The Pirate Bay – the clue is in the name

In a world where it’s so easy to obtain illegal copies of music and video, it’s no surprise that the record and movie industries want to crack down on piracy in any and every way they can.

Anyone following the story of The Pirate Bay trial surely can’t help but feel they’ve asked for trouble by choosing such a provocative name.

Whatever claims they make about not storing illegal content on their servers are almost irrelevant in this light, as even a fool can see that the whole purpose of the site is to facilitate the downloading of the latest movies, albums and TV shows.

If I stood on Oxford Street and pointed people down a back alley to where my mate was selling drugs, I could hardly get away with telling the police that I was innocent of any wrongdoing, since I wasn’t actually selling anything – and surely it’s a similar situation with many websites that track torrents.

Although there may be a re-trial due to a biased judge, who happens to also be a member of the Swedish Association of Copyright, The Pirate Bay isn’t exactly helping its case by adding new features to help users share torrents anonymously. One is the IPREDator service which lets members use VPNs (virtual private networks). If everything was above board, there’s no need for such measures.

It remains to be seen whether the four guys behind The Pirate Bay go to prison or not, but maybe it would be advisable to change the site’s name to something more legal-sounding, perhaps The Totally Legal Bay?

Making Stuff Up

According to LCD TV manufacturers, we've got a massive problem with what we watch: it's not smooth enough. In particular, they'll argue, films are incredibly jerky. In some respects, they've got a point. Films are shot at just 24fps, which is fine for most scenes, but looks jerky when there's a wide-angle panning shot.

At least, that should be: looks jerky on a TV. In the cinema, you'd be hard pushed to notice it for a couple of reasons. First, the screen's so big that it's hard to take in everything, let alone focus on a bit of jerky motion. Secondly, it's the way that cinema projectors work. Film is passed frame-by-frame at high speed in front of a light-source that projects the image onto the screen. Synchronised with this is the projector's shutter, which cuts the light off as the film moves to the next frame (if it didn't, you'd just get a blur of light caused by the moving film). The result is that you see frame layered upon frame, creating the illusion of movement. Persistence of vision, where the eye retains an image for a brief moment of time, helps blend the short gap between frames, making the final image smoother.

In addition, most cinema projectors have a higher shutter speed to reduce the perception of flicker on the screen. So, for each frame of video that's displayed, the shutter will open and close twice (48Hz) or three times (72Hz). You can even look out for this next time you go to the cinema by blinking at different speeds until you see the black 'gaps' in the film. Well, either that or people near you will think you've gone bad.

With LCD TVs, there's a constant backlight and a smaller screen. Without the shutter, films played at their native frame rate can become noticeably jerky. The answer to this problem is for TVs to create some extra frames to create smoother motion.

So, in a panning shot the TV can insert a frame or two of interpolated data to smooth the movement. It's a brilliant idea, but perhaps one that's gone too far with the new TV sets, capable of running at 200Hz (200fps). To put this in context, for every frame of real footage, the TV has to make up 7 1/3 frames itself. To put it another way in the final image that you see on screen, only 16 per cent of the video ever actually physically existed, the other 84 per cent has been made up by your TV.

That is a ludicrous amount of data to just add, and not entirely successful. At this year's consumer electronics show we were lucky enough to see one manufacturer showing off its standard TV, 100Hz TV and 200Hz TV with Iron Man. The regular TV looked gritty and real; the 100Hz TV's motion looked a bit strange; the 200Hz TV made it look like a Benny Hill episode directed by an MTV music video producer. People's legs moved in unnatural, comically fast ways, while a helicopter landing looked as though it was made of Lego and the footage sped up.

These systems also get it wrong quite a lot, as they have to predict the path of movement in an object. If something's moving erratically and unpredictably, you end up with a stuttering mess on screen.

I'm all for technology improving what we see and watch, but in this case it appears as though the TV manufacturers are playing a numbers game and we're getting worse-quality video as a result.

No, internet downloads will not kill music

But if we're very lucky, they might kill the music industry as we know it.

I'll admit that I'm not very fond of major labels. I certainly don't think organisations like the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry have artists' best interests at heart - they're all about protecting an industry that makes most of its money by exploiting musicians.

The argument that every illegally downloaded track would otherwise be a legitimate sale is blatantly fallacious – many people would rather download a track than bother to tune in a radio and wait for it to come on, but that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily listen to it more than once or for any longer than it takes them to decide they don’t like it. Convenience is a big part of the appeal of illegal downloads.

If the music is good and its fans dedicated, they will pay for it, whether they've already downloaded it or not. I know bands who have released their entire catalogue for free online - they make their money, like most musicians, from live ticket sales, merchandising and, yes, from album sales, often to people who've already downloaded and fallen in love with the music. People like to own the CD or LP, the physical artefact that proves their allegiance to the band.

Most of the musicians I know want to be heard. I would never have discovered half my favourite bands if not for illegal copies, whether they were dodgy mix tapes made by my school friends or files copied from my mates' MP3 players. The music I liked, I bought. If I wasn't impressed, the files were deleted or the tape relegated to the back of a drawer.

P. Emerson Williams of US bands Choronzon and Veil of Thorns says that "the fact that the case against the Pirate Bay was brought in the first place smells of desperation. The major label system and the copyright laws they have manipulated over the last couple decades are already dead.

"This time is the best possible opportunity for true artists to get creative with ways to make a living. Under the old label system, it was mainly the few, the malleable, the aspirational among artists who benefited. The RIAA argument that piracy hinders artists from making a living is b*******s. Music has always been a hard gig, it's just that now the majority are on the treadmill of writing, production, release and touring for themselves instead of a group of suits who lend them cash in return for the artists' indenture."

Over a decade ago, many of my favourite independent labels allowed fans to download large chunks of their catalogues as free MP3 files. Legendary punk label Alternative Tentacles is still doing it. These days, I discover most of my new music via services like last.fm and Spotify, magazine cover CDs or recommendations from friends that point me at a band's MySpace page.

I go to several gigs every month, where I not only pay my entry fee but buy t-shirts, CDs, badges, monogrammed toast racks and whatever other shiny promotional objects take my fancy. I reward the artists I like by buying their products. Most music fans will pay to keep the artists they love in business, even if they did first hear them by downloading an album illegally.

HDMI: The non-standard standard

TVs and video equipment used to be very easy to connect: you'd take a SCART cable and plug one end into your video device and one end into your TV and it would all work. The standard, while hardly easy to connect, never changed and there was never any trouble where one bit of kit wouldn't work with another.

Then along came HDMI, which gave us a way to digitally connect our devices together. It seemed like a brilliant advance. Sadly, it suffers from exactly the same problems as all other digital devices: a confusing and bewildering away of versions and standards, which leaves manufacturers open to creating devices that are incompatible with each other.

HDMI should be as simple as plugging one simple cable that carries sound and picture in, but somehow manages to turn this into a long drawn-out nightmare if you've chosen kit that doesn't want to work with each other. Take PCs, for example. If I plug my PC into my LCD TV via HDMI and set the refresh rate to 50Hz (the standard for this country), DVDs judder when played; switch to 60Hz (the American standard) or 24Hz (the standard for films) and they play correctly. Yet, plug in a DVD or Blu-ray player via HDMI at 50Hz and all is well. So, two devices connected via the same cable produce two radically different results.

It would be easy to simply dismiss this problem as PCs being a bit rubbish and not outputting video correctly, but the pain of HDMI doesn't stop there. We had a recent situation at work where a brand-new Samsung Virgin V+ box wouldn't work with a brand-new Panasonic projector. After a few engineer visits, the conclusion was that as the projector didn't take sound the V+ got confused and refused to output anything. The fix: a specially-written software patch to get the HDMI port on the V+ box talking to the projector.

That's not the only problem we've had. At Shopper we use an HDMI splitter, which can distribute one playback device (a Blu-ray player in this case) to four televisions, so that we can compare quality side-by-side. That's all well and good, except we recently had one television that refused to work with this system and, by doing so, stopped all of the other TVs plugged into the splitter from working too. The strange thing was that unplugging the first TV would cause the other televisions to start working, only the audio track was suddenly out of synch.
The biggest problem there's ever been was when Sky launched its HD service. Anyone with a Pioneer plasma screen was at risk of severe damage, as using HDMI to connect to the Sky HD box could fry a chip on the television, requiring a new (expensive) circuit board to fix it. You definitely wouldn't get that kind of problem with SCART.

A lot of the problems seem to be down to the way that HDMI has been developed, going through several versions of the standard, all of which support newer features. In addition, HDMI was also developed to be more than just something that carried audio and video, it was also designed to offer copy protection with HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection).

The idea behind HDCP is that it can prevent unprotected high-definition audio and video from being produced, in turn stopping people from making a perfect copy of a movie by recording the output. It's a nice idea in theory, but why would you bother recording something in real-time? Surely (by surely, I mean, actually), the easiest way to copy HD content, such as from a Blu-ray disc is to break the encryption and rip it as fast as your computer will let you, using the countless tools that are easily available on the internet.

Finally, HDMI is designed to allow other signals to be sent over it, such as control signals to let you control all devices made by one manufacturer using just one remote. Great idea in practice, but why let extra junk be pumped over this connection? Surely, it's just going to lead to more problems.

HDMI's a great idea, but it really needs to be a carefully considered standard that all manufacturers have to closely adhere too, and it should only be there for transmitting audio and video, nothing else. Rather than updating the standard as we progress, why not simply make sure that everything that's needed is included in the original standard in the first place?

Conficker - deadly worm or potent marketing weapon?

It's April 1st and the dreaded Conficker worm is set to unleash havoc upon millions of PCs. We're told to be extra vigilant with our net use, beware of USB sticks and, of course, update our security packages. Otherwise we could risk, well, anything and everything - no-one seems to know.

So far though, there's been no sign of hell breaking loose but security companies are still "braced" for the worst malware attack ever.

I don't want to speak too soon, and I know that if I'm proven wrong, it could possibly be at the expense of many people's personal details, but if one noticeable thing has come out of all the Conficker hype, it's that security companies are getting their names into the papers.

Before any of us heard the name Conficker, or Downadup, how many of us actually read about McAfee, Symantec, Kaspersky or Trend Micro in the national newspapers? Now, though, the Conficker worm seems to be the biggest threat to our safety since the atom bomb was invented.

I'd be intrigued to know just how many more visits security companies' websites have seen since news of this "fatal worm" broke, and just how many more consumers have bought or updated security solutions.

In the current climate, people are spending less on things that they don't value. For most people, security solutions don't come too high up on their list of concerns, so there's never been more cause for security providers to publicise what they do and why it's important.

I'm not suggesting that there's some sort of conspiracy among security companies, or that Conficker is some mythical beast that doesn't actually exist. I'm just suggesting that the whole thing may have possibly been blown out of proportion.

New viruses and worms regularly come onto the scene, and each time a new one hits a high profile person or company, it's "unlike any other" that security companies have ever seen before. Well, it has to be, doesn't it? If they'd seen it before then their anti-virus solutions would (or at least should) have nullified the threat before it's had any effect.

But with Conficker, the hype has been extraordinary. The national media is today reporting news that the worm hasn't had the effect (yet) that everyone expected it to. So, the news today is that the April 1st Conficker attack is a non-event. And who exactly expected it to happen? Well, the security companies. These companies told the media that this is the most potent threat they've ever seen, and we in turn, told the public. But just now, I'm starting to wonder have we all fallen for an elaborate April Fool's prank?