February 23, 2004

DMCA Killed the Video Star

last week in san francisco, a us federal judge ruled against 321 studios and has given them seven days to stop selling its controversial software DVD X Copy. in a funny sort of way, i think this will work to the benefit of 321 studios since i can't imagine they won't win their appeal, and based on my searching the local stores to finally buy my copy for it's too late -- sales are booming. all of the normal outlets were sold out!

over on the pvrblog, there is apparently discussions at tivo about allowing you to transfer recorded programs both into and out of the units. tivo eludes in their survey that people might want to burn the programs onto dvd. duh! i wonder what trouble they will run into with this?

thinking of tivo and big brother... the mpeg-7 standard, due for release this spring, has a strong information retrieval focus, including face recognition technology fast enough to locate a scene containing a particular person out of 24 hours of video in one second on a conventional computer. despite the implications of face recognition, there really are some interesting applications for this technology... from the overview document:

  • Play a few notes on a keyboard and retrieve a list of musical pieces similar to the required tune, or images matching the notes in a certain way, e.g. in terms of emotions.
  • Draw a few lines on a screen and find a set of images containing similar graphics, logos, ideograms,...
  • Define objects, including color patches or textures and retrieve examples among which you select the interesting objects to compose your design.
  • On a given set of multimedia objects, describe movements and relations between objects and so search for animations fulfilling the described temporal and spatial relations.
  • Describe actions and get a list of scenarios containing such actions.
  • Using an excerpt of Pavarotti’s voice, obtaining a list of Pavarotti’s records, video clips where Pavarotti is singing and photographic material portraying Pavarotti.

Posted by ac at February 23, 2004 03:23 PM

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