Another story to file under 'the-times-they-are-a-changing';

UK sales of games will outstrip music and video for the first time in 2008, says a report from Verdict Research. A huge shift in consumer attitudes has turned video games into the UK's most popular form of entertainment, say the retail analysts. It predicts spending on games will rise by 42% to £4.64bn in 2008, with sales on music and video at £4.46bn.

Director Wayne Wang, who made films such as 'Smoke' and 'The Joy Luck Club' has released his latest film online, for free on YouTube;

 On Friday, the director Wayne Wang premieres his movie "The Princess of Nebraska" on the video sharing site... Wang...is one of the most notable filmmakers to try giving away a film for free online. While it has become standard practice in music for albums to stream for free, movies are generally only available for free illegally.  Last month, Michael Moore released his documentary "Slacker Uprising" for free to stream or download. Coupled with Wang's YouTube release, it's starting to feel like feature-length filmmakers are wading deeper into the Internet.

Lawrence Lessig has a great article in the Wall Street Journal that is worth reading:

We are in the middle of something of a war here -- what some call "the copyright wars"; what the late Jack Valenti [who was the long-time president of the Motion Picture Association of America] called his own "terrorist war," where the "terrorists" are apparently our kids. ... Peer-to-peer file sharing is the enemy in the "copyright wars." Kids "stealing" stuff with a computer is the target. The war is not about new forms of creativity, not about artists making new art....Yet every war has its collateral damage. These creators are this war's collateral damage. The extreme of regulation that copyright law has become makes it difficult, sometimes impossible, for a wide range of creativity that any free society...

There is also some good commentry on the article here .

An interesting event occoured with the release of Iron Man on Blu-Ray; Blu-Ray players allow people to connect, using a service called BD-Live, to download extra content and the like.  However it would appear that the technical side of this service was not yet ready for a big surge in demand;

Following the release of the blu-ray version of Iron Man on october 1st, Paramount’s BD-Live servers were brought down completely by the popularity of the disc....According to most sources, the content is downloaded as soon as a disc is first inserted into the player. Because of the popularity of this release, Paramount’s servers were completely overwhelmed with traffic....That alone wouldn’t have been a problem, but because this caused the loading of the movie to halt while the content was downloaded lots of people thought the disc itself was defective.