Why Microsoft isn’t supporting the Sony DVD format

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Well, well. Here’s an interesting interview in The Daily Princetonian with Bill Gates. The bit that grabbed me is this:

Q: There has been a lot of debate about the next generation Blu-ray and HD DVD technologies in recent weeks. It seems more and more companies are backing the Blu-ray standard. The current debate seems to harken back to the Betamax vs. VHS format war in the 1970s and 80s, where Betamax was ostensibly the superior technology yet it did not gain wide acceptance. Why is Microsoft not backing Blu-ray today — a technology that many consider to be superior?

Gates: Well, the key issue here is that the protection scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there’s not much visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won’t work well on PCs. You won’t be able to play movies and do software in a flexible way.

    It’s not the physical format that we have the issue with, it’s that the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray group] would fix that one thing, you know, that’d be fine.

    For us it’s not the physical format. Understand that this is the last physical format there will ever be. Everything’s going to be streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it’s even unclear how much this one counts.

At first sight, this looks encouraging. At last, a major computer technology company is standing up to the copyright thugs. The only problem is that the same Bill Gates has ceded veto rights to Hollywood studios over some features of the forthcoming Vista (aka Longhorn) release of Windows. Not much evidence of concern for consumers there. So either Redmond’s right hand knoweth not what its left hand doeth; or Mr Gates speaks with forked tongue.

Update: Cian Ginty of Gamestoaster.com writes:

Possibly overlooked by many people, Microsoft’s main reasons for not supporting the format may be because Sony is to use Blue-ray in their rival PS3 games console, which is to launch within a year after MS’s Xbox 360 console which should be out for Christmas.

Quagmire news

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From today’s New York Times…

Mr. Bush’s own way of talking about the future, in Iraq and beyond, has undergone a subtle but significant change in recent weeks. In several speeches, he has begun warning that the insurgency is already metastasizing into a far broader struggle to “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.” While he still predicts victory, he appears to be preparing the country for a struggle of cold war proportions. It is a very different tone than administration officials sounded in the heady days after Saddam Hussein’s fall, and then his capture.

After an extensive debate inside the White House, Mr. Bush has begun directly rebutting the arguments laid out in manifestos and missives from Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mr. bin Laden’s top aide. He did so again on Saturday, quoting from one of Mr. Zawahiri’s purported letters – one whose authenticity is still the subject of some question – which predicted that the Iraq war would end as Vietnam had, and that, in Mr. Bush’s words, “America can be made to run again.”

The president argued anew that the terrorist leader was “gravely mistaken.””There’s always the question of whether we give these guys more credibility by directly addressing their arguments,” one of Mr. Bush’s most senior aides said recently. “But the president was concerned that we hadn’t described Iraq to the American people for what it is – a struggle of ideologies that isn’t going to end with one election, or one constitution, or even a string of elections.”

Sound familiar? Check out Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, a sobering account of how the US got sucked into an unwinnable war in Vietnam.

United States Patent: 6,947,978

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Awarded 20 September to the US National Security Agency. Details here.

Method for geolocating logical network addresses on electronically switched dynamic communications networks, such as the Internet, using the time latency of communications to and from the logical network address to determine its location. Minimum round-trip communications latency is measured between numerous stations on the network and known network addressed equipment to form a network latency topology map. Minimum round-trip communications latency is also measured between the stations and the logical network address to be geolocated. The resulting set of minimum round-trip communications latencies is then correlated with the network latency topology map to determine the location of the network address to be geolocated.

In plain English… How to find the geographical location of a networked computer from its IP address. Now I wonder why they’re interested in that? And wouldn’t the RIAA and MPAA just love to licence the patent… (Link via Bruce Schneier.)

Music on tap

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Today’s Observer column about the long-term future for recorded music.

Rock star David Bowie wrote a thoughtful piece in the New York Times in June 2002 about the future of music. ‘The absolute transformation of everything we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years,’ he wrote, ‘and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music, itself, is going to become like running water or electricity…’

Later… Bill Thompson writes to point out that however perceptive Bowie may be, his lawyers are the usual troglodytes. Here’s a quote from a Thompson column on the subject:

David Bowie, or those of his advisors who shape his public image, has always been interested in the internet and launched a website and even an ISP long before any of his peers.

Now there is a competition for fans who are invited to make a mash-up of two or Bowie songs and send their work into the site.

At first this seemed like a brilliant idea. EMI is trying to suppress Danger Mouse’s Grey Album and getting lots of bad press, while Bowie encourages his fans to appropriate and reuse his music.

It seemed that the man really understood the ways in which digital technologies can encourage creativity and new forms of artistic expression – the site even suggests that you rip songs from the older albums you own to use in your work.

But if you go to the trouble of reading the terms and conditions you find that it just is not so.

The lawyers have got to them, so everyone who enters “irrevocably grants, transfers, sells, assigns and conveys to the sponsors, their successors and assigns, all present and future right, title and interest of every kind and nature whatsoever in and to the Mash-Up(s) for exploitation throughout the universe, in perpetuity, by means of any and all media and devices whether now known or hereafter devised”.

Suddenly it is not so friendly at all – you can take the stuff, make something really great with it, but it is still theirs.

Don’t you just love that phrase “all media and devices whether now known or hereafter devised”!

The Rights mug

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Here’s a neat idea — the text of the Bill of Rights gradually disappears as the mug is filled with hot liquid! Simulates the effect of a Bush presidency. Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

Our broadband world

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Amidst the hoo-hah over the video iPod, two interesting developments have been overlooked. Both concern the new iMac G5 range. The machine now comes with an iSight video camera built in. And it ships without a modem (an external modem is available as a high-priced optional extra). What this tells us is that Apple is now assuming that the majority of its customers have broadband connections.

The Microsoft Protection Racket

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No — it’s not my headline, but one from John Dvorak, a prominent technology commentator. He’s been musing about the significance of a change in the way Microsoft approaches the provision of ‘patches’ to its flaky software. Sample:

Does Microsoft think it is going to get away with charging real money for any sort of add-on, service, or new product that protects clients against flaws in its own operating system? Does the existence of this not constitute an incredible conflict of interest? Why improve the base code when you can sell “protection”?

So what is actually going on here? I think there were some bottom-line questions that must have been brought up internally. Obviously someone at Microsoft looked at the expense of “patch Tuesday” and asked, “Is there any way we can make some money with all these patches?” The answer was “Yeah, let’s stop doing them and sell ‘protection’ instead.” Bravo! And now the company has a new revenue stream.

World music sales

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From this week’s Economist…

Sales of music CDs and other physical formats fell by 6.3% in the first half of 2005. But sales of digital music (not shown in the chart) more than tripled to $790m. Music downloads and mobile-phone ringtones now account for 6% of retail revenues. Of the countries with the most music sales, the British bought the most per person, thanks to their attractive specialist music shops, and the release of Coldplay’s album “X&Y”.