2018 Gold Earrings blog

The decision represents a major victory for the film studios, which had accused Real of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and breach of contract in a lawsuit filed last fall. Had the decision gone against the film studios and its trade group, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), it would have been an affirmation that consumers have the right to copy their DVDs for personal use. Right now, when a DVD owner loses or breaks a disc, they conceivably must purchase another copy. RealDVD and Facet eliminate the need for discs once copies are made.

“We are very pleased with the court’s decision,” MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said in a statement. “This is a victory for the creators and producers of motion pictures and television shows and for the rule of law in our digital economy. Judge Patel’s ruling affirms what we have known all along: Real took a license to build a DVD-player and instead made an illegal DVD-copier.”

In her questions to both sides’ attorneys, Patel seemed concerned about the potential for people to use RealDVD and Facet, to copy rented discs without compensating the creators, a practice known as “rent, rip, and return.”

One glaring hole in Real’s argument was its assertions that RealDVD didn’t circumvent ARccOS and RipGuard because they really aren’t anticopying software; and that Real had licensed CSS, the technology designed to prevent unauthorized copying of DVDs, so it was essentially authorized to do what it wanted with it.

Facet, the DVD player that copied and stored digital movies, will not be hitting store shelves anytime soon.

Real CEO Rob Glaser demonstrated the device in court last spring and showed how an owner could move between films–it holds more than 70–in a way similar to how someone scrolls through an iTunes playlist. I wrote that the device could have helped spur flagging DVD sales and given DVD collectors, such as myself, a way to revitalize their movie collections.

“Real was aware of ARccOS and RipGuard during the development of the RealDVD
products,” Patel wrote in her 58-page decision. “Real software engineers identified ARccOS and RipGuard as both copy protection systems and barriers to their development of a DVD copying device from the outset of the RealDVD project.”

“We are disappointed that a preliminary injunction has been placed on the sale of RealDVD,” Real said in a statement. The company that makes entertainment software said it would have more to say after it had reviewed Patel’s decision.

The big question for Real is whether it has the stomach to continue the fight. The legal fees have already set Real back more than $6 million.

So, now we wait to hear whether Real will carry on the fight. However it turns out, the company has earned kudos from anticopyright proponents for waging the campaign. The question is whether carrying the flag for the free-content crowd is enough of a payoff.

The MPAA crushed these arguments in proceedings. The studios showed that both ARccOS and RipGuard are anticopying technologies used by some of the major film studios as a layer of piracy protection in addition to CSS. The studios’ lawyers produced documents that revealed ARccOS and RipGuard were effective enough copy protections to stymie Real’s engineers, as well as a group of “Ukranian hackers,” from cracking them.

Bart Williams, attorney who argued case for the studios.

While the courtroom showdown was first billed as a fight over RealDVD, it soon became clear that what was really at stake for Real was Facet.

“RealDVD makes a permanent copy of copyrighted DVD content,” Patel wrote in her decision, “and by doing so breaches its (Content Scramble System) License Agreement with the (DVD Copy Control Association, the group that oversees the protection of DVDs for the major Hollywood studios) and circumvents a technological measure that effectively controls access to or copying of the Studios’ copyrighted content on DVDs.”

But the MPAA argued that Facet and RealDVD are pirate tools that enabled users to copy and redistribute movies and could cost the industry billions. The MPAA has maintained that under the DMCA, consumers do not have the right to copy films–ever.

(Credit:
Munger, Tolles & Olson)

Hollywood, however, is working on its own programs to give consumers access to digital copies after buying a CD. But the studios typically want additional money for the digital copy.

Patel’s decision is unlikely to surprise anyone who followed the case. During last year’s hearings on a temporary injunction and last spring’s proceedings on the preliminary injunction, Patel appeared highly skeptical of Real’s arguments.

In her decision, Patel made a play on words using Vegas–Real’s code name for RealDVD–to illustrate how the software could lead to the mass pirating of movies.

U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction that will prevent RealNetworks from selling the $30 software until a jury can decide the issue. That will undoubtedly keep RealDVD and Facet, Real’s prototype DVD player, off store shelves for an indefinite period. Facet also makes digital copies and stores them to a built in hard drive.

“Had Real’s products been manufactured differently, i.e., if what happened in Vegas really did stay in Vegas,” Patel continued, “this might have been a different case. But, it is what it is. Once the distributive nature of the copying process takes hold, like the spread of gossip after a weekend in Vegas, what’s done cannot be undone.”

A federal court has found enough evidence to decide that RealDVD, the software that enables users to copy DVDs and store digital duplicates on a hard drive, violates U.S. copyright law.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET)

One other important detail: ARccOS and RipGuard are not included in the CSS license. By circumventing the technology, Real had risked violating the DMCA, which prohibits the cracking of antipiracy technologies. And that’s exactly what happened.

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Google)

Google has developed an algorithm that it says can filter out obvious spam, naughty words, and the classic all-caps technique employed by some of the Internet’s more unhinged pundits, said Caesar Sengupta, group product manager at Google. As comments build over time, a recursive algorithm can analyze the quality of past comments using reader votes on the comment’s usefulness.

Sidewiki–shown on the left-hand side of this page–lets Google Toolbar users add comments to any Web page.

You can share your comments with your Facebook or Twitter accounts, and can post a link to a blog item discussing that Web page with a snippet of the text, Sengupta said. Only Google Toolbar users will be able to see the comments on the Web page, obviously, but Google plans to work on an API (application programming interface) that will allow developers to use Sidewiki in other places.

Sidewiki is a new addition to the Google Toolbar that will let users read comments on any Web site and add their own in a special interface on the left hand side of the screen enabled by the toolbar. This idea has been tried before by others, but Google is proposing to use an algorithm to rank comments by quality and to link comments to a user’s Google Profile.

This kind of service will likely sink or swim on the strength of its ranking algorithms, but could give readers a way to discuss, correct, or clarify static Web pages that don’t allow reviews or comments directly on the page.

Google plans to try its hand at the bane of many a Web publisher’s existence: comment moderation.

Google Toolbar is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, and you’ll need to download the toolbar to get started with Sidewiki. Current Google Toolbar users will see the Sidewiki button shortly as Google works out a few kinks in the delivery process, but they can re-download the toolbar if they want to get started.

In the meantime, Microsoft is encouraging users to download any photos or documents they have stored in their events, either to their hard drives or to Windows Live SkyDrive. The service has also long had a way to export events to other services including Outlook, Google, and Yahoo calendar, as well as Apple’s iCal.

Windows Live Events was launched as part of the Windows Live rebranding back in late 2007. Designed as an Evite competitor of sorts, it let users create events that could be shared publicly. It also made use of other Microsoft services like Live Spaces and Live Messenger to let party goers and planners alike communicate.

Microsoft has decided to close down Windows Live Events and will be focusing its development efforts on building event planning and management tools for Windows Live Calendar instead. Beginning next month, users of Windows Live Events will be unable to create new events. And sometime next year, the site will simply redirect to Live Calendar instead.

Numbers released by J.P. Morgan Research in conjunction with the acquisition announcement predict that Zappos will post moderate, single-digit growth for the 2009 fiscal year after raking in $635 million in revenues last year.

Amazon’s acquisition of shoes-and-more retailer Zappos is complete, the e-commerce giant said in a release Monday. The company in July had announced its intent to make the purchase, for about $850 million in cash and stock.

Zappos, which made a name for itself based on outside-the-box customer service principles, will stay independent from the Amazon.com brand and will continue to operate out of its Las Vegas headquarters.

Ancestry.com is run by a firm previously known as The Generations Network, which changed its own name in early July to Ancestry.com to capitalize on the brand name. The majority of the company is owned by Spectrum Equity Investors, a communications business that paid around $300 million in 2007 for a 67 percent stake. Underwriters for the IPO are Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Profits have risen steadily over the past couple of years. For the first six months of 2009, Ancestry.com took in earnings of $8.18 million on sales of $99.9 million, according to its SEC filing. Those results compare with earnings of $1.24 million on sales of $87.4 million for the first six months of 2008.

As a genealogy site, Ancestry.com enables people to research their family history to find out who their ancestors were and how their family tree blossomed. The company started life in 1983 as a book publisher and then jumped online in 1997.

Popular genealogy site Ancestry.com is going public, hoping to raise around $75 million, according to its SEC filing for an initial public offering submitted Monday.

Ancestry.com’s foray into the public arena comes at a time when funding from venture capitalists to start-ups and IPOs is down. The company is hoping its past growth and success will help it buck the trend.

Clarification, Wednesday 5:07 a.m. PDT: The headline on this story has been changed from the original to avoid confusion.

With almost 1 million customers, Ancestry.com relies on paying subscribers rather than advertising to bring in the cash.

You also won’t be able to embed your Word documents in other Web pages, Scribd-like. There will be options to embed Excel files. (The feature does not seem to be turned on yet.)

Excel

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

In the preview we saw the user interface of the Web-based version of Excel is extremely close to the traditional version of the app. Getting comfortable with the app took no time at all. It’s just a lot slower than the desktop version. Given that this is such an early preview, we were not surprised that many tabs and features were missing from the Web app. But complex formatting, database elements, and charts from Excel files created in Windows transferred with good “fidelity” (that’s Microsoft’s word) to the Web. It appears users won’t lose anything in translation in the move from editing documents on a desktop to the Web.

The technical preview of Office Web Apps shows how similar the online apps will be to their desktop counterparts, even though many features are missing in this early version.

Sharing in Office Web Apps is unbelievably tedious.

In what appears to be a childish move, but one that Microsoft is defending by saying, “we had to prioritize,” Office Web Apps doesn’t work on Google’s Chrome browser. That’s a shame, since for Web apps (as opposed to more-static sites), I have found Chrome to be a faster and thus more usable platform than Firefox or Internet Explorer. (Office Web Apps also supports Safari.)

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Google, for its part, lets you share files from within the files themselves, by selecting “Invite people” from the “Share” menu. It makes much more sense. You can also see all your Google docs in one big list. With Microsoft, you have to page through your folders to see your documents. Microsoft does have a nice browser plug-in for drag-and-drop uploading of files, however. That’s a bonus, but not enough of one to offset the awful sharing workflow.

OneNote is on the same track as Word, and will get editing capabilities online when Word does.

For people and companies that have standardized on Microsoft Office, the preview shows that Office Web Apps will do a good job of extending the desktop experience to the Web. But the desktop legacy may also be a liability. File management — moving documents between desktop and Web, or keeping them in sync across platforms — is going to be complex, and it’s unclear how Microsoft is going to integrate its desktop apps, PC sync products like Mesh, and Web-based storage services like Skydrive, where Office Web Apps stores files for consumers. Also, Enterprise customers can use SharePoint for storage, which may not integrate well with workers’ personal file stores, online or offline.

The version of Excel that we have access to is the most similar to Google Docs in capabilities. It allows simultaneous editing — two or more people working on a spreadsheet at the same time. As in Google Docs’ spreadsheet app, as soon as one person updates a part of the spreadsheet, everyone else viewing the sheet gets the change in real time, or close enough to it. Users don’t have to “save” their file for the changes to get pushed out.

In summary, Office Web Apps is, very clearly, the desktop Office suite put on the Web. It’s feature-rich and appears to be targeted at individuals creating complex documents on their own. New users who don’t need or want the complexity of a desktop app, or who are more accustomed to working hand-in-hand with others, may be put off. Certainly, if Microsoft releases this product to the public without fixing the collaboration workflow, even die-hard Office users will avoid the service when they’re in a hurry and have work to do with colleagues.

In raw editing capability, Excel on the Web beats Google. It will have features approaching the PC counterpart of the app, not to mention the same user interface (the “ribbon” Office users are accustomed to) instead of Google’s old-timey but clear pull-down menus. The commonality between the Web and PC versions of the products should make it easier for people to pop between the desktop Office apps and their Web counterparts.

The capability to edit a PowerPoint doc from any Web-connected PC right before you have to make the actual talk will make many presenters a lot less nervous about making last-minute changes before a pitch.

It’s no Google

Like the online version of Excel, PowerPoint on the Web is a high-fidelity experience. Documents come through just as they appear on the PC, and can be edited in place on the Web. Most of the graphically intensive features, like adding animations and design elements, are not yet in this preview, though, so we could not evaluate the experience of creating complex builds and graphics over a Web connection. PowerPoint documents displayed very well on the Web, as I said, but I’d like to see a real full-screen slideshow viewer (the current version displays just a touch of browser frame) for showing presentations over the Web.

Finally, while online Word editor isn’t available yet (the viewer is, and it works well), we did learn a few things about the capability — none good. First of all, Word online won’t get you simultaneous editing. When you open a file to work on it you will lock it, and other people won’t be able to get in to change things. If you want simultaneous editing, you’ll apparently be able to do it from within the Word 2010 installed app. Online simultaneous editing is “on the road map,” we’re told, but won’t be ready even when Office Web Apps goes public in 2010.

Office Web Apps is a fundamentally different product from Google Docs. The apps run more slowly than the lightweight online Google productivity apps, but Microsoft will offer more features and commonality with the desktop apps.

Word

As in Excel on the Web, only new Office 2007 files (.PPTX for Powerpoint; .XLSX for Excel) can be edited online. Older .PPTs can be viewed and displayed, but not edited.

Microsoft has finally started to open up its Web-based versions of Office apps to early testers. Thursday we got access to a “technical preview” of Excel and PowerPoint on the Web (not, notably, Word). The obvious comparison that will be made is to Google Docs.

PowerPoint

However, setting up sharing is much more tedious in Office Web Apps than it is in Google Docs. In Office Web, you don’t share files, you share folders. So to share a spreadsheet, you first save it to a particular folder, and then share that folder with the people who you want to let into the file. That’s no big deal if you’re just sharing one file, but if you want to share different files with different groups of people, it’s confusing and tedious, since you have to create a different folder for each set of people you want to share with. If you want to change the sharing specifics on one document in a folder but not others, you’ll have to move the document to a different folder. This is a catastrophic design flaw. Worse, there’s not even a clear “share” link. You have to find the “Shared with” entry in each folder, click on the “People I selected” link, then “Edit permissions,” then enter the name of the person or people you want to share with, and then, once that person shows up in your sharing list, you have to change the default permission from “view” to “edit.”

Video game industry takes another big hit

Bing 2.0 could be around the corner

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Motorola’s comeback attempt rests on software

Future AMD chip boasts ‘human eye’ reality

According to some wayward tweets emanating from the Microsoft all-hands meeting Thursday, the new search engine, Bing, is about to get a makeover. It’s unclear when it will happen, but it appears it will include integration between Silverlight, maps, and images at the very least. Also looking for a fresh start is Motorola, which yesterday unveiled some new Android phones as well as a new philosophy for approaching the handset market. Plus, Facebook gets a new, more Twitter-like look, and much more.

Fitness bot whips Japanese seniors into shape

Facebook Lite is here. Verdict: Better

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Globalfoundries, Chartered to merge

Masdar City is under construction in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It aims to be the first carbon-neutral and zero-waste city. It’s also home to the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. The post-graduate research center, a collaborator with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began offering courses and research facilities in alternative energy and sustainable technology for graduate students in September.

A smart meter on a refrigerator at GE's labs.

Abu Dhabi’s planned green community, Masdar City, will be testing General Electric’s smart appliances in a handful of residences and coordinating them with its power grid, GE said Monday.

A refrigerator equipped with a “smart” meter, for example, communicates with the local power utility. That refrigerator then waits to run its automatic defrost cycle until it has received a signal from the electrical grid that it’s an off-peak period.

GE’s Consumer & Industrial division announced in October 2008 that it was developing home appliances that could ease the strain on electrical grids by coordinating with a grid’s off-peak hours to perform flexible functions.

The two-year pilot project with GE appliances will include refrigerators, stoves, and European-style washer/dryer machines that run on 220volt/50HZ platforms and will be installed in 10 residences.

The installation, to be completed in early 2010, will include a communication system between the appliances and Masdar City’s utility grid that will allow the appliances to transmit real-time data and run nonessential functions during off-peak usage hours. Since Masdar City is not scheduled to be fully inhabited until 2013, the city’s grid will simulate peak usage strains in order to test the system.

Previously, GE began testing its smart appliances in select homes in Louisville, Ky., in conjunction with the Louisville Gas and Electric Company.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET)

Pixie dust comes and goes
Still, Gartner has a point. It’s true that there are trade-offs that come with commercialization of open-source projects. Some of the magic pixie dust arguably evaporates when a company is behind a project.

In response to commercial open-source demand, many new projects are being commercialized early in their maturity phases–often by a dot-com startup, and before a broad community “network effect” is firmly established. These projects are often under the patronage (if not authoritative control) of a single vendor that employs nearly (if not entirely) all key code contributors.

It would be nice to discount this cost savings as transitory–a near-term phenomenon that dissipates once vendors control open-source projects–or related to community-based open source. But Forrester’s Jeffrey Hammond, supported by IT executives from Virgin Mobile and San Francisco International Airport, argued at OSCON in July that open source, commercial or community-based, saves money in deployment costs, acquisition costs, and ongoing maintenance costs (if any).

In every case, I’d argue that the projects have been significantly blessed by vendor involvement, not cursed. There are downsides to company involvement, but those are primarily the vendor’s issues, not the customer’s.

Given the momentum behind open source, and how it has grown through the economic downturn, it’s not surprising that more and more vendors are getting involved to commercialize open-source projects. What is perhaps surprising, however, is how early in the open-source project lifecycle that commercialization is emerging, as Gartner indicates in a December 2008 report (”Predicts 2009: The Evolving Open-Source Software Model”).

Forrester, too, called this out at OSCON, articulating that while many companies adopt open source to save money, and do, they discover a myriad of other benefits along the way. Increased flexibility, higher quality, and more.

Adopters will continue to receive benefits from open-source solutions, but these benefits will be increasingly realized by advantages in investment protection, innovation and technology alignments, rather than by simple cost savings alone.

But other “magic pixie dust” appears. Polish. Documentation. Enterprise acceptance. And more.

Driven by expanding mainstream IT adoption, open-source usage profiles are shifting to more-conservative, risk-versus-reward dynamics. As a result, new adopters now place an increasing premium on commercial support channels to establish service-level agreements on par with closed-source alternatives.

I’ll buy that. Frankly, whether it ultimately costs me more or less is somewhat immaterial. I don’t buy Macs because they’re cheaper. I buy them because they’re better. In like manner, I buy open-source products because they are often much better, in several ways, than proprietary alternatives. Not always, but often enough that if you’re not at least considering open-source alternatives, you’re missing out.

But it’s not just Linux. Is Drupal adversely affected by Acquia? Lucene/Solr by Lucid Imagination? MySQL by MySQL? Jasper Reports by JasperSoft? And so on.

Gartner suggests that by 2012, “50% of direct commercial revenue attributed to open-source products or services will come from projects under a single vendor’s patronage.” What this means, however, is open to interpretation.

Here’s Gartner’s:

Regardless, Gartner is right to highlight the significant benefits of open source that transcend price tags.

For those that think community-based support is the way to go, consider CentOS, a clone of Red Hat Enteprrise Linux. CentOS recently had its leader go AWOL. While the situation was eventually resolved, a serious vendor like Red Hat mitigates the vagaries of community whims, like Red Hat’s Alan Cox deciding to stop working on tty development.

Was Linux hurt by Red Hat’s involvement? Hardly. Linux has thrived in tandem with Red Hat’s prominent role in developing the Linux kernel.

While Gartner suggests that this trend will lead to cost parity with proprietary solutions 50 percent of the time, the facts don’t bear out this assertion. For example, Forrester finds that 87 percent of enterprises surveyed reduced costs through open source.

For example, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration argues that “Being able to look at source code is a huge benefit, instead of just getting a black-box executable we can’t even look at….[I]t’s always nice to be able to modify something on our own. We count on [open-source vendor] Progress to do the heavy lifting, but we do keep our own options open.” The FAA depends on Progress, without being dependent on Progress, and gets a great deal of benefit from both the open-source software and the open-source vendor.

In part, this is due to commercial open-source vendors charging dramatically less than their proprietary peers. We can pass on sales and marketing cost savings in the form of maintenance savings.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

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Forrester)

Microsoft has not said when the new version–Silverlight 4–will ship. Silverlight 3 was launched in July at an event in San Francisco.

At that time, Microsoft said it is aiming to have Silverlight on half of all Internet-connected devices by next year. That’s still a far cry from Adobe’s Flash, which is almost ubiquitous on PCs and on a growing number of cell phones as well.

In particular, Microsoft said the next version of the Adobe Flash rival would support its PlayReady digital rights management technology for offline content. That feature should allow studios to offer extras commonly found on DVD and Blu-ray discs on movies that are distributed digitally, Microsoft said.

Also on Tuesday, Microsoft said it would release in the next 30 days its Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services 3.0, which allows so-called “Live Smooth Streaming” of content. The technology has already been used in beta form since May to offer coverage of events such as the French Open tennis tournament, the Tour de France cycling event, and the Michael Jackson memorial.

Ahead of a broadcasting conference that starts later this week in Amsterdam, Microsoft on Tuesday shared a few new details on the next version of Silverlight.