Seeking Nerdvana

Google Video recently arrived in Australia and it's interesting to look at the differences compared to YouTube. Whereas YouTube is a community which owes its growth and success to user participation and has a 'by the people, for the people' feel to it, Google Video is clearly designed and planned by a corporate giant.

57 billion channels and nothin' on

YouTube doesn't appear to show any favouritism, last night the front page had stuff like a guy setting the Guiness World Record for most T-Shirts worn at one time and some poor woman unknowingly caught singing on the beach, listening to music with her eyes closed. The people who posted these little gems can set up their own YouTube homepage to showcase their videos, like Seeking Nerdvana's YouTube page. It's nothing special but, to be honest, I'm just using them so I can put my TechVidReviews online without having to worry about hosting and bandwidth but still have it embedded in my site.

Over at Google Video Australia they also have their share of silly stuff like the Fun with Nukes Half Life 2 clip, but underneath them is a "Featured" section with content from ABC TV, Network Ten and Fairfax (you won't see Seven and Nine on there because they've got their own online affiliations in Yahoo!7 and NineMSN respectively). While some media outlets do put content on YouTube, they obviously don't have deals that get them constant front page exposure like these media giants do on Google Video. It's a different story if you're just an Average Joe on Google Video. Google Video doesn't let you enter in the same amount of metadata about your videos as YouTube but, more interestingly, it doesn't seem to let you create your own homepage to showcase your videos. Nor can people subscribe to your content in the way they can on YouTube. So, unless you're one of those media heavyweights which assumingly pay to get special treatment on the front page, you're just another face in the crowd at Google Video, with no chance of using it to build your own profile. Doesn't sound like much of a community to me. It will be interesting to see how the two sites progress. I suspect YouTube will attract talented people with quality work to showcase, as well as the junk that wouldn't even meet Funniest Home Video's low standards. Meanwhile Google Video will be another outlet for media giants feeding you the same junk on a different screen, plus the mandatory Funniest Home Video rejects.

There's an ongoing debate over whether quality user-generated content will ever be worth watching and whether it poses a threat to the mainstream media's status quo. It's a debate the fate of YouTube and Google Video might help settle.

Consumer anger at intrusive Digital Rights Managements is growing, with the Free Software Foundation's anti-DRM initiative Defective By Design ramping up its activities.

Defective By Design aims to alert consumers to intrusive DRM

Defective By Design has a history of things such as holding protests in Apple stores and this week it organised a Day Against DRM. They're asking Bono to support their cause - the campaign aims to collect 10,000 signatures, at which point they will "seek an audience with Bono, and discuss with him the threats posed by DRM".

Personally I don't like their chances with Bono, especially considering U2's relationship with Apple, but it will be interesting to see how they go. I don't think your average consumer really understands the implications of DRM or cares enough to create the kind of mainstream swell required to get something like this off the ground, but still these kinds of campaigns have to start somewhere.

For those who see Digital Rights Management as a challenge rather than a barrier, DVD Jon is a god amongst men. The Norwegian reverse engineering specialist, otherwise known as Jon Lech Johansen, is best known for releasing DeCSS at the tender age of 15. DeCSS cracks the encryption on DVDs so you can either make backups of your own precious discs or pirate ones you've borrowed from the shop, depending on which way your moral compass points. DVD Jon has also vowed to defeat AACS, the next generation of disc encryption designed for Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

DVD Jon, the DRM slayer, has set his sights on Apple

DVD Jon is exactly the kind of thorn in the side of the big copyright players that I blogged about on Monday. He has a long history of defeating DRM methods and now his company DoubleTwist Ventures has managed to reverse-engineered Fairplay, the DRM Apple uses on iPods. The result is not to strip copy protection from files, but to let you play content from sources other than iTunes on an iPod. DVD Jon has already been dragged through the courts by the movie industry, and was acquitted twice. Now we're waiting to see if Apple will take him on and, if so, how much luck they'll have. DVD Jon's latest efforts actually make an iPod more attractive to a wider audience, but there's a fair chance Apple won't see it that way. With Microsoft's PlayForSure DRM system also under attack from FairUse4WM, the DRM wars look set to rage for quite some time.

After years of pre-fight trash talking that would make Muhammad Ali blush, the high-capacity Blu-ray and HD DVD disc formats have finally stepped into the ring.

Read the full review at http://www.theage.com.au/news/upgrade/first-burst-of-bluray/2006/10/02/1159641260859.html

Copyright protection has always been a cat and mouse game of patch and counter-patch, but sometimes it's hard to tell who is the cat and who is the mouse.

FairUse4WM was released in August to strip PlaysForSure copyright protection from Windows Media 10 music files you've purchased, so you can play them on whatever software or hardware you desire. Microsoft quickly released a patch to prevent this, but it took FairUse4WM's creator a mere 24 hours to counter-patch. This time Microsoft responded with both a counter-counter-patch and a lawsuit - claiming FairUse4WM's author, only known as "Viodentia", has access to the source code. Undeterred, Viodentia struck back with the version 1.3 counter-counter-counter-patch.

While such battles make entertaining reading, unfortunately they also delay the coming of the digital lounge room. Copyright holders have been holding out for infallible copyright protection before fully committing the content which will make the digital lounge complete. Time and time again copyright protection is circumvented and, every now and then, someone goes too far such as Sony with its ill-fated rootkit which used hackers' own tools to hide itself on computers. The end result, the general public mistrusts Digital Rights Management even more - making the job of protecting content even harder and delaying things even further. Reports that Microsoft's upcoming Zune "iPod killer" isn't PlaysForSure compatible is not a good sign for PlaysForSure's future and is further proof that industry heavy weights can't even be trusted to play by their own rules when it comes to DRM.

Of course, the digital lounge room is already a reality for those who know their way around a computer and the web, as you can see in this article I wrote for The Age on piracy. File sharing technologies such BitTorrent, plus DRM removal tools such as FairUse4WM, DVDShrink and DVDDecrypter, allow the tech-savvy to side-step the copyright game. Should copyright owners manage to quash such things and bring in their vision of the mainstream digital lounge room, you can bet it won't be the utopian vision many BitTorrent-loving early adopters have. They'd be happy for the war over copyright protection rage on, stopping the big players getting a foothold in their lounge rooms.