[JackSpratts]

Environmentalists Condemn Disposable DVDs
AP

Promoters of a new disposable-DVD technology tout the product's convenience, but environmentalists condemn the self-destructing movie discs as a step backward in developing reusable products.

Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a branch of The Walt Disney Co., introduced the "EZ-D" in September and now offers 35 movies in the format.

Consumers have 48 hours after opening the box to watch movies on the $7 (U.S.) discs before an oxidation process changes their colour, rendering them unusable.

The disks were tested in four markets around the country, including Austin, where they are available at stores such as 7-Eleven, Walgreens and HEB supermarkets.

Local environmentalists protested outside one 7-Eleven in October and urged shoppers to send postcards to Disney, condemning the disposable DVDs.

They claimed some success — Robin Schneider, executive director of the Texas Campaign for the Environment, said HEB instituted recycling facilities for the EZ-Ds in response to the outcry.

"The whole way the product is being marketed as 'no returns' is environmentally irresponsible," Mr. Schneider said. "I've worked on many different issues, and I think this has been the easiest one to mobilize the public because they see the advertisements on television and see how wasteful the products are."

Buena Vista officials said consumers will have a different reaction to the discs.

"We believe consumers will enjoy the convenience of a rental alternative that requires no extra trips to return product and no late fees," Bob Chapek, president of Buena Vista, said in a statement.

Representatives of Flexplay Technologies, the New York-based developers of the EZ-D technology, declined interviews.

Buena Vista promotes the recycling of EZ-Ds on its Web site, including instructions for mailing the EZ-Ds to collection points free of charge. The recycling program is being handled by GreenDisk, a Seattle-based company that disposes of electronic waste.

GreenDisk's address is included on the EZ-Ds, and people are encouraged to mail the discs using downloadable mailing labels that cover postage, said David Beschen, GreenDisk's chief executive officer.

GreenDisk grinds up the EZ-Ds and ships the polycarbonate plastic remains to a recycling company for use in plastic products such as auto parts or appliances, Mr. Beschen said. He praised Buena Vista's effort to recycle the discs.

"What we saw was a group of people who worked aggressively before they even put a product on the street to make sure they had a way to get it back off," Mr. Beschen said. "That's about all you can ask for in a free-market system."

Mr. Beschen said he didn't have numbers on how many discs have been recycled, but he said mail-in and bin collection started slowly and appeared to have picked up since Christmas.

At the city of Austin's recycling centre, home to one of two local designated EZ-D recycling bins, only about 10 discs have been turned in, said city spokeswoman Stephanie Lott.

Some retailers said Austin residents have been slow to latch onto the technology.

At a 7-Eleven this week, 11 EZ-D titles were on display next to magazine racks on the store's front counter. Shift manager Rafy Hernandez said that shoppers have asked about the EZ-Ds and expressed concerns about their waste.

"I haven't really sold any," he said. "I would like to sell some so I could get some feedback from people."

Jessica Felter, of Austin, stopped at the store for a cup of coffee but said she has little incentive to buy an EZ-D. She said she generally returns rented movies on time, making a $7 disposable movie unnecessary.

"For my husband and I, we would watch it once and that would be it," she said.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/


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Not A WASTE Of Time
Christopher Saunders

Much of what has been written about WASTE, the controversial peer-to-peer (P2P) application released without permission by an America Online programmer, has centered around its notorious origins. But largely overshadowed by the brouhaha is a significant work of collaborative technology that enables secure, basic communication -- and from which makers of more corporate-ready applications might learn.

The WASTE flap began in May, when programmer Justin Frankel published a working version of the application, and the software's source code, and attempted to release both under the GNU General Public License, in an effort to hand WASTE and its code to the open-source community.

But Frankel happens to be the head of Nullsoft, a subsidiary of Time Warner's America Online unit, and shortly after WASTE's posting to Nullsoft's Web site, the software was removed. (Whether the software today is legally in the public domain remains in doubt; the download page was replaced with a stern notice warning from Nullsoft that "Any license that you may believe you acquired with the Software is void, revoked and terminated.")

That wasn't the end of WASTE, however. Despite being available online only for a few hours, the application and its code had already made its way into the wild; in September, an updated version of the program appeared on open-source application repository SourceForge.net.

Now, the tiny program (about 300k in file size) continues receiving updates from the open-source community, and its latest iterations -- WASTE version 1.4 Alpha 1 for Windows debuted earlier this week -- reveal steadily evolutions in highly secure collaboration technology.

At present, WASTE provides one-to-one instant messaging, group chat, and file sharing -- uploading, downloading, and browsing a shared directory.

This isn't a system for large, distributed P2P networks like Gnutella (which, incidentally, Frankel also originated.) Instead, WASTE is more oriented toward smaller groups of mutually trusted users. (The original documentation indicates that WASTE has a maximum effectiveness of about 50 participants.)

Architecturally, WASTE creates a web of distinct nodes linked by peer-to-peer connections; it's not centralized, like the traditional instant messaging networks operated by America Online, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.

As a result, network traffic flows throughout the entire web of nodes -- even circumventing firewalls -- and the loss of one user won't bring down the entire network. The application also can support a form of authenticated auto-discovery of new users -- enabling recent additions to the network to appear in others' contact lists, automatically.

Trust comes into play because a user wishing to gain entry into the network must exchange public keys with a current participant. Depending on users' trust settings, a user that joins the network by linking to an already-collaborating peer is generally available for collaboration with all others, although participants can set their program to require manually authorization of new peers.

In other words, WASTE's lowest level of trust protections mean that someone in a WASTE workgroup must authorize the entry of an outsider. At its highest setting, individual users must decide whether to become visible to each new addition.

WASTE also provides for high-level information security. The system relies on 1,536-bit RSA public keys for session key exchange and authentication. Links between users are encrypted using Blowfish in Propagating Cipher Block Chaining mode. Consequently, text chat and file sharing is secure and encrypted.

The application also provides for clear-text logging of IM conversations.

Granted, WASTE requires more time to mature. For one thing, adding nodes manually is a bit user-unfriendly, to put it mildly. There's also the fact that its closed-network framework could pave the way for so-called "darknets" of illicit file-trading activity (albeit, on a far smaller scale than networks like Gnutella and KaZaA). And, as part of its intrinsic design, there's no provision for central oversight by an IT administrator.

Yet its strengths also highlight the benefits of a P2P-based architecture for IM and collaboration. In addition to strong encryption and authentication features, the system obviates the need for a centralized server while protecting against information interception.

Considering the possibility that the open-source community could layer additional applications onto WASTE's framework, we could be seeing much more out of the controversial little application in the near future.
http://www.instantmessagingplanet.co...le.php/3300391


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Indie Music And Beyond

CBC Radio 3 has been hailed as a model for the future of broadcasting. But many Canadians have never even heard of the award-winning virtual network, ALEXANDRA GILL reports
Alexandra Gill

VANCOUVER — Is the CBC boring? A recent report says yes, resoundingly so.

''Loosen up,'' urges a summary account of the public broadcaster's six-month, 1,000-page study, which suggests the network's image could be ''enhanced by having a more youthful and lively style.''

The findings are hardly new. Back in 1957, Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan made a case for Why The CBC Must Be Dull in Saturday Night magazine. A grainy black-and-white photocopy of that article hangs on the wall behind Rob McLaughlin's desk.

"It reminds me that the struggle is a long one," laughs McLaughlin, executive producer of Vancouver-based CBC Radio 3.

Long, perhaps, but not impossible. McLaughlin's experimental new-media unit is doing everything in its offbeat, high-tech power to reach new audiences while injecting some excitement into Canadian public broadcasting. And despite the odds, they're succeeding spectacularly.

In just four years, CBC Radio 3 has chalked up more than 30 awards, including several Webbys, the holy grail of new media, and a Prix Italia, the oldest and most prestigious radio competition in the world. When CBC Radio 3 won that prize for arts and culture in 2001, it was the first for CBC in nearly 40 years.

So what is CBC Radio 3? It's not exactly radio, although the unit does produce three late-night programs on the network's regular FM frequency, CBC Radio Two. And it's not exactly a website, although they do have five.

If you go to the flagship site at http://www.cbcradio3.com, preferably with a broadband connection, you'll find stories on a diversity of subjects, ranging from the Dene Winter Games finger-pulling contest to the Romanow commission, photo essays, poetry, videos, interviews with bands and a smorgasbord of weird and wonderful art commissions.

Take Sites Unseen, for example. "Seven Days, Six Disposable Cameras and Two Blind Photographers," reads the tag line. And you really must see the lopsided shot of the urinal with your own eyes to understand what photographer Ryan Knighton means when he says it's not easy to feel his way around public washrooms.

The elements, which flash, pop and slide through the virtual matrix with greater ease than daring young men on a flying trapeze, are all accompanied by audio and a steady stream of independent Canadian music, selected from a huge bank of songs submitted by musicians from across the country.

Every week, the site features a new 20-song playlist, downloaded from one of Radio 3's other sites, http://www.newmusiccanada.com.

For folk, country and world music, tune in to http://www.rootsmusiccanada.com. Or for recordings of live concerts across Canada, go to http://www.justconcerts.com. The White Stripes in Vancouver anyone?

CBC Radio 3 also produces the veteran indie-music program Brave New Waves (weeknights on CBC Radio Two from midnight to 4 a.m.), plus the new CBC Radio 3 program (Saturday, 7:30 p.m. to 4 a.m., and Sunday, midnight to 4 a.m.).

The virtual network has been hailed as the vanguard of independent Canadian music. Some say it's a model for the future of broadcasting. But most visitors simply can't believe it's a part of the CBC.

"HOLY CRAP!" one listener calling himself G.K. exclaimed in an audience feedback form.

"This site is incredible," wrote another, named Dave. "I had no idea the CBC was producing material like this. It's so nice to see CBC getting back to ree-ali-tee."
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/


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Viruses Turn To Peer-To-Peer Nets
BBC

Virus writers are setting up peer-to-peer networks to help their malicious creations spread. The networks are being used to control thousands of innocent PCs that some virus programs have infected. The tactic is being used because peer-to-peer networks are hard to disrupt, making viruses using this technique hard to stop spreading. Security experts say peer-to-peer networks are likely to become more and more popular with virus writers.

Kevin Hogan, head of Symantec Security Response, said the good news about peer-to-peer virus networks was that they were rare. He said many peer-to-peer networks were often not very efficient at passing commands between member machines. Also many swap data via rarely used ports that most firewalls routinely block.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3409187.stm


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Easing of Internet Regulations Challenges Surveillance Efforts
Stephen Labaton

The Federal Communications Commission's efforts to reduce regulations over some Internet services have come under intense criticism from officials at law enforcement agencies who say that their ability to monitor terrorists and other criminal suspects electronically is threatened.

In a series of unpublicized meetings and heated correspondence in recent weeks, officials from the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration have repeatedly complained about the commission's decision in 2002 to classify high-speed Internet cable services under a looser regulatory regime than the phone system.

The Justice Department recently tried to block the commission from appealing a decision by a federal appeals court two months ago that struck down major parts of its 2002 deregulatory order. Justice Department officials fear that the deregulatory order impedes its ability to enforce wiretapping orders.

The department ultimately decided to permit the F.C.C. to appeal, but took the highly unusual step of withdrawing from the lawsuit, officials involved in the case said.

As a result of the commission's actions, said John G. Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general who has played a lead role for the Justice Department, some telecommunications carriers have taken the position in court proceedings that they do not need to make their networks available to federal agents for court-approved wiretapping.

"I am aware of instances in which law enforcement authorities have not been able to execute intercept orders because of this uncertainty," Mr. Malcolm said in an interview last Friday. He declined to provide further details.

The clash between the commission and officials from the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies pits two cherished policies of the Bush administration against each other. On one side stand those who support deregulation of major industries and the nurturing of emerging technologies; on the other are those who favor more aggressive law enforcement after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The outcome of the debate has far- reaching consequences.

Law enforcement officials say it will determine whether they can effectively monitor communications between suspects over new kinds of phone services that otherwise might allow them to escape detection. Also at stake is whether the government or industry will bear the considerable costs of developing the technology for such surveillance.

By contrast, some F.C.C. officials and telephone industry executives say that if the commission buckles to the other agencies and forces the industry to take on a host of expensive obligations the development of promising new communications services may be stalled or squelched for years to come.

"What's most scary for industry and perhaps some people at the F.C.C. is the notion that the architecture of the Internet will depend on the permission of the F.B.I.," said Stewart A. Baker, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency, which monitors foreign communications. Mr. Baker now represents a number of telecommunications companies as a partner at the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson.

Classifying Internet-based phone services as "telecommunications" would allow law enforcement officials to require companies to provide them with access to contemporaneous conversations on their networks under the 1994 wiretapping law.

But such a classification also imposes on the companies a host of onerous requirements under the 1996 act, including those intended to assure that telephones are universally available and that everyone has access to 911 emergency services. These obligations, purveyors of the new Internet telephone services say, are so expensive that they will deter their development.

Government and industry lawyers say that the commission could try to define the new services as "telecommunications" under the 1994 surveillance law and "information" under the 1996 act. But taking that potentially conflicting approach could undermine the F.C.C. in court in the inevitable legal challenges that would follow its rulings.

Mr. Powell, in a series of recent speeches and interviews, has suggested that the new technologies need to be classified as "information services" and thus be subjected to fewer regulations.

"Don't shove the round Internet into a square regulatory hole," Mr. Powell said at a luncheon appearance last week before the National Press Club. "We cannot contort the character of the Internet to suit our familiar notions of regulation. Do not dumb down the genius of the Net to match the limited visions of the regulator.

"To regulate the Internet in the image of a familiar phone service is to destroy its inherent character and potential," Mr. Powell said. Such new technologies empower people, "giving them more choice and control."

"And I think as consumers do more, governments do less, because we don't regulate our citizens."

In the same speech, Mr. Powell added, "We will need to ensure the legitimate concerns of public safety and law enforcement are addressed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/te...l?pagewanted=2


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Microsoft Lightens Up On Teen's mikerowesoft Site
Reuters

Microsoft Corp. indicated on Tuesday it might have overreacted to the Web site of Canadian teenager Mike Rowe who had added the word "soft" to his name and registered the address mikerowesoft.com.

"We take our trademark seriously, but in this case maybe a little too seriously," Microsoft spokesman Jim Desler said.

"We appreciate that Mike Rowe is a young entrepreneur who came up with a creative domain name, so we're currently in the process of resolving this matter in a way that will be fair to him and satisfy our obligations under trademark law," Desler said.

In November, Microsoft's Canadian lawyers demanded that Rowe, 17, change the name of his Internet site, claiming copyright infringement. They said they would pay Rowe, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia, $10 for his trouble.

But the high school student decided to fight back and his story got media attention to the extent that he was forced to shut down his Web site on Monday morning after getting about 250,000 hits. He managed to get the site back up after moving to a service provider with greater capacity.

"I never expected this type of feedback. I have put up a defense fund so that I can hire a lawyer to guide me through the process of talking to Microsoft.... I could never think this could happen, even in my wildest dreams," Rowe wrote on his site.

Rowe is demanding $10,000 from Microsoft to change the site's name.
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/040120/odd_c...crosoft_1.html


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Funny File

“RIAA Phone Call”


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ISPs Ignore RIAA's New P2P Ploy
Roy Mark

After an appeals court ruled that Internet service providers (ISPs) do not have to hand over names of suspected music pirates to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), ISPs are showing no interest in the RIAA's latest effort to enlist them in its fight against music piracy.

The RIAA now wants ISPs to notify its customers that are suspected of illegal downloading but not yet targeted for a lawsuit by the music industry.

"We would like to work with you to supplement our efforts by arranging for ISPs to notify their subscribers who are engaged in infringing activity that this conduct is illegal," the RIAA wrote to most of the nation's 50 largest ISPs in a Dec. 16 letter. "We are asking you to do this without providing us any identifying information about the subscriber."

Under the proposal, the RIAA would supply an identifying IP address of a suspected infringer to its ISP, which would then send a notice of infringement to the subscriber.

According to industry officials contacted by internetnews.com, not one ISP has agreed to cooperate with the music industry, which was dealt a major legal setback on Dec. 19 when an appeals court ruled the RIAA could not force ISPs to turn over the identities of alleged music pirates. The RIAA claimed it had subpoena power under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The decision reversed a January 2003 lower court decision upholding the DMCA subpoena power. Armed with that decision, the RIAA issued more than 3,000 subpoena requests to ISPs and filed nearly 400 copyright infringement actions in a highly publicized and controversial attack against individual downloaders. No subpoenas have been issued since the Dec. 19 decision.

The Dec. 16 letter, signed by RIAA CEO and Chairman Mitch Bainwol and president Cary Sherman, shows that the group wants to go a step further in order to stop illegal downloads of copyrighted material.

"Specifically, when we determine the IP address of an infringer, we would like to send you the IP address along with a Notice of Infringement that you would forward directly to the subscriber matching that address," the RIAA wrote. "You would not identify the subscriber to us. However, we believe if you forward the Notice to them it will dramatically increase awareness and effectively discourage continued infringement."

A music industry official, who asked not to be identified, said the proposed ISP infringement notice is intended to send an early warning to downloaders. Since a large of percentage of music downloading is done by teenagers, the RIAA hoped the notifications, which were to be sent to the account holders, might tip off parents as to their children's possible copyright infringements.

"Our hope is that the voluntary Notice program we are proposing will allow us to work cooperatively to educate the public and to reduce online copyright infringement," the letter states. "Not only will your participation help ensure that a vibrant and legitimate market for online music can succeed, but forwarding a Notice to your subscribers may also save them from becoming defendants in future copyright infringement lawsuits."

The RIAA declined to elaborate on the letter. "We feel the language of the letter speaks for itself," RIAA spokeswoman Amanda Collins said.

ISPs are cautious in their public responses, although all agreed they are under no legal obligation to comply with the RIAA request. The RIAA aknowledged that there is no law requiring the ISPs to send the notification letters.

"We are more than happy to talk with them (RIAA), but it has to as a part of a broader issue," said Verizon (Quote, Chart) vice president and general counsel Sarah Deutsch.

She noted that the RIAA has not said whether it will appeal the Dec. 19 decision to the Supreme Court and that the music trade group is still litigating the authority of the DMCA subpoena in other jurisdictions.

Earthlink (Quote, Chart) spokesperson David Blumenthal said his company would "evaluate the request, talk with the RIAA and decide what we think is best."

Nicholas Graham, a spokesman for AOL, said the company does not discuss "day-to-day letters from the RIAA."

MSN, the online network operated by Microsoft, did not respond to calls from internetnews.com.
http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3300211


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RIAA Slams Uploaders With Hundreds of New Suits
Ted Bridis

The recording industry on Wednesday sued 532 computer users it said were illegally distributing songs over the Internet, the first lawsuits since a federal appeals court blocked the use of special copyright subpoenas to identify those being targeted.

The action represents the largest number of lawsuits filed at one time since the trade group for the largest music labels, the Recording Industry Association of America, launched its legal campaign last summer to cripple Internet music piracy.

Music lawyers filed the newest cases against "John Doe" defendants - identified only by their numeric Internet protocol addresses - and expected to work through the courts to learn their names and where they live. All the defendants were customers of one of four Internet providers.

The 532 new defendants represent a tiny fraction of the estimated tens of millions of U.S. computer users who regularly download music illegally across the Internet, but the recording association described each one as a "major offender," distributing an average of more than 800 songs online. Each defendant faces potential civil penalties or settlements that could cost them thousands of dollars.

The resumed legal campaign was intended to discourage music fans emboldened by last month's federal appeals court decision, which dramatically increased the cost and effort to track computer users swapping songs online and sue them.

"Our campaign against illegal file sharers is not missing a beat," said Cary Sherman, president of the recording association. "The message to illegal file sharers should be as clear as ever."

All 532 lawsuits were filed in Washington and New York - home to Verizon Internet Services Inc., Time Warner Inc. and a few other prominent Internet providers - although the recording association said it expects to discover through traditional subpoenas that these defendants live across the United States.

"These are soccer moms, immigrant families, just ordinary citizens trying to reap the benefits of what appears to them to be nifty technology," said Jay Flemma, a New York lawyer who represented eight people sued in previous rounds by the music industry. "They're scared and they're frustrated and they really don't understand the nuances of copyright law."

The RIAA said that after its lawyers discover the identity of each defendant, they will contact each person to negotiate a financial settlement before amending the lawsuit to formally name the defendant and, if necessary, transfer the case to the proper courthouse. Settlements in previous cases have averaged $3,000 each.

Verizon had successfully challenged the industry's use of copyright subpoenas, one of its most effective tools to track illegal downloaders. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled last month that the recording industry can't use the subpoenas to force Internet providers to identify music downloaders without filing a lawsuit.

The court said the copyright subpoena process available under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act "betrays no awareness whatsoever that Internet users might be able directly to exchange files containing copyrighted works."

The appeals decision and Wednesday's new lawsuits threw into legal limbo hundreds of computer users previously identified as illegal downloaders.

The RIAA said that, for now, it will not file new lawsuits or demand new financial settlements against computer users whose names were previously turned over under the disputed copyright subpoenas. But it did not rule out filing "John Doe" lawsuits against those same computer users - even though it already knows their identities.

"We will not be making any use of the names previously disclosed to us," Sherman said.
http://view.atdmt.com/FUL/iview/ntni....300/01?click=


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Recording Industry Is Accusing 532 People of Music Piracy
John Schwartz

The music industry returned to the courthouse today with lawsuits against 532 people it is accusing of large-scale copyright infringement.

``Our campaign against illegal file sharers is not missing a beat,'' said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. ``The message to illegal file sharers should be as clear as ever.''

The lawsuits, with the largest group of defendants to date, is the third round filed against suspected file sharers since the industry began its campaign of lawsuits last summer. But these are the first lawsuits since a federal court of appeals declared that the industry's tactic of using special copyright subpoenas to unmask anonymous music traders was illegal.

The new lawsuits are ``John Doe'' lawsuits, an increasingly common type of litigation in the Internet age, which allow plaintiffs to sue people whose identities are not known. These suits identify the suspected file traders only by the numerical identifier, known as an Internet Protocol number, assigned to them by their Internet service provider.

In the previous lawsuits, the industry used a streamlined process under copyright law to determine the identities of copyright infringers by filing a simple form with a court clerk, instead of a using a more conventional subpoena that must be reviewed by a judge. But in December, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia declared that the provision of copyright law did not apply to file sharing over peer-to-peer computer networks.

Industry officials said when that decision was handed down that they would change their tactics to conform to the law, but that they would not change their overall strategy of suing to enforce copyright.

Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said the new round of lawsuits showed ``the record industry making good on its promise not to let up.''

Although the hundreds of defendants might live anywhere in the United States, the industry actually only filed four lawsuits today, three in New York courts and one in Washington, because those courts are close to major Internet service providers.

The industry are asking the courts to issue subpoenas to the Internet service providers to disclose their subscribers' names based on the Internet Protocol numbers. Once the subscriber's name is known, the original complaint will be amended to include the subscriber's name, or in some circumstances the cases will be re-filed or moved to other courts.

The industry lawyers said they would offer a defendants a chance to settle the lawsuit before amending the suit under the defendant's name.

Sarah Deutsch, vice president and associate general counsel for Verizon Communications, said her company would comply with the subpoenas. Verizon brought the suit against the Recording Industry Association of America to protect the identities of its Internet customers, and it insisted at the time that the industry should file John Doe suits instead of using the copyright subpoena shortcut.

The new wave of suits, however, might raise other issues, Ms. Deutsch said. ``Although in theory the John Doe lawsuit is more protective of consumers' interests, in this case a lot depends on whether the R.I.A.A. will push the envelope of what's permitted'' under the process, she said. ``If that doesn't seem kosher to a judge, they may well have a problem.''

The process of consolidating so many suits into actions for single courts and the grand scale of the suits have caused some legal experts to wonder if the courts are ready to deal with the challenge.

``The court system will have to decide how big an administrative burden it is willing to suffer to allow the industry to get these names and go after people,'' Mr. Zittrain of the Berkman Center at Harvard said.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has fought the industry's attempts to unmask suspected file traders through streamlined subpoenas, said, ``This is a better process, in the wrong direction.''

While the use of John Doe suits protects individual privacy and due process to a greater extent than the copyright subpoena system, she said, the recording industry is nonetheless pursuing a doomed strategy in trying to punish potential customers. Her group favors establishing a system of set fees in exchange for broad access to music like those used in the broadcast realm.

``They should be offering consumers the right to share files in exchange for fair payment like they offer radio stations,'' Ms. Cohn said.

Although the lawsuits have generated a harsh response and bad publicity, recording industry officials said that by other measures the industry's tough approach was proving successful. By some measures, file trading on peer-to-peer networks has dropped, at least in the United States, while awareness that trading music violates the law ``has shot through the roof,'' said Mitch Bainwol, chief executive of the Recording Industry Association.

At the same time, fledgling legitimate services like Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody from RealNetworks have grown, and music sales overall rose in the months after the industry filed its suits. According to Nielsen Soundscan, sales of compact discs last year declined 2 percent from the year before, a smaller drop than had been anticipated before the first round of lawsuits were filed in September.

``The debate isn't digital versus plastic,'' Mr. Bainwol said. ``It isn't old versus new. Here's what it is: Legitimate versus illegitimate.''

Mr. Sherman of the recording association said that regardless of whether file trading activity could be quashed, the industry would measure its progress ``by the success of legitimate services - and by that measure, we are delighted.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/21/bu...rtner =GOOGLE


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“RIAA goes after 532 unnamed file sharers.”

Dynamic IP’s? Cycle’em if you got’em baby. – Jack.


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The World's Most Dangerous Geek

Justin Frankel, the man who popularized file-sharing, has even bigger plans
David Kushner

The most dangerous man in music is ready to rock. It's Saturday night in San Francisco as Justin Frankel, gangly and bed-headed, ambles through the warehouse garage he aptly calls his "playground." He has come here, as he often does, to screw around on his drums or his Moog or electric guitar. But first he needs his fog machine.

"It's around here somewhere," he says, checking under his makeshift concert stage, a riser set against a wall postered with naked women. Then he looks under his Porsche, his VW van, his Swiss military truck, his Go Big scooter, his gutted Audi. He pokes his head behind a hacked Xbox, pulsing the word SeXbox onto a forty-eight-inch flat screen. No luck. "I don't know if I have any CO2 cartridges for it anyway," he says, bumming. Not to worry, there's always his light-show laser. A twenty-five-year-old with $100 million deserves his toys.

If you've downloaded a song in the past few years, it's in large part because of Justin Frankel. Seven years ago, when he was just eighteen, he invented Winamp, the first software program that made it easy to play digital music on your computer. A few years later, he created Gnutella: the vast, and vastly controversial, online network that lets you swap songs. The fact that Frankel secretly did the latter while working at America Online, the company behind his multimillion-dollar buyout, made him both the Internet's greatest punk -- and hero. Now he's about to punk the industry again.

That's because, after years of being muzzled by AOL for igniting the pirate nation, Frankel is breaking his silence. "This is an environment where I don't get to do what I want to do," he says. What he wants to do is even more radical than Gnutella. And to do this, he needs to break free. "Eighty percent of the people at AOL are clueless," he says. When I ask him if they have anything to fear by him leaving, he replies, half-jokingly, "If anything, they have more to fear when I'm working for them."

Frankel kills the lights and gets behind the drums. Despite my rusty chops, he encourages me to strap on an electric guitar. "Things I've done are often interpreted as anti-record-industry," he says, "but it's really about empowering people."

Back in 1996, when a seventeen-year-old Frankel downloaded his first song -- "Pepper," by the Butthole Surfers -- no one really cared about such things. Napster didn't exist. The Recording Industry Association of America hadn't sued a twelve-year-old girl in the projects for downloading, among other things, the theme song to the TV show Full House, and America Online hadn't started hemorrhaging 2 million subscribers a year.

The son of a lawyer and a postal worker, Frankel grew up in a mobile home in the hippie nexus of Sedona, Arizona, where he spent his afternoons taking apart old radios or constructing elaborate model airplanes. "Once Justin gets an idea for something," his father, Charles, says, "he finds a way to create it."

Unchallenged by classes, Frankel took control of his own education, largely directing his own home schooling. Around then, he also started messing with his brother's Atari 8-bit computer. By the time he started high school, he was a self-taught whiz. He ran the school's computer network and racked up a better than 4.0 GPA. In addition to writing an e-mail program for the school, Frankel coded software he called Happy Bug, which would log the keystrokes of teachers at their machines. "It would show you everything they typed," he recalls. But he didn't create the program to steal tests or eavesdrop, he says. "It was more like, 'Cool, look what I can do.'"

After graduating from high school in 1996, he enrolled at the University of Utah, but he clashed with his more traditional computer-science professors and dropped out after two semesters. A few months later, he uploaded Winamp (the name is short for Windows Amplifier). With its equalizer, playlist features and trippy visuals, Winamp trumped every MP3 player out there. In a year and a half, 15 million people downloaded the program. A sizable portion even sent in the voluntary ten-dollar shareware fee that Frankel had requested, reluctantly, on his parents' advice. With tens of thousands of dollars coming in every month, his dad all but abandoned his law practice to help field calls from companies that wanted to cash in on the outfit Justin nihilistically called Nullsoft, a play on Microsoft.

But Justin, despite buying himself a used turbo Audi, was in no rush to sell out. Early on, he had included the tag line "Winamp whips the llama's ass" (riffed from a line in a song by the late schizophrenic Chicago street singer Wesley Willis) on every player. When a pharmaceutical company offered big money to adapt Winamp for use in sales presentations -- on the condition that he remove the tag line -- Frankel balked, and the deal fell apart.

Soon, Frankel coded another program, Shoutcast, do-it-yourself broadcasting software that let people "stream" their own audio over the Net. By 1999, Winamp and Shoutcast put digital music -- and its young creator -- on the map. And America Online wanted in, to the tune of $100 million. Frankel responded with two words: "Holy crap!"

In addition to acquiring Nullsoft in the summer of 1999, the company paid $300 million for Spinner, the leading online-radio service at the time. These were the boom years, and the message was loud and clear: The future of music was on the "information superhighway," and Justin Frankel, hired to further develop Winamp as the standard MP3 player, was going to drive it. And AOL was going to own it. In a statement, AOL's chief operating officer, Bob Pittman, the guy who had previously created MTV, trumpeted, "Combining these leading Internet music brands with the audience reach of our brands will lift music online to the next level of popularity." He had no idea.

"All right, Radiohead!" says frankel, shuffling to a row of CDs inside Amoeba Music, a sprawlingly hip record store in Haight-Ashbury. He's wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and a black leather jacket. He has the patchy Chia-like beard of a dude who doesn't give a shit about patchy Chia-like beards.

"When Hail to the Thief leaked on the Internet," Frankel says, "I was like, 'Right on!' But I still bought the CD. I think it's wrong to download music and never give anything to the artist. But if you download something and you're like, 'This sucks,' and you never listen to it again, I don't think there's anything wrong with that." A true child of Sedona, Frankel maintains a heartfelt sense of morality and karma. It's this passion to do right by music fans that inspired him to create the very thing that so many people consider to be wrong: Gnutella.

Gnutella's birth came at the end of what Frankel now calls his "very short honeymoon" with America Online. At first, it seemed like the ultimate setup: good money, a nice office and the freedom to work on the next version of Winamp. But it didn't take long for things to sour. Almost immediately after the deal was struck, persnickety hackers online cried "sellout." Frankel's girlfriend broke up with him because, he says, "she got freaked out by the money." And the big, open office Nullsoft and Spinner shared in San Francisco got Dilbertized by AOL. "Three months after we arrived," Frankel says, "they built all these cubicles, and it sucked."

It was inside his cubicle one day that Frankel first saw Napster. File-trading wasn't new. But Shawn Fanning, Napster's nineteen-year-old creator, had coded a clever piece of software that made this geekish pastime user-friendly. "When I first saw Napster, I thought, 'Wow, that's pretty cool,' " Frankel says, " 'but how will they keep from getting sued?'"

Napster had a fatal flaw. Fanning was using a bank of his company's own computers to facilitate all those Metallica songs flying back and forth online, and Fanning was setting himself up to profit from copyright infringement. "Napster was a company built on people doing things that are illegal," Frankel says. "That's wrong." Rob Lord, who had joined Nullsoft's team, even tipped off the RIAA to Napster.

Frankel decided to "take the wind out of Napster's sails." His solution: an online network that could let people trade all kinds of files -- songs, videos, whatever -- in a decentralized environment. By connecting people's computers directly with one another, they could trade data without having to go through some company's rack of servers. Best of all, Frankel thought, such technology would be good karma, too. "I would not be getting any money from it," he says. "I'd be giving power to people, and what can be wrong with that?"

Frankel got to work on what became Gnutella, named after the chocolate-hazelnut spread and, more tellingly, the "GNU" free-software project. He coded fast and on the sly. "I didn't want AOL to find out," he says, "because they'd prevent it from happening."

On March 14th, 2000, Frankel and Tom Pepper, a Nullsoft cohort, uploaded an early version of Gnutella, with a note: "Justin and Tom work for Nullsoft, makers of Winamp and Shoutcast. See? AOL can bring you good things!" The next day, Frankel was with his parents touring Alcatraz, appropriately enough, when his cell phone rang. It was Pepper. "Dude," Pepper said, "you better get back to the office."

By the time Frankel returned, he says, "the shit had hit the fan." The timing of Gnutella couldn't have been worse from the company's point of view. AOL was in the midst of trying to merge with Time Warner, which was involved in suing Napster for facilitating copyright infringement.

AOL ordered him to take the program down immediately, and the company put out a statement calling Gnutella an "unauthorized freelance project." But Gnutella, unlike Napster, couldn't be stopped. More than 10,000 people had downloaded the beta software that first day, and intrepid hackers had gone to work to reverse-engineer it and throw it into the hands of the open-source community, laying the foundation for BearShare, Morpheus, LimeWire and other file-trading wares.

With Gnutella, Napster became almost irrelevant. There was no company to sue, no computers to shut down. AOL had paid Frankel $100 million for a slice of the future, but Frankel decided he'd rather give the future away.

After that, Frankel says, AOL kept him on "a very short leash," steering him away from interviewers and encouraging him to focus on Winamp, the program they paid him 100 million friggin' dollars to work on in the first place. Not surprisingly, he acted out. In August 2000, he uploaded an MP3 search engine. AOL took it down. The next month, he uploaded to a secret section of the Nullsoft site a program called AIMazing, which would replace the banner ads in AOL's Instant Messenger with an image of a musical heartbeat. Frankel called it nothing more than "a cute innovation." The Wall Street Journal called Frankel "AOL's loose cannon."

AOL cracked down, again -- this time requiring Frankel to seek approval before blogging online. "We fought off the AOL bullshit as much as possible," he says. When the company tried to insist that an AOL icon instantly appear on a user's desktop during a Winamp installation, Frankel hit the roof. "I'd be like, 'Look, our users don't want to use AOL!' " he says. " 'They think AOL sucks!'"

But Winamp was having problems of its own, losing ground to Windows Media and RealPlayer, both of which incorporated video streaming. Nullsoft attempted to re-establish the brand with Winamp 3.0. But the new version was bloated, if not somewhat embarrassing -- particularly for Frankel, who prided himself on lean, simple wares. On Frankel's urging, Nullsoft trimmed back the next version of the player, calling it Winamp 2.9.

Around that time, Frankel began tinkering with a new kind of software. Taking the name from an underground postal system in the Thomas Pynchon novel The Crying of Lot 49, Frankel created Waste: a "private workspace," as he calls it, that allows small groups of friends to trade files without being as conspicuous as those on the larger peer-to-peer networks.

Sometimes called a "darknet," it's a kind of mini-Gnutella, a small, password-protected file-trading network. Because you can't get in unless you're invited, even the most intrepid hackers -- or recording-industry lawyers -- would have trouble figuring out when or where a Waste system is running.

This time around, Frankel took the high road. He tried pitching Waste to AOL, but after the company dragged its feet for months, he got fed up. On May 28th, 2003, four years to the date that he was acquired, Frankel rebelled again -- uploading Waste as a way to force AOL to deal with it, and him, once and for all. "AOL as a company should not just sit on their asses and try to keep from losing as many subscribers as it can," he says. "I mean, I'm a stockholder of the company. I want them innovating. I want them doing things that are good for the world and being socially conscious."

AOL responded by taking the program down. (AOL had no comment about Waste for this story.) Days later, Frankel took it to the people one last time. "For me, coding is a form of self-expression," he wrote online late one night. "The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leav [sic]. . . . "

Shut your mouth! Shut your mouth! Raise your hand if you need to take a piss!"

Night is falling on Frankel's warehouse, and we're midway through an impromptu jam onstage. Frankel's half brother Brennan, another Nullsoft staffer, is belting out these lyrics for a song about obedience and oppression. When I joke that it sounds like it's inspired by real life, no one argues. "America Online as a company is all right," Frankel says diplomatically, "but big companies have limitations about what they can or can't do."

A few weeks after I visit, AOL proved his point once again. On December 9th, the company shut down the San Francisco office that once housed Nullsoft and Spinner, and laid off 450 employees, including Frankel's half brother. The next week, Frankel uploaded what could be his swan song as an AOL employee: Winamp, version 5.0. In the near future, he says, he's going to have a sit-down with his boss and enthusiastically return to a riskier way of life. This could include some new programs such as a free and open solution for mobile text messaging -- a kind of Gnutella spin on BlackBerry -- or some other stuff that he won't reveal. "Those are the really good ideas," he says.

In many ways, Frankel's future encapsulates the debate over the future of the Internet itself. Does it become just a distribution system for corporate product or more of a way to subvert that corporate control? For Frankel, subversion is in the eye of the beholder. "The question is," he says, "do you think people are ultimately good or bad? Do they want to do the right thing, or do they want to do what's good for them and fuck everyone else? I hope it's not the latter."

With our song done, Frankel and Brennan tweak the mix into shape. "I'll put this online," Frankel tells me, cracking a grin, "with your permission, of course."
http://www.rollingstone.com/features...n.asp?pid=2763


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Music Fans Find Online Jukebox Half-Empty
Frank Ahrens

The world's largest music company had been hectoring rock singer Tom Petty since last summer. You've got a big and popular catalogue of albums, Universal Music Group said. We've got to put them up for sale on the Internet -- they're being traded free every day on the Web and we're all losing money.

He should have been an easy sell. The Internet-savvy Petty let fans download one of his songs back in 1999. After some haggling, he and Universal agreed to make almost all of his songs available for purchase online.

But Petty's fan's did not get everything they wanted. Online buyers will not get their hands on Petty's outtake songs, studio tunes that rarely made it onto albums and are craved most by many hardcore fans. Petty controls the rights to those songs, unlike the bulk of his songs, which are owned by Universal, and he held them back for fear of diminishing the value of a 1995 CD boxed set that included them.

The Petty case underlines the complexity of buying and selling music online. A hornet's nest of performance and publishing copyright laws, marketing decisions, artists' egos and negotiating power plays can stop people from legally buying songs on the Internet, just as millions are trying to do so for the first time.

One of the hotter holiday gifts was the iPod, Apple Computer Inc.'s MP3 player, a device about the size of a cigarette pack that can hold as many as 10,000 digital songs. The iPod and other MP3 players are used to play music downloaded from Internet services such as Apple's iTunes, launched last April.

By the end of 2003, iTunes had sold more than 30 million songs at 99 cents each. Similar services, such as the revamped Napster, BuyMusic.com, Musicmatch, Rhapsody and even one on the Web site of Wal-Mart sprang up, some with lower prices, most with strong sales numbers.

But fans who venture onto any of the pay music sites will not find the most popular band ever, the Beatles. They will not find other top-selling acts, such as the Dave Mathews Band, Garth Brooks, the Grateful Dead, AC/DC and the Cars.

They will find that top-selling acts Madonna and Red Hot Chili Peppers sell their songs by the album, but not as singles.

They will find some musicians on one service, but not on others. They will find puzzling choices: Led Zeppelin fans can buy a 47-minute spoken-word biography of the band online, but no Zeppelin songs because the band has not licensed them for sale on the Internet.

Petty's fans, however, are mostly happy now. Fans will be able to buy and download beloved hits such as "Don't Do Me Like That" and "You Got Lucky." The songs went up for sale on Napster last Monday.

"Basically, it was Universal that was driving me crazy for the last six months" to put Petty's catalogue on the Internet, said Tony Dimitriades, Petty's manager for the past 28 years. "From our point of view, we wanted to make sure the business model had no unfair implications for the fans or for Tom."

But Napster had no say in the decision by Petty and his management to hold back the outtake songs.

"I got a call from Universal Music Group saying, 'You can't make these songs available,' " said Aileen Atkins, Napster's chief counsel and negotiator.

Some artists, such as cerebral Brit-rockers Radiohead, believe their albums should be listened to in their entirety and will not sell them online as singles.

Securing rights to the band's songs reflect the many cracks that exist in a system that encompasses sprawling music companies, far-flung publishers, temperamental artists and mega-retailers to be on the same page. Until last Monday, several songs from Radiohead's "Kid A" CD were for sale for 88 cents each on Wal-Mart's online music site. A day after Radiohead's label, EMI, was informed of that by a reporter, the singles were gone, replaced with a note reading, "song not sold individually." EMI said it noticed the Wal-Mart transgression the previous week.

Madonna may be the ultimate singles singer and is also among the most powerful. She can dictate that her albums be sold online as whole works or not at all.

"There is the philosophy that it cannibalizes album sales," said Caresse Henry, Madonna's manager for the past 14 years. Madonna probably will begin selling singles online in the coming months, Henry said, but maybe not through one of the existing services.

Another factor holding up Madonna's singles: royalty rates. Musicians should be paid a higher royalty for songs sold online than those sold in CD or album form, Henry said, because in the online world the record companies do not bear the costs associated with manufacturing CDs. When iTunes sells a song for 99 cents, 70 cents is paid to the artist's record company. The artist typically gets 10 to 15 cents; the songwriter, about 8 cents.

Though Henry said she is not happy that her client loses money to free online song sharing, "thank goodness Madonna has had a successful career and made money."

Wal-Mart and BuyMusic have agreed to Madonna's terms -- her recent "American Life" album is sold online -- but iTunes and Napster have not. Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs is so adamant about selling singles, as is Napster, that he would rather keep Madonna off iTunes until she agrees to sell her songs individually.

"It's not that we don't respect the concept of the album as art, but particularly in light of fact that all the tracks are available individually on every illegal free service, it doesn't seem to make sense that they're not available in other than on album format on the legitimate services where the artist actually makes money," said Napster's Atkins. "To compete with the illegal sites, we need to at least offer consumers what they can get there, so maybe the artists have to look at that and make different decisions."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Jan18.html


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In case you missed it…

Free Album Downloads!
Press Release

From October - We at Go-Kart Records want to make it perfectly clear that the RIAA does not represent the views of all record labels. So, we are putting our music where our mouth is to prove a point. We believe that if you like the music you hear you will support it by going to shows, telling your friends, and buying the bands CDs. With this in mind, we are allowing people to download some of our current releases AT NO CHARGE. In other words, we are essentially GIVING these albums away!

We feel that only by embracing technology can we gain from it, and that a battle like the one that the RIAA is fighting can simply not be won.

We do not believe that online downloads are all that is hurting the music industry. It is a combination of problems, CD burning being the most injurious. Of course, major labels will never take action against the manufacturers of burnable CDs, since in some cases they would then have to sue themselves (why would Sony sue Sony?) Instead they are going after the music fans, whom they hope to intimidate and extort.

We also feel that the lack of original and meaningful music is part of the major labels' problem. Simply put, if there is better music, people will spend money to own it instead of downloading or burning it. The success of Itunes proves that people are willing to buy music online if it is delivered in an intelligent way that is respectful of the consumer.

The major labels control almost all the means of exposure available today. How can you sell records without exposure? Radio is controlled through payola (or its modern form, consultants), the print media is controlled through quid-pro-quo agreements of ads for coverage and vice versa, retail is controlled by co-op dollars (which also includes in-store play for videos), and they even buy their artists' way onto opening slots on tours. So, with a few exceptions, the new music that most people are exposed to is controlled by the five major labels. But they CAN'T control what people download. All they can try to do is control people's access to MP3s, or scare them out of downloading music altogether!

These songs are all RIAA safe! If you like what you hear, please make a donation (see the PayPal button), check out the bands' shows, and spread the word. If you don't, what have you lost?

To read a more in depth article about why we feel the RIAA is wrong please click here http:// www.gokartrecords.com/freedownload/riaa.php and please send this email and/or the open letter to the RIAA to as many people as you can. Only by educating each other can we hope to take advantage of the technical innovations and not run scared from them.

To read an interview discussing this with Greg from Go-kart go here http://www.openp2p.com/pub/ a/p2p/2003/09/25/gokart.html

Also, make sure to check out our upcoming release, the first commercially sold MP3 Sampler called GO-KART MP300 RACEWAY featuring 150 bands and 300 songs. Visit www.gokartrecords.com/mp300 for a demonstration.
http://www.gokartrecords.com/__BOARD...y;threadid=637


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Software Piracy Is in Resurgence, With New Safeguards Eroded by File Sharing
Douglas Heingartner

LONDON - Inside a nondescript office building here, investigators for the Business Software Alliance are working to track down software pirates around the world. To help maintain secrecy, they often rely on several computers running on different operating systems, with special programs allowing them to switch Internet service providers every 60 seconds.

"I can be perceived to be in China in one minute and in the U.S. the next minute, so they wouldn't be able to track it back to me,'' said one investigator, who allowed a reporter to follow his activity on the condition he not be identified.

Long before downloading music and movies became a hobby of teenagers and others, the software industry was struggling to keep digital pirates at bay. Even in the pre- Internet 1980's, introducing software was fraught with peril.

"If it didn't have copy protection, you lost that market, and you would never get it back," said Deanna Slocum, an antipiracy manager at Macromedia, which makes multimedia business software.

Since then, the industry has developed techniques to safeguard programs and thwart pirates, and global software piracy rates have declined somewhat. Yet the advent of peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing programs like Kazaa is quickly eroding those gains. As many file-swapping advocates note, P2P is agnostic - it embraces all digital files, be they Beastie Boys songs, knitting patterns or high-end computer programs.

The amount of software piracy attributable to Internet file sharing is difficult to determine, in part because not every downloaded file represents a successful installation. But William Plante, director for worldwide security at Symantec, estimated that roughly half of the illegal copies of his company's software, which focuses mostly on protecting computers against viruses, stem from electronic downloads.

The Business Software Alliance estimated global losses from all software piracy at just over $13 billion in 2002. The global software market that year was valued at $152 billion, according to Ovum, a research and consulting firm.

"Internet piracy is the fastest-growing form of piracy," said Jeffrey Hardee, a vice president of the alliance. "It's really quite phenomenal.''

Why now? One reason is the ascendance of high-speed Internet access, which makes downloading giant files feasible for millions more people. Convenience is another: the easy use and availability of free peer-to-peer software largely makes it unnecessary to learn older and more complex file-exchange systems like FTP or Usenet.

"Increasingly we're finding that people are skipping straight to P2P," the investigator for the alliance said.

The organization, which has three antipiracy monitoring centers - one here, one in Washington and one in Singapore - is loath to have the exact locations of these operations disclosed, because its investigators are sometimes subject to threats from those who object to their antipiracy efforts.

Sitting at a computer in the center, the software investigator quickly spotted a P2P site offering multiple versions of popular (and expensive) programs like Macromedia's Dreamweaver, Adobe's GoLive and even a full version of Microsoft's Office XP. Many contain text files that explain how to install the software, which has been "cracked'' by hackers to defeat its copy protection, making the process almost foolproof.

Beyond relying on an automated Web crawler that scours the Internet for unauthorized files, alliance investigators also try to snare pirates by gradually building relationships with them, using assumed identities. After pinpointing a transgressor's Internet address, they send a note to the company that provides Internet access to the pirate, requesting that the files or sites be removed. The responsiveness varies, but service providers on good terms with the software alliance often comply "within a few hours," the investigator said.

But as some pirates find better ways to mask their identities, it is becoming harder to track them. "They're truly ghosts on the Internet now,'' Mr. Plante of Symantec said. "They're virtually untraceable."

Another problem is users' motivation. Fly-by-night Web stores that sell pirated software on CD's and DVD's are a nagging reality, but many pirates are in it for the kicks.

"It's about getting recognition," said Drew McManus, who directs Adobe's antipiracy operation. "It's about being the first or the best at cracking."

Some are so fast that pirated versions of new programs often hit the P2P networks before they are officially released, a problem that also plagues Hollywood.

Adding to the worries is the relatively recent appearance on P2P sites of high-end business software like AutoCAD, an industrial design program that can sell for more than $3,000. "You basically need to be trained in that in order to use it," the alliance investigator said. "It's a professional program."

How are the software companies fighting back? "I don't think anything is off the table," said Robert M. Kruger, a vice president of the software alliance. "You're competing against free, and that's hard to do."

One approach is mandatory online activation, which Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, Macromedia and others, have introduced for some products. Software pirates have already cracked many of these new registration methods, a familiar development in the antipiracy battles.

"Yes, you can crack it," Mr. Plante said, but he added, "It's extremely inconvenient to try and use the cracked version."

Smaller software firms that cannot afford pricey copy protection technology sometimes adopt an ambivalent attitude toward peer-to-peer theft. Edwin de Koning, a Dutch programmer, created with a colleague, Bart van der Ploeg, a video mixing program called Resolume that sells for about $200. The program, which has attracted a few hundred buyers a year, recently began proliferating on the P2P networks.

That "hits us in the wallet directly," Mr. De Koning said. "But in the end, there's also a positive side. There's more and more video software coming out, so in the beginning we want to get a big share of that. If there weren't P2P software, I think we would be less popular."

Building a customer base in part through illegal copying is anathema to many in the industry. "I strongly take exception with someone that would promote the idea of seeding the market with illegal copies so that they could somehow get future revenue," Mr. Plante said. "That's just a flawed business model."

A more nuanced solution revolves around meeting the P2P networks halfway. In 2002, for example, Microsoft used the Kazaa network to help start its media player, which is free software for anyone who has the Windows XP operating system. "By promoting Media Player 9 through P2P networks, Microsoft is embracing the promise of P2P technology, while respecting the importance of preserving intellectual property," Tim Cranton, a Microsoft lawyer, said in an e-mail response.

Mr. McManus of Adobe says he is also intrigued by the potential of P2P. "We've actually been looking at Kazaa specifically," he said. "Adobe's always interested in innovation, and if there's ever a more efficient way for our customers to get our software, I think we have to look at it."

But Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, warns: "One reason not to do that is that it helps legitimize the existence of these services. It's the same argument that allows you to buy a crowbar, despite the fact that it can be used in a burglary."

The P2P proprietors say they would welcome more cooperation with the software industry. Michael Weiss, the chief executive of StreamCast Networks, which makes Morpheus, a popular P2P program, has been challenging copyright law since he opened one of the world's first video stores in 1978.

The software industry, he said, "has to embrace the technology, just like the movie studios ended up embracing VCR's." He said he would "love to engage in discussions with the companies that want to," but added that in some respects their participation was immaterial.

"This is not going to go away," he said. "Technology always wins out. You would think the software companies would know that more than Hollywood."

Software files, however, may by nature be impervious to some of the problems that beset the entertainment industry's movie and music files. "Software is not just the code that comes with it," said Ms. Slocum of Macromedia. "Software is also the technical support, the customer service, the upgrades" - extras that are largely unavailable to users of illegal versions.

Eric Garland, chief executive of BigChampagne, which monitors file swapping for the entertainment industries, said that music and video accounted for 88 percent of the files on P2P networks (the other 12 percent consists of software and "everything else.") He says he sees this moment as a chance for the software industry to flourish where the entertainment industry has floundered.

"It's the carrot, not the stick,'' Mr. Garland said. "The only way to really marginalize online piracy is to make online retail so transparent, so convenient and so appealing that when you're faced with two icons - one that's an unknown, perhaps virus-infested crack on Kazaa, and the other that's double-click to download the legitimate version" - users will naturally turn to the official version.

In the meantime, the software alliance's sleuths have plenty to keep them busy. The organization recently discovered a P2P site, whose name the investigator declined to make public, that offers verified downloads of innumerable programs and can even locate files invisible to other P2P programs. You will not find it through Google.

"It's incredible how much you can get," he said. "It's too easy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/te...rtne r=GOOGLE


For some possibilities on this puzzling P2P site mentioned above check out the thread “Mystery P2P”. - Jack.


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Beyond File Sharing: An Interview with Sharman Networks CTO Phil Morle
Kirk L. Kroeker

"I have the benefit of many years thinking about P2P and its potential, and [the RIAA has] not got past the stage of fear," Phil Morle, CTO of Sharman Networks, told TechNewsWorld. "I am naturally disappointed that we are all wasting time and money on futile legal battles. P2P will endure."

The legal and social debate over the legitimacy of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications has made headlines since the days of Napster and Hotline -- and continues to be a major issue today. While there are certainly other hotspots in the tech industry, the P2P debate serves as a focal point for some of the most important issues of the day, such as security, personal privacy and copyright law.

On one side of this debate are applications like LimeWire, Morpheus, Bearshare and Kazaa , whose makers say their products have many uses and that they promote the legitimate ones and are not responsible for any illegitimate activities. On the other side are entertainment companies that see those products as taking revenue from music labels and artists. The two sides have waged an ongoing war in the courtroom, which continues unabated and in which consumers now find themselves as participants.

One can argue about the legality of such applications, but there is no debating their popularity. Sharman Networks' Kazaa P2P application has been downloaded more than 315 million times, making it -- according to Download.com -- the most-downloaded software in the world. Clearly, demand for these applications is still strong, despite the Recording Industry Association of America's push to squelch P2P file-sharing activities.

TechNewsWorld turned to Phil Morle, CTO of Sharman Networks, for an exclusive interview to talk about the future of file sharing and the latest developments in the world of P2P.


TechNewsWorld: Please tell us a little about Sharman Networks and what your role is there.

Phil Morle: Peer-to-peer software is an evolutionary development and not a revolutionary one. It is a very natural direction for technology to take. Every day, more people move more files, and these files get larger. Simultaneously, the same people own increasingly powerful computers that are underutilized.

Network resources are like any other resource that is needed by society, but if the Net were our water supply, our reservoirs would be depleted more quickly than we could build them while the entire population would have enormous, unused tanks of water in their backyards that stagnated. Sharman was formed to connect these water tanks to ensure that no one goes thirsty and the cost of water remains low.

Our main priority has been on solutions for media distribution. This area has seen explosive growth in file sizes and the demand for files. As media companies put their digital catalogues online, they are going to need the resource capacity to meet the demand. By using peer-to-peer for both streamed media and direct downloads, online distributors can save about 90 percent of the cost of traditional methods -- and in many cases can offer more robust, faster delivery through the intelligence of the peer-to-peer network.

We have been proving the model for the past two years, demonstrating that bands can make it big, movies can be released and game publishers can do excellent business over P2P. My role as CTO is to collaborate with our international technology group and the other areas of our business to develop Kazaa technology to meet Sharman's vision for P2P.

TNW: What would you say the biggest technical challenges are right now in the world of file sharing?

Morle: The benefits of distributed peer-to-peer networks create unique challenges that are not present in centralized environments. Users of the Kazaa application itself -- and not Sharman Networks -- manage the files on the P2P network, and our challenge is to give them the tools to manage it effectively. The network can only be created, organized and made safe by the users.

For example, Kazaa is the only file-sharing application with integrated antivirus technology. Using P2P technology, we push the latest virus definitions to users at an incredible rate. Users effectively give the definitions to each other. Automatically, they protect each other from viruses and clean the experience for other users at the same time.

We are making good progress on the security challenges. We are also looking at collaborative filtering techniques to empower users to manage the files that are available so that they are collectively responsible for removing bad files and categorizing and labeling good files effectively.

An example here is the metadata in digital photographs. There are billions of photos out there waiting to be shared by their creators, but they are lacking detailed metadata. We are looking at ways to facilitate fun and easy management of metadata by all users. The more complete the metadata, the better the search experience.

TNW: What about the most exciting technologies right now?

Morle: I am most excited about magnet links at the moment. Read more about these at magnetlink.org. Magnet links are an open standard that we have adopted to allow bloggers and other Web site creators to add P2P links to their Web sites or as links in an e- mail.

For example, if a blogger creates a short film but has a very limited bandwidth allowance, he or she can add a magnet link enabling consumers of the blog to download it from other peers using a P2P application like Kazaa instead of downloading directly from blogger.com. This breaks out file sharing beyond the application into the Internet at large.

When we released magnet links, we also released Kapsules. We are only just beginning to imagine the possibilities of these. They are basically ways of collecting distributed files together. When a user downloads a Kapsule, they have all the information they need to download all the files referenced in that Kapsule automatically across multiple sources. A client could try to search Kazaa for each file and -- if it fails -- try another P2P network, and if that fails then fall back to a Web server . With Kapsules, a world dominated by individual files gains the concept of collections of files, presented in context. We are considering making the Kapsule file format an open standard.

From this we can extend the application of Kapsules into a way of digitally packaging a collection with a multimedia presentation layer and value-add functionality, distributed playlists, distributed slide-shows and so forth. On a larger scale, we are also seeing the emergence of the next generation of P2P network layers and really exciting products that will use those layers.

I think 2004 will be the year that P2P becomes more than file sharing. Skype is a superb example of a P2P technology of this kind being applied to create tremendous value to users and businesses. Skype is a completely distributed VoIP solution built completely on P2P technology from lessons learned building Kazaa.

TNW: Would you say that Morpheus is your biggest competitor right now? Are there other clients, like LimeWire, that you admire or are partnering with for future developments?

Morle: Morpheus ceased to be our main competitor, or indeed a trusted solution for users, a long time ago. eDonkey/Overnet is a strong competitor. They have cool technology and millions of users. I am consistently impressed with their releases that show a passion for P2P and what it can accomplish.

I am also surprised that Shareaza stays under the radar. Mike, who develops it, is a very ambitious young man, and I have to wonder when he sleeps. Shareaza is a well-made application that is a pleasure to use. His singular vision shines in Shareaza. He is also in Australia, demonstrating that the country is a center of P2P innovation today.

These talented groups have their sights firmly set on the file-sharing phenomenon as it is today -- but we are past that. We are focused on the future of file-sharing and the extension of P2P into next-generation consumer Internet tools. I am confident that we will continue to out-innovate these great companies in 2004.

TNW: While the latest Kazaa client declares that it is free of spyware, the client has been criticized for including spyware in the past. And now that the current client includes software that would be better described as adware, has Sharman Networks been listening to users about the spyware issue? And do you anticipate a time when the client will be adware-free?

Morle: We listen to users in a big way on this issue. Spyware is like the bogeyman of the Internet. The phrase gets thrown out there to strike fear into the hearts of users, but it is just a phantom -- a character in scary stories. It exists, but it is rare and certainly not distributed with KMD. Nothing goes into KMD without going through a very detailed acceptance testing procedure that ensures that the integrity of a user's privacy remains intact. No way will we allow anything that spies on users into our installer.

Ads are necessary for us to run our business -- as necessary as they are in modern television, radio and print. Viewing the ads is the payment for the free software users enjoy. We do install some advertising software, or adware, with Kazaa, but we are careful to keep this to a minimum. We install GAIN (which displays contextual advertising) and PerfectNav (which suggests Web sites to look at if a Web site cannot be found) only. eDonkey, as an example of another mainstream P2P application, installs Webhancer, TopText, New.Net and nCase.

Altnet is sometimes incorrectly cited as adware. This software is the P2P software that powers our premium content delivery. Altnet TopSearch displays premium content to users in search results in the form of gold icons, and Altnet PeerPoints gives users redeemable points (like frequent flyer points) for sharing premium files. Over time we are migrating from adware to other revenue streams as those revenue streams mature. We have so few adware products because revenue generated through content distribution is growing very well.

TNW: What is your general feeling about the RIAA?

Morle: Mostly disappointment. I have the benefit of many years thinking about P2P and its potential, and they have not got past the stage of fear. I am naturally disappointed that we are all wasting time and money on futile legal battles when everyone could be growing their businesses and benefiting users today. P2P will endure. We at Sharman have great confidence in this, and in the future we will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about, as we do today with videocassettes.

TNW: How about personal privacy on P2P networks? Is Sharman Networks planning any privacy-protection measures like those found in some Kazaa Lite modules?

Morle: Where I differ from some other file-sharing CTOs is that I don't believe users have anything to hide. Creating default "darknets" through technology defines the purpose of the network as illegal and encourages a certain kind of activity. This is not what we are here for because P2P is an enabling technology for all and not somewhere to hide. The modules found in Kazaa Lite that claim to bring privacy to the user can cause problems with other Internet applications, decrease the performance of the software and are ultimately possible to work around.

Kazaa users are only identifiable by IP number in exactly the same way that Outlook users and Mozilla users are. The rights of an organization to subpoena ISPs for the identity of the user connected to that IP has just been rightfully overturned. This, of course, is a great victory for a user's right to privacy. The only privacy issue in Kazaa was the capacity to view the entire contents of a user's shared folder. This functionality is now disabled by default to prevent abuse and has been disabled for some time. We want to put the users in charge of their own privacy.

TNW: What do you see as the biggest threat to P2P technology?

Morle: I don't think there is any great threat to P2P technology. There is so much value in the technology and so many groups and individuals making great P2P software, I am not sure what force could stop it. The greatest threat would be that the application of P2P technology does not meet its potential because it is resisted by some.

TNW: What do you think the best use of P2P technology is?

Morle: Today I would say it is highly optimized for the delivery of media files at a price that's right for end users. We will see more and more games, movies and music collections distributed across the P2P nets. Recently, we have become very good at distributing movies. In the next 10 years, we will see P2P becoming more pervasive, used for many different P2P applications, even built into phones and TVs.

The great thing about P2P is its simplicity. This is what makes it so democratic. Anybody can just drag a file into a special folder and make it available to the world. Written a book? Just drag and drop. Launching your band? Just copy to your shared folder.

TNW: The age of grid computing is upon us. P2P applications like Kazaa have demonstrated the power of distributed computing. What do you see as the role of Kazaa in the future of distributed computing?

Morle: The file-sharing era has given us the opportunity to get the resource-sharing relationship right with millions of users. It is actually quite difficult for users to understand that their resources could be used when they participate in a grid.

This is something that I don't think many of the more theoretical grid-computing projects have put enough effort into considering. It needs to be developed with respect for users with the tools in place for them to be in complete control. They must also feel that they are getting back from the grid at least as much as they are putting in -- meaning costs are reduced or extra value can be had.

P2P is more than file sharing, and we are looking at many applications for it. We have the practical experience of making software that millions of users connect to at the same time. I expect we will continue to take a leadership position as the market blossoms.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/32641.html


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Big and getting bigger.

BitTorrent Statistics
Thomas Mennecke

BitTorrent has exploded onto the P2P community with a fanfare that is rarely matched. Considering the efficiency and resourcefulness of this community, its popularity is not surprising.

Although BitTorrent was best known for its availability of videos (i.e. TV shows) during its first days, just about any kind of file is available off this network. Its great resource of mp3 files has attracted a wide audience and allowed this community to grow to impressive heights.

In order to deliver you the latest numbers on BitTorrent, an administrator of Suprnova.org contacted us with the following information. We were allowed to deliver this information on the condition of anonymity. Suprnova.org is the largest BitTorrent tracking site, and is one of the key reasons for the network's success.

"So I though that I should use the data that I have at my disposal as an
Admin of suprnova.org to see if I could generate some interesting
information. …I souped up some data that you might find interesting:

A Bittorrent popularity analysis, derived from Suprnova.org statistics.

How does Suprnova.org gather BT statistics?

Suprnova.org itself is a sort of reversed spider when it seeks out statistics. Instead of searching for trackers itself, users feed it torrent files. It dissects the torrent file and stores the tracker that the torrent uses. It then asks that tracker for a 'scrape' list of all torrents it tracks, if the tracker supports this feature (all advanced trackers do) and if the feature is enabled (less and less these days), Suprnova.org receives a list of torrent hashes and accompanying stats (minimum is number of seeds and number of non-seed peers) and it stores this list. Then if a torrent is fed to Suprnova.org with a known tracker, it can look the torrent up by its hash and gets stats without having to immediately request a new list.

A side effect of this 'caching of hashes' by Surpnova.org is that it has
general info about all torrents on the trackers it can poll, and not only the ones that the users feed it.

Can these stats be used for a global BT peer estimate?

Since the birth of suprnova.org (roughly 6 months ago), it has been collecting trackers, and has been gathering statistics. It has about 2100 trackers listed in its database, of which roughly 560 are actively functioning and can be polled by Suprnova.org.


All large tracker URL aliases (different tracker URLs leading to the same tracker) are filtered out. While this list of trackers is far from complete (private trackers / trackers with disabled 'scrape'), it gives a clear indication of the usage of the largest open trackers out there.

Suprnova.org also has some other information, derived from the torrent files that were uploaded to it, of which the most interesting is the torrent's data file size (an indication of what kind of data is transmitted and thus the networks 'total storage' at any time).

What are these stats then?

(Active torrents - torrents with more then 1 seed - added because there are a lot of 'dangling' torrents with no seeds and 1-3 peers, which are not very interesting).

Statistics from the Suprnova.org global tracker cache @ 18-1-2004 3:38:

Total amount of trackers: 2,181
Total amount of active trackers: 561
Total amount of torrents: 67,354
Total amount of active torrents (seeds>0): 25,212
Total amount of seeds: 213,484
Total amount of non-seed peers: 792,983
Total amount of peers: 1,006,467

Suprnova.org torrent database data:

Total amount of torrents received to date: 97,275 (100k draws near)
Total amount of live torrents: 34,290
Total amount of live active torrents: 14,091
Total amount of seeds: 169,861
Total amount of non-seed peers: 631,246
Total amount of peers: 801,107
Average filesize active torrents: 643Mb
Average filesize all torrents: 426Mb

Combined rough stats:

* An estimation of the amount of data on the global tracker network can
be calculated by taking the average file size of Suprnova.org's active torrents times the amount of seeds, plus the file size times the amount of non-seed peers times 0.5: 392.4 Tb

* Roughly 60% of the torrents out there have no seeds, but these
torrents usually have only a few peers attached. (less then 10% of the total amount of peers)

* The global seed / non-seed ratio is roughly 21%/79%

* It can also be concluded that Suprnova.org knows about roughly 60% of all public torrents out there, which contain 80% of all the peers connected to the open trackers.

Which would put BitTorrent at least as nipping at the heels of the currently popular p2p programs, and that with only a very modest estimate which covers only the public trackers. Of course you have no way to verify any of this data, but I am fairly certain that there aren't any other groups who have that kind of detailed information about the BitTorrent network."

Its important to realize that this information was only collected from Suprnova.org, and does not include statistics available from other tracking sites. This conservative estimation of over 1 million peers places BitTorrent among the heavy hitters of file- sharing, such as Overnet, eDonkey and FastTrack.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=370


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Seeing Payday, Not Piracy, Musicians Put Concerts on the Web
Seth Schiesel

SHORTLY after Phish, the improvisational rock band, finished its New Year's Eve concert at American Airlines Arena in Miami, perhaps a couple of hundred people remained at play in the private suites that lined the hall. Brad G. Serling, as big a Phish fan as they come, joined them briefly but soon had to depart for the bowels of the arena.

"Everyone's making plans to go party, and here I am making plans to go to the production office," said Mr. Serling, 31. His tone was a bit rueful, but he was certainly not complaining.

That is because there was no place Mr. Serling, a Johnny Appleseed of online concert recordings, would rather go. By 2:30 a.m., he later recounted, he had the entire concert on his iPod, courtesy of the band's sound engineer. At 4:30 a.m., he was back at his hotel in South Beach, transferring the more than two gigabytes of audio files to one of the three laptop computers he had brought along.

Later in the day, from a hotel with a faster Internet link, he uploaded the concert files to the Internet. And so, by the morning of Jan. 2, Phish fans worldwide could pay $11.95 to download the New Year's Eve concert from Live Phish Downloads (www.livephish.com), a site run jointly by the band and Mr. Serling's company, Nugs.net.

Mr. Serling had also joined forces with three less-prominent bands - the Radiators, the String Cheese Incident and Yonder Mountain String Band - to post recordings of their own New Year's concerts at another site, LiveDownloads (www.livedownloads.com).

As other technology companies scramble to match the success of Apple's online music store, iTunes, which sells songs for 99 cents each, a different online-music economy is emerging around the sale of recordings of live performances - often with no restrictions on how they can be played or shared.

Since it was established in late 2002, Live Phish Downloads, which now offers audio files for about 50 Phish concerts, has generated more than $2.25 million in sales. Its success has helped prompt a new look at the potential for bands to become their own distributors online.

And on Tuesday, Coran Capshaw, manager of the Dave Matthews Band, said the group had agreed to set up a downloading site with Nugs.net. While other bands following a similar model have focused on selling concert recordings, the Dave Matthews Band intends to begin in March by selling downloads of its album catalog, to be followed shortly by sales of concert recordings. (RCA, the band's record company, is to receive part of the proceeds from the sale of albums online.)

Even Phish's record company, Elektra, which receives a small cut of the Live Phish Downloads proceeds, has embraced the band's online marketing of its music.

"We always thought it would be nice for there to be a happy medium where the band gets more involved with the fans, and this seems to us to be a perfect way to do it," Brian C. Cohen, Elektra's senior vice president for marketing, said in a telephone interview. "It gives the fans access to officially sanctioned recordings. It conditions the fans to not expect to get these things for nothing, and I personally think it's a model, both for the record business and for bands, whether signed or not, to make money from valuable content and at the same time seed the relationship in a very positive way with the fans."

One way that selling downloads appeals to fans is by offering music files that are not crippled by limitations on where and how many times the file can be copied. Such so-called Digital Rights Management systems are used by many traditional online music stores. But most of the budding concert download sites, including Live Phish Downloads, sell unrestricted files.

"The No. 1 issue that most of the music industry has wrong is D.R.M.,'' Mr. Serling said in an interview last week at his home in Los Angeles. "Why make it harder for people to buy your product? The answer is fear, and you have to get over the fear. What would you do if you walked into Tower Records to buy the new Dave Matthews Band CD and the guy behind the counter said: 'Here's your CD. It's $18, but you can only listen to it in your den on one stereo. You can't take it to the car. You can't put it on your iPod.' You would laugh at him and walk out, right? It's the same thing here.''

"I don't live in a fantasy world," he added. "I know we're getting ripped off left and right by people copying our files. But people who are intent on ripping you off are going to rip you off no matter what you do. All we can do it make it easier for the vast majority of people who want to do the right thing."

However compelling that argument, Mr. Capshaw said the Dave Matthews Band had not decided whether its online offerings, particularly its albums, would be copy- protected or unrestricted. (For its part, Phish recently gave would-be pirates a new incentive to do the right thing, announcing that it was donating its profits from Live Phish Downloads to a nonprofit group supporting music education for children.)

Other bands, too, are being drawn to the model. In November, the hard-rock band Primus began PrimusLive (www.primus.com) with a company called BackOfficeMusic. Last month, the guitarist Steve Kimock started a live-concert download store in partnership with a new New Jersey company called DigitalSoundboard (www.digitalsoundboard.net).

A year ago Pearl Jam began offering downloads of live shows to fans who also bought a CD of that concert. Now, the band also offers concert recordings through iTunes, though only song by song.

But even as other bands and other companies get into the concert-downloading game, Mr. Serling is the sector's youthful godfather.

Growing up near Philadelphia, Mr. Serling became a serious fan of the classic rock of the 1960's and 1970's. By 1990, when he entered Cornell, he was regularly taping Grateful Dead concerts in the area that the band set aside for noncommercial tapers - and meeting like-minded fans through the Internet-based interest groups known as Usenet.

At that time, trading Grateful Dead tapes was an arduous experience, often conducted by mail, and there was one big problem: sound quality. "People have all of these subjective ratings for their tapes and someone's like, 'Oh this is an A+,' but then you get it and it sounds horrible," Mr. Serling said. "So I thought it would be great to put up clips from the tapes so you know what you're getting."

Given the bandwidth limitations of the early 1990's, that was a challenge, but by 1994 Mr. Serling had posted some audio clips from his collection to a computer server set up for Grateful Dead fans. And so the seeds of Nugs.net were planted.

After college, Mr. Serling went to work in a new kind of business - Web design and consulting - where his company did not mind his using the corporate bandwidth. In 1995, he started offering RealAudio streams of shows. In 1997, he bought the Nugs .net domain - short for nuggets - and in 1999 began offering MP3 tracks that could be downloaded and replayed.

Meanwhile, Mr. Serling continued to collect and post concert recordings of bands that allowed taping. By June 2000, fans were downloading 500,000 MP3 files a month from Nugs .net, from bands including the Grateful Dead, Phish and the String Cheese Incident. The demand was met with the bandwidth of Mr. Serling's new employer, CinemaNow, for which he became chief technology officer.

When Nugs.net hit that mark, Mr. Serling said, "that was when I saw that there was enough interest to make a business out of it" - in other words, to begin selling recordings, if permission could be obtained.

Around the same time, the same idea appeared to occur to music executives, including John Paluska, Phish's manager. "We became aware of Nugs.net in particular as a very well-run and successful fan site that had both a lot of shows, high-quality shows and, even more than that, high reliability and customer satisfaction, even though it was just a fan site," Mr. Paluska recalled in a telephone interview. "So we started looking around and asking, 'Who's running this site?' "

The result was a collaboration between Phish and Mr. Serling called Live Phish Downloads, established in December 2002, which now posts live recordings of every Phish concert for sale within 48 hours. Profits are divided between the band and Nugs .net on undisclosed terms.

Last summer, when it was clear that Nugs.net had made the leap from fan site to business and that Mr. Serling had made the leap from Johnny Appleseed to commercial farmer, he quit his job at CinemaNow.

Now, from a spacious house in the Hollywood Hills, with a microwave antenna pointed at a receiver somewhere in the flatlands below, Mr. Serling is just trying to stay ahead of his new competitors. In addition to a deal with the Dave Matthews Band, Nugs.net has reached a broader agreement with Musictoday, a company run by Mr. Capshaw that provides Internet services to more than 250 other bands, including Metallica and the Rolling Stones.

Musictoday already offers services like Web stores, ticketing and fan club support to its artist clients. Now, Musictoday will also offer those bands a downloading service powered by Mr. Serling's operation. For Nugs.net, the Musictoday deal is meant to expose the company to hundreds of bands without having to hire dozens of salespeople.

"Hopefully this deal can help us get to the next level," Mr. Serling said.

Until now, most bands that have embraced selling concert recordings are best known for their improvisational live performances, not studio albums. Mr. Serling acknowledges that his distribution model might not appeal to every musical act - at least until there is more evidence of potential profits.

For now, though, after years of running Nugs.net as a labor of love, Mr. Serling feels as if he is living a fantasy. In addition to the pay sites, Nugs.net still offers dozens of concerts free, in both streaming and downloadable formats.

"This is what I would be doing even if there were no LivePhish.com," Mr. Serling said. "I would be out there as a taper with my recording deck and making files and putting them up on Nugs.net. It's nice to be able to do the same thing and also pay the rent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/te...ts/22band.html


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Online with Eric Garland, Chief Executive, Big Champagne.

Internet Piracy: Recording Industry Lawsuits

The recording industry's latest attempt to stop illegal digital music swapping targets 532 defendants, the largest amount of people it has sued so far. Eric Garland, chief executive of Big Champagne, tracks Internet "file sharing" in the United States and overseas.

Garland and washingtonpost.com reporter David McGuire were online Thursday, Jan. 22 at 1 p.m. ET to discuss Internet piracy.

________________________________________________

David McGuire: Hi Eric, thanks for joining us today. Your company, Big Champagne, tracks the usage of peer-to-peer networks pretty closely. What does your research tell you about what effect, if any, the recording industry lawsuits have had on downloading?

Eric Garland: We use an empirical measure -- that is, the number of nodes (people/ computers) logged on to file sharing networks simultaneously (at any given time), and the number of files available. By that measure, the rate of _growth_ in file sharing may have been affected, but there has been no net decline in recent months. On the contrary, the popularity of file sharing is at an all-time high.

_______________________

Arlington, Va.: How should people know what numbers or surveys to believe? The RIAA says downloading is down; NDP and you say it is up. What gives?

Eric Garland: Remember the story of the blind men feeling the elephant? The man holding the tail said, "an elephant is like a rope!" while the man holding the ear said, "no, an elephant is like a fan!" Of course, they were both right and wrong altogether. I think that surveys are in some ways no different. There is truth in every observation, but without a lot of contextual information (or read in a screaming wire story headline -- FILE SHARING UP! NO, IT'S DOWN!), each study becomes meaningless.

Now, having said that, I have seen little evidence that all of these studies are really in conflict:

Survey studies (like the Pew report) tell us that people are no longer _admitting_ that they download when asked by a telephone survey company. This is important, and a win for the RIAA, as it indicates that people now _know_ that the RIAA wants them to cut it out, they have been "educated" and they no longer brag about all that free music. However, this doesn't mean that they don't download, only that they do it more quietly. We call this a gap in the "say/do," and it is typical when it comes to socially stigmatized behaviors like alcohol consumption or illegal drug use. Now music downloading has joined the ranks!

Of course the other broad category of P2P study is empirical: what do we _see_ people doing? Here, companies like BigChampagne and NPD agree, based on similar methods, that file sharing is on the rise. We differ in our conclusions about _why_, however. NPD suggests that file sharing dipped in the summer following the announcements of pending RIAA litigation. We, however, have seen similar declines in use in previous summers (when there was no threat of lawsuits) and believe that perhaps people are just getting a little sunshine in July and August, rather than swapping tunes.

_______________________

Washington, D.C. : Seems like the popularity of Tivo and other digital recording devices would have led to the sharing of not just music and movies but also television shows online. Are we seeing that sort of thing happening on the P2P networks, or through swarming technologies like BitTorrent? If not, why not? Thank you.

Eric Garland: Absolutely. Feature film and television are the fastest _growing_ media on file sharing networks. While the number of MP3 files still dwarfs movies and TV, bit for bit there may now be more film swapped online than anything else.

_______________________

Arlington, VA: With the use of high speed internet and routers making sometimes 3 computers able to surf the net at the same time, how does the RIAA get an IP address? Don't they change each time a connection is made and how can a distinction be made between different machines on one hub?

Eric Garland: I should be clear: our company does not work with the RIAA in their enforcement efforts, so I have no particular insight into their methods. Your question, however, points to one great difficulty that the industry faces.

In short, I think that a few hundred (soon to be a few thousand) lawsuits are intended to educate and dissuade (like speeding tickets), but it is not their intention to hunt down every last infringer.

_______________________

strange question but...: Is there any possibility that there are "secret" or underground p2p networks out there that are doing a brisk business in trading but are unknown to the authorities or the music industry? Sort of like a p2p speakeasy? I guess if there were it wouldn't be a secret, but maybe?

Eric Garland: Certainly. Remember that any two (or more) networked computers can be used to swap files, and therefore there are at least thousands, and likely many more, "mini-P2Ps" that are underground and there to stay. Keep in mind that a great deal of file swapping takes places locally, meaning the users of the network are not even _on_ public internet, and will therefore remain truly anonymous.

Again, I think the RIAA clearly intends to try to reverse the growth of massive widespread online infringement -- this is a war on the scope, not on every last file swapper.

_______________________

strange question: the sequel: So with the speakeasy concept in mind, would you ever even dream of venturing a ballpark figure about how many file sharers there REALLY are out there?

Eric Garland: Some very good survey work has been done in this area by Ipsos- Insight (formerly Ipsos-Reid) as well as Forrester (we contributed to their last study), among others. In this country, most agree that the _total_ number of file sharers numbers about 60 million.

In our observation, the USA consistently accounts for between 55 and 60% of users worldwide. So sure, I'd venture a ballpark figure: I think there are likely 100 million people sharing files.

_______________________

Dulles, Va.: Can illegal file-trading conducted on small P2P networks be tracked?

Eric Garland: Without explicit permission from each user (think of a TV viewing family with a Nielsen box), only public Internet activity can be tracked.

So if you want to swap files locally (sit in the office and swap with your wife in the kitchin), you're probably pretty safe LOL!

_______________________

Washington, DC: Other than illegal P2P networks that consume massive amounts of storage and clog up bandwidth around the globe, what else is pushing the demand for internet hardware?

Eric Garland: More than P2P networks, hardware demand is driven by digital media. People like the idea of music, movies and photos that they can acquire online, manage on the desktop, export to portable devices and take on the go.

I believe P2P is really a facilitator, or a symptom of this desire, and a pretty efficient model at that.

_______________________


Washington, D.C.: How can the P2P model be adopted by legitimate copyright holders for the distribution of their works?

Eric Garland: This is my favorite question, because I think it leads us directly to solutions to "the P2P problem," which is really just "the internet problem."

We now live in a world where people can and will exchange information, globally and instantaneously. There's no turning back the clock on that.

Now, remember that to a computer, music is just information -- bits and bytes. Unless we unplug the internet (as one music industry executive suggested, facetiously), here's the deal, in layman's terms: stuff is gonna get passed around.

P2P is just distributed computing -- in many ways the internet is just a vast P2P network. Computers are linked (networked) and users communicate. Because of this underlying (scary) fact, the tools of massive infringement also include Microsoft's Outlook (email) and AOL's Instant Messenger (IM). Clearly the technology is here to stay.

So the mandate is clear: _charge_ for the distribution of copyrighted material online without naively believing you can control (or stop) that distribution.

Just think for a moment about the model for commercial radio. The music goes where it will, and artists and other rightsholders get paid.

Thanks for all the good questions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Jan21.html















Until next week,

- js.













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