Two More Small Tales from the IP Front

There are a small number of areas in which I am an expert, and intellectual property is not one of them. For expertise, I like to refer folks to Mike Masnick and Techdirt.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to move through the technology world and not get bonked on the head by IP absurdities and incongruities calling out for some solution aside from lawsuits and Nancy-Reagan-style denials.

First up is the tale of two Comcasts, and two identical HD streams of Battlestar Galactica. One of these streams comes in via the HD DVR, and the other comes in via Bittorrent.

Actually, I’m leaving a bit of information out in the setup. See, the two HD streams from SciFi channel should be more or less identical modulo commercials. But they’re not.

Due to bandwidth allocation and network management issues, the “legitimate,” paid-for SciFi channel stream is full of bitrate-spike artifacts reminiscent of late ‘90s web video. So the HD channel, the HD DVR, the HDTV gets you … a pretty awful picture the second characters start fighting, running, or blowing things up.

Then you have the Bittorrent stream, ripped from SciFi, and carried in via the same Comcast coax line. This stream looks great, and makes a customer glad to have Comcast and a HDTV. In some strange respect, this latter stream may represent a problem in the “industry’s” opinion, even though it’s clearly what the customer wants and is paying to view, and even though the bandwidth (both instant and aggregate) is a small fraction of that required for the “broadcast” stream.

Next strangeness is Grooveshark, a free, crowdsourced, on-demand streaming service that appears to live on the razor-thin edge of legality if it has a claim on legality at all.

That said, the ability to send (or post/tweet/blog/…) a link that goes directly to a particular song is an extremely potent way to virally spread the music you like. And more music loved by more fans is the core asset base for any music industry, whether it resembles the 20th-century “legacy” record industry or not.

Without Grooveshark, there is always YouTube for sharing instant, no-membership, no-login-required tracks. But unlike YouTube, Grooveshark is structured in a way that encourages more exploration of an artist, album, etc.

So anyone wanna throw into a pool for how long ‘til this service gets shuttered? Wait, that’s not quite legal either. We’ll “just say no” and it’ll all just go away.

Om:Yes, Gillmor:No ... Comcast's Data Transfer Cap

Om Malik nailed it at the end of one his posts on the 250GB cap. He lists Comcast's stilted usage examples for email, music, etc., and asks "How many HD movies will fit under the cap?"

That's the right question, but not because he is worried he'll bump the cap watching video.

The reason it's the right question is that the cap has more to do with Comcast's long-term business plans -- and the cable/telco industry's plans -- than about slapping down a handful of network hogs.

One fact before we continue. As I've written before, while everyone squabbled over BlueRay or HDDVD, the filesharing world settled on the x264 implementation and a container format for it. In that compressed format, a high-def film averages 10-15 GB.

But here's the real deal:

Comcast's cable TV and on-demand video business competes directly with Internet video (both legal and gray-market). By making the cap high enough that it won't immediately impact YouTube watchers but -- over time -- will put a serious dent in customers' ability to get HD video over the Internet, Comcast is simply crippling one product so that customers will have to buy another product from them. Don't even think about mentioning broadband competition -- if you define competition as more than one entity offering substitutable goods (i.e. similar bandwidth, QoS, etc), then most of the U.S. has zero competition.

The 250GB cap is a way to push customers to buy the same content twice. To be specific, you'll pay to see a movie broadcast on cable TV in HD, and then pay again for some special plan that lets you watch the same content later on Hulu. Or you'll pay for Comcast "on-demand" to watch a show on your TV. But if you want to place-shift that show to your laptop or the gym (on your phone), you'll have to pay to get enough headroom to download the same video.

This move is not just about trying to squeeze out more money. It's yet another attempt by network operators to neglect their core business and instead try to get into a content business, so they can do two things badly instead of just one.

Meanwhile, Steve Gillmor writes that bandwidth caps will mean the end of BitTorrent downloading and a shift to streaming. Steve's a smart guy, but streaming is one of those perennial non-trends like speech recognition and thin-client computing. It's only conceivable to someone who has a computer connected to their TV or who lives on their laptop.

Having played a key role in several home-entertainment / media-tech startups, two of which have been successfully acquired, I feel confident saying streaming is only a little piece of a solution. For the foreseeable future, streaming will never be more than that. It neglects too many consumer needs and desires, is too inflexible, and is too warped by DRM and platform-lock-in issues.

Moreover, the latest round of DRM around HDMI and high-def media playback in general means that even in-home "streaming" -- i.e., from a PC to a TV or from one PC to another -- is facing setbacks just as Joe tech-savvy consumer finally starts to realize how to use a home server or network attached hard drive to get and watch shows.

And the set-top boxes, increasingly tied in tightly with content delivery (Comcast DVR, DirecTV TiVo expiring your pay-per-view movies, etc.) are more closed than ever. Instead of encouraging an ecosystem of streaming, they force customers into an ecosystem of downloading.

I think we'll see more people gaming the 250GB cap ... using scheduling software so they can maximize the utility of the 250GB and hoard downloads. Not to mention leaving the torrent client running so that every time I visit someone else's network -- an office, a coffeeshop, etc. -- I'll keep the downloads slowly but surely coming in.

One final note: the marginal cost of moving a kb of data around a big network -- that is, the cost of the power and cooling for the switches and the amortized cost of the cables and gear and ops guys divided over their lifetime data transfer -- is more or less zero when the network isn't already near peak bandwidth somewhere. So even if there is a problem, the volume-based cap is the answer to a different problem.

DVD Flick Installer Needs to Rewrite a System Library Why?

I feel bad ripping one in the crew that builds DVD Flick, a well regarded open source tool. From what I can tell, this is a fully-open, Sourceforge-hosted, quick-authoring tool similar to the excellent ConvertXToDVD.

During its installation, though, it attempts to overwrite the richtx32.ocx file in the windows/system32 directory. Richtx32.ocx is a Microsoft-authored GUI widget component (an AcitveX library) present in all or most Windows systems.

Trying to overwrite this is bad on so many levels. Who knows which version of this lib is being supplied by DVD Flick? The installer definitely doesn't compare versions and make an intelligent choice, or it would have chosen not to even try on my systems, where everything is up to date. So it's an old version, maybe one with bugs or security vulnerabilities, that could compromise my system because any process might load this code up.

Not to mention it appears to the user that the app needs to alter their system in order to continue. Since they trust this app (it's been written up in blogs like LifeHacker), they start thinking "oh, sometimes free apps I download off the Internet need to overwrite my system libraries, no big deal" ... all the UAC in the world won't be able to overcome that mentality (although theoretically Vista has other protections to remedy this specific problem).

I tried to think of any justification for this behavior, but I couldn't. True, there are aspects of the ActiveX/Registry/DLL Hell problem that can make something like this a little tricky, but there are workarounds as well.

Starting with the easiest fix: include a legit Microsoft merge module containing the latest DLL version, and first, in the installer script, check the installed lib version/signature to see if it's necessary to install a new one at all.

The other possibility, that DVD Flick isn't trying to update this library, but needs to install its own version on top of the existing one, with some extended functionality, would be even more ridiculous... I entertained this idea for a moment, but it appears not to be the case.

Not News, But Still Weak: PPV Timeouts on DirecTV DVR

Just got my DirecTV bill which mentions how, from now on, pay-per-view videos will self-destruct from my DVR after 24 hours (they used to remain indefinitely). This wasn't a surprise, as it was reported ages ago.

Sad and amusing really: the PPV offerings are already more expensive (by 2x) than the video store 4 minutes from my house. Oh, but PPV has second-run films that aren't on video, and it's more convenient.

But they're not competing with the video store, are they?

BitTorrent has first-run films and is even more convenient, and the films stick around as long as they want. Oh and they have gorgeous HD specimens with an open codec and no HDCP, special video cards, fancy cables, strange monitors, blah blah blah.

And if I'm going the PPV route, and I really wanted to keep the PPV videos from the DVR, I could just push the record button on the attached DVD recorder, which records in the clear, obviating any CSS-based, DMCA-granted restrictions (beyond the normal copyright restrictions) that might get in the way of my time- and place- shifting.

Those DirecTV guys and the Hollywood schemers who thought this up are so smart, I want to know what they're eating for breakfast so I can get some too.