February 23, 2012 8:57:52 AM

Microsoft, Google and Netflix want to add DRM-hooks to W3C HTML5 standard

boingboing.net

Microsoft, Google and Netflix want to add DRM-hooks to W3C HTML5 standard

A proposed anti-copying extension for the WC3's standard for HTML5 has been submitted by representatives of Google, Microsoft and Netflix. The authors take pains to note that this isn't "DRM" — because it doesn't attempt to hide keys and other secrets from the user — but in a mailing list post, they later admitted that this could be "addressed" by running the browser inside a proprietary hardware system that hideverything from the user.

Other WC3 members — including another prominent Googler, Ian Hickson — have called for the withdrawal of the proposal. Hickson called it "unethical." I agree, and would add "disingenuous," too, since the proposal disclaims DRM while clearly being intended to form a critical part of a DRM system.
In an era where browsers are increasingly the system of choice for compromising users' security and privacy, it is nothing short of madness to contemplate adding extensions to HTML standards that contemplate designing devices and software to deliberately hide their workings from users, and to prevent users from seeing what they're doing and changing that behavior if it isn't in their interests.
Writing on Ars Technica, Ryan Paul gives a good blow-by-blow look at the way that this extension is being treated in the W3C:

Mozilla's Robert O'Callahan warned that the pressure to provide DRM in browsers might lead to a situation where major browser vendors and content providers attempt to push forward a suboptimal solution without considering the implications for other major stakeholders.
Some of the discussion surrounding the Encrypted Media proposal seem to validate his concerns. Mozilla's Chris Pearce commented on the issue in a message on the W3C HTML mailing list and asked for additional details to shed light on whether the intended content protection scheme could be supported in an open source application.
"Can you highlight how robust content protection can be implemented in an open source webrowser?" he asked. "How do you guard against an open source web browser simply being patched to write the frames/samples to disk to enable (presumably illegal) redistribution of the protected content?"
Netflix's Mark Watson responded to the message and acknowledged that strong copy protection can't be implemented in an open source Web browser. He deflected the issue by saying that copy protection mechanisms can be implemented in hardware, and that such hardware can be used by open source browsers.

"Unethical" HTML video copy protection proposal draws criticism from W3C reps(Thanks, Rob! )

February 12, 2012 2:56:16 PM

Five Best Movie Recommendation Services

lifehacker.com

Whether you're planning a dinner and a movie with a special someone for Valentine's Day, or you just like to read up on what's worth seeing before you spend your hard earned cash on a theater experience, you have plenty of options to read up on what's new in theaters or what's worth seeing before you go. Here's a look at five of the best movie recommendation and review services, based on your nominations.
Earlier in the week we asked you for your favorite movie recommendation service , and you certainly responded. Sadly we can't look at all of them, but here are the top five nominees.

Criticker

Criticker doesn't just match you up with movies that you would like, it also matches you up with other movie lovers who enjoy the same types of movies that you do. If you're a movie buff or a self-described movie critic, Criticker gives you a platform to share your thoughts, rate movies, and comment on other people's ratings. The service is only as good as the movies you rate though, so as soon as you sign up, your best bet is to start rating movies right away so the site can get an idea of what you'd enjoy watching. When it does know what you like, though, it makes some great predictions. Best of all, the algorithm that it uses to determine whether you'd like a movie, the "Taste Compatibility Index," is dynamic, learns from your changing tastes, and can help you determine whether you'd like a new blockbuster before you spend money on it.

Jinni

Jinni, often described as "Pandora for movies," works best when you search for the types of movies, genres, moods, even performers that you like, and you'll see a list of movies that Jinni thinks will fit the bill, thanks to its aptly-named "Movie Genome Project ." Even if you search for "date night," Jinni can suggest some titles for you that are perfect for the atmosphere that both of you will enjoy. Then you can further customize the search by limiting the results to types of films, dates released, genres, and more. If you have an account, you can save your searches, along with any preferences and favorites you have, so Jinni can hone your recommendations even further. Plus, hook Jinni up with your Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon Video, or Blockbuster account to make use of its suggestions.

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is the quintessential movie review site. For a lot of people, a "rotten" rating is enough to make them not want to see a movie at all, much less spend money on it in the theaters. Rotten Tomatoes does an excellent job of aggregating movie reviews from all over the web, including the voices of professional movie critics, newspapers reviews, bloggers, and forum and movie fan buzz around the web. The site is a great way to quickly see how well received (or poorly received) a new film that's just landed in the theater has been. You can have your say as well—after registering for an account, you can rate movies on your own and contribute to the community. Think of Rotten Tomatoes as an essential research tool to use to decide if a movie worth seeing—even if it doesn't use your tastes or watch history to help you decide.

ChickFlix

With the tagline "movie reviews by industry chicks," ChickFlix aims to give you a female perspective on the movie industry's latest releases. Operated by three women who started the site by debating what exactly a "chick flick" really is, the blog has grown into an amazing source for movie reviews and perspectives that you won't find represented in newspaper reviews or on other movie review sites. Keep in mind though that ChickFlix doesn't aim to rate movies, or give you detailed background into why movie A is better than movie B, or why you'll like movie C because you liked movie D. Instead, you'll find interesting and engaging movie reviews, information on films that you may like that you may not have heard of, and great suggestions for films that you may not otherwise have investigated.

Metacritic

Metacritic rates just about everything , and movies are no exception. Similar to Rotten Tomatoes, the site is largely sentiment-driven and scores are an aggregate based on reviews from elsewhere on the web, prominent voices, independent reviews, authors, bloggers, commenters, and members of the community who are invited to sign up and rate their own movies and experiences. The process of building a metascore is unique and complex enough that there's a whole page about it , and to this day Metacritic rankings—which fluctuate based on the sentiment of the web—are used to communicate the overall worth of a movie, video game, book, or album, even if that media has been out for years. Again, Metacritic is a research tool, much like Rotten Tomatoes—even though Metacritic covers a much wider series of topics, it's not going to help you decide whether you'd like a film based on other films you like, but it will help you determine whether the overall reception of a movie has been positive or negative, and why.
Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to vote for the overall winner.
Honorable mentions this week go out to the venerable IMDB , which not as many of you nominated as we expected, but is still a great go-to site for information on past movies, actor bios, upcoming projects and productions that your favorite performers are in, trailers, and news. Also worth mentioning is MovieLens , a site that does a really good job of suggesting movies to you that you'd like based on movies you already know you enjoyed or disliked.
Did your favorite not get enough nominations to make the list? Have something to say about one of the contenders we missed? Sound off in the comments below.

February 13, 2012 3:04:48 PM

BitTorrent doesn't hurt US box-office, delayed international releases drive downloading

boingboing.net

Economics researchers at Wellesley College and U Missouri have published a study showing that feature films' US box office returns are not correlated to BitTorrent sharing. They also show that shorter delays between the US exhibition and overseas releases result in less file-sharing — that is, people outside the US download movies because they can't buy tickets to them.

The second point is an important one. There's only one Internet, networked culture doesn't respect national boundaries. A particularly effective marketing campaign for a new release in America will stimulate demand in other countries, and if there's no legitimate way to fulfill demand, then some portion of viewers will choose illegitimate routes. For example, the new Muppets movie has only just been released in the UK, some months after the US theatrical release (which was attended by enormous publicity). Presumably, someone at a studio concluded that there were too many UK movies in the pipeline at Christmas and not enough in February, and chose to delay the film's release to now. However, a certain portion of the audience for Muppet movies have been reading reviews, watching viral YouTube clips, and sitting through extended online discussions of the movie without being able to see it and participate. I'm pretty sure that a lot of these people downloaded the movie so that they could be a part of this moment.

Maybe they'll still buy tickets to the cinema, too. I'd guess that a lot of middle-class families with small children will do this. There aren't many kids' movies in cinematic release at the moment, and Muppets is certainly the best bet for a Sunday matinee during the record-breaking cold-snap, when no one wants to take the kids to a park on the weekend. But child-free adults who love the Muppets may well have slaked their thirst, and there are a lot of adults in the Muppet cohort, and adults who like kids' movies often complain about paying a lot of money to attend screenings that are disrupted by crying, talking, squirming children. If you've already seen the movie on your computer, that may be enough. Finally, there are families in the "squeezed middle" who are struggling to pay the bills may want to see the movie in the cinema, but simply lack the funds to do so, and the amount of time that's gone past since the initial release has meant that there are more online copies and that they're easier to download (for example, more BitTorrent seeds) than ever before. For them, the delayed release makes downloading easier and more attractive.

"Anti-piracy" efforts are often painted as life-or-death struggles for the studios. But in the case of international windows, this is about profit maximization, not survival. If the studios can outsource the titanic expense of policing copyrights in delayed-release nations to the countries themselves, they can wring a few more points of profit by delaying release to an otherwise optimum moment. But considered as a societal problem, it makes no sense to spend a million euros on copyright enforcement just so Universal can save a few thousand euros on the cost of making new 35mm prints.

Here's the study: Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales , by Brett Danaher (Wellesley College - Department of Economics) and Joel Waldfogel (University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - Carlson School of Management ; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - Department of Economics).

"Consumers in the US who would choose between the box office and piracy choose the box office (and the remaining US pirates had valuations lower than the ticket price) but that international consumers who would consider both options choose piracy due to a lack of legal availability," wrote the researchers. "If piracy displaced box office sales in the US, we would have expected the slope of the returns profile to shift more significantly as BitTorrent became more widely adopted."
In other words, researchers were unable to discern an irregular drop in returns of domestic box office sales, which could fault BitTorrent as the culprit.
Despite the mounting evidence and studies providing evidence to the needlessness of the movie studios' assault against file-sharing services, their attacks have been intensifying. At the end of the day, these results suggest that, while directing the blame at file-sharing services induces the fear of prosecution among other file-sharing competitors, much of the power to curb piracy remains in the hands of the studios.

Study suggests U.S. box office not affected by BitTorrent (Thanks, Xeni ! )