Business

The sales of Microsoft’s Xbox are considerably behind that of Sony’s PS2 in Japan, so it is interesting to see that Microsoft have appointed Yoshihiro Maruyama as the new general manager of the Xbox Division at Microsoft Japan, starting 1 October.

Until recently Yoshihiro Maruyama was Senior Vice President (SVP) and Chief Operating Officer COO of the highly respected software developer Squaresoft, who are best known for the Final Fantasy epic series of game.

Maruyama has dealt extensively with both the US and Japan when negotiating content licencing with companies in both countries including Disney.

It is imagined that Microsoft hope his appointment will bring them much needed credibility in Japan.

The current approach of the US film industry to the perceived threat of Internet-distributed film piracy is to cast blame on the consumer and the number of filings of legal action against the creators of DVD-backup software bears testament to this. Perhaps they view the RIAA as their role model in this regard, pursue the consumer, even sue to consumer to try and halt the problem. We and others really do not think this is the best approach. How ever just the protection of their copyright material might be, it is simple business sense, you just do not attack your customers.

Recent AT&T research claimed that 80% of the 300 movies that they looked at on file sharing networks “appeared to have been leaked by industry insiders”. To further underline the fact that it was not consumers who were placing the movies online, AT&T also found that most of the films were available before their public DVD released. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has a connection to the film industry – they know that film material floats around freely.

If copyright holders continuously blame the consumer and tell them “We don’t trust you”, they will eventually tire of this, lose faith and leave, with the strong possibility that they never return. We’re sure that no-one in the industry wants that.

Voting on Europe’s own version of the controversial DMCA, the EU IP Enforcement Directive, has been postponed until 4th November, amid criticism that its implementation would criminalize many activities.

The proposed EU directive is heavily backed by Microsoft and eBay, as you can imagine, and was due for a vote this week. Janelly Fourtou, the MEP responsible for seeing the proposal through parliament has not yet managed to produce her report on the legislation, hence the delay.

Many groups see it as a further erosion of the consumer’s rights in favour of large multinational corporations. Like the DMCA, the directive outlaws reverse engineering and the practice of defeating copyright mechanisms. Buskers will also become copyright criminals, but that’s another matter.

IP Justice

ZDNet: “Europe’s DMCA on Steriods”

Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford University and cultural commentator thinks that the BBC have got it right with their proposal of making their freely archive available to the public for non-commercial uses.

By making the content available, commercial entities will also be able to identify BBC material and then license it for a fee.

Lessig describes this as “a brilliant response to the extra ordinary explosion of creative capacity enabled by digital technologies.”

There is less evidence of this sort of thinking in the US: corporations there are opposed to sharing standards and protocols and, as highlighted by the fascinating and ongoing Linux vs SCO vs IBM case, suspicious of the open source movement.

Original FT article

Lessig on Intellectual Property

Lessig’s weblog

Amongst protestations from environmental groups, the Walt Disney Co is testing out new rental disks which become unreadable after 48 hours.

The trial is this week in Austin, Texas; Peoria/Bloomington, Illinois; Charleston, South Carolina; and Kansas City, Missouri.

Intended for convenience stores rather than Blockbuster, the “EZ-D” discs are intended as impulse purchases. Developed by Flexplay Technologies Inc, the discs start off red, but turn black as they are oxidized. The system doesn’t make DVDs any more secure against piracy, as they can still be copied in the first 48 hours.

To appease environmentalists, such as the Alliance for Safe Alternatives, concerned at the needless landfill this will create, Disney are offering a recycling programme – and as an incentive, customers will get a new disk for every six used ones they return.

Flexplay: http://www.flexplay.com/

AOL and Reuters are forming a partnership to provide a secure, encrypted instant messaging (IM) service for commercial banks, investment firms, mutual funds and other financial organisations. Another feature of the service is that messages can be stored, as regulators require.

This is the first time that AOL has opened up its IM service to another network. The guts of it comes down to translating to and from AOL’s OSCAR protocol and Reuter’s own SIMPLE schema.

Michael Osterman, and industry analyst makes the point: “Email no longer offers a competitive advantage since everyone has it. If you offer instant messaging and the ability to communicate with customers and partners, that can provide you with a competitive advantage.”

Washington Post

AtNewYork