philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

A kinder, gentler DRM?

[PaidContent]

With Harry Potter fan site and e-bookstore Pottermore.com now using watermarkinginstead of heavyweight DRM on all the Harry Potter e-books, anti-DRM arguments are growing louder. Now the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the organization that oversees the EPUB e-book format, hopes to create an industry standard for “lightweight content protection” — something “occupying a middle ground between strong DRM and DRM-free.”

The IDPF is taking the first steps toward creating this standard by launching a discovery process — though it acknowledges the outcome of this process could be “that no feasible standardized solution would be sufficiently useful or accepted, or that no solution is forthcoming that will sufficiently address critical requirements.” Nevertheless, copyright expert Bill Rosenblatt writes, there’s “a growing recognition among publishers that DRM has aspects that work against their interests, including its lack of user-friendliness and eBook distributors’ use of the technology to ‘lock in’ consumers.”

The lightweight DRM Rosenblatt proposes would look something like this:

• Books are watermarked and users can share them, but “unlike watermarking alone, cracks would be considered definitively illegal.”
• The DRM would include a password option that “could be used to discourage ‘over-sharing’ by requiring passwords that contain personal information, such as an e-mail address or credit card number.”
• There are limits on modification, copying and printing “in a matter similar to the encryption incorporated in PDF.”
• It would work for libraries and could be made stricter for library lending.
• It wouldn’t require network connectivity and a reader could still access his or her files if a company goes out of business.
• It wouldn’t impose “excessive restrictions on user behavior, such as prohibiting uses that could well be permissible under copyright law” like reading an e-book on a different device.

Overall, Rosenblatt writes, “a standard method of protecting eBook content that becomes broadly adopted would materially increase interoperability, ameliorate some of the ease-of-use limitations in current DRMs, and may promote broader adoption of digital reading.”

IDPF is taking comments through June 8.

See the original post and more stories here: http://paidcontent.org/2012/05/18/a-kinder-gentler-drm/?utm_source=General+Users&utm_campaign=2b828b3f02-c%3Amed+d%3A05-21&utm_medium=email

Behind the lens of the camera which took the iconic first colour picture of Earth from space

Philip Lelyveld comment: apparently the Earthrise photo was cropped from the original image!  Read about it and the camera that took it here: 

Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic

[Philip Lelyveld comment: Neither the article nor the Pirate Pay website explains how their pirate file torrent interception technology works. It will be interesting to see if there is any substance behind it, since it could be useful for reducing (nothing 'stops' anything online) identity theft and privacy violations as well.]

The Russian based “Pirate Pay” startup is promising the entertainment industry a pirate-free future. With help from Microsoft, the developers have built a system that claims to track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads. ...

Read the full story here: http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-funded-startup-aims-to-kill-bittorrent-traffic-120513/

Younger Generation Embracing A New View Of Privacy

For four years, nearly 200 high school students in Dallas voluntarily allowed every text, email, and IM to be monitored. That these youth would sign off on such an invasion of privacy, especially in light of the content that was discovered within their communication, shows how much the next generation has changed their views on privacy.  Students allowed a team of researchers to capture all of their messaging, whether it was completely innocent or contained swearing, sexual references, and even drug deals, to the tune of 500,000 texts per month in exchange for a free BlackBerry!

With a $3.4 million grant from the NIH, Dr. Marion Underwood from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas-Dallas embarked on the study with the goal of investigating the formation and maintenance of friendships as well as the dynamics of social and physical aggression. The students signed up in 2003 as 4th graders (with their parents consent) for the research, which at the time was named “The Friendship Project.”

Read the full article here: 

Want to reinvent TV? Don’t forget the TV

...[NDS] The Israel-based TV services provider, which Cisco acquired for $5 billion in March, has been exploring what the actual TV set will look like five years from now. Company executives came to San Francisco this week to showcase some of their research, and the results are pretty intriguing.

To sum it up briefly, NDS was showcasing a big matrix of six bezel-less flat screen TVs that were combined to form a huge, almost overwhelming TV wall. NDS CTO Nick Thexton then went on to demonstrate big displays like these can be broken up, showing a video of varying sizes somewhere in the middle, with personalized and content-relevant widgets off to the side. And once you get some cinematic 4k content, you might even want to use the whole screen. Check out Christina Bonnington’s story over at Wired.com for more details about the demo, which was neat.

But what I found fascinating was the points that Thexton and NDS Chief Marketing Officer Nigel Smith raised about the future of TV. The real question, Smith told me, is, If you have a TV the size of a wall, how are you going to interact with it?  ...

Instead, Thexton thinks that TVs may become modular and actually consist of much smaller displays that can be combined to fit the room. Think of 6-inch to 8-inch bezel-less squares that you can buy individually and then mount to the wall next to one another, gradually growing the size of your display to fit your needs. These displays would automatically work together, making sure your Saturday night movie runs on all of them at once.  ...

One of the main points of the NDS demo was that huge displays don’t always equal huge videos. Instead of watching your morning news in theater mode, you’re going to watch clips with a much smaller size and use the rest of the screen for other information. In fact, sometimes you might not be watching TV at all but will still find it useful to leave the large screen wall on. For example, it could display cover art for the music you are listening to while giving you access to your calendar reminders, a wall-sized clock and your Twitter feed. Home automation and security-camera footage are also applications that could be useful to run all day, or fade in and out as needed.

But with that big ambient screen also comes a unique new challenge: You really don’t want to turn it off. ...

NDS ran its demo off an iPad, allowing me to change the immersion level — and display size — of a video with simple sliders. ...

A TV that consists of many little displays working together, a TV that’s always on, a TV the size of your living room wall and a TV that obeys you like a well-trained dog: That’s a lot to swallow, especially if you’ve thought of the next wave of apps as innovation in the TV space.

However, it may be time to think bigger, and leave some of the assumptions of what TV is — and what TV sets are — behind. “TV has to start defining a future for itself,” Thexton told me. And that future may not fit into a 60- or 70-inch bezel.

See the full story here: