But, I wonder if the Digital Economy Bill goes far enough? After all if you download thousands of hours of illegally distributed music and films, your ISP might cut you off. But that merely prevents you from downloading any more.

I say, if the record industry thinks you’re downloaded a significant amount, then they can ask your electricity supplier to turn off your electricity. Then, not only would you not be able to continue downloading, but you won’t get the benefit of enjoying any ill gotten gains you’ve already downloaded!

Surely this makes sense…

In this screenshot from the WWDC 2008 keynote, notice how the last character entered is shown in the prompt for a brief moment before being obscured:

Now Greg Brown is running Motorola, and they’re coming out with $17,0000 bluetooth headsets. Some people never change. And I predict he’ll run Motorola with as much skill as he ran Micromuse…

More Proof that Motorola Is in the Doo-Doo [Goodbye Moto]

(Via Gizmodo.)

>Microsoft Has No Answer For Their Broken XBOX Live DRM [Drm]

>Reader Kevin’s XBOX 360 suffered the usual Red Ring of Death, so he sent it in to be repaired. He got back a different XBOX 360 with a different serial number. That would be no big deal, except Kevin has purchased a bunch of content through XBOX Live… content that is no longer fully functional due to Microsoft’s broken DRM.

This is typical of the problems with DRM and why law abiding consumers are the ones who suffer from DRM. If you purchase content that is tied to a particular bit of hardware, what happens if the hardware fails and you’re sent a replacement?

Now, obviously, it is absurd that Microsoft does not have a mechanism in place to deal with this. But, why should we even have to deal with it at all. Can you imagine if your replacement record player no longer played any of your records? Or you got a new VCR and it wouldn’t play any movies you’d purchased?

If nothing else, this demonstrates the customer relations expense (both financially and in good will) that DRM brings.

I’d love to use OpenID with my account, but I won’t go near anything from Microsoft…

What a crock.

Apple seems to forget that the 90s are over. Selling a rental for a specific time, downloaded or not, is competing with video tapes and Blockbuster. Who the hell want that model? The world has moved on. Between Netflix in the US and Lovefilm (and others) in the UK, I can’t imagine anyone with a brain going for this.

What Apple should do is offer a subscription service, just like Netflix. I.e, iTunes has three, four, or x number of “slots”. You pay a set fee per month, variable with the number of slots you want. I.e., $10 gets you three slots.

When you rent a movie, iTunes downloads it from the store and it fills one of your slots. You can sync it to your iPod/iPhone or your AppleTV or watch it right from your computer. Rent the next one and it fills your second slot. When you’ve filled all the slots, your rentals go into a queue.

When your done watching a film, click a “Return Movie” button next to a slot and iTunes deletes it from your computer, iPod, and/or AppleTV. Then it downloads the next film in your queue.

I’ve been a [Lovefilm](http://lovefilm.com) customer for a while. I can’t imagine going back to being forced to watch a movie in 24 hours.

I just got a new camera and I’ve been having fun taking pictures of my daughter. But every time I take a picture, I’m probably violating somebody’s copyright or design patent, or whatever.

The painting in the dining room, the tv screen in the background, the chair from the famous design house. All of these things are covered by some sort of right of control by the creator.

So, can you imagine if my camera, spotting a painting in the frame could query the painting to determine if it was legal to photograph. The painting’s DRM would say “No, All Rights Reserved!” and the shutter on the camera would refuse to fire.

Perhaps with a friendly “PC MOVE CAMERA” (that’s an obscure film joke btw).

You might think this is far fetched, but let me point out two things:

1. The technology to achieve this is either here today, or not far off. The biggest obstacle is co-ordination among the technology companies.

2. The technology companies are hard at work implementing this at the behest of the media companies.

There are already proposals to make video cameras stop recording if they detect copyrighted content. So, just as you start to capture the first steps of your child, you’d better hope it’s not in front of the television.

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I was impressed by the ease of accessing the actual shows. All you have to do it navigate to the page and click on a show to start watching the most recent episode.

Unfortunately, starting the show is all I could do. No matter which shows I tried to watch, they all ended about three to five minutes in with a message that there was a problem playing the video.

So, once again, in an effort to protect the rights holders from having to get off their butts and innovate, we’ve got yet another video site that doesn’t work as well as bittorrent.

Oh well, maybe next time…

The DMCA makes it illegal to break an encryption key used to protect copyrighted content. In plain english, while Apple can ship iTunes with the ability to rip CDs, they can’t, by law, add the ability to rip DVDs to iTunes.

There is no technical challenge to ripping DVDs, any more than CDs. It’s simply that they would be breaking the law.

Absent the ability to rip DVDs, the only use for Apple TV is to buy movies from the iTunes Store.

The unlocked version will apparently cost more than the locked version.

This means two things:

1) The phone is being subsidised, like most phone. It’s just not as transparent.
2) Anyone in the EU will be able to buy an unlocked iPhone.

The EU is a single market. This means anyone can go to France, buy an unlocked iPhone, and take it back to their own EU country and Apple can’t stop them (well, legally. They might try as they do with the iTunes Store).

I expect a lot of people to buy unlocked iPhones in France and ship them to other EU countries.