Seen and heard last week at Network World's DEMOfall 08 in San Diego:
When RealNetworks took the wraps off new DVD-to-PC copying software, one major selling point was that users now can sleep soundly knowing for the first time that their homemade copies of commercial movies are perfectly legal.
Maybe. The motion picture industry, which doesn't even like to see the words "DVD" and "copying" in the same sentence, said it's not ready to endorse that blanket assurance from RealNetworks, as it had learned of the product only days before. The industry has fought such DVD copying in the past, last year losing a drawn-out courtroom battle with an upstart maker of high-end media servers, a ruling one losing attorney suggested --warned, actually -- would "open the floodgates" to the type of inexpensive DVD copying system RealNetworks unveiled. The industry has appealed that court ruling.
Called RealDVD, the US$50 application ($30 introductory price) is designed to make digital movie collections more accessible, portable and easier to manage. "Unlike existing consumer applications on the market today, RealDVD is licensed DVD software that saves a secure copy of a DVD to the hard drive without removing or altering the CSS encryption," the company says. RealDVD needs 10 to 40 minutes to copy a flick and eats up 4 to 8 gig per saved movie, so portable storage devices will be required to augment hard drives for users who want to collect more than a handful of movies.
As for that much-ballyhooed promise of legality, the Motion Picture Association of America isn't ready to agree: "We really just became aware of this in the past 24 hours," Elizabeth Kaltman, a spokeswoman for the MPAA, told me. "We have nothing else to say at this time."
I'm betting its lawyers will later.
A bit later in the program, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal fame conducted a panel in which they were to "interview" each other in the same aggressive manner one might expect of these veteran journalists when taking on a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. That didn't happen -- they were cupcakes toward each other -- but they had plenty of interesting things to say, including this rather ominous warning from Mossberg concerning the future of 3G phones and the increasingly heavy-duty computing they are enabling:
"I think there's an enormous cloud over all of this," Mossberg said. "I'm really beginning to wonder whether, at least in the United States, the 3G networks that are supposed to provide a broadband experience are going to be able to hold up as people use these devices as little laptops."
SpinSpotter, a start-up founded by former radio talk-show host/Microsoft executive Todd Herman, debuted a browser plug-in that is designed to help users identify media bias with precision and objectivity. ... Uh, good luck with that.
"By installing a SpinSpotter toolbar called Spinoculars, users of the SpinSpotter service can easily see, share and edit any clear sign of bias anywhere on the Web," the company said. You can see the potential in such a service if it would stick to matters of demonstrable fact (such as they exist).
However, SpinSpotter wants to referee writing and I had a problem with one of the examples it flagged from a New York Times story that included this passage: "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton ... delivered an emphatic plea at the Democratic National Convention to unite behind her rival, Senator Barack Obama, no matter what ill will lingered."
A penalty flag was thrown at the phrase emphatic plea: "The reporter has no idea how 'emphatic' she was or whether she made a 'plea' or a calculated political decision. The fact is, she asked her delegates to endorse Obama."
Phooey. Clinton's speech was indeed a plea (I watched it) and it was certainly most emphatic. Neither the word plea nor the word emphatic describes anything other than her verbal intensity and delivery style. Even a con man can
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