The Great Geek Manual News

Google Inc’s YouTube said on Thursday it has reached a deal to post Sony Corp films and TV shows and was talking with other big studios to ramp up content and attract more advertising dollars.

YouTube also announced deals with 11 other partners including the Anime Network, Shout Factory, Telenext Media, Documentary Channel and First Look Studios, bolstering its licensed content offerings from dozens of movies and hundreds of TV episodes to 700 movies and thousands of TV episodes.

YouTube also recently announced a partnership with Walt Disney Co to get shortform excerpts of content from ABC and ESPN, reflecting its aggressive efforts to thaw a chilly relationship with Hollywood, which had criticized it in the past for posting unauthorized content.

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Source: Reuters

The Twitter microblogging service has received an absurd quantity of press in the mainstream media lately. Everybody has been talking about it, from CNN, which has built entire shows around it, to The View, where each host tries to out do the others in how clueless she is about Twitter. And now, the inevitable “Twitter backlash” has begun. What does it all mean?

In a word, nothing.

The so-called backlash is just the media’s knee-jerk pseudo-contrarianism, right on schedule. Obviously Twitter has been clearly overexposed and overhyped in the media, and now reporters and commentators are both slamming their own hype, and, inevitably, attacking Twitter itself.

My advice: Don’t take any of it too seriously. The media does this with every truly major Internet phenomenon that comes along. It happened with the Internet itself, then e-mail, then the Web, then the tech bubble, then social networking and now Twitter.

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Source: Computer World

Google has expanded the free music downloads it offers in China to include songs by artists from each of the big four U.S. record labels, an addition that could help it win users from dominant Chinese search engine Baidu.

Google launched its free music download search last year — only in China — to compete with a similar service that analysts say rival Baidu relies on for a significant portion of its traffic.

A music search on Google’s Chinese site Monday revealed freely downloadable songs whose licensing rights are owned by Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and EMI.

The expansion could boost Google’s traffic in a country where music piracy is common. Baidu has attracted more users than Google through its music search with a wider selection of songs, but it links to unlicensed downloads.

Google’s music search links users to legal downloads on the Web site of partner Top100.cn. It is supported by advertising revenue split between those two companies and the music labels.

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Source: PC World

Rosemary Greenway has been playing passages of opera and orchestral symphonies on the radio to the animals at her stables for more than 20 years, convinced that it helps soothe them.

While not all of her staff are quite as fond of the output of Classic FM as she is, Mrs Greenway, 62, kept the radio tuned to the station religiously while mucking out because of the apparent benefits.

But she has dropped the practice after being told that she must pay a £99 annual licence fee as it constitutes a “performance”.

Because her stables, the Malthouse Equestrian Centre in Bushton, Wilts, employs more than two people it is treated in the same way as shops, bars and cafés which have to apply for a licence to play the radio.

She received a telephone call from the Performing Right Society – now officially known as PRS for Music – which was targeting stables as part of a drive to get commercial premises to pay for licences.

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Source: The UK Telegraph

Movie theaters nowadays are becoming more secure than some airports. Employees are equipped with night-vision goggles and instructed to closely monitor movie goers. Metal detectors are installed, the public has to hand over all recording devices and in some instances even their candy. Despite all these efforts, desperately poor-quality camcorded films that are hardly worth watching still leak onto the Internet - so more has to be done.

Quite common by now are the watermarking techniques used by the studios to track down the origin of cams. Through these watermarks the theaters where the movies are recorded can be identified, and every now and then an arrest is made. Recent technological advances even make it possible to get a fairly accurate estimation of the location of the camcorder equipment using audio watermarks. These audio watermarks have not been implemented yet since they require a lot of extra paperwork in order to work well.

In a recent blog post John August, the director of hit movie The Nines, discusses some of the anti-piracy tools the movie studios are using to decrease or deter camcording in theaters. August himself has a fairly balanced view on illegal downloading. In a previous interview with TorrentFreak he said that he wouldn’t think bad of people who downloaded his movie using BitTorrent. In talks with other studio insiders, however, he discovered something that made our jaws drop.

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Source: Torrent Freak

When Apple Inc. announced in January that it would sell restriction-free music files, that was supposed to mean consumers could buy songs and play them on the portable gadget of their choice.

Finally, music buyers would have in digital music what they had with vinyl, 8-track and CDs: interoperability, meaning the music could play on any device. If your record or CD player broke, you’d buy a new one.

Well, that’s not the case with digital music. If your iPod breaks, replacing it with a Creative Zen may not work for you if you want to hear all your music.

There have been strides to improve this interoperability issue, and Apple’s move to sell digital-rights-free music was a big step in the right direction.

But those “unprotected” songs from iTunes, dubbed iTunes Plus, won’t play on every music player. That’s because there are different types of unprotected music files.

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Source: PhysOrg

Mike Piscetelli was a fan of the Kindle e-book reader even before the pipes in his New Jersey home burst and destroyed his library of more than 500 books.

Now he’s turning his back on paperbacks in favour of their digital successors.

“From now on, I’m going to carry my library with me wherever I go,” the 44-year-old salesman from Princeton said, vowing to use his insurance money to replace his library with e-books that can be read on the Amazon.com Inc. device.

“No more bookshelves … and God forbid my Kindle gets destroyed, I can still back up all that information off Amazon. Anyone who says anything bad about the Kindle has never used a Kindle.”

Amazon’s first Kindle e-book reading device – launched in November, 2007 – was hailed as a watershed moment for the digital book market. But many observers remain unconvinced that book lovers will be willing to ditch paper pages for digital ones the way music fans abandoned CDs for MP3s.

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Source: The Globe and Mail

Stephen Fry has admitted he uses pirated software and lambasted the music industry for its attitude to copyright theft, in a controversial speech for Apple. Stephen Fry, currently the unofficial champion for social-networking phenomenon Twitter, has broken the 100,000 follower mark just in time for a talk at Apple’s Regent Street store in London.

After the talk, where he recounted the early history of computers, and the personal history of his digital life, he answered questions from the audience where he was congratulated for becoming the second most followed person on the planet on Twitter, after Barack Obama. “I’m the vice president of Twitter,” Fry joked.

Fry’s Twitter count only hit the 50,000 mark recently, but received a massive boost following his appearance on the BBC website and the Friday Night on Jonathan Ross TV chat show, taking him over the 100,000 mark in only a few days.

Fry was asked for his thoughts on the Creative Commons group, devoted to lifting the shackles of copyright. The actor and writer admitted he was very much in favour. “I’m not excited about my copyrights,” he said. “If someone stole large wodges of my works I’m sure my publishers would get very upset, but I’d say, ‘Golly, that’s a pity’. I’m in an overpaid profession so if some of it leaks away, then tough.”

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Source: PC Pro

Is extreme government censorship about to rob British comic book fans of their monthly fix of ultra-violence? That’s what some paranoid fans are expecting, thanks to a new (and vague) anti-pornography law in the UK.

The new law - given the extremely vague name “The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act” - makes possessing any “extreme image” produced “solely or principally for the purpose of sexual arousal” illegal, and some British comic fans are so nervous that we’re wondering whether they’re reading different issues of Batman than we are. A statement from the fansite Comic Shop Voice reads:

Do you own any of the following:

Wanted (Top Cow)
Batman: The Killing Joke (DC)
Watchmen (DC)
Punisher (Marvel)
Lost Girls (Top Shelf Productions)
Manga (pick a title)
Cerebus (Aardvark Vanaheim)
(The list continues)

Congratulations you are a comic book fan and the government would like to arrest you, fine you, confiscate your comic collection and ask you to sign the sex offenders’ list.

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Source: io9

The music business has finally come to terms with file-sharing, according to executives at the Midem conference in Cannes. But now they have a different problem.

Until recently, the music industry was in a blind panic about illegal peer-to-peer downloading.

Millions upon millions of fans are spreading music around the world, and the people who made and own it don’t see a dime.

A vast 95% of all digital music comes from unlicensed sources, according to a recent estimate from the global trade body the IFPI.

But the blind panic now seems to have stopped.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents US labels, has traditionally been the most aggressive in chasing file-sharers.

But it has just announced that it will no longer sue suspected offenders.

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Source: The BBC

Apple has reportedly signed a deal with all four of the major music labels to sell DRM-free tracks via iTunes.

The deal will also see the end of Apple’s one-price-fits-all policy, allowing the labels to charge more for chart hits and less for back-catalogue music.

Apple has been selling DRM-free tracks from EMI for more than a year, but according to a report on CNet.com, the company has now finally reached agreements with BMG, Universal and Warner Music.

Apple is expected to announce the new deals later today during Phil Schiller’s keynote speech at MacWorld.

As part of the new deals, the music labels have convinced Apple to drop its uniform pricing policy, which sees every track charged at 99 cents in the US (or 79p here in the UK).

CNet claims that back-catalogue music will now be sold for 79 cents in the US, while the latest chart tracks will be more expensive. The labels have long complained that Apple’s rigid pricing curtailed their earnings potential.

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Source: PC Pro

The Norwegians, who have made a name for themselves by taking on Apple, Inc.’s music business, may have wound up picking a fight with Apple Records as well. A new agreement forged between Norway’s national broadcasting service, the NRK, and TONO, the group that holds the music distribution rights in the country, has given the NRK permission to host music-focused programming as podcasts in MP3 format, provided the copyrighted music comprises less than 70 percent of the podcast. Included in the collection that has already started appearing on the NRK’s site: the entire Beatles catalog.

The Norwegian government as a whole appears to take a rather liberal view of content. The Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman has pursued a case against the Apple based in Cupertino, trying to liberate the music at the iTunes store from the FairPlay DRM scheme. The NRK has also demonstrated an independent streak, making copies of one of its most popular programs available in a DRM-free format on BitTorrent, and pronouncing the experiment a rousing success.

(The NRK’s technology group seems to be a bit self-consciously flippant, as the site describes its use of the mother tongue as follows: “This site is coded in an advanced codec called Norwegian. It’s only readable by about 4.7 million people. So from time to time, when we have something we really would like to show the world, we decode it into English.”)

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Source: Ars Technica

I’ve noticed a trend lately (actually I noticed it back when I worked at Microsoft and my bosses kept refusing to buy booths at conferences, saying they didn’t return the ROI, but that trend has grown and grown big time). Big companies are throwing their own parties to get news out inside of going to big trade shows. Last night I was at Facebook’s party, where they told everyone they had just passed 140 million users. That deserves a blog post of its own, but we’re here to discuss the trade show crunch.

Earlier in the year we attended a day-long event where Electronic Arts introduced a bunch of bloggers to Dead Space, here’s our video with the producer of that.

I’ve watched as Apple invites a few hundred bloggers and journalists into a conference room at its headquarters in Cupertino and gets the news out to the world without having to go to an expensive venue.

What changed?

Blogging and online video.

Big companies are looking at the millions of dollars they spend for booths (not to mention bringing employees to) and are realizing that it’s just not getting the return on investment that they should get.

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Source: Scobleizer

‘Resident Evil: Degeneration‘, or ‘Biohazard: Degeneration’ as it’s known in Japan, will never become a blockbuster film, simply because it is only set for release in a few movie theaters. On the Internet, however, its popularity exceeds all expectations.

The film, produced by Hiroyuki Kobayashi, is set for a Sony Pictures DVD release in the USA on December 30. A few days ago it leaked onto the Internet and since then it has already been downloaded a million times via BitTorrent.

This is not the first time that a movie quickly became popular online due to the release of a pirated copy. “The Man from Earth” is another example of a film that became immensely popular due to its distribution on BitTorrent. Contrary to the opinion of the big studios, many independent filmmakers see piracy as free promotion instead of a threat.

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Source: Torrent Freak