P2P-Zone - Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review

Quotes Of The Week

"I know for a fact that a lot of people first heard my music by downloading it from Napster or Kazaa, and for this reason I'll always be glad that Napster and Kazaa have existed." - Moby

"I'm kind of an optimist. When you have common sense and an important issue, then there's reason to be hopeful." – Brewster Kahle

"Your lack of experience in P2P makes it difficult for you to tell the court of any feasibility for the propositions you mentioned." - Sharman attorney Mark Lemming

"We find that, if measured accurately, P2P traffic has never declined." – Thomas Karagiannis

"Users are very much moving around...rather than moving out." – Eric Garland

"We would like to announce that P2P Network MediaSeek.pl has been placed on auction on eBay." – MediaSeek spokesperson mspl, in a surprise pronouncement here at P2P-Zone

Supreme Court to Hear Internet File-Sharing Dispute
AP

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider whether two Internet file-sharing services may be held responsible for their customers' online swapping of copyrighted songs and movies.

Justices will review a lower ruling in favor of Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., which came as a blow to recording companies and movie studios seeking to stop the illegal distribution of their works.

The file-sharing is ``inflicting catastrophic, multibillion dollar harm on petitioners that cannot be redressed through lawsuits against the millions of direct infringers using those services,'' the appeal by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and other entertainment companies says.

Grokster and StreamCast, in their filings, disagree: ``Once the software has been downloaded by users, (we) have no involvement in, nor ability to control, what it is used for.''

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in August that file-sharing services were not responsible because they don't have central servers pointing users to copyright material.

It reasoned that the firms simply provide software that lets individual users share information over the Internet, regardless of whether that shared information is copyrighted.

The big-money fight has drawn the support of dozens of companies in the entertainment industry as well as attorneys general in 40 states, who fear the file-sharing software will encourage illegal activity, stem the growth of small artists and lead to lost jobs and sales tax revenue.

Civil libertarians, meanwhile, have warned a defeat for Grokster and StreamCast could force technology companies such as Microsoft Corp. to delay or kill innovative products that give consumers more control.

``History has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player,'' the 9th Circuit stated. ``Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution.''

If the lower ruling is upheld, the entertainment industry would have to take the more costly and less popular route of going directly after millions of online file-swappers believed to distribute songs and movies illegally.

Recording companies have already sued more than 3,400 such users; at least 600 of the cases were eventually settled for roughly $3,000 each.

The case is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster, 04-480. Arguments are expected in the spring, with a ruling by July.
http://tech.nytimes.com/aponline/nat...e-Sharing.html

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File Sharing 'Not Hurting' Most Artists
Washington

Most musicians and artists say the internet has helped them make more money from their work despite online file-trading services that allow users to copy songs and other material for free, according to a new study released on Sunday.

Recording labels and movie studios have hired phalanxes of lawyers to pursue "peer to peer" networks like Kazaa, and have sued thousands of individuals who distribute copyrighted material through such networks.

But most of the artists surveyed by the non-profit Pew Internet and American Life Project said online file sharing did not concern them much.

Artists were split on the merits of peer-to-peer networks, with 47 per cent saying that they prevent artists from earning royalties for their work and another 43 per cent saying they helped promote and distribute their material.

But two-thirds of those surveyed said file sharing posed little threat to them, and less than one-third of those surveyed said file sharing was a major threat to creative industries.

Only 3 per cent said the internet hurt their ability to protect their creative works.

"What we hear from a wide spectrum of artists is that, despite the real challenges of protecting work online, the Internet has opened new ways for them to exercise their imaginations and sell their creations," said report author Mary Madden, a research specialist at the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

The nonprofit group based its report on a survey of 809 self-identified artists in December 2003. The survey has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=6997352

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P2P Technology Still Going Strong Despite Lawsuits, Fines
Kim Lane

The threat of copyright lawsuits and large fines has apparently not been enough to deter computer users from illegally sharing music, movie and other digital files through the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking.

That is the finding of UC Riverside graduate student Thomas Karagiannis, who co-authored a paper “Is P2P dying or just hiding?” Karagiannis worked on the two-year project with UCR Computer Science and Engineering professor Michalis Faloutsos, and Andre Broido, Nevil Brownlee and kc claffy from the CAIDA institute at the University of California at San Diego.

Their objective was to determine the validity of claims that music file sharing dropped by as much as 50 percent when, in September 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed the first of thousands of lawsuits that targeted individuals who illegally offered copyright music through P2P networks. These networks allow users to quickly and without cost, share movie, music and other digital files located on their individual PCs with other network users.

“We find that, if measured accurately, P2P traffic has never declined; indeed we have never seen the proportion of P2P traffic decrease over time in any of our data sources,” wrote Karagiannis, in a paper that he presented at the IEEE Globecom 2004 conference, which was held Nov. 29 through Dec. 3 in Dallas.

During the two-year study, Karagiannis and his cohorts looked closely at data that had been provided by major Internet service providers in August 2002, May 2003 and January 2004. By carefully decoding the bit sequences in the data, they sought to determine the percentage of total P2P traffic and how that compared to pre-RIAA lawsuit traffic.

There was no decrease, said Karagiannis. In some instances, there was a slight increase.

“P2P traffic represents a significant amount of Internet traffic and is likely to continue to grow in the future, RIAA behavior notwithstanding,” he wrote in the paper.

This study is more all-inclusive than other similar studies because it looked at eight – as opposed to one or two – of the most popular P2P applications, said Karagiannis. In addition, they were able to identify traffic to P2P networks that had intentionally attempted to mask traffic through the use non-standard port numbers and other sophisticated technology.

The RIAA continues to file lawsuits against individuals. In addition, officials from the Motion Picture Association of America announced that they had filed the first of many lawsuits targeting computer users who share digital movies via P2P networks.

Karagiannis feels his study shows that P2P is here to stay and that these industries would be better off trying to find ways to provide affordable and convenient alternatives that would allow computer users to download their products legally.
http://www.newsroom.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/display.cgi?id=935

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The trial

Report Asserts Kazaa Makes The Rules
Kristyn Maslog-Levis

Setting aside Sharman Networks' objections, an Australian judge accepted on Friday an affidavit with potentially damaging assertions about Kazaa's handling of copyrighted material.

The affidavit contains a report from George Barker, director of the Australian National University's Center for Law and Economics, Intellectual Property and Copyright, and focuses on the financial consequences of the Kazaa system, which is run by Sharman Networks.

According to the report, the Kazaa system is a "marketplace" that brings together people who have copyrighted works and people who want to make unauthorized copies of those works. The report adds that Kazaa "designs the rules, facilitates the 'market' for exchange of copyright works, and enforces or has the capacity to enforce the rules of that market."

"The attractiveness of the system to users, and the success of Sharman's network growth strategy is verified by the fact that Sharman claims that Kazaa has more than 60 million subscribers and is the most downloaded program in history--approximately 20 million downloads per month," the report says. "As the network grows in size, it becomes more attractive to potential users--because more content will be available--and more valuable to Sharman."

The affidavit is part of a trial in which major record labels Universal Music Australia, EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner, Festival Mushroom and 25 additional applicants are suing Sharman Networks and associated parties--including Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Altnet, Sharman Networks CEO Nikki Hemming and others--over alleged music copyright infringement made using the Kazaa software. The trial, which started this week, is taking place in Sydney.

Barker's report also included details on how Kazaa makes its profits from unauthorized music sharing and the damage this causes to the music industry and the Australian economy.

Kazaa's unauthorized distribution system makes money from global advertising, commercial referrals to Web sites, direct marketing and market research, Barker's report states.

Sharman Networks counsel Anthony Meagher tried to prevent the affidavit's admission into the trial by asserting that Barker's report is not relevant to the issue of filtering--which deals with the Kazaa system's ability or inability to stop the sharing of copyrighted music files--or the authorization issue raised by the record companies.

Judge Murray Wilcox, however, rejected the objections from Kazaa's operators saying it was "blindingly obvious it would be to Kazaa's financial advantage" if people could use it as widely as possible. And if that meant using unauthorized material "that would be to Kazaa's benefit...of course it will pay people to freeload on others--it happens all the time."

Tom Mizzone, vice president of data service at antipiracy company MediaSentry, was also cross-examined on Friday. The previous day, he testified that his company can trace IP addresses of Kazaa users and can communicate with them about copyright infringement via instant messaging.

Under cross-examination, Mizzone acknowledged that only 22 percent of the "warning" instant messages were received by Kazaa users.

However, Mizzone also said that instant messaging could be disabled by the Kazaa users, therefore blocking attempts to send warnings about copyright infringement.

The hearing will continue on Tuesday.
http://news.com.com/Report+asserts+K...3-5476260.html

Sharman Lawyer: Witness Switched Sides
Kristyn Maslog-Levis

One of the witnesses against Sharman Networks had at one time offered to be an expert witness for the company in the civil trial now taking place in Australia, according to Sharman's attorney.

Sharman attorney Mark Lemming revealed on Wednesday an e-mail that University of Melbourne professor Leon Sterling sent to an employee at Sharman. The e-mail stated that Sterling was withdrawing an offer to be an expert witness for Sharman during the civil trial, saying that writing a report requested by Sharman would be "stretching his expertise."

During cross-examination, Lemming used the e-mail to question Sterling's expertise in the trial against the company, which makes the Kazaa peer-to-peer software.

"Your lack of experience in P2P makes it difficult for you to tell the court of any feasibility for the propositions you mentioned," Lemming said.

The exchange is part of a trial in which major record labels Universal Music Australia, EMI, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, Festival Mushroom Records and 25 additional applicants are suing Sharman and associated parties--including Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Altnet, Sharman CEO Nikki Hemming and others--over alleged music copyright infringement made using the Kazaa software. The trial, which began last week, is taking place in Sydney.

Sterling responded to Lemming that it was not possible for him to do a report on how peer-to-peer networks behave, which Sharman had previously requested, because he did not have the resources to do so in a short period of time.

Sterling added that he was not able to do a feasibility study on the proposals that he made and acknowledged that any filtering done in Sharman's Kazaa system would not be 100 percent efficient.

However, Sterling maintained that the suggestions for filtering and monitoring that he made on the stand Tuesday are "all plausible mechanisms" that can be added to the Kazaa system.

After a heated discussion on Wednesday morning, Justice Murray Wilcox told Sharman's representatives to present--earlier than previously scheduled--witnesses who could offer a detailed understanding of how the Kazaa software works.

Wilcox demanded that Sharman Chief Technical Officer Phil Morle take the witness stand on Wednesday. Morle was previously scheduled to testify on Friday.

Morle reiterated Sharman's stand that the company cannot monitor or control what its users do, adding that Sharman does not have the ability to force people to download new versions of the software.

Morle said Kazaa can promote the use of a newer version of the software but cannot force people to upload it. He said all that the technology can do is pop a small window to tell the person that a new version is available, which the person can close or reject and will not prevent the person from using the Kazaa system. Morle is due to be cross examined on Thursday.
http://news.com.com/Sharman+lawyer+W...3-5483277.html

Sharman Exec Calls Child Porn Unstoppable
Kristyn Maslog-Levis

Sharman Networks' chief technology officer has refuted a claim on the Kazaa Web site that the company could "permanently bar" users who are using its peer-to-peer software to distribute child pornography.

Philip Morle told the Federal Court in Sydney on Thursday that he did not believe Sharman could actually block user access to Kazaa as stated in the company's zero- tolerance policy on child pornography.

The owners of Kazaa have on their Web site a "no-tolerance policy with respect to child pornography and other obscene material" and say they have the right to "permanently bar" users and their computers from accessing Kazaa and other Kazaa services."

Morle, however, said he did not know how permanently barring users from accessing the Kazaa system could be done and he claimed he had never seen Kazaa's child pornography policy before.

The testimony is part of a trial in which major record labels Universal Music Australia, EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner, Festival Mushroom and 25 additional applicants are suing Sharman Networks and associated parties--including Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Altnet, Sharman Networks CEO Nikki Hemming and others--over alleged music copyright infringement made using the Kazaa software. The trial, which started last week, is taking place in Sydney.

Morle's remarks in the trial came after Sharman Networks' Executive Vice President Alan Morris faced a U.S. Senate judiciary committee in September last year that tackled issues of pornography in a peer-to-peer environment. In Morris' speech, he mentioned Sharman's zero-tolerance policy against child pornography.

"It should be noted that, while we support user privacy, Sharman Networks Limited has not chosen to use methods of providing anonymity to users that could hinder the legitimate quests for purveyors of obscene material by law enforcement agencies," Morris' statement said.

Sharman's porn filter was described during the U.S. Senate hearings as "the most comprehensive and effective, password-protected, family filter available with any P2P software application."

Morle also revealed Friday that he had been "constantly looking at ways to inhibit infringement" of unlicensed music files.

"I've spent a lot of time thinking about filtering and considering how that would be done and I haven't gotten to a position where what I've reported can and can't be done has caused my superiors to want me to try anything," Morle said.

Universal Music Australia parties' lead barrister, Tony Bannon, questioned Morle on his claim, stating that the Sharman parties have not produced any documentation demonstrating any attempt to try to introduce filters to the Kazaa system.

Morle said his efforts had not been committed to paper because he had only been discussing them verbally with Sharman Networks Chief Executive Officer Nikki Hemming and other executives.

Bannon questioned Morle's knowledge of the cancellation of a Web server in Denmark in 2002 which had collected around 15 million e-mails from various Kazaa users worldwide. In a graphic illustration, Morle was asked to demonstrate a live link to a Web server in Denmark which collects data on Kazaa users by invoking a "special command line."

Morle said that as far as he knows, the Denmark Web server had been phased out and he was not aware that it is still functioning. He added that he was not familiar with the software being used and therefore could not comment on the process further.

"This is a very administrative unimportant piece of software that a junior programmer developed…there's no need for me to be involved with this kind of stuff. It's not something that I need to do. It's a very small piece of software that automates the recording of statistics that are publicly available in the Kazaa application and that's all it is…I wasn't aware that the computer was still in operation, I thought it's already been phased out," Morle said.

Morle also maintained that he did not deliberately damage his laptop during the execution of the Anton Piller orders (or civil search warrant) in February to prevent access to its content.

"I have nothing to hide on what was on that laptop. It was my belief that it was destroyed by the process, not by myself and I wasn't even in the room at that time," he said.

Other witnesses put on the stand on Thursday included David Thompson, national director of the Deloitte Forensic Technology Group, who confirmed that when the Kazaa software is installed, it includes a "pre-defined list of 200 Internet IP addresses of current or former supernodes within the Kazaa system."

A supernode contains a list of some of the files made available by other Kazaa users and where they are located. Kazaa users with the fastest Internet connections and the most powerful computers become the supernodes. When user performs a search, Kazaa first searches the nearest supernode to the user and sends the user immediate results.

Thompson added that the list of supernode addresses was regularly updated during the operation of the software and was used in the provision of results in response to Kazaa user's search requests.

Thompson said he observed evidence of communications taking place when the Kazaa software operates on a user's computer, and when the user attempts to uninstall the software. "These include the sending of statistical or other information regarding user activity or identity. Such information is sent by users' computers to remote systems, such as supernodes within the Kazaa system and the Web site and may be available to the operators of such remote systems."

He added that Internet IP addresses are useful to identify specific devices on the Internet--such as computers of particular Kazaa users--"despite the fact that they sometimes change."
http://news.com.com/Sharman+exec+cal...3-5486666.html

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Issues of Copyright and File Sharing Compel MPAA, SAG, AFTRA to Act
Leonard Jacobs

What does it mean to own your work? What are the implications and repercussions when private citizens share that work illegally? Is software that allows individuals to trade TV programs and feature films a threat to the performers who appear in those works and derive income -- residuals, health plan contributions, other benefits -- from them?

Of late, these questions have returned to the national conversation with gusto. From the halls of Congress to the executive suites of motion picture studios to the conference tables of unions and guilds, a multitude of actions are underway to clarify the rights of copyright holders, to redefine what constitutes illegal peer-to-peer sharing of copyrighted material, and to determine how the work of artists -- and performers' subsidiary incomes -- can be protected.

Possibly the most high-profile action came on Tues., Nov. 16, when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), representing the interests of seven major film studios, announced an unspecified number of lawsuits against individuals it accuses of offering pirated copies of films using Internet-based file-sharing programs. "The motion-picture industry must pursue legal proceedings against people who are stealing our movies on the Internet," said Dan Glickman, the MPAA's president and CEO, in a statement. "The future of our industry, and of the hundreds of thousands of jobs it supports, must be protected from this kind of outright theft using all available means."

The suit follows the strategy adopted by the Recording Industry Association of America in its successful battle against Napster: Concentrate on private citizens who trade copyrighted material.

Back in the nation's capital, meanwhile, a $388 billion spending bill approved by Congress includes a program that creates a federal copyright enforcement "czar." The program authorizes the president to appoint one individual to coordinate law enforcement efforts aimed at stopping international copyright infringement and to oversee a federal umbrella agency responsible for administering intellectual property law. That power is currently diluted across multiple agencies, including the Library of Congress, the Justice and State departments, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

In another measure, the Senate has passed the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2004, which, among other things, makes recording a movie inside a movie theatre a crime punishable by three years in prison.

Yet a recent Reuters article underscores just how big a problem the industry faces: It reports that a file-sharing application called BitTorrent is now so popular it is "devouring more than a third of the Internet's bandwidth." It is also more insidious, for it does not offer an online platform or marketplace for trading TV programs or feature films. Instead, the software allows private citizens to contact each other directly and trade files privately -- so-called "peer-to-peer" sharing.

So how does all this affect the actor? Back Stage contacted representatives of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) to examine this issue from the performer's perspective.

Fair and Rhine

"We are opposed to any unlawful use of copyrighted material," said Pamm Fair, SAG's deputy national executive director for planning and external affairs. "When the MPAA held its news conference announcing the lawsuits, our first vice president, Anne-Marie Johnson, made our position even clearer: She said we -- the industry -- need to crack down on this peer-to- peer use. Why? For example, SAG members get a percentage of the gross of the distributors of the films they do. So when people illegally share copyrighted files, our members lose money. Pure and simple."

While not speaking on behalf of the MPAA, Fair said that the "idea behind the lawsuits -- and the reason why it is going after individual file-sharers -- is to let people know that you can't steal. To all of us, this is exactly like shoplifting -- if you walk into Blockbuster and steal a DVD. It's copyrighted material and you cannot distribute it."

As for the argument that technology will always discover ways to circumvent the law, Fair says, in effect, that all is fair in the copyright war: "Manufacturers are beginning to provide technology that prevents copying, and we've met with various folks in the industry to talk about product inserts -- middle-of- the-road artists who would publicly say, 'You wouldn't come to my house and steal, so why would you steal my work?' And a lot of parents, too, think this peer-to-peer stealing is terrible. To some, it's legitimized shoplifting. So while technology may create more ways of sharing files illegally, we also think technology is going to be helping 'our side' as well."

Fair added that just because software like BitTorrent is popular does not mean that there aren't still other, emerging challenges to copyright holders lurking on the scene: "The Directors Guild and SAG are working against CleanFlicks." Created by a company based in American Fork, Utah, CleanFlicks "has developed software that allows, once you have it in your computer, to edit and take out anything you consider indecent so you can use it in a family-viewing setting. Well, of course directors object."

In an email exchange with Back Stage, Rebecca Rhine, AFTRA's assistant national executive director for public policy and strategic planning, said, "The question is not whether the technology is good or bad -- it simply is. The question is how we create a model which allows consumers the widest access and choices while ensuring that individual artists can sustain a career and continue to create. It is easy to attack the 'establishment' and the litigation-based solutions they are employing to try and deal with piracy. What is harder is to reconcile the fact that free access has a direct link to loss of income for individual actors and recording artists which, in turn, can result in everything from the loss of health and retirement benefits to the inability to continue to support a family or pursue a chosen career. Too often the debate is focused on star performers and huge corporations as opposed to the very real fate of thousands of working-class performers. I don't think most consumers want to save a couple of bucks on the backs of those performers."
http://www.backstage.com/backstage/n..._id=1000731069

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It's Bad To Share
Michael Desmond

With lawsuits springing up against file-sharers, what does the future hold for online media swapping?

Where has all the illegal peer-to-peer action gone? Underground. In some cases, it's gone way underground. Many sharers have gone straight, fearful of reprisals from the major entertainment companies and worried about virus-laden, corrupted, or spoofed files.

That's a win for Hollywood. But large numbers of music and video pirates are simply looking elsewhere for their booty and have turned to lesser-known P- to-P networks, Usenet, and even invitation-only networks.

"Users are very much moving around...rather than moving out," says Eric Garland, the CEO of BigChampagne, a market research firm specializing in P-to-P activity.

To combat the new threats, Hollywood has turned to old standbys: new legislation, more lawsuits, and improved copy-control technology.

Once boasting over 30 million users, Kazaa is now down to about 16 million, according to research firm ComScore Media Metrix. WinMX users have dropped from a high of 6.8 million down to 6 million this May, the firm says.

If you looked just at these results, it would appear that entertainment companies are winning the war. But these statistics show only a partial picture of the piracy problem.

Still trading

Have users really reformed? Not really - many are flocking to smaller P-to-P networks like BitTorrent, EDonkey, and EMule. According to ComScore Networks, BitTorrent nearly doubled in users, from about 200,000 to more than 400,000 between November 2003 and May 2004.

EMule grew from under 100,000 users in February 2003 to nearly 300,000 a year later. EDonkey, which ComScore did not track in its survey, has made even bigger gains, says Garland.

Their usage numbers may not be on the same scale as the old Napster's, but these services may pose a greater threat to content owners than previous P-to- P networks. All three use an advanced technique called swarming, in which portions of files are downloaded from multiple sources and immediately offered to the network. The result is potentially faster downloads and more rapid propagation of content.

There are other options for pirated content. Internet newsgroups, best known by the collective name Usenet, offer a vast reservoir of music, movies, and software, at connection speeds that can put the better-known P-to-P services to shame.

In the past, the difficulty of using newsgroups, combined with limits ISPs place on file transfers, has stunted the growth of piracy on them. That could change, particularly with the emergence of user- friendly software - such as the freely available Xnews reader - that makes accessing content in newsgroups easier than dealing with the more unpredictable P-to-P services.

But even if newsgroups become a more popular venue for illegal file trading, they are generally still public and therefore trackable. Private networks set up by file traders are harder to track or quantify.

"John," an IT manager for a financial services firm in the Midwest, says that he and his friends have traded files over an encrypted virtual private network they set up expressly for that purpose. And more and more music and video is being traded face-to-face.

"If it's music, it's almost always sneakernet," John says. "It's just so much easier to hand someone a USB drive and say, 'Bring it back to me next week.' It's easy to trade someone 20 gigs of music for 20 gigs of music."

Going straight or dropping out?

The good news for Hollywood is that the piracy crackdown in the last two years has persuaded substantial numbers of people to go legit. A Pew Internet Project report reveals an increase in those who say they download music files, from 18 million in December 2003 to 23 million in February 2004 - 17 per cent of whom use legal services like iTunes or Musicmatch. And ComScore data shows that the six largest online music shopping services drew more than 11 million visits from US users in March alone.

That's as it should be, says Marc Morgenstern, vice president and general manager of Loudeye's Digital Media Asset Protection Business. The company sells online-content-protection services to the music, movie, game, and software industries. Its Overpeer service line is responsible for some of the decoy files masquerading as copyrighted content on P-to-P networks. The aim: to make file sharing so inconvenient that consumers will pay for a more predictable and satisfying experience.

"(The file-sharing community is) starting to notice. If you go on bulletin boards, you will see that people are getting frustrated by this activity," says Morgenstern.

But while file-sharing old-timers may be frustrated, Hollywood's aggressive antipiracy campaigns may also be scaring off potential customers for legal download services.

The Pew study shows that the Recording Industry Association of America's legal actions are discouraging potential first-time users of legit services. About 60 per cent of those who have never tried downloading don't want to go to any source of downloaded music - legal or not - for fear of lawsuits, the study says.

The much-publicized anti-piracy lawsuits aren't the only reason users might be confused as they consider buying digital tunes. It can be hard to tell the good guys from the bad.

Some legitimate music services such as Wippit in the UK use the same basic peer-to-peer technology that powers pirate havens like Kazaa, while the Russia- based Allofmp3.com, for example, has a download music store with appealingly low prices - but its licenses are based on Russian copyright laws, so its content may be illegal for users outside of that country.

Upping the ante

Despite an overall drop in P-to-P activity, the RIAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the BSA continue to publish apocalyptic estimates of revenue lost to online and offline piracy. The BSA, for instance, maintains that in 2003 nearly $29 billion worth of pirated software was installed on PCs worldwide.

The music industry primarily blames file sharing and music piracy for drops in US sales, from a peak of $14.6 billion in 2000 to $11.9 billion in 2003. What's more, as worldwide broadband adoption continues to grow - especially in Asia - these groups expect the problem to worsen.

Widely available broadband has enabled pirates to expand beyond music to other kinds of digital media. "Accesses for movies and games are increasing dramatically," says Morgenstern. "As soon as a game or movie is released, there is a race out there to get it onto peer-to-peer."

How are antipiracy groups responding? For one thing, they're pushing for more targeted legislation to strictly limit behaviours and technologies that can encourage copyright infringement, points out BigChampagne's Garland.

A flurry of such bills is advancing through the US Congress, including the Inducing Infringement of Copyright Act, which would effectively criminalize P- to-P networks that encourage trading of copyrighted material.

The legislative effort won't end the cat-and-mouse game, says Morgenstern, because some of these P- to-P software vendors, such as EDonkey, are offshore. "This is a gnarly, worldwide problem. Peer- to-peer networks are not going to go away."

In addition to new laws, entertainment and computer companies are bringing new technologies to the content-protection table. One of the more notable is in Microsoft's upcoming Windows Media Digital Rights Management 10 software, formerly code-named Janus. Though it's meant to facilitate the secure downloading of content from subscription services to portable players, its mission could expand.

Janus includes a protected, real-time clock in digital media that permits playback only after verifying that a license is valid. Microsoft has a bevy of partners; expect compatible devices and digital media offerings this year.

Microsoft's software could work with another DRM scheme called Advanced Access Content System. AACS is intended for use with next-generation optical discs, such as Blu-ray and HD-DVDs. It's in the development stage and should work with other existing DRM technology; it may also let users copy a disc onto a compliant movie server in their home or onto select portable devices.

AACS has backing from The Walt Disney Company and Warner Brothers Entertainment, as well as from several major computer firms such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sony, among others.

TiVo.'s upcoming digital broadcast security technology, recently blessed by the US Federal Communications Commission, permits some sharing of DTV broadcast content over the Internet. It allows a TiVo user to send recorded free, over-the-air DTV programs via the Net to other TiVo boxes or PCs registered to that user.

File sharing is here to stay, and the new DRM technologies do acknowledge that and plan for it. Whether they will give users enough rights to make illegal sharing no more than a blip in the digital media market remains to be seen.

Software on the sly

Hollywood is not alone in feeling the pinch of online pirates. The software industry also faces a significant and growing threat from pirates who spam users relentlessly, marketing cheap, bare-bones copies of popular software such as major products from Adobe, Intuit, and Microsoft.

The email originates largely from Eastern Europe, says John Wolfe, the Business Software Association's manager of investigations. While the spam often describes these copies as being for personal "backup" purposes, Wolfe emphasizes that the practice clearly violates copyright law - the sites make no effort to verify that buyers already have a license for the software, and many offer cracks that let buyers avoid the software's copy protection.

Most such sites have sprung up in the last 12 months, according to industry investigations. And though illegal software sales are difficult to track, Sean Myers, manager of Internet antipiracy at the Software Information and Industry Association, says that, based on his observations, sales of sham backup copies have tripled in the past year.

The BSA and similar groups have a very limited ability to confront offshore pirates. So as with P-to-P file sharing, scrutiny could fall on those who buy the illegal copies of applications.
http://www.digitmag.co.uk/features/i...FeatureID=1177

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Hollywood Allies Sue DVD Jukebox Maker
John Borland

A Hollywood-backed technology group is suing a high-end home theater system company, contending that its home DVD jukebox technology is illegal.

The DVD Copy Control Association, the group that owns the copy-protection technology contained on DVDs, said a company called Kaleidescape is offering products that illegally make copies of DVDs. The company, which has won several recent consumer electronics awards, said it has worked closely with the DVD CCA for more than a year, and will fight the suit, filed Tuesday.

Kaleidescape creates expensive consumer electronics networks that upload the full contents of as many as 500 DVDs to a home server, and allow the owner to browse through the movies without later using the DVDs themselves. That's exactly what the copy-protection technology on DVDs, called Content Scramble System (CSS) was meant to prevent, the Hollywood-backed group said.

"The express intent and purpose of the contract and CSS are to prevent copying of copyrighted materials such as DVD motion pictures," Bill Coats, a DVD CCA attorney, said in a statement. "While Kaleidescape obtained a license to use CSS, the company has built a system to do precisely what the license and CSS are designed to prevent--the wholesale copying of protected DVDs."

The DVD technology group has stepped up its efforts in recent months to control hardware that it believes isn't abiding by the rules of DVD copy protection, suing several chip companies. The Kaleidescape lawsuit in particular could help put legal boundaries around the burgeoning home theater market.

The company sells a high-capacity home movie server, which can store hundreds of movies at a time, allowing access from different places in a networked home to as many as seven films at once. Putting the movies on the server requires copying them from the original DVDs, however.

The products don't come cheap. A basic system, storing 160 movies, sold for about $27,000 earlier in the year.

Technology companies including Microsoft have envisioned doing much the same thing with computers such as a Windows Media Center PC. Movies recorded from television or downloaded from a video-on-demand service can be played throughout a networked home using a Media Center Extender.

Kaleidescape Chief Executive Officer Michael Malcolm said his company had designed its products specifically to the terms of a license from the DVD CCA, and that he had repeatedly updated the group on product plans.

"We are flabbergasted by this lawsuit," Malcolm said. "We have gone to great pains to make our system comply 100 percent with licenses and all the associated technical procedures and requirements."

The company will fight the lawsuit and will likely countersue the DVD CCA, Malcolm added.

The suit was filed in California state court in Santa Clara County. The group is asking the court for unspecified damages and to stop Kaleidescape from further sales of its products.
http://news.com.com/Hollywood+allies...3-5482206.html

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FTC Spotlights Proposals On P2P Risks
John Borland

The head of the Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to Congress on Tuesday highlighting efforts that file-swapping companies are making to disclose potential online risks.

Legislators have criticized software such as Kazaa, Morpheus and eDonkey for exposing users to spyware, pornography and the risk of lawsuits. Although protesting that their software was no more risky than use of the Internet at large, peer-to-peer companies have worked with the FTC to develop better consumer notification techniques.

The FTC included several of those proposals with its letter to Congress, saying that when implemented, they would do a better job of warning consumers.

"(Peer-to-peer) industry members have developed proposed risk disclosures that we believe would be a substantial improvement over current practices," FTC Chair Deborah Platt Majoras wrote in the letter. "We intend to monitor and report back to interested members of Congress on the extent to which P2P file-sharing program distributors implement these proposed risk disclosures."

The letter follows a tumultuous year in Congress for file-swapping companies, which faced proposed legislation that would have overturned a series of court rulings to make them responsible for copyright infringement on their networks.

That legislation ultimately did not pass but could return next year.

Under the new proposals, consumers would be notified when the software is installed that downloading music, games, movies or software without authorization is illegal. The companies' Web sites would also have detailed information about other possible risks in using the software.

Representatives for file-swapping trade associations said the FTC letter could help show legislators that they are serious about playing by the rules.

"We are grateful for the interest that the Federal Trade Commission has taken in this young industry's efforts at self-regulation," Distributed Computing Industry Alliance Chief Executive Officer Marty Lafferty said in a statement. "We hope the FTC letter to Congress will help foster a better understanding on the Hill of the realities of P2P technologies and of the actions being taken by responsible parties to commercially develop this new distribution channel."

The FTC will hold a two-day session studying the consumer impacts of file-swapping technology beginning Dec. 15.
http://news.com.com/FTC+spotlights+p...3-5482429.html

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FBI Serves Subpoenas On Nmap Creator
Sam Varghese

The FBI has been seeking information from the creator of the network security scanner, Nmap, about a particular attacker who they think may have visited the nmap site at a given time.

Nmap creator Fyodor said in a posting to the nmap-hackers mailing list that no reasons had been given to him when he was served with the subpoenas.

"If they see that an attacker ran the command "wget http:// download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/nmap-3.77.tgz" from a compromised host, they assume that she might have obtained that URL by visiting the Nmap download page from her home computer," he wrote.

Wget is a download tool used from the command line on Unix boxes.

Nmap is widely regarded as the best scanner around. It is an open source utility for network exploration or security auditing and though designed to rapidly scan large networks works against single hosts as well.

Fyodor said so far he had not given the FBI any information. "In some cases, they asked too late and data had already been purged through our data retention policy. In other cases, they failed to serve the subpoena properly. Sometimes they try asking without a subpoena and give up when I demand one. "

Fyodor said nothing on his site, insecure.org, was illegal. "Nmap was designed to help security - the criminals and spammers put my work to shame! But the desirability of helping the FBI is immaterial - I may be forced by law to comply with legal, properly served subpoenas," he wrote.

"Most of you probably don't care if someone finds out that you downloaded Nmap, Nessus, Hping2, John the Ripper, etc.... But for those of you who do care, there are plenty of mechanisms available to preserve your anonymity. Remember this security mantra: defense in depth," he said.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Breaki...19605187.html#

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Spies Trace Music Swappers
Kirsty Needham

Hundreds of thousands of Australian users of Kazaa are being stalked online by the music industry's hired gun, an American company that tracks down and then remotely enters home computers it finds swapping songs.

The Federal Court heard yesterday that the major record labels are also engaged in a program of actively disrupting the file-sharing network by bombarding it with billions of decoys and spoofs that pose as song files.

The success of the spoof war meant as few as 7 per cent of a given artist's tracks found on the network were usable, according to record industry memos read out in court.

Tom Mizzone, vice-president of data services for Media Sentry, said his New York company was asked in March 2003 to search Kazaa for users located in Australia and download evidence they were swapping copyrighted material. Up to 600 scanners were turned to the task, and the internet addresses of the users recorded and checked against a database of internet service providers in Australia.

"You are spying on a person?" asked Justice Murray Wilcox.

Mizzone replied: "We look for people who are sharing or distributing."

Media Sentry then returns 10 minutes later in an automated process and asks the computer to view the person's full collection of music files.

Outside the court, Michael Speck, the general manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations, said 300,000 Australian Kazaa users had been caught and sent an instant message that read "internet file sharing is theft" and warned they had exposed their computer to outsiders.

But although the US music industry last September sued 261 people it had tracked, Mr Speck said no legal action would be taken against individual file-sharers in Australia.

Executives for BMG Australia and Sony Australia said under cross- examination that they had no knowledge of spoof campaigns conducted for their record labels by another US company, Media Defender.

Damian Rinaldi, director of business affairs for Sony Music Australia, said someone else had drafted the wording of an affidavit he had signed that said spoofs made up only a small number of files on the network and had not limited illegal activity.

But Media Defender reports and record company memos read out in court by Stephen Finch, SC, for Altnet, one of several defendants, stated nine out of 10 attempts to access song files on file-sharing networks failed because of spoofs.

Karen Don, director of legal and business affairs for Universal, said she was aware of the spoof campaigns but, because of the expense, "we are only able to do it for a very small number of titles at a time".

Finch said an email addressed to her in November 2003 read that protection by spoofing campaigns was still very successful and the average level of usable song files on the network had dropped to 6.7 per cent.

Ms Don said: "It only relates to the very limited number of titles that are being protected."

Just one or two of the latest releases would be chosen to be protected, and then only for a limited time, she said.

A decoy is a file that looks like a song but plays only a repeated sound or a warning against piracy. A spoof points a user to a different internet address, and was likened by Justice Wilcox to a wild-goose chase.

"The consumer gets frustrated ... there's nothing really there," Ms Don said.

Earlier, 12 affidavits that demonstrated lawful use of Kazaa by musicians, universities and businesses were withdrawn by the defence after Justice Wilcox said any remedies granted to the record industry could not adversely affect the rights of others who legitimately supply products to Kazaa that did not involve copyright infringement.

The judge said it was important that any legal remedy did not trespass on freedom of communication. "You are entitled to protect copyright. You are not entitled to control the internet," he said.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Breaki...923300479.html

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D.C.-Area Video Game Stores Targeted in Piracy Raid
Ben Berkowitz

Federal authorities raided three Washington, D.C.-area video game stores and arrested two people for modifying video game consoles to play pirated video games, a video game industry group said Wednesday.

The Entertainment Software Association said the Dec. 1 raids at three Pandora's Cube stores in Maryland and Virginia were a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Justice's computer crimes unit, the U.S. Attorney's Office for Maryland and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Authorities arrested two store employees on charges of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and conspiracy to traffic in a device that circumvents technological protection measures, the ESA said.

"One of them is someone who has a more substantial role with the company," said Chunnie Wright, anti-piracy counsel to the ESA. She could not provide more details due to the ongoing nature of the criminal case.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on what, if anything, was seized during the raids. He said the department has not released details yet on the monetary value of what was allegedly pirated.

Like other entertainment industries, the video game business has aggressively pursued the pirates that it says account for billions of dollars in lost revenue annually.

But because video games tend to have very large digital files, a large part of the industry's piracy problem stems from illegal hardware and illegal copying of game discs.

Pandora's Cube, Wright said, sold $500 "Super Xbox" consoles, modified versions of Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox video game console, that had been modified to hold larger hard drives and play pirated games.

The modified consoles, some holding 15 or more games already copied to the hard drive, were on open display in the stores.

"They were burning games onto the hard drive and equipping the hard drive with copying software so that the average consumer could just go ahead and copy the software themselves," she said.

Pandora's Cube operates three stores, in Baltimore and College Park, Maryland, and Springfield, Virginia. Company officials were not immediately available to comment.

Besides industry efforts, some individual game companies have taken steps of late to stop piracy. Last month Nintendo Co. Ltd. won a court order barring the sale of devices running pirated copies of classic Nintendo video games.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Dec8.html

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Sites Attacked Last Month To Plant Backdoor
Sam Varghese

An attack on the British tech news site, The Register, and a number of others using ads as the medium was carefully planned to plant the backdoor, Backdoor.Win32.Agent.ec, on PCs, a Finnish software engineer says.

The engineer, who goes by the name Matt, has analysed the entire attack and concluded that the Bofra worm had nothing to do with it.

After noticing the fact that a number of hackers had compromised the servers at the ad-serving company Falk AG, he informed the company.

"The hackers were successful in modifying Javascript code (on the Falk AG servers) returned to Internet Explorer users that allows the exploit to take place. The user was redirected to a page on search.comedycentral.com that hosted the exploit code.

"From there several downloader trojans were used to download a backdoor trojan from gamedev.he.net. The backdoor trojan can then be used to gain full control of your PC," Matt wrote in his analysis of the attack.

Falk serves ads for an impressive list of publishers.

Matt said the attack was carried out as under:

· The hacked Falk eSolutions AG server returned a document to the user containing the location of the exploit code via an IFRAME element.

· A hacked Comedy Central server hosted the exploit code in HTML format. The document was 8 474 bytes and in Unicode format. Included in the document was Javascript to perform the buffer overflow.

· The shell code created by the exploit was 330 bytes. It contained instructions to download an executable.

· A trojan downloader, Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Small.aaq was used to download the final backdoor from 4. The trojan was 3 114 bytes and saved to the root directory of C: as bla.exe.

· The final trojan, Backdoor.Win32.Agent.ec was saved to the root directory of the C: as winampa.exe and bla.exe was deleted. The trojan was 47 616 bytes.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Breaki...219605013.html

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'Gay' Worm Shuts Down Italian Senate PCs
Rome

A worm containing pictures of gay pornography forced the shutdown of the Italian senate computer system, parliamentary officials said on Tuesday.

The virus attack began late on Monday, and came several days following the firing of an assistant to the upper house's vice president, after images of him attending a homosexual party in Rome surfaced.

The worm slipped by the anti-virus software at the chamber, and computer technicians shut off most of the senate's computers, officials said.

An operation was then begun to clean the worm from the infected machines.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Breaki...om=moreStories

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Caught in the act

Man Fined Over Pirated DVDs

A Melbourne man has been fined $5000 and placed on a two-year good behaviour bond for pirating DVD movies and computer games.

Bing Lin, 25, of Mt Waverley, pleaded guilty to five charges involving the possession and sale of counterfeit DVDs and computer games at the Melbourne Magistrates' Court yesterday.

More than 3500 counterfeit DVD movies and computer games were seized by Australian Federal Police when they raided Lin's home, in Melbourne's south-east on November 9, the court heard.

The counterfeit DVDs included 30 movie titles which had not yet been released on DVD.

Lin, who worked for his father's carpet cleaning business, was downloading a movie from the internet when police walked into his bedroom, the court heard.

Police also seized computer equipment set up in a manner consistent with the illegal production of counterfeit DVDS and about 500 sales catalogues listing more than 200 different movie titles, price details and a mobile telephone number registered to Lin.

Lin came to the AFP's attention after he was observed associating with stall holders selling counterfeit DVDs at the Caribbean Gardens Market, in Scoresby, on three occasions in August during an AFP investigation.

Defence lawyer Richard Lawson said Lin had no prior convictions, and had agreed to an order to destroy the seized property and had pleaded guilty.

Magistrate Julian Fitz-Gerald said he did not accept Lin's suggestion that he was working for another person and described him as an "industrious young man".

He said the charges Lin faced were "very serious" but he took into account that he had never been before the court before and that he had pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Breaki...923301934.html

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Spam-Happy Shoppers Love Stolen Software
Will Sturgeon

Online shoppers are still willing to buy products advertised in spam, indicating that the problem is unlikely to desist anytime soon, a new survey shows.

Among the most popular items being sold via unsolicited e-mail is illegal software--in many cases adding to the number of laws being broken by the sellers.

According to figures from Forrester Research, a staggering 22 percent of U.K. online consumers have bought software through spam.

The problems with this kind of sale in particular are manifold. Users are encouraging the spammers to keep sending bulk mail by buying from them. They are also violating software copyrights. Furthermore, by buying software that is most likely pirated and not produced with much quality assurance they are likely exposing themselves to viruses and spyware bundled with their illegal goods.

Ironically, it is the very Trojans which can come bundled with pirate software that help create the networks of compromised machines abused by spammers.

"Who knows what you're getting when they buy a piece of software from these e-mails," said Alyn Hockey, product director at Clearswift. "There could be anything on there."

Hockey stressed that even if users aren't worried about the copyright implications of pirated software they should certainly take notice of the security threat of installing it.

Some of the most common software suites sold via junk e-mail offer spam protection, anti-spyware and pop-up blocking software--"the current hot topics" and the very problems users are likely to be encouraging through their purchase, Hockey said.

The Forrester survey, conducted on behalf of the Business Software Alliance, revealed there is still a long way to go before there is enough of a financial disincentive to send spammers in search of alternative employment.

"The only guaranteed way to stop the spammers is by hurting them in the pocket," Hockey said. "But by buying from them, users are giving them money and helping them to maintain their business and their lifestyle."

The Forrester survey also revealed that more than 90 percent of U.K. online consumers receive spam. Although there are large variations in the amount of spam received by these consumers, it shows the problem now affects almost anybody connected to the Internet. The survey involved more than 6,000 respondents across six countries.

The BSA warned that before making a purchase, consumers should consider that the same people who send spam offering cheap software are often also involved in identity theft, credit card fraud, and so on.

A spokesman for the BSA said: "Many online consumers don't consider the true motives of spammers. In addition to profiting from selling goods and services and driving click-through ad traffic, organized crime rings use spam to gain access to personal information."
http://news.com.com/Spam-happy+shopp...3-5487375.html

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2004: The Biggest Cases
Rob O'Neill

Universal Music v Sharman
License holdings: P2P or not to P2P

This civil case, which went to trial yesterday in the Federal Court in Sydney, will be of interest to several hundred million internet users, their ISPs and a phalanx of copyright lawyers.

It centres on Kazaa, a piece of networking software that allows users to share files over the internet - such as music recordings, videos and e-books - often in breach of copyright, according to the international music industry. The Kazaa client program, which claims more than 300 million downloads, is part of a class of software known as "file-sharing" or "peer-to-peer" (P2P). Other similar programs include eDonkey, Grokster, Limewire and Morpheus, and have roughly several hundred million more downloads (and users).

In February, as measured by the number of users and the quantity of data transferred daily between users, Kazaa was the biggest network of its kind in the world. That was when Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) investigators raided the Sydney offices of its maker, Sharman Networks, and the home of its chief executive, Nikki Hemming, left, and other executives associated with the business. Telstra, the ISP ihug and several universities were also hit.

Hemming and her rivals are not speaking to the media after lawyers for Sharman Networks secured what was in effect a press embargo.

Since then, a co-ordinated international response that saw ARIA's US counterpart, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sue individuals allegedly engaged in illicit file sharing has seen Kazaa's leadership fade, overtaken by rival eDonkey.

P2P supporters fear that if the music industry succeeds in shutting down Kazaa - as it did its forerunner, Napster - the precedent could stifle innovation on the internet and close the door to new ways of distributing digital content.

Set down for two weeks, the trial could take longer. The case is expected to include technical arguments from both sides.

After months of hearings, insiders told Next, the case will seek to uncover who ultimately owns the mysterious Sharman Networks; unravel the company's complex financial and management structure; and reveal how the embattled software developer makes money and what it does with it.

We could also discover where online marketing company Altnet and its Australian-born star chief executive Kevin Bermeister - founder of Sega- Ozisoft and chief executive of Hollywood entertainment software company Brilliant Digital Entertainment - fit into the picture and what Hemming's role in the company is.

The music industry has a good record of defending its claims. In 2001, the RIAA dealt the original P2P challenger Napster a near-fatal blow in a similar battle in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The same court concluded two years earlier that one of the original MP3 players, Diamond's Rio, infringed copyright-holders' rights. But, last August, it ruled in a case against Grokster that file-sharing software did not necessarily infringe copyright owners' rights because network operators were not liable for their users' actions, provided they had no control over users' copyright infringements. That was a central difference in the Napster case, in which operators controlled the servers.

A month later, Altnet followed with a one-two punch, suing the RIAA for copyright infringement, alleging the music industry goliath had infringed Altnet's copyrights during its P2P investigations.

Although the Kazaa case will be fought in an Australian jurisdiction over alleged breaches of local law, the implications will be felt across the globe.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...577387280.html

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Beijing Loves the Web Until the Web Talks Back
Tom Zeller Jr.

LAST December, China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, sat down for a remarkably candid online chat with Chinese Internet users.

"People are not too keen about your looks," one participant chided, according to a translation published in The South China Morning Post - and Mr. Li replied, "My mother would not agree with this view."

The exchange was the first time that a senior Chinese official had engaged in an online chat with ordinary citizens, but its improbably personal moments belied the restrictive government's tenuous relationship with the Internet.

Indeed, as the number of people online in China has quintupled over the last four years, the government has shown itself to be committed to two concrete, and sometimes competing, goals: strategically deploying the Internet to economic advantage, while clamping down - with surveillance, filters and prison sentences - on undesirable content and use.

Both trends, experts say, are likely to continue.

"The continuance of Communist Party rule is only possible to the extent that the government delivers economic growth," said Duncan Clark, the managing director of BDA China, a telecommunications and technology consulting firm based in Beijing. "Much as Henry IV in France was known for the chicken in every pot," he said in an e-mail message, "China's rulers are bent on putting communications, mobile phones, Internet access and the new growth area, broadband, into as many hands as possible."

China is already the largest mobile communications subscriber market in the world, with more than 320 million subscribers. Internet users - who numbered fewer than 17 million in 2000 - are now estimated to be somewhere near 90 million, according to the China Internet Network Information Center, the government's clearinghouse for Internet statistics. China is second only to the United States in the number of people online, and the 90 percent of its total population around 1.3 billion who are not online still represents a vast, untapped market.

The Internet has given rise to several Chinese companies worth billions of dollars, including Web portals like Netease, Sina and Sohu - all traded on Nasdaq. And American interests responded after Beijing's pledge this year to increase purchases of United States telecommunications equipment.

In June, China's leading Internet search engine, Baidu.com, announced that the American search powerhouse, Google, had bought a stake in the company. Days later, Yahoo unveiled Yisou.com, its own China-based search engine. And on Nov. 11, Cisco Systems of San Jose, Calif., announced that it had been chosen to build the business portion of a new backbone network linking 200 Chinese cities. The company, which has secured over $100 million in contracts with China Telecom since last June, was also the main provider of equipment for the country's largest existing public network, ChinaNet.

But not everyone is celebrating the way China has nurtured the Internet.

"China is the world's biggest prison for cyberdissidents," said Tala Dowlatshahi, a spokeswoman for the group Reporters Without Borders, based in France. "It's extremely worrying."

Human rights groups, which consider the Internet in China to be something of a blessing and a curse, have long raised concerns about the Chinese government's use of the technology. The rise of China's Internet hinted at more freedoms, but it also promised the government a new and effective means of monitoring its citizens. And while some technologically adept citizens have been finding ways to circumvent the monitoring, the government is also becoming more sophisticated, and it remains just as willing to punish transgressors.

In a 2004 report called "The Internet Under Surveillance," Reporters Without Borders noted that although Chinese officials had released four people detained for their activities on the Internet since the spring of 2003, there were still 61 people imprisoned "for posting messages or articles on the Internet that were considered subversive."

The report also noted that the Internet, in its Chinese manifestation, is purposly built for social control and monitoring.

"There are just five backbones or hubs through which all traffic must pass," the report noted. "No matter what I.S.P. is chosen by Internet users, their e-mails and the files they download and send must pass through these hubs."

The OpenNet Initiative - an international partnership linking Internet and legal research centers at the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School and Cambridge University - tracks state filtering and surveillance practices. According to the group's most recent bulletins from China, the government has found new ways to filter search engine results. Sensitive keywords like "Falun Gong" or "Taiwan Independence" will often return no hits.

And with more interactive activities like blogging, online chat and message boards, the monitoring is intense and redundant.

"Those who host such activities within the country understand that they can be held responsible for what their users say there," said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor and a founder of the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard, "and therefore themselves engage in monitoring."

Western companies have been chided by human rights groups for acquiescing to demands from the Chinese government that, for instance, certain words be filtered in their search engines, or that hardware be tailored to assist in surveillance - though most companies counter that they have no control over how the government uses their products. And while it occasionally appears that incremental improvements are being made - Reporters Without Borders noted that China finally tried and sentenced most of the cyberdissidents whom it had held without trial for years - China's huge investment in Internet technology remains generally inseparable from the government's expressed desire to control the information carried.

"The evidence points to the government not giving up on surveillance and filtering," Professor Zittrain said. "Indeed, they are refining the techniques for each."

But so, too, will cyberdissidents refine their efforts to do and say what they want on the Internet, experts say.

"On the censorship topic, best to think of it as a cat-and-mouse game," Mr. Clark of BDA China said. "There will never be an absolute winner or loser."

The kind of cultural and economic flourishing that the Internet has already wrought in China is irreversible, Mr. Clark said.

Repercussions for a narrow range of sensitive topics, he acknowledged, are real - and often severe. But apart from these, "China's Internet is a hothouse of content on a wide range of topics and interests," Mr. Clark said, "especially those embraced by the teens and 20-somethings who make up the bulk of the online population still.

"China's rapidly emerging middle classes, numbering tens if not hundreds of millions, are dependent on the Internet and the Internet is dependent on them," he said. "There's no putting the genie back in the bottle now, and no real attempt to do so."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/bu...al2/06net.html

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China Bans Computer Game Showing Taiwan, Tibet As Independent

China has banned a popular British online computer game that portrays Taiwan, Tibet and Hong Kong as independent countries.

The Ministry of Culture said Football Manager 2005, developed by London-based Sports Interactive, "poses harm to the country's sovereignty and territorial integrity," the Xinhua news agency said Wednesday. "Such a distortion, even in a computer game, violates the relevant Chinese laws and is anathema to the Chinese government," it cited the ministry as saying. China considers Taiwan, which separated from the mainland in 1949 after a civil war, as a province awaiting reunification. It has ruled Tibet since 1951 and views it as an "inalienable part" of China. Former British colony Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Although Football Manager 2005 is not yet legally on sale in China, it is available in pirated form and could be downloaded from the Internet, Xinhua said. Police and government departments across China have been ordered to punish websites, vendors and Internet cafes which disseminate or sell the game, with fines of up to 30,000 yuan (3,623 dollars). Offenders may also have their business licences revoked. Football Manager 2005 is one of the fastest-selling computer games in Britain, according to game review websites. China launched a nationwide crackdown on online computer games earlier this year, banning those with "unhealthy" and sensitive political content in an attempt to rein in what it perceives as harmful influences on the young. Chinese statistics show that one fifth of China's Internet users are game players -- a 64 percent increase over 2002.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/041208/323/f85cn.html

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Two tales of Web collaboration

ERoom And Groove Offer Different Approaches But Same Results
Paul Ferrill

It doesn't take much effort to see the benefits that collaboration tools bring to just about any type of team. Having the ability to effortlessly share documents, notes and conversations between geographically dispersed team members can be invaluable. The tough part is keeping all that information up-to-date and synchronized. If the collaboration tool doesn't make that process easy, it probably won't be used for long.

ERoom and Groove Virtual Office — both of which have recently been released in new versions — provide similar capabilities with very different approaches. eRoom takes a centralized-server tack using either a hosted application model (eRoom.net) or an in- house server located behind the corporate firewall. Groove, on the other hand, uses a peer-to-peer model with minimal central control.

Just another pretty interface?

The products use the concept of a container to keep similar information grouped together. Groove's container is a "work space" while in eRoom, it's an "eRoom."

Each product makes it easy to create a new work space or eRoom tailored specifically to the task at hand. Individual items or tools get added to the container at the time of creation, although you can add more later on.

Using a server-based strategy, eRoom stores work space data in a central database. You have your choice of employing Microsoft SQL Server or SQL Anywhere. ERoom also offers multiple predefined template databases to make customization easier.

Notification alerts let end users know when any item of special interest has changed in an eRoom or a Groove work space or if new information has been added to an area the user wants to track.

Meeting facilitation is another common capability between the two products. ERoom has a meeting-tracking feature that makes it easy to schedule a meeting, invite participants and add items into a common area for the group to use. The Calendar tool can be synchronized with a user's Microsoft Outlook calendar as well.

Groove uses several forms to help track meeting agendas, minutes and action items. There's also a button to publish the meeting along with the profile, agenda and minutes. The only downside is that if you make changes in Outlook the Groove files are not automatically updated.

When the Groove team began designing Version 3.0 of their product, they decided on a user interface model that almost everyone is familiar with — instant messaging. The end result of the interface makeover is the Groove Launchbar, which lists all of the work spaces a user belongs to. Major sections of the Launchbar — such as Active, Unread and Read — make it possible for users to quickly see what information needs their attention.

A second tab on the Groove Launchbar displays all contacts in much the same way you'd see them with an instant messaging program. Three headings group the listings into Active, Online and Offline. We liked the handy option, available from just about anywhere inside Groove, titled "Save Shortcut to Desktop," which makes it easy to return to a task later.

For its part, eRoom offers a standard or enhanced Web browser interface. The enhanced version loads an ActiveX component to make file operations more intuitive; it's available only on the Microsoft Windows platform. Using the standard Web browser makes eRoom available to virtually any user regardless of platform or browser software.

Although eRoom doesn't have the same user interface model as Groove, it does arrange information in a structured way. A better analogy for eRoom might be Windows Explorer with its tree-like presentation of drives, file folders and network resources in a panel on the left and a display of contents in a panel on the right.

Assigning user roles

Administration of individual work spaces or eRooms is left up to the original creator. Both products support the concept of user roles and allow you to assign those roles to individuals by project. They provide essentially the same level of control over user access.

ERoom has a feature that allows new users to authenticate against an external directory such as Windows NT domains or a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol server. These new users must then be added by the creator of the work space to specific eRooms for access.

Groove takes more of an invitation approach, enabling you to invite users to join a particular work space. For bulk import of contacts, Groove supports Vcard-formatted VCG or VCF files.

Because Groove does not use a central file to store information, no additional administration is required. The data is automatically backed up because it is shared among all members of the work space.

Groove does, however, offer an optional relay server, which acts as a "who's online" point and doesn't require extensive storage or administration.

In fact, if you want to employ a relay server, you can choose between Groove's service or you can buy a relay server license and run your own server behind your firewall.

In contrast, an eRoom server requires an external backup program to maintain copies of the data for disaster recovery purposes. Because eRoom uses a database — either Microsoft SQL Server or SQL Anywhere — you'll need to use standard database practices to maintain it.

Something of value

The value of these Web collaboration tools for distributed teams is obvious. Both products offer similar capabilities with a few extras that distinguish them. ERoom.net, for example, offers a hosted or outsourced solution that requires no hardware or software purchase to get started. The eRoom tool is, however, significantly more expensive depending on the hosting model chosen.

Groove offers similar capabilities with a distributed model for a reasonable cost per user. If you can live with the peer-to-peer nature of Groove, you'll definitely get more bang for your buck.
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004...b-12-06-04.asp

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Yahoo Adding Tool to Search Hard Drives
Michael Liedtke

Yahoo Inc. is adding a tool to search computer hard drives as it scrambles to catch up with Google Inc. and stay a step ahead of Microsoft Corp. in the battle to help users sort through gobs of information on the Internet and the desktop.

Yahoo announced the plan late Thursday, but will wait until January to introduce the free tool for searching e-mails and a wide variety of other files stored on computers operate on Windows.

Unlike Google's desktop search tool, Yahoo's won't operate within a browser. The distinction means that Yahoo's desktop searches won't be co-mingled with online searches conducted at its Web site.

The product, licensed from a pioneering startup named X1 Technologies, seeks to cure a common computer-induced headache by making it as quick and easy to find digital information offline as it has become online.

With just 20 employees, X1 has established itself as a trailblazer in desktop search since starting three years ago. The private Pasadena-based company has been charging $74.95 for its search software and plans to continue to license its products to businesses even as Yahoo distributes a version for free.

The rush to develop better technology for scouring computer hard drives reflects a belief that desktop search is an increasingly important complement to online search engines, where advertising has become a major moneymaker.

Yahoo had been widely expected to take this step since Google introduced a hard- drive search tool nearly two months ago. Microsoft's MSN service hopes to introduce a similar product before year's end and Ask Jeeves Inc., which runs several online search engines, plans to unveil its desktop offering next Wednesday.

The competitive pressure likely motivated Yahoo to license an existing product.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...LATE=DEFAUL T

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Kazaa trial won't fix music industry blues

Kazaa Can Track Users, Trial Witness Says
Susan B. Shor

According to computer scientist Leon Sterling, Sharman should be able to stop piracy or at least report it to the music industry. On cross examination, he acknowledged that he didn't know how long it would take to develop such technology or how expensive it would be.

As an Australian court considers whether Kazaa's parent company should be forced to pay damages for the file sharing that goes on over its peer-to-peer (P2P) network, questions persist about the effectiveness of the music industry's enforcement efforts.

Today, the Federal Court in Sydney heard from Leon Sterling, chairman of Software Innovation and Engineering for the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering in the University of Melbourne.

He said that Sharman Networks should be able to track who is using its Kazaa software and what they are doing.

Details Unclear

In other words, Sharman should be able to stop piracy or at least report it to the music industry.

Sterling appeared as a witness for the music industry. On cross examination, he acknowledged that he didn't know how long it would take to develop such technology or how expensive it would be.

Last week, as the trial opened, Sharman Networks attorney Anthony Meagher said there was no technology sophisticated enough to distinguish between licensed and unlicensed music on the network.

Buyers and Sharers

Universal Music Australia, EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner, Festival Mushroom and 25 other recording companies are suing Sharman Networks in civil court claiming that the created the software knowing it would be used to pirate music and even encouraged that use. The court said that it would not shut the service down, but Sharman could be forced to pay millions in damages.

Regardless, the question remains as to whether fighting music listeners and individual P2P networks a good approach?

According to John Barrett, director of research for Parks Associates , 15 percent of people who never use peer-to-peer networks buy music, while 40 percent of people who use such networks also buy music.

This suggests that people who are interested enough to seek out music to share are also interested enough to buy it. "It's one and the same group," Barrett told TechNewsWorld.

Never Stop

"What I think is happening is that they're just pushing it farther underground," he said the music industry's efforts to squelch the P2P networks.

"They're never going to stop piracy. It's been around forever. I think they know that. Even with legal services and all the copyright protection, it's ridiculously easy to get around. They're kidding themselves and hoping no one will notice."

Bigger Issues

The underlying problem for the music industry has to do with a lot more than P2P networks. Barrett said research shows that 60 percent of people who say they go to a P2P network monthly also say they don't download anything.

Finding what you're looking for and getting a high-quality copy of it are difficult and can be time-consuming, he said.

"The problem is that [the music industry's] revenue model is being completely undermined," he said. In the past, music companies have sold the same songs and albums over and over again by releasing them on movie soundtracks, as greatest hits collections and on new media with better sound quality.

"Just by going digital completely undermines that," Barrett said. "You're never going to upgrade your entire collection, never going to buy a greatest hits album, you can burn your own greatest hits CD."

Suing Kazaa may serve as some kind of damage control, but it will not fix the problems the music industry is facing. What it needs is a new revenue model, and the industry is still arguing over what that might be.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/news/38756.html

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Programs: a Checklist for Tuning Up Your PC
Gene Emery

You change the oil in your car every 5,000 miles or so. You clean your house every week or two. Your PC needs regular maintenance as well -- especially if you're using Windows and you spend a lot of time on the Internet.

Virus checkers need to be updated. Spyware or adware may have sneaked onto your PC and the clutter could be slowing everything down.

I have a checklist I follow at the end of every month for keeping my computer properly tuned. The steps may differ slightly, depending on your operating system. Clicking the "Start" button, going to the "Help" section and searching for a feature will show you how to adapt this list to your machine.

Here's my drill:

CLEAR THE DESKTOP. I look at my desktop icons to see if I can consolidate some of them in folders. To create a folder, put your cursor in a blank portion of the screen, click on the right mouse button, select "New" and "Folder." Click on the folder to rename it. Then you can drag desktop icons onto it. I had a friend who, until I taught him this trick, had a screen so cluttered with icons he could barely see his wallpaper.

CLEAR THE PROGRAMS. Next, I get rid of unused programs. But beware: Dragging their desktop icons into the Recycle Bin won't work. Instead, click on the "Start" button, select "Programs," find the program you want to remove, and look for an "Uninstall" option. If there isn't one, click on "Start," select "Settings," then "Control Panel," double-click on the "Add/ Remove Programs" icon, look for the program on the list, and then click "Add/Remove." If that doesn't work, I insert the original disk that contained the program. The opening screen often has an "Uninstall" option.

UPDATE AND RUN THE VIRUS CHECKER. This should be done at least once a month. I've been using McAfee for years and, once you're connected to the Internet, updating is as simple as opening the main program and clicking the "Update" button. Once that's done -- the computer can appear to stall for many minutes, so be patient -- reboot the computer and run the virus checker.

By the way, if you keep your computer on all the time -- which I do not -- most virus checkers can be programed to run at specified times. I recommend 3 a.m. daily.

CLEAR THE CLUTTER. Running the "Disk Cleanup" program, found by clicking on "Start," "Programs, "Accessories," and "System Tools," will get rid of temporary files, empty your recycle bin and eliminate other junk.

UPDATE SPYWARE/ADWARE REMOVERS. Spyware and adware -- also known as scumware -- are programs that can sneak onto your computer via the Internet, slow your PC down, give you unwanted ads, and snoop on your Internet browsing habits. I use "Ad-aware" from http://www.lavasoftusa.com. Use the "Check for Updates Now" feature and let the updates install. But wait before you actually run the main program.

By the way, many readers have told me they run both "Ad-aware" and "Spybot: Search and Destroy" from http://www.safer-networking.org, another free program, to be sure all the spies are out of their system.

GO INTO SAFE MODE. I close all my programs and restart the computer in "Safe Mode." In my case, after the rebooting process has begun, I have to hit the "F8" key when I hear the beep. The process varies from computer to computer. In safe mode, the graphics look horrible, but it doesn't load programs that will interfere with what I do next.

RUN THE SPYWARE/ADWARE REMOVERS. They work more effectively in the "Safe Mode." For me, Ad-aware takes about 5 minutes to run.

The remaining steps don't need to be done regularly, but it's a good idea to do them once in a while.

Again, make sure you are in "Safe Mode," and turn off your screen saver by going to "Start," "Settings," "Control Panel," "Display," clicking on the "Screen Saver" tab, and using the pulldown menu to select "None." Then click OK and close all windows.

RUN SCANDISK (unless you have Windows XP). "ScanDisk" can be found by going back to the "System Tools" folder. It checks your hard drive for problems. Make sure the "Automatically Fix Errors" box is checked and do a "Thorough" scan. Don't plan on using your computer for quite a while. It typically takes many hours.

RUN DISK DEFRAGMENTER. This is also found in the "System Tools" folder. It consolidates the files on your hard drive, making things run smoother. I start this when I'm ready to go to bed. It takes all night.

When I'm finished, I reboot the computer and it brings me back to normal.

If you're having problems, visit the site http://www.pcpitstop.com. Their free scan can be very helpful. (Gene Emery is a columnist who covers science and technology. His Internet address is GEmery(at)Cox.net. Any opinions in the column are his alone.)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=6995014

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Generation Raised With Internet Grows Up
Martha Irvine

Young people are now the savviest of the tech-savvy, as likely to demand a speedy broadband connection as to download music onto an iPod, or upload digital photos to their Web logs.

The Internet has shaped the way they work, relax and even date. It's created a different notion of community for them and new avenues for expression that are, at best, liberating and fun - but that also can become a forum for pettiness and, occasionally, criminal exploitation.

"Students are continuously connected to other students and friends and family in ways that older generations never would have imagined," says Steve Jones, chairman of the communications department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a senior research fellow with the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

More than any previous generation, today's young people are plugged in - all the time - with a world of communication and information at their fingertips.

Take Suhas Sridharan, whose introduction to the Web came as a sixth-grader in South Carolina. In those days, she regularly visited the Disney Web site to play games; by high school, she was researching assignments online and checking her e-mail daily.

"Now I think even my 'senior self' in high school would be surprised how much I use the Internet," says Sridharan, a 17-year-old freshman at Emory University in Atlanta, where the Web is woven into the framework of students' lives via a system called LearnLink.

Assignments are dispersed online. Students are much more likely to do research online than use the library. And even the proverbial class handout has gone the way of the Web, posted on electronic bulletin boards for downloading after class.

So when Emory's computer server went down for a few hours one evening this fall, you would've thought the world had come to an end. "A lot of people were at loose ends," Sridharan says. "They couldn't do their homework."

As time and innovations move ahead, many young people only see the Internet becoming that much more vital.

Crystal Cienfuegos, for instance, found a public relations job via the Web - sending out an "electronic" resume, arranging an in-person interview by e-mail and securing the job with a writing test, taken online.

"Nowadays, a person employed at one company can be coordinating interviews via Hotmail during lunch and literally finding a new job without even leaving their desk," says 25-year-old Cienfuegos, from Long Beach, Calif. "It's quite amusing, but not so funny if you are a business owner."

Gabriel Schaffzin, a senior at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., has used the Internet to rejuvenate his father's personalized calendar business, now called gaboosh.media inc.

Through the Internet, he's found seed funding, business plan competitions and industry data. And perhaps, most importantly, the Web has given customers another way to find the business - and order products.

It's the sort of reach that would've been "unfathomable, not even 20 years ago," says Susannah Stern, a professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego who has studied young people's Internet habits.

"For them, accessing information is easy," she says, noting that the Internet also opens up a chance for teens and 20somethings to communicate with people who are different from them, "people in another state or country, or kids at school they don't talk to."

Of course, there is a dark side to having such broad access: It gives identity thieves and sexual predators a new place to look for victims.

Perhaps more common than those well-publicized dangers are the everyday dramas caused by online rumor-spreading. And it can get ugly, particularly when people post comments on their online profiles and Web logs, commonly known as blogs.

Jennifer Anello recalls the time a friend got drunk one Saturday night, called her ex-boyfriend and ended up arguing with him.

"The following Monday his profile had something to the effect of 'Can someone tell (my ex-girlfriend) how to hold her liquor and get her a shrink?'" says Anello, who's 24 and lives in Stamford, Conn.

Online rumors and innuendo cause angst among teens, too. "Parents say, 'We never knew it would take on this velocity and ferocity,'" says Amanda Lenhart, another Pew researcher.

Andreea Johnson, a student at Central Michigan University and a regular Web user, says those bad experiences make some people, including the grandmother who raised her, wary of the Internet.

"Are you kidding? She would never get an e-mail account," Johnson says, laughing. "I think some older people still think of it as the devil - like it's kind of evil."

But the Internet also has produced many unexpected benefits. Stern, for instance, notes that the Web provides an anonymous outlet to troubled young people who want to talk about everything from suicide and self-mutilation to eating disorders.

"There's nowhere for a lot of kids to go, there's no hanging out on the corner. So the Internet is a place for kids to figure out who they are," she says.

In her research, Stern says it was common to hear young people who've posted online diaries say, "I'd never tell someone this in person."

Indeed, Jones has seen firsthand how students have used the Internet to enhance life - even during classes he leads on his Chicago campus. Using messages sent wirelessly from laptop to laptop, one student recently helped another who didn't speak English very well by translating a point Jones was making during a lecture.

On other occasions, students have surfed the Net during class and found Web sites that supplement the discussion - though Jones also jokes that he's never had his students' undivided attention thanks to the laptops, cell phones and other gizmos they carry.

"There is a real power there, a kind of technological power. But also I think there's a kind of intellectual power that can be harnessed. They are so curious about using these technologies. And I'd really like to be able to regularly marshal that curiosity," Jones says, noting that students - not necessarily universities - are the ones who often drive the use of technology on campus.

He also thinks that young workers will continue to push technological advances in the corporate world, partly because they are able to handle "multiple conversations and juggle better than the previous generations." He says the Internet - and other forms of communication - play very much into this generation's wish for flexibility at home, work and during down time.

AOL's Bird predicts that teens will be among the first to embrace new, Web-based video technology. "You will very soon be able to shoot video messages and play those video messages on your blog that your friends can go to," Bird says. "So your community, your scheduling, your friends, your holidays - all of this stuff will live in an online environment."

It's all very exciting to Sridharan, the Emory freshman. She finds it difficult to predict how the Internet will change her life, even a few years from now. But she knows the potential is there.

"It's just up to us to imagine it," she says, "and put it into motion."
http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/200...D86PB6UO0.html

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Experts Offer a Few Tips to Unplug
AP

Even as we become more dependent on technology, experts say it's still important to unplug once in a while. Here are a few of their suggestions:

- Set a time limit on Web surfing - and, if you have to, set an alarm to remind yourself to log off. "Schedule it in like you would any other task in the day," says Michelle Weil, a psychologist who works with people to find ways to avoid technology-related stress.

- Turn off your cell phone from time to time and use voicemail to help establish boundaries. "You could say, 'I'm not available after 6 p.m.,'" Weil says, suggesting you call people back the following day.

- Limit the number of times per day that you check your e-mail and prioritize what you receive in terms of "important" and "can be read later." And don't be afraid to use the delete key, says psychologist Larry Rosen, who co-authored a book with Weil that looked at tech stress.

- Allow yourself the luxury of a "low-tech day," one day of the week when you put your high-tech devices away. "You can't be attending to where you are if you're punching buttons - playing with your cell phone or PDA or MP3 player. You're not there. You're somewhere else," says psychologist Dave Greenfield.

- Once in a while, resist the urge to e-mail or message someone - and call them instead. Better yet, if they live nearby or work in your office, pay them a face-to-face visit. "It's obvious that there's certain intangible benefits from face-to-face communication," says Allan Stegeman, professor of communications at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Because his students are more likely to e-mail him than visit during office hours, he says it often takes them longer to figure out that he has a life outside the university.

"You come into somebody's office you see pictures on desks." And that, he says, sparks conversation at a different, more personal level.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS

'BitTorrent' Gives Hollywood a Headache
AP

Bram Cohen didn't set out to upset Hollywood movie studios. But his innovative online file-sharing software, BitTorrent, has grown into a piracy problem the film industry is struggling to handle.

As its name suggests, the software lets computer users share large chunks of data. But unlike other popular file-sharing programs, the more people swap data on BitTorrent, the quicker it flows -- and that includes such large files as feature films and computer games.

Because of its speed and effectiveness, BitTorrent steadily gained in popularity after the recording industry began cracking down last year on users of Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster and other established file-sharing software.

The program now accounts for as much as half of all online file-sharing activity, says Andrew Parker, chief technology officer of Britain-based CacheLogic, which monitors such traffic.

``BitTorrent is more of a threat because it is probably the latest and best technological tool for transferring large files like movies,'' said John Malcolm, senior vice president of anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America. ``It is unusual, perhaps unique, in that the moment you start downloading you are also uploading,'' he added. ``It's what makes it so efficient.''

Cohen created BitTorrent in 2001 as a hobby after the dot-com crash left him unemployed. He says the aim was to enable computer users to easily distribute content online -- not specifically copyrighted content.

``It seems pretty clear that a lot of people are actively interested in engaging in wanton piracy,'' said Cohen, 29, of Bellevue, Wash. ``As far as I'm concerned, they're just pushing around bits, and what bits it is they're pushing around is not really a concern of mine. There's not much I can do about it.''

BitTorrent has proven to be resistant to some of the countermeasures the entertainment industry has taken to sabotage file-sharing, including a process known as file- spoofing in which incomplete or decoy versions of songs or other material are uploaded to discourage piracy.

``Spoofing is very difficult on BitTorrent, if at all possible,'' said Mark Ishikawa, chief executive of online tracking firm BayTSP Inc. ``There's no defense for this one.''

Programs such as Kazaa and Morpheus allow users to link their PCs to computer networks and then query a search engine for the file or title they're seeking. The software then churns out a list of other computers sharing the file.

The process is simple and straightforward, which makes it relatively easy to corrupt with spoofed files.

With BitTorrent, however, users don't find whole files. The program seeks out torrent files, also known as seed files, that are hosted by a number of Web sites.

The files on the Web sites are not songs or movies but serve as markers that point the way to other users sharing a given file. BitTorrent then assembles complete files from multiple chunks of data obtained from everyone who is sharing the file.

Attempts to upload bogus files to corrupt the process fail because the BitTorrent program follows a blueprint of the original file when piecing it together.

``It's very difficult for an interdiction company to get in the middle of that system,'' said Ishikawa, whose company combs file-sharing networks on behalf of Hollywood studios and alerts clients when their movies turn up on the Internet.

Some of the BitTorrent host sites, like SuprNova.org, generate a daily list of new seed files added by users. The site recently had listings for movies such as ``Van Helsing'' and ``Wimbledon,'' which is not scheduled for release on DVD for another three weeks.

Some sites offer digitized broadcasts of ``The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,'' computer games like ``Star Trek: Klingon Academy'' and ``Half Life 2,'' e-books on the physics behind an atomic bomb, even footage of kidnap victims in the Middle East.

``A bunch of the different beheadings are online,'' Ishikawa said.

Downhill Battle, a Worcester, Mass.-based independent music group that has developed its own BitTorrent-based software called Blog Torrent, says the technology is much more than a tool for swapping copyright movies and software (a blog is a Web journal).

``What we're excited about as far as BitTorrent goes is the possibility for people to blog video and blog their own home movies (and) independent films and have a way to distribute them online without having to have a big budget for Web-hosting,'' said Nicholas Reville, one of the group's directors.

``Bandwidth has been a big barrier,'' he said. ``BitTorrent solved that.''

While some of the BitTorrent sites that host seed files have been forced to shut down, many others escape scrutiny because they're only hosting marker files, not copyrighted material.

Malcolm of the MPAA says his organization is not focusing any more or less on BitTorrent than other file-sharing system. He declined to say whether the trade group intends to sue Cohen and wouldn't name any BitTorrent users who may have been included in the entertainment industry's latest wave of lawsuits.

``Anyone who uses BitTorrent and is under the illusion that they are anonymous are sorely mistaken,'' Malcolm said. ``There is no reason why those lawsuits wouldn't include BitTorrent'' users.

So far, Cohen said, he has not become a target of the entertainment industry, which has aggressively pursued litigation against other file-sharing software distributors, with mixed success. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal by movie studios and music labels of a ruling that found Grokster Ltd. and StreamCast Networks Inc., the firm behind the Morpheus software, to not be responsible for their customers' online swapping of copyright songs and movies.

For his part, Cohen said he has received just one legal warning, over a computer game that was being distributed using BitTorrent.

``Someone else was doing something with BitTorrent that I had no knowledge of,'' Cohen said. ``It's not being done on any machines I have any control over ... what do you want me to do?''
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts...t-of-Bits.html

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Encryption, Data Hiding And Watermarking

Terrorists might use it to mask their messages: it's called data hiding - the subject of a new book by Ali Akansu, PhD, professor of electrical and computer engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).

Akansu's book, Data Hiding Fundamentals and Applications: Content Security in Digital Multimedia, (Elsevier-Academic Press 2004), develops a theoretical framework for data hiding techniques, including watermarking. Encryption and data hiding are two technologies that play major roles in information security and assurance, Akansu says. A key issue in content- security solutions is the imperceptible insertion of content and information into multimedia data.

"It's a sophisticated research book that has applications for many readers, not just engineers and researchers," Akansu says. "Our government thinks terrorists might use data hiding to pass information to each other by images posted on the public Internet. The book will help information-security engineers learn to decode hidden information in a cover image and retrieve the secret messages."

The book is the first to place data hiding techniques within a framework that tells readers how to calculate the payloads – the allowable hidden bits of information – and crack the code of data hiding. It details, for instance, a Hollywood company whose films were illegally copied onto pirated videos and sold on the street. Using techniques presented in the book, Akansu shows how the pirated video was traced back to its source.

"These emerging data hiding applications include not only watermarking but also fingerprinting, broadcast monitoring and others," says Akansu. "The book provides performance comparisons of popular data hiding techniques."

"The Internet revolution offered efficient and open solutions for information delivery, Akansu adds. "But this development brought with it concerns about security, monitoring and the use of information by qualified end users. Hence, information security is already a household term that will stay with us forever."

Akansu wrote the book with two of his former doctoral students, Husrev T. Sencar, now a research professor at Polytechnic University, N.Y., and Mahalingam Ramkumar, now an assistant professor at Mississippi State University.

Akansu has always blended his theoretical research work with industrial applications. He was the vice president of research and development at the IDT Corporation, Newark, from 2000-2001. He was also the president and CEO of PixWave, Newark, a subsidiary of the IDT Corp., where he led the development of the first software product for a secure peer-to-peer (P2P) video distribution system over the Internet; the system included a real-time video watermarking and fingerprinting system for content authentication and tracing.

Akansu received his bachelor's degree from the Technical University of Istanbul in 1980, and his master's (1983) and doctorate (1987) from Polytechnic University, Brooklyn. He joined NJIT in 1987 as a professor of electrical and computer engineering.
http://www.physorg.com/news2248.html

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Group Enlists Honey Pots to Catch IM Threats
Ryan Naraine

IMlogic Inc. on Tuesday announced plans to use so-called "honey pot," or vulnerable machines, to track malicious virus activity on instant messaging and peer-to-peer networks.

In partnership with a slew of big-name IM and anti-virus vendors, the Waltham, Mass.-based IMlogic is heading up the establishment of a Threat Center to gather intelligence and provide early virus warnings.

The Threat Center initiative revolves around the controversial honey-potting technique used to monitor and track illegal intrusions on a host or network that has been deliberately exposed with known security vulnerabilities.

Honey pots have been used in the past— mostly in e-mail environments—to trap malicious hackers and to collect data on the way intruders operate. Information collected in honey pots is typically used to power early warning and prediction systems.

According to IMlogic chief executive Francis deSouza, the company will manage a system of honey pots running on IM networks powered by America Online Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., IBM Corp. and Jabber.

"These are IM honey pots that are specially created. They shouldn't be receiving any IM traffic outside of spam or malware so when we detect any activity on those IMs, it sets off a warning," deSouza said in an interview with eWEEK.com.

He said IMlogic's engineers will manage and monitor the honey pots on IM networks around the world. When virus activity is detected, deSouza said the honey pot will transmit the data to IMlogic for posting on the public Web repository. "We will then pass that information on to the affected IM network and to the anti-virus firms to stop the spread immediately," he added.

In addition to providing early detection to the IM providers and anti-virus vendors, deSouza said the work of the Threat Center will power updates to its enterprise-facing IM Manager product.

deSouza declined to say how many honey pots had been deployed or how the company planned to work around the legal ramifications of using the technique. In the past, the use of honey pots has raised questions about whether it constitutes entrapment.

"We've obviously paid attention to the mistakes made by e-mail honey pots. There is a preferred way to deploy honey pots and we have the advantage of launching now and incorporating everything we've learned from the e-mail honey pots," deSouza said.

Among other things, the data from the Threat Center's honey pots will be used to create a knowledge base of IM/P2P viruses and worms and an alerts-and-notification mechanism (by e- mail and IM) of new and emerging threats for subscribers.

The plan calls for a rapid response mechanism to provide guidance and protection against IM and P2P threats for both enterprises and consumers, deSouza said.

It will also provide protection against "spim" (spam IM) and known hacker vulnerabilities in the IM clients, servers and networks.

The launch of a dedicated IM virus data repository comes amid a noticeable increase in malicious action on the public chat networks. Symantec Corp. estimates that IM viruses increased by 400 percent in 2003 and played a key role in 40 percent of the top computer viruses. Symantec has previously warned that an IM virus could infect as many as half a million users in as little as 30 to 40 seconds.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1736854,00.asp

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Music Industry: 'We'll Make You Pay For Downloads'
Sylvia Carr

With the film and music industries at last ready to consider the idea of using the Internet to deliver content, the question is--how to make money off it?

The need for new business models was expressed by many speakers at this week's Westminster Media Forum on intellectual property in London, though no consensus was reached on just what that model would be.

The record labels are arguably more ready than their movie-making counterparts to accept downloading as a broadcast medium, if only because music files are smaller than video and therefore more suitable for even today's broadband speeds. But they've made their share of mistakes--especially in taking so long to accept new technologies.

Andy Heath, managing director of 4AD, said at the conference: "If the record labels had embraced the original Napster, we may not be here...but they didn't and we are."

Given the current situation, Heath added: "It's incumbent on the music industry to allow customers to download (songs) but to find a way to make money from it."

Legal online sales are seen to be growing rapidly, with PricewaterhouseCoopers predicting they'll make up 11 percent of the global market by 2008.

As for how music will be sold in the future, Heath and other speakers agreed the practice of paying for content at the "point of delivery" will likely go away, with music delivered on-demand to a number of devices, including mobile phones.

Yinka Adegoke, deputy editor of New Media Age, proposed a new model whereby "funds from music (sales) could be put into one pot that's shared by telecoms, ISPs and music makers".

Anthony Lilly, managing director of Magic Lantern Productions, stressed the need for content developers to create business models "where we add value" and thus give consumers an incentive to pay.

Digital rights management (DRM) systems are expected to be the technology that will facilitate for-pay online content, as they allow content owners to control the use of their music or video and make sure copyrights are not infringed.

Stephen Gale, CTO of BT Rich Media, said the benefits of online content delivery with DRM include the increased amount of content available particularly in niche areas, increased control over content and close one-to-one relationships between the publisher and the consumer.

Yet several speakers shot down the idea that these systems were the be-all-end-all solution for online content.

Fran Nevrkla, executive chairman at Phonographic Performance, said: "Good DRM is not the answer because as soon as you develop (a system) some smart aleck" works around it.

Andy Cox, open-source developer at Red Hat, added: "DRM will always be buggy and will always be compromised."

Piracy, of course, is the thorn in the side of digital content businesses. Content publishers and creators at the forum stressed the need to temper the "policeman mentality" displayed by the music industry thus far and look for fair solutions amenable to all parties.

Magic Lantern's Lilly said content producers need "to appeal to people's self-interest" instead of slapping them for violating copyright laws.

4AD's Heath added the best way to change copyright law would be to find something that respects consumers and that they will comply with voluntarily.

BT's Gale pointed out the need for new content types as well as business models for online delivery to take off, saying that "if we clamp down too much (with copyright laws) we could stamp out the industry before it's started."
http://news.com.com/Music+industry+W...l?tag=nefd.top

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News Business

Newspapers Should Really Worry
Adam L. Penenberg

Publishers of newspapers and magazines like to corral readers when they're young. If you can shape kids' info- seeking habits when they're in their teens or twenties, so the thinking goes, you'll nab them for life.

Because brand loyalty isn't just about offering the best product for the best price, as it is with, say, minivans or socket wrenches. It's also about image: Are you a New York Times guy or a Washington Post aficionado? Do you read The Wall Street Journal, The Economist or Fortune? Do you subscribe to Newsweek or Time? Is Wired more than the way you feel after a double espresso at Starbucks? Your choice says a lot about you.

From the perspective of publishers, the 18- to 34-year-old demographic is highly prized by advertisers -- the people who make writing, editing and working at a newspaper or magazine a vocation, not just an avocation (like it is for most bloggers.) But there is trouble afoot. The seeds have been planted for a tremendous upheaval in the material world of publishing.

Young people just aren't interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, according to Washington City Paper, The Washington Post organized a series of six focus groups in September to determine why the paper was having so much trouble attracting younger readers. You see, daily circulation, which had been holding firm at 770,000 subscribers for the last few years, fell more than 6 percent to about 720,100 by June 2004, with the paper losing 4,000 paying subscribers every month.

Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.

Don't think for a minute that young people don't read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.

The Post experience merely mirrors the results of a September study (.pdf) by the Online Publishers Association, which found that 18- to 34-year-olds are far more apt to log on to the internet (46 percent) than watch TV (35 percent), read a book (7 percent), turn on a radio (3 percent), read a newspaper (also 3 percent) or flip through a magazine (less than 1 percent).

And when young people go online, they tend to browse for news in much the same way they window-shop for jeans or sneakers: sampling a headline here, a blog entry there, a snippet of a story there, until their news cravings are satisfied.

For instance, Patrick Reed, a 27-year-old disc jockey, sound designer and record store manager in Manhattan, clicks to Americablog "for indie politics, Slashdot for geekery," as well as daily fixes of CNN.com and Google News -- "probably five to 10 times a day," he said. Reed is afflicted with digital wanderlust and enjoys getting "different perspectives from around the world."

John Athayde, also 27, a web designer who works in Washington, D.C., buys a newspaper once every "two to three months," usually "because someone I know has a picture in the events section or something." Instead, he views news as "packets of distributed information," and uses NetNewsWire to aggregate about 70 news sources, including several blogs. "I typically will read entire stories within the news aggregator, bypassing all design (and) advertising" to get "to the content."

Twenty-four-year-old Max Fenton makes websites for fashion designers and tutors celebrities on how to use a Mac. He did his "best to stay confused about RSS until the last phase of this election cycle, when the news just started coming from too many sources." He reads the liberal bloggers of Pandagon religiously, because "they're anchormen" and "human aggregators of news" and "voices I trust."

Blogger Waldo Jaquith, also in his twenties, souped up his laptop with Wi-Fi so that he's almost never without internet access. Between classes at Virginia Tech, he reloads various RSS subscriptions and spends a half-hour reading stories or blogging his own, "so that people who use me as a content aggregator can get their news fix." He believes that "as news-reader (programs) improve and become more widely used, adding the sort of auto- filtering and smart-sorting capabilities of a decent e-mail client, their popularity will snowball."

He also predicts that print media, which he says his generation has largely rejected in favor of digital dissemination of news, will die off within 30 years, "when the dead-tree readers will die off."

What this world will look like is anyone's guess, but it probably won't include The Washington Post thudding on anyone's doorstep at 5 in the morning.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65813,00.html

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Focus Pocus
Erik Wemple

There's a reader lurking in the greater Washington region who's haunting news executives at the Washington Post. He's a youngish man, a recent law-school graduate.

When presented with a copy of the Post, this fellow fumbled with it, according to sources. He professed that he didn't know how it was organized. And the kicker: He expressed wonderment at the spread known as the editorial/op-ed pages.

How could this well-educated man be so clueless about his local newspaper?

Well, he's not. He reads the Post constantly on its Web site, WashingtonPost.com—"sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for hours," according to a Post source.

This profile in traditional-media ignorance comes courtesy of a recent series of focus groups that the Post has conducted with prospective subscribers in the Washington area.

According to Deputy Metropolitan Editor Keith Harriston, the Post organized six such sessions in early and mid-September, with more to come. The focus groupers are largely young folks—all of them are under 45—who've arrived in the area within the past five years. Most have either dropped their subscriptions or never had them to begin with—and the Post wants to know why.

The answers, as filtered through a one-way mirror, aren't exactly pumping up morale in the Post newsroom. Says Post national editor Liz Spayd, "It's pretty intimidating listening to these people—the mission we have ahead in trying to draw new subscribers in the region. It's an invigorating challenge for us."

Editors everywhere are saying the same thing. In markets large and small, newspapers are pandering to new, young readers, only to watch them walk away. Readership desperation hit such an extreme that in June, three papers—Newsday, Hoy, and the Chicago Sun-Times—admitted to padding their circulation numbers.

Having company hardly comforts Post honchos. The paper, after all, covers a fast-growing and highly educated region of 7.6 million people. The Post has plowed untold resources into reaching them, but recent circulation figures show declines that are beginning to steamroll the company's business plan. Daily circulation (paid subscribers plus single-copy sales, Monday through Saturday) held fairly steady from 1999 through 2002, dropping from 775,005 subscribers to 767,843.

Then it fell off the trucks. As of June 2004, the daily circulation tally had hit 721,100.

So some people don't care to hear that 5:30 a.m. plop at their front door. Many focus groupers, in fact, said they wouldn't even accept the hard- copy version for free. The explanation offered, in many cases, was that they didn't want a bunch of newsprint "piling up" around the house. "People are saying, ‘Why is it so big?'" says Gabriel Escobar, the Post's city editor. "It was as if they wanted it almost the size of the short versions of Shakespeare that you can buy at Wal-Mart."

And this was before the Post ran nearly 50 articles on the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian!

Via focus groups, Posties are learning that nonsubscribers haven't lost touch with their journalism. On the contrary, these folks are ferocious, regular readers. It's just that they don't want to touch the paper or pay for it. And the company offers a perfect platform for the free rider—its Web site. "The good news is they're extremely familiar with the paper. The bad news is that they don't want to buy it. News is like air, and we've taught them that," says a Post source who has watched focus groups.

Certainly Posties can't feign shock at the popularity of their dot-com operation. The site is a news-spewing monster, always brimming with updates on big stories and easily scannable. According to July figures supplied by Nielsen/NetRatings, WashingtonPost.com's 114 million page views that month placed it behind only NYTimes.com among individual newspaper sites. And that's for a paper that isn't even distributed nationally.

In a region dominated by white-collar types, WashingtonPost.com has a distinct office-cubicle advantage over paper. When a salaryman spreads out a newspaper at his desk, he's goofing off. But when he reads the latest Michael Wilbon dispatch on the Redskins online, he's doing research —a dynamic documented in the focus groups.

But Internet-generation slackerdom doesn't fully explain why young'uns won't pay for the hard-copy Post. Says Harriston: "There was a real concern in that group with the recycling issue, and they did talk about it in terms of recycling and the environment and the availability of news online."

Other focus-group miscellany:

• The Post should run fewer pictures.

• The Post should provide more coverage of the constitution of the European Union.

• The Post should expand all of its foreign news briefs into full-fledged stories.

• The Post is good for its coupons.

According to Posties, the imperative of making the Post a more navigable newspaper drew the most nods from focus groupers. That means more news summaries, indexes, keys, and so forth. "For a few of them, [the paper] looked kind of like a foreign object, and they looked at their companions to see what they were doing," says Spayd. "A lot of people at the Post talked about various ways of helping them figure out what's in the paper and how to find it."

Already the navigation aids are popping up in the Post. The far-left column of last Saturday's Metro section, for instance, featured a box highlighting the goodies inside—although Metropolitan Editor Bob Barnes said its appearance was unconnected to the ongoing save-the-subscriber campaign.

Even if the Post bests the Wall Street Journal and USA Today on the navigational gimmick front, rest assured that such tinkering won't deter the roughly 4,000 paying readers who are leaving the Post every month.

They'll just keep logging on, free of charge, until the Post wagers that they're hooked enough to pony up for the service.

Capturing the hard-copy deserters would help cement a legacy for Executive Editor Leonard Downie, who took command of the Post newsroom in 1991. Although he's piloted first-rate political coverage and some penetrating—if bloated—investigative series in his years as top editor, Downie can't afford to be remembered as the guy who lost the subscriber.

In addition to focus-grouping, Downie has created committees to examine the paper's design and front-page presentation. "We're looking at trying to increase readership of the newspaper—what to do to entice people into regular readership in a variety of ways," says Downie.

Good idea. Yet Downie, at least for now, refuses to mess with the Post's free-Web-site policy, the very heart of its circulation difficulties. In fact, Downie feels the same way about charging for WashingtonPost.com as he famously feels about elections. "That's a very complicated issue, and I don't have a position on it. I am focused on the newspaper," says Downie, who doesn't vote for fear of biasing the paper's coverage.
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/a...media1001.html

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PluggedIn: Mobile Operators Seek Higher Sound Quality
Yukari Iwatani Kane

Ring tones on mobile phones were once considered cool if they simply sounded musical. Then phones starting ringing to the tune of a pop song, giving way to "ring songs."

Now Japanese mobile operators are taking phone sound systems to the next level with stereo-quality songs that can be fully downloaded and edited, as well as surround-sound systems that trick users into hearing a bell ringing behind them or a ball whizzing by.

As consumers lose their fascination with embedded digital cameras, high-speed Internet connections, action-packed games and other entertainment features, operators are turning back to the basics of sound as a way to differentiate themselves.

Mobile phone carriers and handset makers around the world are scrambling to combine music players with phones, but Japanese operators are also focusing on improving the quality of the sound itself.

"There's no question that music is one of the most popular contents. It gets the largest share of revenues," said Yoshiaki Maeda, manager at NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s (9437.T: Quote, Profile, Research) multimedia services department. "We're very particular about the quality of the sound."

DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile operator, earlier this month unveiled its latest line of phones, which include what it calls compact disk quality "three-dimensional sound."

In addition to music, the phones promise to give users a much more enriching game-playing experience by combining 3D graphics.

Its rival KDDI Corp.(9433.T: Quote, Profile, Research) , also in late November, started selling phones with the ability to download full songs over-the-air and listen to them at a higher quality than ever before by applying advanced sound technology.

"This is just the first step," said Tatsuo Yagi, an assistant manager at KDDI's content and media business division. "The sound quality is still too inadequate to fully compete with music players."

He added that its latest technology can produce the same quality of sound as an iPod digital music player, but the phones' amplifiers still have limitations.

"The challenge is how to get the best sound possible in a small enough file to download and play on a phone," Yagi said, who promises even better speakers in KDDI's next phones.

Vodafone K.K. (9434.T: Quote, Profile, Research) , the smallest of Japan's main operators, also said it considers sound to be one of the more important features, particularly since it offers phones with embedded antennas that allow users to watch television. The company is a unit of Britain's Vodafone Group Plc. (VOD.L: Quote, Profile, Research) SOUND EFFECTS

But, researchers at DoCoMo have gone a step farther, working on a next-generation 3D sound technology, which can make mobile phones produce sounds that appear to come from different directions.

In a museum, for example, consumers can receive commentaries on their phones as if they were coming from the artifacts themselves, or a business executive could be on a three- way conference call via mobile phone and the other participants' voices would appear to come from two different directions to avoid mix-ups.

Kirk Boodry, an industry analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, said this was a natural evolution for Japanese operators, who see 33 percent to 45 percent of all data usage from ring tones and screensavers.

Japanese commuters have long daily train rides, making the mobile operators' opportunity to capture their attention that much more attractive.

KDDI alone sees about 10 million downloads per month of so-called "ring songs," or ring tunes with vocal music. Its newest music download feature allows users to cut a segment of a song and designate it as a ring tone.

Yagi also points to the advent of flat rate data discount plans and high-speed mobile Internet access to be key factors in helping to drive music and sound features on mobile phones.

"Technology has enabled the operators to provide good quality music services for the first time and that's what you're seeing here," said Boodry.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=6997280

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A Library and Cinema in Your Pocket
Doreen Carvajal

One day before too long, when your mobile telephone sounds, it could be a novel calling to recount how the headstrong heroine dumped the handsome heartbreaker. Or it might be a guidebook surfacing at a critical moment in a crowded bar to provide you with pickup lines in Spanish, French or German.

The increasing power of cellphones is fast shaping innovative forms of compact culture: micro-lit, phone soap operas and made-for-mobile dramas that can be absorbed in less time than it takes to flick through a book introduction.

Today very few people are using so-called third-generation mobile services, or smart phones, which allow users to browse the Internet and watch videos. But most cellphones sold these days have color screens and the ability to receive picture messages. So media companies are reinventing quaint old formulas with the aim of reaching youthful customers.

"Are people going to read 'War and Peace' on their telephones?" asked David Harper, whose company, Wireless Ink, in Cold Spring, N.Y., offers Web users cellphone-size literature on such weighty themes as the zombie apocalypse. "The answer is probably no. Right now the content on mobile devices is almost like early television. What they did then was to sit down and do a radio broadcast for the television screen. But there was a picture. Our mission now is to get feedback."

One pioneer is Media Republic, an Amsterdam company that is successfully reaching young women with the mobile equivalent of the French "roman photo," a sentimental genre of romantic still photos and text that dates to the postwar period.

Dutch users register their mobile phones to follow the adventures of the hormone-driven characters of "Jong Zuid," or "Young South," which is now in production for its fourth season. Customers receive two episodes daily, each with six photographs of well-known Dutch actors and text describing the travails of glamorous young people seeking their fortune in the big city.

A weekly subscription costs about $1.50, but most of the revenue comes from an assortment of corporate sponsors who pay for product placements, Web advertising and the exclusive rights to sponsor "Jong Zuid" contests and promotions.

Media Republic and a partner are to produce a similar English-language version, which will start appearing in Australia this month, using local actors and scenes. Called "My Way," it is calculated to appeal to young women, as did the Dutch phone soap, which attracted 78,000 subscribers, 68 percent of them women, with an average age of about 18.

Media Republic is planning to bring out other versions of the soap opera early next year in Germany and in France, where its partner, NX Publishing, is in the final stages of negotiation with major French television channels, magazines and mobile telephone operators.

"Everybody is eventually moving to video on mobile, and this 'roman photo' concept is a bridge for those people who are not able to use videos yet because they need a sophisticated telephone," said Jean-Michel Blottiere, NX's chief executive. "This is a step that could lead us very sweetly to video."

The market researcher IDC of Framingham, Mass., predicts that about 4.5 million smart phones will be shipped to stores this year and estimates that the number will grow to 35 million by 2008.

Almost two-thirds of the 62 million cellphones shipped in Europe in the last quarter were camera phones with color screens, according to Canalys, a technology consulting and research firm based in London. Only 3 percent of phones sold in Europe last year were smart phones, but Canalys expects that number to pick up substantially next quarter.

Still, that hasn't stopped a number of companies from trying to exploit the potential market. During the Asian Film Festival this month in Singapore, MediaCorp, a local company, announced that it was spending a half-million dollars to produce 45 two-minute episodes of a Chinese-language mobile video drama.

The giant British mobile-phone company Vodafone has struck a partnership with 20th Century Fox to create a made-for-cellphone video series, based on the television show "24," which will start appearing next month in the first of 13 countries. (It will eventually appear in the United States through Vodaphone's partner Verizon Wireless.) A British phone manufacturer, I-Mate, has also produced "Cjaq," a 10-part thriller with video about five young people trapped in a futuristic nightclub to which they were drawn by a hoax text-message invitation.

In Japan, major publishers like Shinchosha and Kadokawa Shoten have created Web sites to offer telephone reading material. Japan is also home to probably the most successful telephone venture. Earlier this year a mobile novel jumped from phone screens to the silver screen, evolving into a feature film, "Deep Love."

In the book industry in the United States, the initial reaction to mobile-lit is: "Are you kidding?" as one veteran put it.

Still, some major New York publishing houses are pondering the future. "We are paying attention, but we haven't entered the market yet," said Kate Tentler, vice president and publisher for Simon & Schuster Online. "It would be crazy not to look at this. Smart phones are everywhere and it's the fastest-growing device."

In Europe, even some old-guard publishers have jumped into the mobile format. The Munich-based Langenscheidt Publishing Group is a traditional, family-run company that would seem an unlikely player in this market. It has been publishing dictionaries, travel guides and map books since 1856 and is run by the fourth generation of the Langenscheidt family.

This month Langenscheidt started offering a phone-size flirting dictionary that is its way of promoting international understanding. For about $5, the service offers 600 or so phrases in the chosen language, and practical advice including phonetic pronunciations of polite brushoffs.

The benefit, said Ina Kaese, who manages Langenscheidt's mobile services, is that if you are a traveler in a foreign city in a busy bar, your telephone can be your instant guide to romance. It is the mobile equivalent of the 17th-century Cyrano de Bergerac, who famously supplied lines to the lovelorn. But certainly not ones like this: "Will anybody be jealous if I invite you to a cocktail?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/books/07cell.html

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Indian Movie to Debut on Cell Phones
AP

An Indian cellular phone company plans to air a new Bollywood movie on mobile handsets for free and in full Thursday in a bid to promote its video-streaming service.

"Rok Sako To Rok Lo," or "Stop, If You Can," will be available to Bharti Tele-Ventures customers in 11 Indian cities, provided their phones have the supporting technology, said Atul Bindal, a director at India's second-largest cellular service provider.

Bharti Tele-Ventures Ltd. will be "the first cellular service in the world to premiere a full-length movie on mobile phones," Bindal said. "I am certain that this service will add a whole new dimension to the concept of mobile-based entertainment."

The Hindi movie, a teenage romance, was directed by Arindam Chaudhary. Bollywood star Sunny Deol is the only name in a cast of virtual unknowns. It is scheduled for general release in movie theaters on Friday.

To be among the first to see the movie, Bharti customers' phones must have EDGE, or Enhanced Data Rates for Global System for Mobile Communications Evolution. EDGE enables mobile phones to connect to the Internet and transfer data at high speeds.

A maximum of 200 people will be able to connect and watch the movie simultaneously, and the movie cannot be copied or replayed.

Bharti had 6.76 million mobile phone customers at the end of April 2004. No information was available on the number of Bharti customers with EDGE-enabled phones, which typically cost around $270.

The company hopes to air more movies, and may charge a fee depending on customer reactions to Thursday's preview, another Bharti official said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS

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U.N.: Mobile Phones to Overtake Land Lines
Bradley S. Klapper

Mobile phones are expected to generate greater revenue this year than traditional land lines with the nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America driving growth, a U.N. agency said Thursday.

Mobile phones, which account for 1.5 billion of the world's 2.7 billion telephone subscriptions, will achieve revenues of $480 billion this year, compared with $450 billion for land line phones, the International Telecommunication Union said in a report on global trends.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS

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BellSouth Prepares Network Upgrade for Video
Justin Hyde

BellSouth Corp. (BLS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , the No. 3 U.S. local telephone company, plans to upgrade its network to offer video services and speedier Internet access to about 80 percent its customers by 2009, industry sources said.

BellSouth, like SBC Communications Inc. (SBC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , will control costs by combining fiber optic cable and copper wire rather than performing the total fiber-optic upgrade planned by Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ.N: Quote, Profile, Research) All three "Baby Bells" are upgrading for video to compete against cable companies, which are charging into Internet-based telephone service.

It was not clear how much BellSouth was planning to spend to upgrade its local network, which has about 21.6 million access lines across nine states. SBC has said it would spend about $5 billion on its upgrade over the next three years, eventually offering video and high-speed Internet to 18 million homes, or about half its residential customers.

Jeffries & Co. analyst George Notter said BellSouth was expected to select vendors for its project by the end of the year, with upgrades to begin in the second half of 2005. Notter and other industry sources said French equipment maker Alcatel (CGEP.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) was expected to be BellSouth's primary supplier, with a deal similar to the $1.7 billion contract it won from SBC.

"This looks like a very big deal for BellSouth and the winning vendors," Notter said in a research note earlier this week.

BellSouth's upgrade follows a strategy similar to SBC's, running fiber optic lines to new homes but using existing copper wires elsewhere. In older neighborhoods, BellSouth will run fiber optic cables to a neighborhood terminal, which then connects 300 to 500 homes with traditional copper phone lines.

Such "fiber to the node" systems are far cheaper to construct than running fiber optic lines directly to homes, as Verizon plans. But they offer less bandwidth than fiber optic lines or cable connections, making it more likely that BellSouth and SBC will need more upgrades in several years.

According to Notter and other sources, BellSouth's vendor request specifies that it wants to build lines with download capacities of 20 to 25 megabits per second -- enough for voice service, high-definition video and high-speed Internet access over one connection.

BellSouth has previously said it would try out a video service over the next several months. Spokesman Brent Fowler said the company was "excited about IP-based digital TV services, and are readying our network for testing of these services in the near term." The company declined to offer further details.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=6992762

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This Week In DVD News
Steven Musil

In an effort to ease the transition to higher-capacity disc technology, Toshiba and Memory-Tech have developed a dual-layer disc that supports DVD and HD DVD formats.

The disc will be single-sided, with the upper layer storing up to 4.7GB of data in the DVD format and the lower layer holding 15GB of HD DVD data.

On the other side of the DVD fight, Disney said it will release movies on the Blu-ray format in North America and Japan when the discs become available. Manufacturers and disc makers said players and discs should start hitting the market in late 2005 or early 2006. On Friday, Thomson said its Technicolor business will manufacture both the HD DVD and Blu-ray discs.

The Disney announcement means consumers will be able to get movies from Buena Vista Home Entertainment on the Blu-ray Discs. Also part of the library of films are those from Walt Disney Home Entertainment, Hollywood Pictures Home Video, Touchstone Home Entertainment, Miramax Home Entertainment, Dimension Home Video and Disney DVD.

Meanwhile, a Hollywood-backed technology group is suing a high-end home theater system company, contending that its home DVD jukebox technology is illegal. The DVD Copy Control Association, the group that owns the copy-protection technology contained on DVDs, said a company called Kaleidescape is offering products that illegally make copies of DVDs.

Kaleidescape creates expensive consumer electronics networks that upload the full contents of as many as 500 DVDs to a home server, and allow the owner to browse through the movies without later using the DVDs themselves. That's exactly what the copy-protection technology on DVDs, called Content Scramble System was meant to prevent, the Hollywood-backed group said.
http://news.com.com/This+week+in+DVD...3-5487697.html

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Disney Backs Blu-Ray Format for Its Movies
Gary Gentile

The Walt Disney Co. plans to release its movies and other content in the Blu-Ray format, one of the two major contenders for next-generation DVDs that will deliver high-definition images to TV sets.

The studio said Wednesday that its agreement was non-exclusive and would begin as soon as companies start releasing Blu-Ray DVD players in North America and Japan.

Blu-Ray was developed by Sony Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes the Panasonic brand, and Philips Electronics NV. It has the support of Columbia Pictures, which is owned by Sony, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which was recently purchased by a group led by Sony.

Blu-Ray also has wide support among consumer electronics makers and computer giant Hewlett-Packard Co., which said it will start selling PCs with Blu-Ray disc drives late next year, coinciding with movie releases.

Disney also said Monday it will become a member of the board of the Blu-Ray Disc Association.

Last month, three other large studios announced they would release films in the competing HD- DVD format, which was developed by electronics makers Toshiba Corp. and NEC Corp.

Paramount Home Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros., which includes New Line Cinema and HBO, said they would start releasing films in the HD-DVD format in time for the holidays next year.

The other major studio, 20th Century Fox, has yet to say which format it would support.

Earlier Wednesday, Disney president Robert Iger said he hoped one of the two competing formats would emerge as a leader, eliminating the need to offer movies in two formats and potentially confusing consumers.

"It doesn't seem likely," Iger said while speaking at an investor conference.

Studios are hoping to avoid the confusion that slowed the early adoption of videocassette recorders when consumers were faced with choosing between Betamax and VHS.

Both of the competing next-generation DVD formats promise increased storage capacity and movie resolution superior enough to get the most out of high-definition TV sets. And both would contain stronger anti-piracy protection, a key factor in the studio's anxiousness to adopt a new format.

The software that protects current DVDs is easily circumvented.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

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Thomson To Enter HD DVD Market
Dawn Kawamoto
Thomson announced Friday it that it will enter the HD DVD market with a line of players and that it will also manufacture HD DVD and Blu-ray discs.

Thomson is the latest company to throw its support behind the next-generation DVD formats. And while the debate continues over whether the industry will ultimately favor the HD DVD format or the Blu-ray format, Thomson is pushing ahead.

"Our tradition is based on being a trusted service provider to content owners, independent of format choices," Quentin Lilly, president of Thomson's Technicolor Home Entertainment Services business, said in a statement.

NEC and Toshiba are main advocates for the HD DVD standard, while Sony and a larger number of technology powerhouses, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Royal Philips Electronics and Samsung Electronics, support the Blu-ray format.

Supporters of both HD DVD and Blu-ray say their respective format will pave the way for higher-capacity DVDs, which in turn will result in higher resolution for video and audio, Web connectivity and other advancements.

Thomson's Technicolor business will manufacture both the HD DVD and Blu-ray discs. However, the company is planning to only provide HD DVD players--they're scheduled for release by the latter part of next year--and has no immediate plans for unveiling a Blu-ray player, said Monica Coull, a Thomson spokeswoman.

The next-generation DVD players will be sold through Thomson's RCA brand in the United States and through the Thomson brand in Europe.

"While HDTV is just beginning in Europe, our experience with other digital entertainment products tells us that the steady growth of HD content will fuel continued growth of the category," Mike O'Hara, a Thomson executive vice president, said in a statement.
http://news.com.com/Thomson+to+enter...3-5487246.html

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Maroon 5 Makes Room on the IPod for Schoolwork
Mark Glassman

FOR Samantha Greene's parents, there was no getting around it: she had to have an iPod this year. Everybody at school was getting one.

At the Brearley School, a private school for girls on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Samantha is in the eighth grade, the iPod went from a "want" to a "must have" this year when its use was incorporated into foreign-language and classics courses. For about 300 girls in grades 7 through 12, the iPod is now required to do homework and classroom assignments.

The 20-gigabyte iPod required by the school sells for $299 at stores but was made available to students for $269 through Brearley with Apple's education discount. Nonetheless, only 117 students purchased the device through the school, and 95 rented it from the school at a cost of $50 per year. The rest owned them already.

Stephanie J. Hull, head of the school, put the program in place and is an avid iPod user herself.

"It's undeniably attractive," Ms. Hull said of the iPod. "It's not pedagogically sound as an argument, but it does help."

While Apple says Brearley's mandatory-iPod program is the first it has heard of at the secondary-school level, there have been comparable efforts at universities. This fall Duke issued an iPod to each of its 1,650 incoming freshmen and has tried to incorporate the device into several courses, including music, language and engineering. Last year, Georgia College & State University began lending the devices to students for use in several humanities courses.

At Brearley, students use the iPods predominantly in interactive exercises. Last week, two students in Roberto Lazo's tenth-grade Spanish class were asked to read sections of a poem into iTalk microphones, devices compatible with the iPod that let users make digital recordings. "Empieza," he told Nina Cochran, 15, one of the readers. "Make sure that it is on."

Six other students in Mr. Lazo's class took live dictation, then listened to the tracks to check their work.

In Jian Gu's Mandarin course that afternoon, one student played snippets of her Chinese diary entry, while another student translated it aloud. Three advanced students transcribed the recording in Chinese characters. As the class ended, they all listened to Chinese rhythm and blues.

Ms. Gu said she asked students to record diaries in Mandarin because there was educational value in stumbling through awkward moments when speaking. "To learn a language," she said, "you shouldn't be afraid of making mistakes." Jacques Houis, a French teacher at Brearley, said the iPod kept his students engaged. "The ability to vary what you're doing is important for maintaining interest," Mr. Houis said.

Other teachers at Brearley agreed. "That 'wow' factor for a middle-school girl is such a great hook," said James Mulkin, the head of the classics department.

Some students said that trendiness aside, the iPod has helped their foreign-language skills.

"You get more of a sense of how people actually speak," Samantha Greene, 13, said, as she dragged the audio files for Chapter 4 of her French textbook from the school's academic server onto her iPod. Twenty new tracks of French appeared in her iPod library, just beneath three songs by OutKast.

The long-term efficacy of the iPod as a language aid has, of course, not been established. "I don't necessarily see a correlation between using the iPod and an increased fluency in the language," said Lisa Merschel, who teaches a Spanish class at Duke in which students use the device.

Nonetheless, when Ms. Merschel asked students to record a diary using the grammar, phrases and vocabulary they had learned over the course of a week, "I think that really helped me to see how they were progressing as a class," she said.

The iPod initiative at Brearley began as a gift from last year's graduating class. Bicky David, a graduate who led the effort, said she was inspired to improve the school's foreign-language equipment after a summer studying in France. Speaking of the iPod program, Ms. David said in a telephone interview from Harvard, where she is now a freshman, that she "was kind of disappointed that there was nothing here like it."

A panel at the school reviewed several options before deciding on the iPod. "We started out looking at the classic language labs," said Katherine Hallissy Ayala, the head of the computer education department. "They were all kind of expensive and required desktops, and most of them ran on Windows." Brearley uses mostly Macs.

Ms. Ayala said the school also wanted more flexibility than typical language labs offer. "The out-of-the-box systems, they're great in that you don't have to develop your own content," she said, "but at the same time, you can't develop your own content."

Several instructors at Brearley have uploaded songs and audio books in foreign languages to supplement the audio materials that come with their textbooks.

"Listening to many different types of French, not just the teacher, is very important," Mr. Houis said.

He said his students enjoy listening to modern music, including songs by the French rapper M C Solaar. "He's very literary, very high quality," Mr. Houis said.

Ms. Ayala said that sort of real-world content could encourage students to use their iPods more often. "The hope is that if students are interested in this, they'll download and explore on their own without being told to," she said.

She added, "Of course, through this process, we thought, 'Well, wait a minute. Is this all legal?' "

The school developed internal rules to comply with usage laws. Students are asked not to share their school materials with people outside the classroom, and must delete audio files when they are done with them.

For parents, the hope is that the iPod will become more than just the new graphing calculator: an expensive piece of hardware required for their children's homework.

Pria Chatterjee, the chairwoman of the Brearley parents' association, who bought the device for her daughter, an eighth grader, said that although some parents were concerned about "flashy" gadgets, most trusted the faculty's enthusiasm.

"Obviously, parents should be concerned about any additional expenses," Ms. Chatterjee said, "but the iPod is not the deal-breaker here."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/09/te...ts/09ipod.html

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Q & A

Command Demystifies Missing Music Files
J.D. Biersdorfer

Q. I have some songs that play fine with the iTunes program, but when I look for the song files on my hard drive, I can't find them. How can I find these files?

A. Apple's iTunes for Windows and Macintosh is a versatile music-management program that can do everything from converting songs from CD's to computer- friendly digital audio files to loading up your iPod and printing fancy jewel-case covers for homemade mixes you make for friends and loved ones.

Although iTunes keeps its own default folder to store the audio files you make from CD's or for tracks you purchased from the online iTunes Music Store, the files do not have to be in this folder for iTunes to display or play them. That makes it possible for songs all around your hard drive to be listed in your iTunes database, regardless of whether they reside in the iTunes Music folder.

Song files may appear under names other than the ones they have in iTunes, which can make locating them a challenge. You can, however, locate the file in a few steps, using iTunes.

In the iTunes window, click on the title of the song file you want to locate. Press Control-I on the keyboard if you use Windows or Command-I if you're on a Mac. This brings up the song's Get Info box (which you can also display by selecting Get Info under the iTunes File menu). Click on the Summary tab. In the Where area of the box, you will see a description that includes not only the location of the file on your hard drive, but the file's real name as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/09/te...s/09askk_.html

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Digital Copyright Act’s Good Faith Requirement Is Subjective
David Watson

The “good faith” required under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 to demand the shutdown of an allegedly infringing Web site is subjective, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday. In what it said was the nation’s first ruling interpreting the term as used in 17 U.S.C. Sec. 512(c)(3)(A)(v), the court rejected the contention of Web site operator Michael J. Rossi that the Motion Picture Association of America Inc. should have determined whether it was actually possible to download copyrighted material from his site before demanding that his internet service provider take it down. Judge Johnnie B. Rawlinson said the MPAA was entitled to believe the site, internetmovies.com, was making movies available to its members based on language contained on the site’s home page. The page included the phrases “Join to download full length movies online now! new movies every month”; “Full Length Downloadable Movies”; and “NOW DOWNLOADABLE.” It also contained images from films produced by MPAA members.

‘Notice and Takedown’ After learning of the site, the MPAA followed the “notice and takedown” procedures prescribed by Sec. 512(c)(3)(A), advising Rossi and his service provider of their infringement claim. The service informed Rossi that his site would be shut down. Rossi located a new host and then sued the MPAA in federal court for tortious interference with contractual relations, tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, libel and defamation, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. A magistrate judge in the District of Hawaii dismissed the claims. That ruling was correct, Rawlinson said yesterday. The MPAA followed the procedures prescribed by the act and met the requirement under Sec. 512(c)(3)(A)(v) that its notice include a “statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law,” the appellate jurist said. She added that the MPAA was not required to conduct a reasonable investigation before making that assertion. “Rossi’s contention notwithstanding, interpretive case law and the statutory structure of [Sec.] 512(c) support the conclusion that the ‘good faith belief’ requirement in [Sec.] 512(c)(3)(A)(v) encompasses a subjective, rather than objective, standard,” she declared.

‘Distinct’ Standards Citing cases interpreting the Fair Labor Standards Act and other federal legislation, Rawlinson said an objective reasonableness standard “is distinct from the subjective good faith standard, and that Congress understands this distinction.” She continued: “When enacting the DMCA, Congress could have easily incorporated an objective standard of reasonableness. The fact that it did not do so indicates an intent to adhere to the subjective standard traditionally associated with a good faith requirement.” The judge pointed out that Sec. 512(f) creates a cause of action for improper infringement notifications, but imposes liability only if the copyright owner’s notification is a knowing misrepresentation. Interpreting Sec. 512(c) to include an objective good faith standard would be inconsistent with that scheme, she said. The phrases included on the Web site “led the MPAA employee [who reviewed it] to conclude in good faith that motion pictures owned by MPAA members were available for immediate downloading from the website,” Rawlinson commented, adding: “The unequivocal language used by Rossi not only suggests that conclusion, but virtually compels it.” Since the MPAA’s actions were proper under the DMCA, they could not as a matter of law give rise to tort liability, the judge explained. “Because the MPAA acted in compliance with the DMCA and was otherwise justified in its response to Rossi’s website, Rossi’s tortious interference claims must fail,” she wrote. “Because the MPAA’s communications were privileged and were well within the bounds of decency, his defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress claims must fail as well.” Hawaii First Amendment litigator James H. Fosbinder, who represented Rossi, said a request for rehearing is likely. If that is denied, he said, he will probably ask the Ninth Circuit to rehear the case en banc or seek review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Fosbinder said the Web site never had the capacity to provide movie downloads and characterized the statements cited by the court as “hyperbole.” He criticized the panel for failing to “even mention” the First Amendment and argued that if a similar standard were applied to print media, it would authorize a copyright owner to “shut down the New York Times on a mere suspicion.” The “good faith” standard has been held, under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, under federal securities laws, and in other contexts, to include an obligation to make a reasonable investigation into the truth of an allegation before making it, Fosbinder said. The MPAA should have purchased a membership and determined whether movies were in fact available for download before invoking the protections of the DMCA, the attorney said. He added that the membership price was about $3, and analogized the MPAA’s tactic to seeking suppression of a book based on its cover without buying or reading it. The court’s interpretation of the DMCA creates “a second class of First Amendment protection for a new mode of communication,” Fosbinder said. If the interpretation is correct, then the act is unconstitutional, he declared.

Russell J. Frackman of Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp in Los Angeles represented the MPAA. Steven A. Marenberg of Irell & Manella represented amici curiae American Federation of Musicians of the United Statesand Canadaand other content provider groups, including the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball and the Directors Guild of America. An amicus brief was also filed in the case on behalf of the Internet Commerce Coalition, a trade association which includes AT&T, BellSouth Corporation, eBay Inc., MCI, SBC Communications Inc., Time Warner, and Verizon Communications. Senior Judges Jerome Farris and John T. Noonan joined in the opinion authored by Rawlinson. The case is Rossi v. Motion Picture Association of America Inc., 03-16034.
http://www.metnews.com/articles/2004/ross120204.htm

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Fight for Public Domain Goes On
Katie Dean

Digital archivists aren't giving up on their efforts to free out-of-print books, movies and music from overreaching copyright laws, despite a recent setback in court.

District Judge Maxine Chesney dismissed the case filed by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, and Rick Prelinger, founder of the Prelinger Archives, in late November. The archivists allege that the government's sweeping changes in copyright laws are unconstitutional because they lock up creative works that should be returned to the public domain. The government filed a motion to dismiss, and the motion was granted Nov. 19.

Kahle -- who wants to include out-of-print books and films in his nonprofit archive for educational and research purposes -- and Prelinger will appeal the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the next several weeks, said Chris Sprigman, a fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. Sprigman, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said First Amendment matters are normally dealt with at the appeals court level of the judicial system anyway.

The plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of four copyright laws: the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the Copyright Act of 1976 and the Berne Convention Implementation Act.

For most of the 20th century, artists and creators had to register with the copyright office to get a copyright, and were granted a term of 28 years. At the end of that term, they had to renew their copyright to get a 28-year extension. Many didn't bother to renew and the work entered the public domain. But Congress passed several laws that gave copyright owners far more power: It removed the registration and renewal requirements, so now anything "fixed in a tangible medium" is under copyright, and the term is the life of the creator plus 70 years.

The plaintiffs claim that removing registration and renewal requirements and expanding the term of copyright have made it virtually impossible for works to enter the public domain. Now, out-of-print albums and books -- many of which are not commercially viable -- are simply rotting away unused, but are still protected by copyright.

"The move from 'opt-in' to 'opt-out' creates a significant problem in the copyright law," Sprigman said. "It burdens speech, and we're going to press that argument on appeal."

Sprigman, who said the judge decided the case on papers filed in the case and didn't feel a hearing was necessary, said he's hopeful that the plaintiffs will have better luck in the 9th Circuit.

"We have the wonderful opportunity of this digital technology, but unfortunately it is being tangled up in laws that were passed for very different purposes," said Kahle. "For the orphans, it's just collateral damage for the last 40 years of copyright expansion."

He said that kids are being denied the kind of massive library he had when he grew up. Plenty of the volumes in the library were out of print. Now, as more children use the internet for their library, they should be able to access the same materials. But getting permission to digitize those works can be difficult, especially for materials that are decades old.

Kahle said Congress was trying to protect the works that were making corporations money, and in the process made sweeping changes to the structure of copyright itself.

He said he's committed to bringing these valuable resources to the public.

"I'm kind of an optimist. When you have common sense and an important issue, then there's reason to be hopeful," Kahle said. "And it's certainly worth the effort."
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65898,00.html

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ILN News Letter

Belgian CT. Orders ISP To Terminate P2P Users

EDRI reports that a Brussels court has ruled that Tiscali, a major ISP, should disconnect customers if they infringe copyrights, and block the access for all customers to websites offering file-sharing programs. The case was instituted by the Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM) earlier this year.

French language coverage at
http://www.lalibre.be/article.phtml?...&art_id=195335

Australian Senate To Launch Overnight Copyright Inquiry

An Australian Senate committee is set to create a new record for the shortest inquiry to ever be held in federal parliament. The Senate yesterday afternoon referred copyright laws linked to the Australia-US free trade agreement to the legal and constitutional legislation committee. The committee has until today to examine and report on the bill. The hearing is taking evidence from the Internet Industry Association, the Australian Digital Alliance, the Australian Film and Industry Coalition and the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia.
http://aucopyrighthearing1.notlong.com/, http://aucopyrighthearing2.notlong.com/

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Australia

FTA Doubts After ISP Protest
James Riley

THE passage of the US Free Trade Agreement enabling legislation has been thrown into doubt after the government agreed to an 11th hour review of key concerns outlined by the Internet Industry Association (IIA).

Concerned ISPs met today with Trade Minister Mark Vaile to outline their problems with Items 11 and 13 of legislation amending the Copyright Act. The amendments were required as a precondition for the free Trade Agreement coming into effect.

The ISPs also met with Attorney General Phillip Ruddock and Communications and IT Minister Helen Coonan, as a part of a last ditch campaign to have the additional copyright requirements amended.

While the purpose of the legislation was to "harmonise" Australian copyright law with that of the US, the IIA believes the bill to be put parliament this week is far more strict than US law.

The concerns are to be addressed tonight at a meeting of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

The enabling legislation must be passed by the parliament this week if it is to meet the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement scheduled start date of January 1.

The IIA claims the legislative changes would make possession of pirated materials a criminal offence, and could make internet service providers criminally liable for pirated material that exists on their systems. The IIA also believes the system of take-down orders proposed through the legislation would put an onerous administrative burden on its members.

While the IIA had been briefed by government on the impending legislation, it complained that it only became aware of the extent of the changes when the legislation was first made publicly available late last week.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html

ISPs Accept Copyright Promise
James Riley

INTERNET and telco companies have accepted a promise from the Howard Government to protect them from an avalanche of copyright law suits after the free trade agreement with the US comes into force on January 1.

Following a last-minute lobbying effort on Monday involving industry bodies, Telstra and Optus, the Government yesterday wrote a letter to the Opposition defending the proposed law.

But after the lobbying, Trade Minister Mark Vaile said some details - such as when internet providers were required to block websites which allegedly breached another person's copyright - could be clarified by a special regulation.

The promise was enough to secure Labor's support for the final bills that implement the landmark trade deal. Earlier in the day some Opposition MPs had argued they should block it, rather than let the copyright changes stand.

Telstra and Optus, together with the Internet Industry Association, had been concerned about two items in the legislation under which they would be required to remove disputed copyright material, leaving the internet company exposed to potential litigation.

"These concerns could be resolved through the regulations that will flesh out the legislative safe harbour provisions," Mr Vaile said in his letter to counterpart Simon Crean.

"We will continue to consult with stakeholders on these issues in the preparation of the regulations."

Though Labor had not considered blocking the FTA legislation, Mr Crean acknowledged there were genuine concerns in the internet service provider industry and that he would table Mr Vaile's letter in the Lower House.

"I've not wanted this to hold up the FTA, given that our amendments were not at issue," Mr Crean said.

"The issue was the Government's failure to implement what they had promised with regard to copyright.

"What I am prepared to do under these circumstances is to accept the fact that they will pick up these issues under regulation.

"The Government (through Mr Vaile's letter) will keep the implementation of the scheme under close review, and will consult with the stakeholders on any issues that may arise, including appropriate responses," Mr Crean said.
http://www.news.com.au/common/printp...624856,00.html

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Libraries Reach Out, Online
Tim Gnatek

THE newest books in the New York Public Library don't take up any shelf space.

They are electronic books - 3,000 titles' worth - and the library's 1.8 million cardholders can point and click through the collection at www .nypl.org, choosing from among best sellers, nonfiction, romance novels and self-help guides. Patrons borrow them for set periods, downloading them for reading on a computer, a hand-held organizer or other device using free reader software. When they are due, the files are automatically locked out - no matter what hardware they are on - and returned to circulation, eliminating late fees.

In the first eight days of operation in early November, and with little fanfare, the library's cardholders - from New York City and New York state and, increasingly, from elsewhere - checked out more than 1,000 digital books and put another 400 on waiting lists (the library has a limited number of licenses for each book).

E-books are only one way that libraries are laying claim to a massive online public as their newest service audience. The institutions are breaking free from the limitations of physical location by making many kinds of materials and services available at all times to patrons who are both cardholders and Web surfers, whether they are homebound in the neighborhood or halfway around the world.

For years, library patrons have been able to check card catalogs online and do things like reserve or renew books and pay overdue fines. Now they can not only check out e-books and audiobooks but view movie trailers and soon, the actual movies.

And they can do it without setting foot in the local branch.

"The lending model is identical to what libraries already have," said Steve Potash, president of OverDrive, which provides the software behind the e-book programs in New York City, White Plains, Cleveland and elsewhere. "But lending is 24/7. You can borrow from anywhere and have instant, portable access to the collection."

At the same time, libraries are leveraging technology - including wireless networks that are made available at no charge to anyone who wants to use them - to draw people to their physical premises.

Library e-books are not new - netLibrary, an online-only e-book collection for libraries, has operated since 1998 - but the New York Public Library decided to wait for software that would let users read materials on hand-held devices, freeing them from computers.

"The key was portability," said Michael Ciccone, who heads acquisitions at the library. "It needs to be a book-like experience."

E-books' short history has already begun to yield some lessons. At the Cleveland Public Library, Patricia Lowrey, head of technical services, thought technical manuals and business guides would be in greatest demand.

"We were dead wrong on that," Ms. Lowrey said. "There are a lot of closet romance readers in cyberspace."

She saw patrons check out the same kinds of materials rotating in the physical collection. The e-books librarians like best, according to Ms. Lowrey, are the digitized guides and workbooks for standardized tests, which in printed form are notorious for deteriorating quickly or disappearing altogether.

Cleveland's success with e-books encouraged librarians there to expand to audiobooks in November, when OverDrive introduced software to allow downloads of audiobooks. "We had 28 audiobooks checked out in the first six hours, with no publicity at all," Ms. Lowrey said.

The OverDrive audiobook software encodes audiobooks from suppliers' source material, such as compact discs or cassettes, packages the stories into parts with Windows Media technology, and manages patrons' downloads. Borrowers can listen using a computer while online or offline; the books can also be stored on portable players or burned to CD's.

The King County Library System in Washington State, which serves communities like Redmond and Bellevue and the computer-savvy workers at local companies like Microsoft and Boeing, has also embraced both e-books and audiobooks.

In November, the King County libraries added 634 audiobooks to the 8,500 e-books in its catalog (www.kcls.org). With no publicity at all, 200 of the audiobooks had already been checked out. "As soon as people find out about it, it will be extremely popular," said Bruce Schauer, the library's associate director of collections.

At the King County Library System's Web site, patrons can watch film trailers and reserve titles, which they can pick up at a branch. Before long, they can expect to be able to borrow entire movies online.

Mr. Potash of OverDrive says the company plans to release such a video program for libraries by next summer.

Posting electronic versions of libraries' holdings is only part of the library's expanding online presence. Library Web sites are becoming information portals. Many, like the Saint Joseph's County Library in South Bend, Ind., have created Web logs as community outreach tools.

Others are customizing their Web sites for individual visitors. The Richmond Public Library in British Columbia (www.yourlibrary.ca), for example, offers registered users ways to track books and personal favorites, or receive lists of suggested materials, much like the recommendation service at Amazon.

Other libraries have moved their book clubs online. Members of the online reading group at the public library in Lawrence, Kan., (www.lawrence.lib.ks.us) receive book passages by e-mail and discuss them in an online forum.

"Libraries have been very enthusiastic adopters of technology," said Patricia Stevens, the director of cooperative initiatives at the Online Computer Library Center, an international cooperative with some 50,000 libraries that share digital resources.

The center, which recently acquired the netLibrary e-book service, plans to announce a downloadable audiobook package with the audiobook publisher Recorded Books this month. It also provides add-on Web site programs that put traditional librarians' functions on the Internet. "The services found inside a library are now online," Ms. Stevens said. "And the trend is to continue moving to remote self-service."

An example is QuestionPoint, a creation of the Online Computer Library Center and the Library of Congress that offers live 24-hour assistance from cooperative librarians via a chat service. More than 1,500 libraries worldwide make remote reference help available through QuestionPoint, which recently consolidated with a similar program, the 24/7 Reference Project, started by the Metropolitan Cooperative Library System in Southern California.

Another library IM tool, Tutor.com, is geared for a younger audience, helping children with their homework. More than 600 library sites offer the program, which matches students with tutors, whether for help reducing fractions or diagramming sentences. More than 105,000 tutoring sessions have been logged in the United States since September.

But libraries' investments in online services are aimed at more than just remote users. They are also adding technology inside their buildings to draw community members in. Despite all the modernization, old-fashioned formulas still matter.

"Most libraries measure success by using circulation, so if you check out a book, that's good for us," said Ms. Lowrey of the Cleveland Public Library. "There might be a door counter as well, so if you come in to use a wireless connection or a PC, we're watching those numbers as well."

In Sacramento, the library system has drummed up interest by holding several after-hours video game parties in which teenagers gather to play networked games like Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II.

Always on the lookout for the kernel of learning to be found in the fun, the librarians have matched the game play with reading material.

"We saw the Star Wars game as providing a great tie-in to books," said Suzy Murray, youth services librarian for Sacramento's Carmichael branch. "Teen boys, in addition to being voracious consumers of video games, are also huge fans of science fiction, so the connection seemed very natural."

But one of the most effective uses of technology to entice visitors, librarians say, is turning the building into a wireless hot spot.

For less than $1,000, a library can set up a wireless network and draw the public in for free-range Internet access.

The Wireless Librarian (people.morrisville.edu/~drewwe/wireless) lists more than 400 such library hot spots in the United States.

Michele Hampshire, Web librarian for the library in Mill Valley, the woodsy San Francisco suburb, logs an average of 15 wireless users a day on the library's high-speed connection. "We're not collecting personal information; we don't put filters on, you don't even need a library card," Ms. Hampshire said.

She and other librarians do not consider the rise of online access a threat, Ms. Hampshire said. Rather, it will allow librarians to spend less time and money reshelving books and reordering supplies, and more time helping online and in-person visitors to find materials.

" Google will never replace me," she said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/09/te...ts/09libr.html

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Pew File-Sharing Survey Gives a Voice to Artists
Tom Zeller Jr.

The battle over digital copyrights and illegal file sharing is often portrayed as a struggle between Internet scofflaws and greedy corporations. Online music junkies with no sense of the marketplace, the argument goes, want to download, copy and share copyrighted materials without restriction. The recording industry, on the other hand, wants to squeeze dollars - by lawsuit and legislation, if necessary - from its property.

The issue, of course, is far subtler than this, but one aspect of the caricature is dead on: the artists are nowhere to be found. A survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, an arm of the Pew Research Center in Washington, aims to change that. The report, "Artists, Musicians and the Internet," combines and compares the opinions of three groups: the general public, those who identify themselves as artists of various stripes (including filmmakers, writers and digital artists) and a somewhat more self-selecting category of musicians.

Most notably, it is the first large-scale snapshot of what the people who actually produce the goods that downloaders seek (and that the industry jealously guards) think about the Internet and file-sharing.

Among the findings: artists are divided but on the whole not deeply concerned about online file-sharing. Only about half thought that sharing unauthorized copies of music and movies online should be illegal, for instance. And makers of file-sharing software like Kazaa and Grokster may be unnerved to learn that nearly two-thirds said such services should be held responsible for illegal file-swapping; only 15 percent held individual users responsible.

The subset of 2,755 musicians, who were recruited for the survey through e-mail notices, announcements on Web sites and flyers distributed at musicians' conferences, had somewhat different views. Thirty-seven percent, for instance, said the file-sharing services and those who use them ought to share the blame for illegal trades. Only 17 percent singled out the online services themselves as the guilty parties.

"This should solve the problem once and for all about whether anyone can say they speak for all artists," said Jenny Toomey, the executive director of the Future of Music Campaign, a nonprofit organization seeking to bring together the various factions in the copyright wars.

Ms. Toomey, whose group helped draft part of the survey, believes that artists are usually underrepresented in the debates about the high-tech evolution of the industry.

"These decisions need to be made with artists at the table," she said, adding, "it's not enough for both sides to reach out and get an artist who supports their position."

Indeed, big-ticket acts like Metallica and Don Henley have famously denounced illegal file sharing. And the Recording Industry Association of America, which has filed thousands of lawsuits against individual file-sharers, often invokes musicians as prime movers in its crusade.

"Breaking into the music business is no picnic," its Web site reads. "Piracy makes it tougher to survive and even tougher to break through."

File-sharers, on the other hand, often point to high-profile performers like Moby and Chuck D who acknowledge that the online swap meet has provided them with valuable exposure.

"I know for a fact that a lot of people first heard my music by downloading it from Napster or Kazaa," Moby wrote in his online journal last year. "And for this reason I'll always be glad that Napster and Kazaa have existed."

Without questioning the convictions of artists who feel strongly one way or another, however, the Pew survey appears to show that the creative set is both mindful of the benefits the Internet promises and ambivalent about the abuses it facilitates.

"The overall picture," said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Project, "is that the musician-artistic community has a much wider range of views and experiences than folks who watch the Washington debate about copyright might imagine."

Whether the survey will help speed a resolution to the copyright wars, however, remains an open question.

"The goal is to build a new structure that doesn't repeat the failures of the existing structure," Ms. Toomey said. "But," she added, "these things don't change overnight."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/arts/06down.html

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Paid Digital Music Services Face Challenges In Converting P2P Users

According to data presented by The NPD Group this week at the Music 2.0 conferences in Los Angeles, although digital music presents a prime opportunity for the music industry, challenges remain in attracting and maintaining customers; and in converting peer-to-peer (P2P) users.

NPD found that 62 per cent of U.S. Internet-enabled households currently have digital music files saved on their PCs. "Nearly two- thirds of U.S. households are now personally familiar with digital music," stated Isaac Josephson, Senior Account Manager of The NPD Group. "That means that among regular Internet users who have been online during the past 30 days, there's a potential audience of 43 million domestic households with at least some level of digital music savvy. This represents big opportunity for digital music retailers - especially if they can find effective ways to convert those using free P2P services."

The challenge for paid digital music services, NPD notes, is to build trial rates, which are currently running at a monthly rate of two per cent of U.S. households with Internet access. In addition, paid digital music services should be looking to increase “conversion” rates (“conversion” is defined as a new user who tries a particular service and goes on to become a regular user of that service), which currently stand at about 20 per cent - nearly half of the conversion rate of P2P services.

"Eight per cent of P2P users have tried a legal service: that's four times the trial rate of the average Internet user," said Josephson. "The hitch is that those who did try legal services continued to use P2P services by a two-to-one margin. The legal services need to convincingly articulate the key features and consumer benefits against free P2P alternatives."

When it comes to file sharing and digital music, the industry's focus is trained on younger demographics; however, NPD found that teens are somewhat less drawn to legal services than are older consumers. Teens age 13 to 17 represent a 15 per cent share of physical music (CD) purchases and 21 per cent of P2P usage, but only 12 per cent of legal service users. By contrast, adults age 26 to 35 represent 21 per cent of all CD sales, 19 per cent of P2P users, and a strong 25 per cent of legal service users.

By comparison to CD sales, in which sales of new releases are the most crucial marketing component, catalog titles that were released more than 18 months prior are a key point of focus for consumers looking to purchase digital music. Sixty-seven per cent of the content acquired from P2P is catalog, versus 33 per cent for new releases. Similarly, 63 per cent of the content acquired via paid music services were catalog titles, versus 37 per cent for new releases.

"Catalog sales are a much larger part of digital music than they are in the physical-music realm," explained Josephson. "For some consumers, the numbers suggest that digital music is filling a content void created by the limited shelf space available to brick-and-mortar CD retailers. For others, it's a way to build a more robust digital collection of their favourite music one track at a time."

NPD adds that the music industry has lingering concerns that fewer restrictions on digital music will encourage piracy; however, those fears have not been borne out by NPD's most recent research. While the industry has focused on limiting CD burning and digital file portability, P2P users, who have no restrictions on either of those features, actually burn fewer CDs and upload to portable music players less often than do users of paid digital download services.

Additionally, NPD's research challenges the assumption that pricing digital music offerings competitively will reduce the perceived value of physical CDs. Only six per cent of legally downloaded songs were played multiple times in the first two months after they were purchased, and just eight per cent were uploaded to a portable music player. By comparison, nearly 80 per cent of CDs get constant attention in the first two months after they are purchased.

"The question is whether consumers hold the average digital music file to a different value standard than they do for physical music," Josephson noted. "Many consumers tell us that they buy physical CDs for their favourite artists. These have a high value in consumer's minds. If consumers are using digital, in part, to build collections and sample new music, then the digital purchases may have an entirely different consumer value. As such, the music industry might want to come at consumers with a different value proposition for digital music vis-a-vis CDs."

For the NPD MusicWatch Digital, 10,000 U.S. households agreed to install software on their home computers that lets The NPD Group monitor digital music activity. For NPD MusicWatch Tracker, 1,000 U.S. music buyers each week tell NPD what they bought, why they bought it, from which retailer, and other related information.
http://marketnews.ca/news_detail.asp?nid=274

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Things change

June 2003:

Dear User,
We are happy to announce that the file sharing network of MediaSeek.pl is back online!

During the last few months both client and server software has been completely rewritten in order to provide you with a high quality product capable of fulfilling your P2P needs.

The key features of the new MediaSeek.pl network are:
- Web-based user interface
- Auto-resume of broken downloads
- MPEG Audio Layer 3 Support (64-320 kbps VBR & CBR)
- Pure music indexing (only the audio frames are indexed not ID3Tags)
- Ability to queue off-line files (download starts when the file becomes available)
- Download location optimizer (finds the fastest link from you to the file)
- High anonymity (other users do not see your username and can not list your files)
- High security (only shared MP3 files can be accessed by remote users)
- W3Cache proxy support (download only)
- Remote management - ability to run MediaSeek.pl Client on one PC and queue files from another (i.e. queue form work, download at home)

Note: Due to security reasons your old account has been deleted and you will need to create a new one.

We hope that you will find our service interesting.

Best Regards
MediaSeek.pl Team
http://web.mediaseek.pl/

You have received this e-mail because you were a former user of MediaSeek.pl.
No further messages from MediaSeek.pl will be posted to this address.

This Week:

From a post on P2P-Zone.com

To Whom It May Concern,

We would like to announce that P2P Network MediaSeek.pl has been placed on auction on eBay.

The reason for that is we no longer wish to develop the system and at the same time do not desire for it to simply disappear. Hopefully somebody will be keen on continuing our work.

This offer includes:
- Server software (incl. web-based and mobile interfaces)
- Windows client software
- Linux (i386) client software
- Database dump (users, songs, files)
The software is fully developed and working (as can be seen at http://mediaseek.pl/).

The buyer will gain exclusive rights to both the software (including source code) and the domain name. That person can do whatever he/she wants with it - keep it as it is, release it without the ad-support, make it open-source or even delete it .

The starting price is $99
Auction ends December 10th at 13:15 PST

More details can be found in auction's description.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...item=3857140659

PS. If you think you know somebody who might be interested feel free to forward this message, we would really appreciate it.

Best Regards
MediaSeek.pl Team

http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...d.php?p=225555

Update: The bidding for MediaSeek.pl ended on Friday afternoon December 10th at 4:15 PM Eastern time. The last offer was $1420.00 US. I bid early and at the end, but the final bid wasn’t mine. However since the reserve was not met, it remains in the hands of the developers. Ultimately I hope for some continuity within the community and I wish the MediaSeek team all the best in their future endeavors with this network.

Until next week,

- js.

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