarter on average – a difference between the markets by $313 million.

Unfortunately, most of the articles on DigiTimes is behind a paywall, but if one were to look at the headlines in the “related” section, one would see, “China market: Online gaming services valued at nearly 4 billion yuan in 1Q08″, “China market: Online gaming services valued at over 3.3 billion yuan in 4Q07″, “China market: Online gaming services valued at over 2.9 billion yuan in 3Q07″, “China market: Online gaming valued at 2.67 billion yuan in 2Q07″ Quite an impressive rate of growth (note: headlines in reverse chronological order. #Q denotes the quarter of the year and the two numbers following denotes last two digits of the year) considering the country is said to have a huge piracy problem.

It’s not perfectly clear what this means for all the claims of piracy, but it certainly puts the so-called devastating effects of piracy, even in China, in question here. We here at ZeroPaid don’t support physical piracy, but we also don’t support the distortion of facts on a situation either.

There’s an interesting report from The times of India where there is a problem – there’s not enough piracy courts to deal with the load of busted pirates.

Of course, for the average North American, the concept of a “piracy court” is pretty much unheard of. Generally speaking, when someone gets sued for copyright infringement, they go through a regular court system just like any other case. Judging by what this report suggests, there is a court set aside in India to deal specifically with alleged pirates.

It may seem like overkill, but not only is there a court specifically set aside for piracy cases, the court is bogged down by the sheer volume of cases it has to deal with. The cases are “bailable” but people caught up in the system, it’s been extremely difficult. From the report:

Take the case of Madala Krishna Prasad who was arrested on charges of video piracy in Ongole on July 22, 2008.

He was remanded in judicial custody the next day. But when the bail petition was moved by his counsel, the judge expressed his helplessness as the case did not fall under his jurisdiction.

Then the counsel, K Venkata Reddy, moved another bail petition before the additional chief metropolitan magistrate court, which is the designated court for such offences. He rejected to hear the petition because the remand was in a different court.

Then the counsel moved a lunch motion in the high court on Friday. Justice P Swarup Reddy granted bail to the accused in this case. Now the counsel has to go to the Ongole court again to submit the bail documents to secure freedom for the accused . In all the accused will be in jail for more than 12 days for an offence that is bailable. “We have heard of similar cases in Anantapur and elsewhere in the state in this type of offences,” he said.

It’s not entirely clear what the report is specifically referring to when it says ‘video piracy’ and a Google search of the persons name only refers to the above article. Whether it means videos being sold on bootleg DVDs or videos being downloaded online is unclear. One might hope that resorting to courts being set aside in North America won’t be necessary.

There are a number of countries that have implemented a blank media levy on portable media. The idea, when one boils it down, seems simple and straight forward. There are those that record or burn copyrighted material without authorization, therefore copyright holders should have a system of compensation.

In Canada, for instance, royalties collected on CDs are collected by an organization known as the CPCC. The CPCC takes the money that was collected through the levy on CDs and redistributes it to copyright holders. It’s a system that has been under appreciated by the major copyright industry when discussing things such as copyright reform mainly because it has undermined their typical argument that their profits have dropped (though there are pieces of evidence to suggest otherwise) While Canada and France are two completely separate countries on two separate continents, the underlying principle seems, at least, fairly similar.

Like in Canada, there has been opposition towards the levy, but now new developments as pointed to on French news site 01Net (Google translation) suggest that the underlying principle has been overturned – thus prompting a rethinking of the blank media levy.

The French courts seem to have annulled decision “No. 7″ From the report (Google translation):

To calculate the amount of the fee levied on such equipment and returned to the rightful claimants, the commission had taken into account, wrongly, of damages resulting from unauthorized copies of video or phonograms, “justifies the Council. That is to say that piracy for the Council of State, should not be considered to determine the scales. In summary, this fee (5 to 50 euros) no longer be in the state.

Judging by that paragraph alone, this could prompt a major legal, civil, and business headache. If the blank media can’t be based off of supposed piracy going on through, among other things, private copying, then how does one base royalty calculations to keep the major copyright industry in France happy?

Obviously, going back to simply outlawing things like CDs won’t be a feasible option since burning CDs and DVDs is simply a common occurrence these days – whether it’s making a simple mix of your favorite tunes or losing nearly half the population of Britain in the mail, things like CD burning is just commonplace at this point in time – and people suggest the internet genie is out of the bottle.

What will be fascinating to watch is what France comes up with now that the method of calculation based off piracy has been overruled. It may be something all sides of the copyright debate may want to keep an eye on.

The Motion Picture Association were congratulating police recently after the success of “Operation Blackout” recently. The bust happened in the Banmor area of Bangkok. They say that while they did make 5 arrests, many more escaped police when lookouts warned them by blowing whistles.

“The police have no day off when it comes to pirates selling their products. We will
continue to do everything within our powers to stop these criminals.” said General Visuth
after the raid.

“We are happy that the Thai authorities have taken Operation Blackout to heart and
persisted in cleaning up Banmor despite all the challenges faced,” said Mike Ellis, Senior
Vice President and Regional Director, Asia-Pacific for the MPA. “It is a very promising start
to the New Year and we look forward to many more such success stories from Thailand.”

No famous dogs were involved in this raid.

The MPA says that many big titles that were confiscate in the raid including Alien vs. Predator 2, American Gangster, and I Am Legend.

Its performance bucked the trend in the market which prompted pre-Christmas profit warnings from rivals HMV and Woolworths. Virgin said the figures exclude online sales, which surged 191%.

Simon Douglas, the managing director, said there had been market share growth across all main formats. “Despite all the talk of high street doom and gloom, particularly around entertainment with its rampant price deflation, I am delighted with our trading performance,” he said.

DVDs became the dominant format for Virgin Megastores, eclipsing music for the first time in its trading history. Underlying sales growth in DVDs was 24.1%, with its market share rising by 0.7%.

Warner Home Video just announced via Reuters yesterday that it will release a new "Hybrid DVD" that will be capable of playing both HV DVD and regular DVD format video on the same disc.

Scheduled to be released on May 9th, 2006, the new Hybrid DVD will have an HD DVD version video on one side of the disk and and standard DVD format definition on the other.

It will retail for a whopping $39.99, an outrageously higher price than the current average price of $20 bucks or so for a regular DVD.

To add insult to injury, the first movie scheduled for release in the new Hybrid DVD format is "Rumor Has It," the terrible 2005 flic starring Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Costner. Many call it the "The Graduate Part 2." The title says it all.

LG is set to unveil a a new player at the Consumer Electronics Show next week in Las Vegas that is capable of playing both HD DVD and Blu-ray format video but, what impact this means for consumer desire for one format or the other is still not known.

CNet is also reporting that Warner Bros will announce a Total HD disc that will include both HD DVD and Blu-ray format video, each placed on separate sides of the disc.

This is also a big development but, I think the price would be astronimical as you would have to pay both camps their technology licensing fees and other additional costs. I can only imagine what the heck they would charge for the Total HD but, I guarantee you that it will be a much higher price than consumers want to pay for it.

Warner Bros. "…came up with came up with the Total HD disc after concluding that neither Blu-ray nor HD DVD was going the way of Betamax anytime soon," according to an interview with Barry M. Meyer, its chairman and chief executive.

People are definitely not going to fork over $40+ dollars for your average run-of-the-mill movie. It’d have to be a darn good blockbuster or classic flic like Goodfellas to get people to shell out that kind of cash for a single movie.

What everybody needs to do is sit down and talk with one another and remind themselves that it all comes down to cost. People are already weary of having to toss out their DVD players and purchasing a next generation format video player in the first place, let alone the prospect of having to purchase the "right" one, the one that will be around in 10 years time. This is before the $40 dollar price per disc sticker shock.

I think in the end, I think price and availability of movie titles will decide the winner of the two formats.

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The dual-format player will be able to play the Sony-backed Blu-ray discs and the Toshiba-led HD DVD discs.

The introduction of two next-generation formats has split both the electronics industry and Hollywood film studios.

The player will be launched at the same time as a hybrid double-sided Blu-ray HD DVD disc, developed by Warner Bros.

The Total HD discs and the LG player will both go on display at the Consumer Electronic’s Show (CES) in Las Vegas that starts on 8 January.