We all understand why DRM is implemented in the first place, which is essentially to prevent piracy and ensure revenue for those who produced the software. However, there may be times when DRM policies on certain products become a little bit too rigid, which may be the case for Nokia's N-Gage service. More details in the full article.

Hardware pirates are about to get another force to contend with: The new EPIC chip locking system developed by computer engineers at the University of Michigan and Rice University. While not infallible, the new locking technique should make things very difficult and costly for hardware pirates to copy chips that come armed with it. More in the full article.

The human eye can only see the colors within the visible spectrum of light. What that basically means is that there's a bunch of other colors we can't see, but our cameras can though. Now new technology called Kameraflage is aiming to use it as their invisible ink.

Kameraflage basically puts in an extra layer of images - within the color range human eyes can't see - where it becomes visible through the lens of a digital camera. (That includes cameras built into mobile phones too!

 This actually opens up a whole new method of advertising and capitalization in a market that was once invisible (literally). Kameraflage has some pretty good ideas on how it can be used:

• Stopping movie piracy: If people record movies straight out from the cinema, their cameras will also record that extra layer of content, permanently tagging that recording as a piracy.
• Advertising: Now you can advertise in places where it would have been inappropriate before, like a museum. Now people don't have to see it unless they intentionally point a camera at it.
  
• Fashion: Uniforms? Boo. Now you can spice it up (secretly though) with the new Kamerflage technology.

So it's un-x-ray vision?

Paul Steed, former artist for id Software's first in the Quake franchise, is now Chief Creative Officer at Exigent, an Indian game outsourcing firm. No longer drawing gorgeous pixels for your VGA screen, Steed is now educating Indians and encouraging them to make games for the western market.

We know you're probably asking, "What in the world is he doing there?" In an interview with "The Art of Gaming" haven Gamasutra, he revealed his revelation of the business of outsourcing and how he got interested in it.

After leaving Atari last September, he moved on to Exigent, and hoped to tap into the productivity potential in the Asians' love for games.

But more importantly, he sees that the future of the game industry rests on the mobile game and the PC. He said that there are more computers and cellphones in the world than consoles and "[that will] never change." In fact, he believes once his company goes from outsourcing only to part developer studio "Exigent Interactive," they will be only focused on games for the PC. He defended his position, saying, ""That’s what’s most accessible for audiences."

Steed also spoke about Sony and the PSP. And guess what, PSP folks: he says that "Sony just lost focus" on the PSP. In the defense of his opinion, he added, "They tried to do too much with it. And God, the price. You look at the PSP and you’re like, 'Hey, do you even realize your portable costs as much as Nintendo’s next-gen home system?'"

Piracy is commonly frowned upon by most members of the game industry - but not by Paul Steed. We'll let him explain his two cents worth on the (overrated?) issue of piracy:

My take on piracy is kind of weird. I know I can’t stop it, so I don’t try to stop it. I just try to create a whole fanbase. If you can buy it, buy it. I was in China and I saw a copy of my book ... my first book, translated in Chinese and it had my name on it, and I was like, 'Well, at least they put my name on it!' I don’t think people mean to steal when they pirate your stuff. I just don’t think they realize that it only increases the price.

He also said something about casual gaming, although it's a bit "nit-picky" on the fairer gender of gamers. We'll leave it to you, oh curious web surfers, to hop right to the interview and read it for yourself, via the "Read" link below.

Sony Corporation has just  announced CLEFIA (based on the French word "clef" or key). CLEFIA is "a new highly secure and efficient block cipher algorithm that delivers advanced copyright protection and authentication" for digital data like music and images. Sony said that CLEFIA "maintains high security levels while providing both world-leading hardware and software implementation capabilities, the combination of which had proved difficult until now."

Sony will reveal more about CLEFIA at the Fast Software Encryption 2007 international conference in Luxembourg (the conference starts on March 26 and will run for three days). Here are other details:

• When implemented in hardware it achieves maximum throughput of 1.42 Gbps using a 0.09 micrometer CMOS standard cell library and gate size of just 6.1K.
• Able to provide advanced capabilities, even in restrictive environments such as smart cards and mobile devices.
• When implemented in software it can realize high speed performance on a wide variety of processors.
• CLEFIA is said to be more secure and faster than most other security measures - it takes fewer operations to encode and decode (that means the gadget's hardware won't be burdened; that means it is possible for CLEFIA to be used by many AV devices).
• CLEFIA is a strong cipher: block length is 128 bits, while key length can be selected from 128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits.

Apparently, Sony's aim is to establish an environment in which CLEFIA can be used across various applications and products such as AV devices "while continuing to develop technologies that our customers can use with confidence."

For those of us who still remember the Sony BMG rootkit scheme from 2005 (which became a costly "scandal" in 2006), we're wondering how soon Sony will implement CLEFIA in commercial applications like its wide range of video, music, and video game products. CLEFIA may just be the fast, non-intrusive, tough-to-crack, and convenient anti-piracy tool that today's digital market has been watching out for.

Despite ongoing anti-piracy campaigns being implemented all over the globe, pirated computer games, CDs, and DVDs still continue to proliferate. And one the major sources of such products is China, which is said to have 90% of all its digital entertainment as illegitimate copies and illegally made.

China has come up with a 100-day anti-piracy campaign to try and improve their country's reputation regarding piracy, and so far, the said campaign has been effective in closing down 8,907 shops and street vendors, as well as 481 publishing companies and 942 illegal websites.

Chinese police have begun to confiscate materials, assets, and fake products in the country's known selling areas of pirated software. According to Xinhua News Agency, almost 13 million units of pirated computer software, as well as CDs and DVDs, have been confiscated and destroyed since the Chinese authorities initiated the 100-day anti-piracy campaign.

13 million units is still a small number if you think of how widespread piracy has become. But small steps and solutions such as these are still helpful if we are to totally eradicate worldwide piracy, don't you think?

This past June The Pirate Bay torrent site's headquarters were raided by Swedish authorities. Afterwards, the site quickly rebounded and it has been in near constant operation since. The site's operators were accused by corporate interest groups like the MPAA and RIAA of being at the center of the rampant piracy which was being conducted with impunity by the users of The Pirate Bay.

While there is little argument over whether or not illegal activity was taking place, representatives of The Pirate Bay and others claim that Bit Torrent technology is used (by tracking sites like The Pirate Bay) simply to track users, establish and maintain connections between the appropriate users and then wrangle the complex algorithms necessary to get complete files distributed to the entire swarm.

The full article awaits after the jump!

John Hsu, a reporter in China's commercial capital of Shanghai, got in ahead of the Blackberry's September launch. He bought his Blackberry online for just $65 - roughly a fifth of its retail price in the United States. He uses it like a regular phone because it looks cool and he thinks its sound quality is better than an average smart phone. Still, he has no plans to subscribe to a Blackberry e-mail service provided by China Mobile, which can cost as much as 598 yuan ($75) a month.

"I would like to get work e-mails on my Blackberry, but the price has to be right," said Hsu, who now pays 20 yuan ($2.50) a month to get personal e-mails on his Hewlett-Packard PDA phone.

Yes, China has caught Blackberry fever, and it comes with complications. If Hsu is representative of price-sensitive Chinese retail customers, the most debilitating and lingering effects of Blackberry fever may be felt by the device's maker, Research in Motion, and service providers such as China Mobile Ltd. In this case, the problem is an old one: cheap knock-offs.

Pirated products have long been a thorn in China's side. The country's audio and video piracy industry is one of, if not the biggest piracy industries in the world. China has a poor track record of enforcing intellectual property rights, and Chinese companies are being hit just as hard as foreign companies. "Piracy is something that affects everybody in China," said Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based research firm Marbridge Consulting.

According to George Guo, senior vice president at top Chinese mobile phone manufacturer TCL Communications, used phones and phones sold by unlicensed vendors forced all the major local mobile phone makers except Lenovo Group Ltd. into the red last year. TCL, which bought France's Alcatel's cell-phone assets, is making a big bet on the better regulated, and arguably less competitive markets abroad.

In 2005, China sold roughly 15 million so-called black-market phones, compared with 80 million handsets sold through licensed dealers, according to Marbridge Consulting. That means an estimated 16 percent of handsets sold in China are either made by unlicensed companies or smuggled in.

A lot of unscrupulous people are getting into the already-prevalent piracy market, lured by great returns in exchange for a considerably smaller investment. An unlicensed factory needs as little as 1 million yuan ($125,000) to start, and can get its phones to market early by skipping the government testing process. Makers of the so-called "black phones" often evade taxes and provide no customer service. Piracy is also a more attractive business than smuggling, because while smuggling can be a capital offense in China, makers of unlicensed phones merely get a slap on the wrist.

The use of refurbished and unlicensed phones is also rampant in Eastern Europe and Middle East, but not in more developed markets. Such products pose a growing threat to the likes of foreign brand names such as Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd and Nokia as well as home-grown players such as TCL, Ningbo Bird Co. Ltd., Shenzhen Konka Group.

The Chinese mobile phone industry's future does not look pirate-free just yet, what with the huge market for cheap knock-offs. Consideration for big faceless companies is hard to come by these days, and some people will always let quality be damned and go for what is cheaper, especially considering the high prices of virtually everything else in these times. But is the price you're paying now really worth the effect it has on your whole country's economy? That's the question that those who patronize pirated goods need to ask themselves.