The UnSub

Two Sunday times articles on Singapore’s Odex saga titled:

“Is it time for privacy laws?” by Andy Ho
“We (Odex) learnt to be more humble.. Yes, we’ve made mistakes” by Chua Hian Hou.

I apologize for the lack of hyper links to these two “premium” articles. Please buy the newspaper, I don’t want to get a lawyer letter/email for linking to something that cost only $0.80…

Here’s a video post that I could link… (I hope so)
Singapore Straitstime video-cast on this saga

Jokes aside, it does make sense for Singapore to look into privacy laws. If we compare ourselves with the Swiss in terms of number of higher-education institutions and affluence, then why not compare ourselves in terms of privacy? For a country that aims to be world-class, it is ironic that ISP that bears part of Singapore’s name did not bother with her users’ privacy.

For now, smaller niche anime studios may depend more on video sales, but it doesn’t mean that they can’t make money from merchandishing. Was Gundam popular right from the beginning? I believe it was considered niche too when it was first shown. Fansubbing is one of the channels that made “smaller” animes big.

After knowing Odex’s earlier efforts to market and distribute anime with video-on-demand, it is fair to say that they (Go & Sing) tried. But the choice of words like “hate” and “freeloaders” reveals a certain thinking pattern. Compare what fansubbing is doing to anime industry development with the Open-source movement. Many excellent software are not longer possible if Open-source developers were to “hate” and see the users who don’t pay as “freeloaders”.

As for the so-call revolutionary idea of copy-protected Video-On-Demand (or VOD), it is probably centered around Digital Rights Management (D.R.M) technology using Microsoft WMV format, which has been broken. This speculation could explain why there is concerned with higher quality anime content being circulated. I hope journalists should refrain from words like “revolutionary idea” since if the VOD service were to be so great, then this “enSUEing” saga will not be the main topic.

My 2 cents based on my information security experience is, most protection mechanisms will be broken with time. That is why bigger players are considering application of watermarks for targeted advertising and possibly giving away free DRM-freed music.

It is also plausible for watermarking as a proof of ownership of high quality audio and video content. Meaning, if you buy high-quality content online, the product is uniquely watermarked and linked to the buyer. Any leaks of the high quality contents would allow enforcers to trace the “leaker”.

Such enforcement minimizes privacy issues since the basic idea is: “if you the buyer wants to maintain your privacy, then do not circulate or share what you paid for with others in P2P networks”. Of course, the robustness of such watermarks becomes critical when it comes to such applications.

By robustness, it means that the watermark is resilient to attacks such as change of encoding format, reduction in quality etc. If the quality of content is severely degraded or it takes too much effort to get rid of the watermark, then there is little motivation for casual P2P sharing. Of course, the statement is only true if someone had not release an easy to use tool to break watermarking or DRM.

If the process of enforcement and their intent are all clearly conceptualized and well-conceived by Odex, why do I get the feeling that hiring an auditor to go through the accounts for the purpose of donating the profit from the crackdown was a last minute reaction?

It seems that Odex’s enforcement is out of desperation; desperate to get the studios to do VOD with them. By trying to earn the partnership or rights to provide VOD, you have to step onto the users to do so. I am sorry to say that it is like shooting yourself in the foot. In short term, enforcement may reduce piracy, that doesn’t mean that in the long run, users would want to buy.

All these begs another question: Now that the situation has backfired, why should studios run a VOD service with Odex?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Opinions, Singapore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.