I have finally managed to go through Stevens v Sony Computer Entertainment, the ruling from the High Court of Australia regarding modchips. In case you are too bored to check on Wikipedia, a modchip is a modification to a built-in technical protection measure in a computer game console (like PlayStation, Read more…
The Playstation mod chip case has come against the games industry. A court in Australia has ruled that mod chips are not an infringement of anti-circumvention legislation as present in the European Information Society Directive, the WCT and the DMCA. The full text of the ruling is not out yet, Read more…
There is a new format war brewing in consumer electronics that reminds people of the VHS vs Betamax battle. This brings two competing incompatible DVD formats against one another – Sony’s Blu-Ray vs Toshiba’s HD DVD. You may wonder why do we need a new DVD format. After all, DVD Read more…
One of my favourite phrases in English is “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. When I was growing up, I used to get a lot of my music from tapes recorded from friends (and even from the radio). I didn’t have money to buy records, and Read more…
DRM protection in DVDs is laughable at most. That is the reason why there is new protection being planned. Blu-Ray is just one of the competing DRM standards being discussed for DVDs. The protection will have three steps, content protection so that users cannot use the DVD in certain ways; Read more…
What is Digital Rights Management? This may seem like a rather straightofward question as there is quite a lot of information already on what is a digital rights management. Yet, maybe there is not. There are many people who equate DRM with restrictive technical protection measures, yet this is inaccurate. Read more…
The Paris Court of Appeals has ruled against the copy protection mechanisms included in DVDs, called Content Scrambling System (CSS). Not too long ago the same mechanism was being enforced in American and Norwegian courts, and now they are declaring that the technology is a bit dodgy. The case was Read more…
MP3.com was one of the early pioneers of online music sharing. It started offering direct links to MP3s, which was shut down easily by the music industry. Afterwards, MP3.com has been offering music from emerging groups that want to offer their music online. Now MP3.com will open a novel music Read more…
The BBC reports that accounts in the popular game Half-Life 2 have been cancelled by the manufacturer. The developers were able to require authentication for the online part of the game, and have been able to shut them down. I am not sure why they are so enthusiastic about it. Read more…
Sounds like something taken from Mission Impossible: “This DVD will self-destruct in 5 seconds”. The movie industry is hoping to bring out self-destructing DVDs that can be viewed only twice. They have a chemical cover that destroys the information. This is not really a DRM as the protection is not Read more…