Yesterday, Popcorn Hour announced that its only product, the highly anticipated Popcorn Hour A-100 digital media streaming device is now available for pre-order directly from the company’s site.
For those unaware, the A-100 “allows for streaming digital media from users’ PCs via a wide range of connectivity options, digital cameras or USB mass storage devices or directly from the Internet via its integrated Media Service Portal. The A-100 supports high-bitrate video formats, including DivX and Matroska, as well as subtitle files, with firmware upgradeable to future codecs.”
More interestingly, the media hub can also act as a NAS device and BitTorrent P2P downloader in place of a computer. For those features however, you will need to add an internal HDD. Using the device’s Media Service Portalallows for IPTV compatibility with YouTube, Google Video and Metacafe.
Flickr and Photobucket, as well as a ton of video, audio, Internet radio and RSS feeds can stream content to A-100.
The A-100 “includes 256MB of DDR SDRAM along with 32MB of flash memory and is network-ready. A pair of USB 2.0 plugs as well as a Parallel ATA port act as the physical interface options. Connections include an HDMI v1.1 input, component video in, S-Video, composite plugs, as well as coaxial and analog audio.”
Available now for pre-order, the A-100 has a $180 USD price tag.
Result for: Downloader
According to the Associated Press it seems that Comcast is not the only company guilty of throttling P2P traffic, Singapore’s StarHub, and Cox Communications were equal offenders as well.
Comcast has been seen as the main offender for the last few months and saw backlash from net neutrality advocates, customers and the even the FCC. The AP however, says that a worldwide study of 8,175 Internet users, showed that 3 companies were indeed blocking the traffic, and that Cox was likely the worst offender.
Of the 151 Cox subscribers, 82 had their transfers blocked, read the survey. The Cox interference however, was different than that of Comcast. Cox only blocked seeding of a file downloaded through BitTorrent, thus reducing the amount of people the downloader can share the file with.
Cox’s subscriber agreement does state that subscribers are signing up for “protocol filtering,” meaning that the company “prioritizes some forms of Internet traffic over others,” but spokespeople have said that BitTorrent is not particularly discriminated against.
Result for: Downloader
Jammie Thomas, the Minnesota woman ordered to pay the record industry $220,000 USD for unauthorized sharing of music file is finally getting her chance to appeal the case, and may get to see the jury once more.
The issue at hand is whether the record industry needs to know prove that anyone even downloaded the songs Thomas made available or if her making them available is enough to warrant throwing the appeal out. Over the past few years the record industry has sued thousands upon thousands of would be file sharers and has argued that all they must prove is that the defendant put the music on file sharing networks.
File sharing fans, and the EFF, have argued that so far the only proven downloaders of the music were private investigators working for the record labels and trade groups such as the RIAA.
In October 2007, U.S. District Court Judge Michael J. Davis said that making copyrighted music available was illegal “regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.” Yesterday however, Davis admitted that may be a mistake. Citing a 1993 ruling from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, he noted that infringement “requires an actual dissemination of either copies or phonorecords.”
The judge also noted that a case used by the record companies during the original trial was vacated on April 29 and therefore no longer relevant.
“If we have to retry the case, we will do so without hesitation,” added a record industry lawyer.
To date record companies have sued over 30,000 people for unauthorized distribution of music online. Most of the defendants settle their cases for $3000-7000 USD but a few have fought back and taken the cases to court. Thomas was the first to make it to a jury trial. She was originally charged with offering 1,702 songs on the Kazaa file-sharing network but at the trial the record companies only brought up 24 songs. When she lost, she was then told to pay $9,250 for each of the 24 songs, a hugely disproportionate number.
