[JackSpratts]

Students Tune Out Industry Lawsuits
Marcella Bombardieri

When the Recording Industry Association of America sued 261 people last week for sharing copyrighted songs over the Internet, it was a direct attack on Katie O'Hara's lifestyle.

O'Hara, a Boston University junior and classic-rock fan, illegally downloads music on her computer nearly every day. A new song on the radio might strike her fancy, or something she hasn't heard in years might pop into her head as she walks to class, and back in her dorm room she'll download the song off the Internet file-sharing service Kazaa.

If the record industry is to win the battle over online music-sharing, it will have to win the hearts and minds -- or at least the fear -- of students like O'Hara. But the day after the music lobby launched its headline-making lawsuit, O'Hara got up and did what she normally does: Download some free music.

"There are millions of students using it on a day-to-day basis. Think of BU's population," said O'Hara, a Paul Simon devotee. "If they're going to start suing people, there's a lot of people to be sued. I feel like it's a war they're really not going to win anytime soon."

About two-thirds of US 18- and 19-year-olds surveyed download music, according to a study by Forrester Research in Cambridge. Although they do not represent a majority of all file-sharers, college students have been at the center of the phenomenon since the beginning, a population with the time, bandwidth, and techno-savvy to influence the music-listening habits of the nation. After all, Napster -- the now-defunct computer network that put music-sharing on the map -- was created by a Northeastern undergraduate.

"The industry sees this for the cultural war that it is," said cyberlaw specialist Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School. "They think it's important to prevent the up-and-coming generation of lifelong music users from continuing to expect they won't have to pay for it. The purpose of the suits is not to win, but to instill the kind of fear that will change behavior."

Data and interviews with college students suggest that so far, the recording industry hasn't instilled enough fear to have much effect. Traffic on the popular Kazaa network jumped from less than 3 million users a day in August to over 4 million a day last week, after students had returned to school, according to the market research firm BigChampagne.

It's hard for people even a few years out of college to grasp just how central file-sharing has become to university life. O'Hara is not the least bit unusual in that she has not purchased a CD in several years. Stereos have almost become old-fashioned -- you don't need one when you can simply hook up nice speakers to your computer. At parties, the music often comes straight off a computer, or else from mixes burned onto CDs.

There's an infectious feeling of possibility -- most any song is a few clicks away.

"It's download, download, download," said BU senior Lauren Vane. "You can spend all day thinking, `What song do I want?' "

Not to say that students are blind to the risk of a lawsuit. Three-fifths of 18- and 19-year-olds would stop downloading music if there were a serious risk that they would go to jail or have to pay a fine, according to the Forrester study. And the fines in question are potentially serious: Under copyright infringement law, a judge could order a file-sharer to pay $750 to $150,000 for each song he or she makes available to others on the Internet. The record industry association has said it is close to settling with several people for $3,000 each.

Universities, by and large, are not providing any legal protection for their students -- a number of local colleges have already been subpoenaed for the names of file-sharing students. Although BU, Boston College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology initially resisted the subpoenas on technical grounds, they have since handed over the names.

The problem for the industry is that so far, students have looked at the risk of being sued and decided -- correctly -- that it is tiny. The hundreds sued represent a minuscule percentage of the 60 million people who are estimated to download music. Also, the industry is targeting only the most prolific file-sharers, those who leave their hard drives open for free downloading.

For users like O'Hara, the odds are in her favor: They're more likely to get hit by a bus than by a lawsuit.

That's why Marian Moore, vice president for information technology at Boston College, is unimpressed by the record industry's strategy. "It's like using a flyswatter on a gorilla," she said. "Unless they are willing to go out and subpoena a couple of million people, this isn't going to stop music sharing."

Some students take steps to stay under the industry radar. They download music illegally and then click a box to shut off their hard drives from other users. "Peer-to-peer" programs like the popular Kazaa, as well as Morpheus, Grokster, and Gnutella, generally give users a choice about whether to grant others access to their songs.

However, a lot of students may be sharing without even realizing it, since they usually have to go out of their way to disable the sharing function, Zittrain said. O'Hara, for example, isn't sure whether her music is available to others. Lorraine Sullivan, a student at Hunter College in New York who says she is being sued by the record industry association, has created a website (suedbytheriaa.com) that asks for donations and says she had no idea her files were "open to the world."

The industry hopes that students will all start to click that box, meaning that their song collections will no longer be available on the Internet for free.

But BigChampagne chief executive Eric Garland called it a doomed strategy, because American users are a minority of people using the global Net, so plenty of people in Australia -- or France, or Canada -- will still be sharing the latest 50 Cent tunes. "There's great redundancy built into the system," Garland said. "Even if most [Americans] got scared and turned off their software, you and I would never know the difference."
http://www.boston.com/news/local/art...stry_lawsuits/


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Some Advise 'Everywhere Internet Audio'
Don Tapscott

THE music industry, hurt by a decline in CD sales and the continued free swapping of files on the Internet, took the drastic action last week of filing more than 250 lawsuits against consumers. But whatever catharsis record executives and their lawyers may feel, the courts cannot solve the music industry's fundamental problem. Nor does the answer lie in getting people to pay for each music file they download from the Internet.

Instead of clinging to late-20th-century distribution technologies, like the digital disk and the downloaded file, the music business should move into the 21st century with a revamped business model using innovative technology, several industry experts say. They want the music industry to do unto the file-swapping services what the services did unto the music companies - eclipse them with better technology and superior customer convenience.

Their vision might be called "everywhere Internet audio.'' Music fans, instead of downloading files on KaZaA - whether they were using computers, home stereos, radios or handheld devices - would have access to all music the record companies hold in their vaults. Listeners could request that any song be immediately streamed to them via the Internet.

If consumers could do this, the argument goes, they would have no interest in amassing thousands of songs on their hard drives. There would be no "theft" of music, because no one would bother to take possession of the song. To clinch music fans' loyalty to the new system, and make them willing to pay for it, the music companies and the supporting industry would need to provide attractively priced, easy-to-use services to give consumers full access to the hundreds of thousands of songs available to them.

Consumers could still ask for song titles or artists, as they do now on KaZaA. But they could also, for example, request rock 'n' roll tunes that appeared for more than three weeks in Billboard's Top 10 during the 1960's. Or ask for early 1990's guitarists that sound like Eric Clapton, or new artists similar in style to Alanis Morissette.

Requests could be intricate, like asking for music subsequently recorded by the original members of the Lovin' Spoonful. Or they could be simple, like requesting light jazz for dinner-party background music. The system would be interactive and could learn each user's tastes. As listeners voted thumbs up or down to tunes (should they choose to), the service would amend their personal libraries accordingly.

If it worked, it would be as if we each had our own private satellite radio channels - customizable collections of tunes for hundreds of millions of audiences of one. It is a compelling business model, and the current music companies, as the owners of the content, could be at the fore of designing the system.

A tiny taste of such an approach is available on Internet radio networks like live365.com. On such services, listeners can essentially customize a radio station to their individual tastes. But crucial to the future of everywhere Internet audio, many believe, lies in widespread wireless Internet access, because wireless means portability.

"Wireless gives the record companies a chance to do it all over again, and this time get it right," said Jim Griffin, the former head of technology at Geffen Records and now the chief executive of the music publisher Cherry Lane Digital. Mr. Griffin is also a founder of pholist.org, home of an active online discussion of music's future on the Internet.

Many of the brightest industry insiders, academics, lawyers, musicians, industry critics, broadcasters and venture capitalists assemble at pholist.org daily to debate the music business beyond downloading. Many say wireless holds the key.

Myriad portable devices already offer Internet access. Some, like the BlackBerry, maintain an always-on wireless Internet connection. Some business-oriented devices, like the Palm Tungsten, now play high-fidelity music in the MP3 format. Newer cellphones also offer MP3 functions, and include extra features like digital cameras and FM radios.

The seers once thought portable devices would connect to the Internet via cellphone technology. But it now appears that Wi-Fi hotspots - wireless Internet access hubs - may eventually provide blanket coverage in urban areas and become the dominant means of connection.

But there are big obstacles to overcome. To make "everywhere Internet audio'' profitable, the music industry must develop a system to collect money from users and divide it fairly among performers, songwriters and others involved in creating music.

How this would work is already causing hot debate. Mr. Griffin and many others in the pholist.org discussion advocate an Internet fee that would create a revenue pool to be distributed according to song popularity. Current recording industry sales in the United States work out to about $2.50 a month per person.

As CD's sales declined, a digital musical surcharge, or something similar, could be assessed by Internet providers.

At regular intervals, the industry could sample what music is being streamed to users, to determine the distribution of money to the responsible parties. By using sampling, as opposed to detailed census techniques, listeners would not have to worry about invasions of their privacy.

This idea would turn the recording industry's business model upside down. Institutions are genetically averse to massive change. But the payoff could be huge. Right now, for example, the industry incurs large costs from its CD distribution model.

The industry also has many intermediaries, including distributors and promoters. To take a band from obscurity to popularity is expensive, but that is what music labels must do if they want shelf space at the record store. Recording companies are in constant quest of superstars, because fewer than 10 percent of CD's released make a profit. Revenues generated by the best sellers must try to cover the losses incurred by less popular releases.

In this context, the Internet could be a godsend to musicians as well. It can distribute a digital copy of a song to a few or to millions of listeners with virtually no cost difference. Music companies would have more incentive to nurture minor artists. As a society and culture, many argue, we would be much better served by such an approach.

Market forces alone would not produce such a system. It would take enormous industry cooperation, which could only occur with government approval, lest it be deemed a violation of antitrust laws.

The need for cooperation and leadership is clear. Children should not wind up in court because they are fanatical about their favorite pop stars. If the music industry devised an affordable, equitable, and convenient alternative to file sharing, the fans would come, money in hand.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/te...rtner=USERLAND

The Wrong Alternative For Digital Music

Don Tapscott: "As CD's sales declined, a digital musical surcharge, or something similar, could be assessed by Internet providers."

So let me get this straight. To deal with the conflicts between record companies and their customers over P2P file-sharing, we should turn ISPs into government-regulated collectors of a mandatory music tax. This is an innovative new business model?

Some sort of compulsory license makes sense for Internet radio, for the same reason it works for conventional radio. But radio is not the same is my personal collection, even in a world where every piece of music is instantly available from a hard drive in the sky. One is broadcasting, an inherently collective activity. One is personal. It is reasonable to use statistical approximations to allocate broadcast revenue flows, because that's the only way to tie them back to individuals. But my relationship with my content providers is something different. The endpoints of the transaction are easy to identify; the problem is just the mechanism in the middle.

iTunes and other second-generation licensed online music services are getting closer to a workable alternative for the majority of users who are willing to pay for digital downloads if given a reasonable price and experience. A music tax would take all the pressure off the industry to deliver the product their customers want. It puts government in the position of guaranteeing the record companies current revenue stream, and ISPs in the position of tax collectors.

Anyone who thinks a "digital music surcharge" makes sense should consider the effect of universal service charges in telecommunications. Decades ago, these mechanisms did help people get phone service in rural areas. For the past thirty years, though, universal service charges have been an albatross making true phone competition nearly impossible. They created vested interests who will do anything to keep the subsidy gravy train going.

Tapscott's article is positively scary. I know he and those he quotes, such as Jim Griffin, mean well. They are looking for a win- win solution to the current impasse. But this isn't it.
http://werbach.com/blog/2003/09/15.html#a1165


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UNR Among First To Monitor Students’ Computer Use
Lenita Powers

When the music industry filed lawsuits last week against 261 people for trading songs online, University of Nevada, Reno students living on campus were unlikely targets because their computers have been monitored for the past five years.

Reno’s university is among the first in the nation to measure all the Internet traffic on campus in an effort to halt the illegal distribution of copyrighted material, including music and movies.

Although some students are apprehensive about the monitoring, university officials and a civil libertarian said the measure was carefully crafted to ensure privacy is protected.

Steven Zink, UNR’s vice president of information technology, said the purpose of the policy is to help keep the students and the university out of court for using music- sharing networks like the former Napster.

“When Napster was in its heyday, I talked to the Student Senate and to students in the residence halls about how this actually does cost people their rightful income,” Zink said.

“And there’s always been this sense that they’re not going to go after students or kids. Wrong!” he said of the recording and film industries. “They want to make a point. They’ve paid for these intellectual properties and they want to get reimbursed for them.”

UNR has disciplined two student employees within the last three years for using their work computers to download music without paying for it, officials said.

Some UNR students are uneasy about having the Internet equivalent of Big Brother peering over their shoulders.

“I feel a little disturbed by it, but not too much,” said Howard Knudsen as he used one of the computers in UNR’s library. “Considering I’m using the university’s broadband, they would have the legal right to monitor my use.”

Knudsen, a 19-year-old accounting major from Sparks, said he understands the recording industry’s need to protect its intellectual property rights like any other property right. But he thinks it has been heavy-handed levying tens of thousands of dollars in student fines.

“It seems pretty subjective, the way they’re going about it. And the ones they’re prosecuting are not just the major violators, but random users.”
http://www.rgj.com/news/stories/html...sp7=local_news


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Sharing Music Over Internet Part Of Life On Campus

Copyright suits don't faze local students
Coleman Warner Staff writer

"We don't steal music. It's illegal now," a Tulane University student with a sober expression said last week as he left a Broadway apartment house. "Nobody steals music in this house."

Maybe he had gotten the message: Two days earlier, a music trade group had filed 261 copyright lawsuits in distant federal courts.

Or maybe not.

The student's deadpan delivery was quickly betrayed by a round of snickers from his companions. Collectively, they scoffed at a much- publicized attempt by the Recording Industry Association of America to curb free downloading and distribution of music via the Internet, a phenomenon that has exploded in recent years among tech-savvy college students hooked into high- speed campus networks.

"It's like the war on drugs; it's a fruitless kind of endeavor," said Adam Breit, an economics major from Atlanta. "The Internet is too difficult to regulate. It's a bunch of faceless culprits."

Across the street, peering out the door of his fraternity house, business major Ben Katz had no sympathy for music executives who say file- sharing networks cut into their profits.

"If they really want to discourage it, they should stop charging like $22 for a CD," said Katz, who is from Boston. "There's tens of millions of people doing it. I guess I'll roll the dice."

Irreverent, come-and-get-me reactions among students contrast sharply with those of local college officials, who take the recording-industry threats quite seriously. They don't relish even a remote chance that their students could be hauled into court, forcing the students' families to spend large amounts of money on a legal defense, regardless of a suit's outcome.

No local students have been hit with such lawsuits, federal court records show.

Universities also want to be seen as vigilant in policing use of their own computer networks to minimize chances that they will be targeted for litigation. The recording industry association isn't threatening to sue schools, but at least 10 universities, mostly in the Northeast, have been served with subpoenas demanding help in identifying offenders. Some Louisiana universities regularly get notices from the trade organization that specific addresses on their computer network have been used to download music.

Bandwidth hogs

Aside from the legal concerns, colleges don't like how downloading music and video files gobbles up their Internet bandwidth, limiting their capacity to send and receive data. Such recreational computer use obstructs professors' research and other business vital to daily campus operations. That's the primary reason Dillard University has blocked communications between campus computers and known music file-sharing Web sites, university officials say.

"Our goal was not to take care of American recording artists' mandate," said Terry Simon, director of telecommunication services at Dillard. "If a byproduct is that we adhere to their guidelines, then so be it."

Despite a 2000 order by a federal court forcing Napster Inc. to shut down a free service that allowed swapping of copyright music, no court has yet ruled that song-trading among individuals is illegal, said Glynn Lunney, a professor of intellectual law at Tulane. He said the recording industry is probably less interested in a resolution of that complex legal question than it is in forcing a significant number of people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars defending themselves, before settling out of court."Then they will tout the settlement as victory," he said.

"The very fact that they're trading music and video doesn't seem to sink in as a crime. These kids grew up doing it; their friends do it. And I think the music industry has its hands full," said Ron Hay, LSU's computer services director. "Are they reformed? My suspicion is that they are not."

Hay finds irony in the high-tech struggle: Universities that helped launch the Internet are now being forced to restrict its use.

"We're going to have to start closing rather than opening" Internet access, he said. "That's going to be a hard pill to swallow."
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/index.s...0872168860.xml


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Pirates Vs. Dinosaurs

The recording industry decided to get tough.

So it sent out its lawyers to find a diabolically clever criminal -- a 12-year-old. Then it filed a lawsuit against her for stealing music over the Internet.

Properly chastised, the pre-teen and her mother (who live in subsidized housing) bought "amnesty" from the multibillion-dollar industry for $2,000 and a promise not to copy anymore songs.

One down, 64,999,999 more lawsuits to go.

This is no way to do business.

Using the Internet to download digital music files has fundamentally changed the way an entire generation listens to and acquires songs. Instead of going to a record store and paying an inflated price for a plastic disc, those connected to the Internet visit online peer-to-peer (or P2P) networks and search out the music they crave. They download a song, burn it onto a disc or load it onto an MP3 player, then crank it up. Beyond minimal P2P and Internet fees, there is no other cost.

Sources put the number of people capable of downloading music in this way at between 40 million and 65 million. That's in the United States, not counting Australia, England, Canada and all the other nations where songs with English lyrics are appreciated.

The increasingly anachronistic music industry, through its lobbying group, the Recording Industry Association of America, has decided to go after these freeloading downloaders -- hence the 261 lawsuits filed last week.

Downloaders are outraged. Web sites such as www.boycott-RIAA.com are dedicated to beating this attack on "sharing." They have hundreds of postings from filesharers, testimonials from artists who embrace the emerging business paradigm and editorials excoriating the RIAA.

"This country revolves around greedy Congressmen and lobbyists," wrote one. "I'm never buying a CD, DVD or anything else."

"Should the laws stick around even though culture has evolved?" asks another writer. "Fine. Bring back slavery."

Finally, "Where was all the fuss during the time that the RIAA was price-gouging the public for the last 20 years? Odd, politicians didn't seem to care too much about that."

The recording industry, basically, calls downloaders thieves. After all, says the industry, they are stealing copyrighted property.

Under current law, the recording industry is right. Downloaders -- or filesharers, if you prefer -- are stealing. No one who uses Kazaa or Morpheus or another P2P can say they haven't been warned about the possibility of being sued.

But the RIAA shouldn't lose sight of two critical points:

Most of those "thieves" are also their best customers, often buying CDs after having heard a song or two via a filesharing site.

The world has changed and the music industry hasn't. To survive they will have to stop assaulting customers in court and find a way to harness the new technology to create profit. Napster, Kazaa and Morpheus figured it out and have at least 65 million fiercely loyal customers.

Regardless of the RIAA members' rights, it is impossible to have sympathy for the four companies (Sony, AOL-Time Warner, Universal and BMG) who dominate the recording industry.

Frank Sinatra didn't have any sympathy for them when he tried to organize artists to get a better deal in the 1960s. The Dixie Chicks -- who sold 20 million copies of their first two CDs (generating $175 million) -- have none. Dixie Chick Natalie Maines told "60 Minutes II" that they didn't make a penny off those sales. The Chicks sued Sony two years ago to force a better deal for their third CD. Don Henley (Eagles), Roger McGuinn (Byrds), Luther Vandross and Meatloaf have all either sued the record industry or testified about its abusive practices.

So when downloaders say they aren't hurting the artists by sharing the songs, they're essentially right.

In an effort to retrieve its customers, these companies lowered the prices of most CDs. That added insult to injury; they could have done that years ago when CD technology made producing discs far cheaper than making LPs. Instead, the price of discs went up and stayed there.

It's impossible for this newspaper to embrace anyone who disdains copyright laws. After all, this is a copyrighted editorial and not available for reprint without permission.

But the record companies are dinosaurs, mired in a dying technology. Instead of embracing the modern and finding a way to profit from it, they flail at their own customers. Don't expect that 12-year-old or anyone else to mourn if they fail.
http://www.modbee.com/opinion/story/...-8362855c.html


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321 Studios Sued In United Kingdom

321 Studios is facing another lawsuit, this time in the United Kingdom.

The Motion Picture Association filed suit Aug. 29 against the company, on similar grounds as a suit in the United States in which seven major movie studios said 321 Studios' products are illegal under federal law. 321 Studios and the movie studios have been in a legal battle for nearly a year. 321 Studios filed a complaint in April 2002 against nine movie studios to try to keep its software on the market. The movie studios filed a counter claim on Dec. 19, 2002, alleging that the firm was trafficking the tools of digital piracy and violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The company is still waiting for a judge's decision.

The company makes software that allows legal owners of DVD movies to make legitimate backups in case of scratches, heat damage, loss and other problems.

"Following similar lawsuits in the U.S., we have anticipated this legal action and are fully prepared to meet it head on," the company said in a statement. Rob Semann, chief executive, will be in London next week to meet with the company's U.K. law firm and British media.

St. Louis-based 321 Studios also has offices in Berkeley, Calif., and London. It sells its DVD copying software via its Web site, www.321studios.com.
http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlou...1/daily42.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...lm/3090768.stm

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Company Working on Iran Web Censor System
Anick Jesdanun

A San Diego company that runs a system for evading Internet censors is working with the U.S. government to create a special service for people
in Iran.

Anonymizer Inc.'s six-month contract with Voice of America's parent agency, International Broadcasting Bureau, calls for daily e-mail newsletters to Iranians with instructions in Farsi for accessing the free service.

According to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based media freedom group, Iran requires Internet service providers to block hundreds of news and other sites deemed illegal. Several providers have been closed for failing to install filters.

Anonymizer and similar proxies bypass filters by masking the sites users are trying to reach.

Theoretically, anyone in the world can access Anonymizer to reach blocked sites. But many governments and companies have learned to include Anonymizer.com on their filter lists.

So Anonymizer will frequently change its Web addresses and publicize them through its daily newsletter.

Lance Cottrell, Anonymizer's president, would not disclose the amount the government is paying for the Iran project.

Last year, Anonymizer provided a similar service in China, although it has been suspended pending additional funding.


Spyware Boycott

An Internet site devoted to tuning up personal computers has launched a boycott of companies that advertise through software that's often installed on computers without users' knowledge.
Matthew Fordahl

Among the dozens of companies on the PC Pitstop's boycott list are corporate giants like Disneyland Resorts, Orbitz and Gateway. Those companies' ads are often forced to pop up by software made by Gator Corp.

"We decided it was time to raise awareness of the problem both with users who have this software on their PCs and with advertisers," said David Methvin, PC Pitstop's chief technology officer. "What we found is quite often the people who are advertising are not aware they're supporting spyware-based systems."

In the past, Gator has said its software is not "spyware" because users are informed when it's installed, usually with free programs such as a weather utility or game. Gator prefers the term "adware."

Critics say the installation notice is buried in legalistic licensing agreements that most users don't read. Once installed, the software generates pop-up ads based on the users' surfing habits.

A Gator spokeswoman would not comment on the boycott. A number of companies on the boycott list either did not return phone calls seeking comment or said they were unaware of the action.

So far, the campaign has produced mixed results, according to messages posted at the boycott Web site. The online travel service Orbitz, for instance, declined to stop using Gator. Coca-Cola, however, asked Gator to remove its ads from Gator's network.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ws/6739364.htm


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Will China's Net Nannies Be Working Overtime?

According to Reporters Without Borders, China employs 30,000 people to watch what people are doing online and they estimate more people are in prison in China for expressing their views on the Internet than in any other country in the world.
Ben Macklin

The Chinese "Net nannies" are working overtime at the moment trying to regulate the estimated 60 million Internet users in China, but the government watchdogs are facing a new and growing challenge -- 240 million mobile phone subscribers.

China's mobile market is massive. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) reported that there were 206.6 million mobile phone subscribers in China at the end of 2002. The United States, the next largest market, had 140.8 million. The Chinese government recently reported half-year figures for 2003 at 239.5 million and China's leading mobile phone operator, China Mobile, recently dislodged Vodafone from its position as the largest mobile operator in the world.

Subscription required -

http://www.emarketer.com/news/article.php?1002440


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Government Can't Block Porn Sites - Researchers

Web filters seen as ineffective.
Sasiwimon Boonruang

It will be almost impossible for the government to effectively block access to pornographic web sites, according to researchers from Chulalongkorn University, but it can introduce other measures such as a rating system, self- regulation and even consider legalising the porn business.

The researchers tracked 1,000 pornographic sites in both Thai and English and found that 643 sites are active and accessible from Thailand. Of these, 45% offered porn galleries, 11% web-boards, 7% free movie clips, and 6% VDO sales. The revenue from Internet pornography worldwide was US$2.5 billion a year, with teenagers between 12-17 years old the largest group of visitors.

The research project, titled Underground Business on the Internet, was published by Chulalongkorn University's Political Economy Centre.

``It's impossible to block the sites and web filtering or blocking does not work anymore because these web sites can easily change their domain names,'' said Sama Komolsing, one of the researchers, who added that even popular sites could have links to pornography.

The research pointed out that there are some 72 million Internet users each year who access porn sites. American youths access such web sites as early as 11-years old, while Thais start at 13 on average. Many surf these sites while doing their homework.

Intellectual property rights enforcement and the crackdown on illegal CDs has also boosted the number of sex-related CDs sold via the Internet, and this trend is growing, according to the research team.

Such businesses can earn some 8,000 baht from banner ads, 5,850 baht for VCDs, 350-12,000 baht from the sale of sexual tools and 3,600-48,000 baht in membership fees.

The researchers noted that in many countries, governments had introduced industry self-regulation and that Thailand could ``learn from their practices,'' the team said.

Apart from educating young people and their parents and seeking greater responsibility from the business sector, the researchers proposed that web sites should be rated in one of three categories: forbidden, restricted to adults and unlimited access.

Sethaporn Cussipituck, a member of the committee drafting cyber laws, suggested that some businesses could be made legal. ``Why don't we let them run openly and legally by doing trading registration?'' he asked.

The web site owners, meanwhile, would practise self-regulation. However certain areas, such as child pornography or images from hidden cameras, should be forbidden, Sethaporn noted.

He suggested that the terms ``pornography'' and ``erotic art'' should be defined, a task that could be undertaken by the committee drafting the Computer Crime Bill.

The research team claimed that worldwide revenue from the porn industry was around US$57 billion, which includes adult videos, magazines, escorts and sex clubs. The Internet share is around $2.5 billion, or 4% overall.

There are an estimated 4.2 million porn web sites in the market, accounting for 12% of all web sites in the world.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/100903_Da...03_data61.html


Top 10 D/Ls - Singles

BigChampagne


RIAA Showdown Set, FCC Rules Blasted
Jay Lyman

The RIAA has indicated its intention to file more lawsuits, saying in a statement that there ultimately could be "thousands of civil lawsuits against major offenders who have been illegally distributing substantial amounts of copyrighted music on peer-to- peer networks."

Verizon's U.S. District Court appeal over the subpoena powers granted to the Recording Industry Association of America , to be considered Tuesday, calls into question the music industry group's tactics and highlights privacy concerns.

The RIAA has pushed forward with its strategy of pursuing individual Internet subscribers who allegedly trade copyrighted music over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as Kazaa and Grokster, filing more than 261 lawsuits against computer users last week.

Verizon, one of two Internet service providers (ISPs) to resist the RIAA subpoenas legally, failed to convince District Court Judge John Bates to rule the subpoenas unconstitutional. Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Wendy Seltzer told TechNewsWorld that Verizon faces an uphill battle, given that the court already denied the company's motion to stop the subpoenas.

"But the recent spate of lawsuits and the increased volume of the lawsuits helps to illuminate the set of problems with this sweeping subpoena campaign," Seltzer said.

The EFF has filed a supporting brief on behalf of about 45 consumer privacy, civil liberty and ISP associations, according to Seltzer, who said the court could rule instantly or wait weeks on Verizon's appeal.

Seltzer said that, through its more than 1,600 subpoenas and 261 lawsuits, many of which involve children, parents and the elderly, the RIAA has shown it cannot effectively pick good cases.

She said the RIAA's claim that last week's lawsuits were only a "first wave" indicates that more legal action will follow, and added that individual privacy is compromised by the RIAA subpoenas. "If the recording industry is picking and choosing, even someone not sued has had important privacy interests violated," Seltzer said.

Indeed, the RIAA has indicated its intention to file more lawsuits, saying in a statement that there ultimately could be "thousands of civil lawsuits against major offenders who have been illegally distributing substantial amounts of copyrighted music on peer-to-peer networks."

The group stressed its actions have come after a multiyear effort to educate the public about the illegality of unauthorized downloading. It also noted that major music companies have made catalogs of music available to several high- quality, low-cost and legitimate online music services.

An RIAA spokesperson told TechNewsWorld that the group expects the court to uphold its earlier decision against Verizon, which has been used by the RIAA in resisting other subpoenas.

Seltzer, who referred to other resistance to the RIAA subpoenas, including a suit by Pacific Bell Internet parent SBC and an individual woman in New York, said the RIAA's recent lawsuits might factor in to the courtroom decision on Tuesday.

"It doesn't change what's in the briefs, but it may change the tone of oral arguments and the type of questions the judges raise," she said.

"It may raise their concern that the recording industry is not behaving in a careful and limited fashion, but is really using this as a sweeping scare campaign against the American public."

SBC Takes Case to Court

In a separate appeal, SBC has asked a federal court to halt new Federal Communications Commission unbundling rules that the company claims would do "irreparable harm" to its business.

The new rules, from the FCC's Triennial Review order, give competitors blanket access to SBC's network at below-cost rates, the company contends, pointing to two prior defeats of similar rules by the U.S. Supreme Court and a federal appeals court.

The motion for a stay in the appeals case came from SBC, which was joined by Verizon, BellSouth, Qwest and the U.S. Telecom Association.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate is also scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to uphold loosened- ownership restrictions from the FCC, which last spring voted to allow more media ownership by major companies.
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31585.html


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Labels' actions overshadow their message, observers say

Trade Group Viewed As Bully For Going After Consumers
Sam Diaz

The music industry could have been seen as a victim -- a generations-old industry being robbed blind by thieves depriving hard-working artists of their
livelihoods.

But the Recording Industry Association of America, representing the largest record labels in the world, sued Brianna LaHara, a 12-year-old girl who lives with her single mother and younger brother in public housing in New York City.

And suddenly, the trade association -- in its effort to squelch illegal music sharing over peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Grokster -- looked more like a schoolyard bully.

Brianna and her mother, Sylvia Torres, were targeted in one of 261 lawsuits music labels filed a week ago. Mitch Bainwol, RIAA chairman and chief executive, said the lawsuit against Brianna illustrates the importance of parents being aware of what their children are doing on their computers.

``We're trying to send a strong message that you are not anonymous when you participate in peer-to-peer file sharing and that the illegal distribution of copyrighted music has consequences,'' he said in a statement.

There's no question the suits were a last resort. They came after the RIAA lost a court battle to shut down file-sharing networks. The industry had tried sending instant messages to users of the networks, letting them know they knew who they were. Later, an ad campaign, using popular celebrities fell upon deaf ears in the MTV generation.

Meanwhile, CD sales continued to fall.

But some observers question if the industry put enough thought into the repercussions of its actions.

The suits were probably a necessary evil but the situation could have been handled better, said Robin Lutchansky, senior vice president of Neale-May & Partners Public Relations firm in Palo Alto.

``I don't think they really thought about this from a PR perspective,'' she said. ``They're trying to protect the rights of the musicians but the way they're going about it may not be best. I think it would have been helpful to take a softer tack.''

Through the Kazaa network, Brianna downloaded at least 1,000 songs -- including television show theme songs and the nursery rhyme ``If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands'' -- to her family's computer.

As the Brianna case attracted publicity, public sympathy shifted to a family that would struggle to come up with $2,000 to settle the case, Lutchansky said.

P2P United, a newly formed peer-to-peer industry trade association consisting of six of the largest file-sharing sites, leaped at the chance to pay Brianna's fine as a symbol of its outrage over the lawsuits.

``We don't condone copyright infringement, but it's time for the RIAA's winged monkeys to fly back to the castle and leave the Munchkins alone,'' said Adam Eisgrau, the group's executive director.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercuryne...ss/6775671.htm


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RIAA's Pyrrhic Victory
Barry Willis

It's just about impossible to imagine a worse public relations campaign than the one being waged by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the nation's courtrooms.

One of the first victories scored against 261 alleged music pirates was a quick settlement by 12-year-old Brianna LaHara, an honor student who lives with her 9-year-old brother and single mother in a New York housing project. Brianna's mom, Sylvia Torres, testified that she had assumed that her daughter's paid subscription to the KaZaA service made her downloading perfectly legal.

On September 9, that assumption cost the nursing supervisor $2000 in fines, and cost Brianna a public apology for having downloaded songs like "If You're Happy and You Know It" and the theme to the television show Family Matters. A statement issued by the RIAA quoted Brianna as saying, "I am sorry for what I have done . . . I love music and don't want to hurt the artists I love." Prior to the settlement, she told reporters from the New York Daily News that her stomach was "all in knots."

A Washington, DC–based Internet music service trade association known as "P2P United" reportedly volunteered to pay the fines, relieving Ms. Torres of what would have been an immense financial burden and somewhat mitigating a sour public reaction to the RIAA's draconian legal tactics. An RIAA spokesman told the Los Angeles Times that the payment by P2P United was appropriate considering that "it was their members who induced her infringement in the first place." Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, stated, "Brianna and her mother shouldn't have to pay the price of the recording industry's consistent unwillingness to embrace new technology."

Despite the potential for damaging its already tarnished image, the RIAA went forth with the Brianna case to make its point for zero tolerance of downloading. Damage control will be nearly impossible. Litigation against children isn't popular even among the most ardent copyright supporters. "If you go after too many 12-year-old girls, you can alienate a lot of people," analyst Mike McGuire told the LA Times. Market researcher Phil Leigh commented that the RIAA settled quickly "to get her out of the headlines . . . . They don't want to be seen picking on children. She's not even a teenager."

The music industry is also going after folks at the other end of the age spectrum. On September 10, BBC News reported that Durwood Pickle, a 71-year-old Texas grandfather, was also caught in the RIAA's crosshairs—the result, he claims, of visits by his teenage grandchildren, who used his computer while they were at his home. Mr. Pickle told reporters he didn't understand why he was being targeted for something he hadn't done.

Defendants like Brianna LaHara and Durwood Pickle are exactly the sort of people that Senator Norman Coleman (R-MN) had hoped to protect with his inquiries into the RIAA's antipiracy campaign. "Someone has to take responsibility," responded RIAA president and general counsel Cary Sherman to accusations of heavy-handedness in the effort to contain the downloading epidemic. The RIAA's new CEO, Mitch Bainwol, reiterated that sentiment, saying his organization's goal was "to send a strong message that illegal distribution of copyrighted music has consequences."

Two unlikely consequences of the lawsuit blitz are resurgence in retail music sales and a decline in the popularity of downloading. A September 11 news analysis by the BBC claims that the RIAA's efforts to scare people away from peer-to-peer file sharing simply aren't working. Eric Garland, a spokesman for BigChampagne, a research firm that monitors peer-to-peer network activity, told the BBC that use of the Fast Track network, used by both Grokster and KaZaA, had increased following the avalanche of subpoenas launched by the RIAA in August. "There's no mass exodus, that's safe to say. Ironically, usage this week and this month is up," Garland stated.

Music fans aren't daunted by the RIAA, and some are beginning to fight back. Shortly after the Brianna LaHara case was settled, a Northern California man initiated his own countersuit against the music industry. On September 10, Eric Parke filed suit in Marin County Superior Court in San Rafael. In his suit, Parke seeks an injunction against the RIAA's "Clean Slate" amnesty program, and accuses the trade group of deceptive business practices in persuading consumers that recanting their file-sharing ways will protect them from future lawsuits. Clean Slate is a "misleading attempt to obtain admissions of copyright violations by individuals without giving individuals any meaningful benefit in return or any binding amnesty from suit," Parke told the San Francisco Chronicle. The 37-year-old mortgage broker told reporter Benny Evangelista that he had never downloaded, but initiated his suit out of conviction that "somebody had to stand up to the RIAA."
http://www.stereophile.com/shownews.cgi?1733


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“Recently he was discussing his research with an executive at a media organization that has been very aggressive about trying to discourage file-sharing. When Mr. Bernoff asked the executive how he had gotten the report, which Forrester sells for $895, the man hesitated.

‘They got a copy from one of the studios,’ Mr. Bernoff said.

‘Here is an organization that's saying that stealing hurts the little people, and they took our intellectual property and they shuttled it around like a text file.’ “
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/14/fashion/14COPY.html

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Crackdown May Send Music Traders Into Software Underground
Saul Hansell

Some people may well be intimidated by the 261 lawsuits that the music industry has filed against Internet users it says are illegally sharing songs.

But hundreds of software developers are racing to create new systems, or modify existing ones, to let people continue to swap music — hidden from the prying eyes of the Recording Industry Association of America, or from any other investigators.

"With the R.I.A.A. trying to scare users around the world, the developer community is pumping up to create networks which are safer and more anonymous," said Pablo Soto, a developer in Madrid who designed the software for two file-sharing systems, Blubster and Piolet.

Some experts wonder if the industry's efforts will create more trouble for it than ever. "The R.I.A.A. is breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria," said Clay Shirky, a software developer who teaches new media at New York University.

Blubster, which has an estimated quarter-million users, already uses technology to make eavesdropping more difficult, Mr. Soto said. Its next version will encrypt files so they can be decoded only by their intended user.

Other systems are sending files on more circuitous Internet routes instead of, or in addition to, using encryption. And some developers hope to replace the current systems, which connect millions of users, with private file-sharing networks — speakeasies that may be too small for the industry to find.

The developers of the new systems say there is nothing illegal about writing software that helps people keep secrets. United States courts have held that file-sharing software may not be banned if it has both legitimate and illegal uses.

The Recording Industry Association of America has said that it is unconcerned about the increasing anonymity of file sharing. The stated purpose of its lawsuits is not to catch every hard core music pirate, but to show millions of casual file sharers that what they are doing is illegal.

In addition, none of the new methods offer perfect anonymity, experts say. Yet many of the new systems are likely to make the recording industry work harder to find file traders.

Private file sharing stems from academic work on encryption and data security over the last decade. One system is Freenet, introduced in 1999 by Ian Clarke. It allows people to publish files to be used by others, with technology meant to keep the source anonymous.

"Everyone said the Internet was an anarchistic thing through which anyone could say anything," Mr. Clarke said. "But in reality it is incredibly easy to monitor what is going on on the Internet. I was interested in creating a system that would preserve anonymity."

Freenet is similar to other file-sharing services in that users make part of their hard drives available to hold content to be downloaded by other users. But all the files are encrypted so no one knows what files are on a given machine. Requests to download a file are also encrypted.

Freenet has been a way to disseminate banned political tracts and has been used by people who want to share illegal content like child pornography. Mr. Clarke says he is willing to help people send files illegally if he can also prevent political censorship. "I am an absolutist on free speech," he said.

Freenet, however, is slow and hard to use, and it requires knowing a specific file name. As a result, it has not been a viable alternative to music-sharing services like KaZaA. Developers in Germany are creating a program called Frost meant to make Freenet easier to use.

Another file-sharing model is for business users who want to collaborate while protecting secrets from competitors. "The needs of businesses and the needs of file traders are the same," Mr. Shirky said. "I want a secure way to send you a three megabyte PowerPoint file with no way for anyone else to see it. That is not different from an MP3 file."

Software by companies like Groove Networks creates private file networks for specified users. Groove, which can cost $69 or more per user, is not widely employed by music sharers. But a program called Waste is attracting the interest of music traders who want to create "darknets," as private file-sharing communities are known.

Waste was written by Justin Frankel, who works for the Nullsoft unit of America Online. It was posted on Nullsoft's site one day last May and removed the next , although not fast enough to keep copies from circulating on the Web. (AOL's corporate cousin, Warner Music, is a backer of the R.I.A.A.'s campaign against file sharing.) Frankel and AOL did not return calls seeking comment.

Investigators for the music industry acknowledge that some of these technologies may make their jobs more difficult, but they suggest that users may not want to take advantage of them.

"The thing about darknets is that the users show more culpability than people who simply use peer-to-peer," said Randy Saaf, referring to peer-to-peer sharing systems like KaZaA. Mr. Saaf is chief executive of MediaDefender Inc., a music technology company that does work for the record industry. "When people are found to be using them, they will face stiffer penalties."

Meanwhile, older file-sharing services do not want to lose users to darknets or other newcomers. Many of them are trying to add features they say will protect privacy. Streamcast networks, the creator of Morpheus, introduced a feature this summer that lets users relay files by way of intermediary computers known as proxy servers — a technique that can help obscure the path between the source of the file and the person who downloads it.

Proxy servers and similar methods can be an effective way to hide, said Stuart Schechter, a Harvard security researcher. But, he said, there is nothing to stop the recording industry from creating proxy servers as so-called honey pots to serve as decoys and gather information on users. "The problem with any of these systems is how do you decide who to trust," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/te...gy/15DARK.html


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CEO of iMesh, Leading Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Firm, to Meet Lawmakers in D.C.
Press Release

Arrives From Israel Today

Elan Oren, CEO of iMesh, a top-three peer-to-peer file-sharing firm, arrives in the U.S. today from corporate headquarters in Israel to demonstrate iMesh for lawmakers and to meet U.S. media. Mr. Oren will meet with lawmakers and their staffs Wednesday, September 17 on Capitol Hill. He is available for interviews in both New York and Washington, DC until his departure on September 19.

Mr. Oren has in the past called for talks among record labels, lawmakers, industry associations, artists and the digital community to reach consensus on a mutually acceptable commercial distribution of entertainment on the web. iMesh recently expanded its offerings to include original entertainment content available for purchase, including games, software, independent films and music, ringtones and other content for mobile devices, according to Mr. Oren. Thousands of downloads are available, and sales are already strong and growing, he notes.

iMesh makes original content available under legal arrangements reached with its content partners, Mr. Oren says. In a boon for customers, most content on iMesh is available on a try-it-and-buy-it basis. For example, a game can be downloaded for free and played for a set period of time or to a predetermined level. The user then has the option to purchase the game for a reasonable fee, as low as $20.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release...lease_id=57510
For more information about iMesh or to speak with Mr. Oren, please contact (212) 999-5585.

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SBC Won't Name Names in File-Sharing Cases
Seth Schiesel

As the recording industry pursues its lawsuits against those it says are digital music pirates, SBC Communications has emerged as the only major Internet service provider that has so far refused to identify computer users whom the industry suspects of copyright infringement.

Since early July, major high-speed Internet providers — including BellSouth, Comcast, EarthLink, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — have complied with more than 1,000 subpoenas from the record industry's lobbying arm, the Recording Industry Association of America, to turn over the names of their customers who are otherwise known only by the murky screen names and numeric Internet Protocol addresses used in cyberspace.

SBC, the No. 2 regional phone company and a major local telecommunications service provider in the Midwest and West, has received about 300 such subpoenas and has refused to answer any of them. It has stuck to that position even though Verizon, the biggest local phone company — which has most of its customers along the East Coast — lost a major lawsuit this year against the recording industry.

The contrast between SBC's stance and that of its peers illustrates how Internet providers have been caught in the middle of the music industry's pursuit of individual music swappers. Their range of responses underscores the complexities of the legal landscape in this new area of law, the mounting tensions between copyright enforcement and privacy, and the limits of technology in finding cyberspace pirates.

In the Verizon case, a federal judge in Washington ruled that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 required the company to reveal the identities of its customers even though the industry's subpoenas had not been individually reviewed by a judge. Oral arguments in Verizon's appeal are to be heard today by a federal court in Washington.

Most big Internet providers say that the original decision in the Verizon case essentially validated the subpoenas that the recording industry sent to other companies. SBC, however, has sued the recording industry group in California.

"We are going to challenge every single one of these that they file until we are told that our position is wrong as a matter of law," James D. Ellis, general counsel for SBC, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

Ever since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 remade the communications industry, SBC has been considered by far the most legally aggressive of the nation's major communications companies. Mr. Ellis is scheduled to testify tomorrow about the copyright subpoenas before the Senate Commerce Committee. With about three million high-speed data customers, SBC is the nation's No. 1 provider of broadband Internet access using digital subscriber line technology.

"Clearly, there are serious legal issues here, but there are also these public policy privacy issues," Mr. Ellis said. "We have unlisted numbers in this industry, and we've got a long heritage in which we have always taken a harsh and hard rule on protecting the privacy of our customers' information."

Recording industry officials see SBC's stance not as a matter of principle over privacy but as a matter of dollars from downloading. They assert that SBC is not concerned about copyright protection because the company uses the lure of music piracy to attract high-speed Internet customers.

A record industry official pointed to a past print advertisement from SBC's Pacific Bell unit that read, in part: "Download all the music you like. And all the music you sort of, kind of, maybe even a little bit like. Go MP3 crazy. Try new music. Build a song library. Whatever."

"Sure beats going to the record store," the advertisement concluded.

A spokesman for the record industry group said the ad had appeared in The Los Angeles Times as recently as January 2002.

Matthew J. Oppenheim, the trade group's senior vice president for business and legal affairs, said the ad was important because it suggested a strong motive for SBC's position. "SBC believes that free music drives its business," he said. "That's the only explanation for why they would relitigate issues that have been resolved."

An SBC spokesman, Selim Bingol, said the advertisement was irrelevant. "It's ludicrous to suggest that an ad that has not appeared for many months has anything to do with today's debate," he said. "We are opposing these subpoenas because under the R.I.A.A.'s interpretation, they are a threat to consumer privacy and safety."

The wave of subpoenas that led to last week's lawsuits began about 10 weeks after the judge in the Verizon case issued his final ruling in April. On July 7, the Monday after the Independence Day weekend, lawyers at Internet providers returned to their offices to find a blizzard of legal requests from the recording association. Comcast, the nation's leading provider of high-speed Internet access to homes, which it supplies through its cable system, received more than 100 subpoenas in the first two days after the holiday.

"It really was a fire drill," said Gerard J. Lewis, Comcast's chief privacy officer. At Comcast and other companies, the first subpoenas were dated July 3, the last day before the holiday weekend, and they required the companies to provide the information within seven days. That meant that Internet providers that thought the subpoenas were legal had only two or three days to comply.

Now, according to lawyers at several major Internet companies, the recording industry has agreed to a looser schedule: 10 business days from when the Internet provider receives the subpoena.

The digital copyright law does not require anyone to notify consumers that their personal information has been subpoenaed. It appears, however, that most major Internet providers — including Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — made an effort to send letters to many customers who were the subjects of subpoenas, notifying them that unless the customer signaled legal action, the information would be provided to the recording industry.

According to executives at several major Internet providers, only the barest minimum of customers took any steps to block the disclosure of their information. Of the 261 individuals sued by the industry so far, however, a number have said they never received any notice from their Internet provider.

Tracking down the numeric Internet protocol, or I.P., address employed by any given user of a file-sharing network is relatively easy. In essence, the industry focused on users who appeared to be making large numbers of music files available to others on file-swapping networks like KaZaA and Morpheus. Industry investigators noted the I.P. address of the user and the exact time at which the user was making files available.

The recording investigators could then determine which Internet provider assigned the specific I.P. address. The subpoenas included both the I.P. address and the time so that the Internet provider could see which of its customers was using that address at that particular moment. With many consumer Internet services, the I.P. address for a user can change every time the computer is turned off and turned back on, so the exact time is a critical tool for matching I.P. addresses and users.

The length of time that Internet providers maintain logs of users, addresses and times varies. Comcast and Time Warner Cable, for instance, generally keep those logs for only 30 days. That means that if those companies receive a copyright subpoena with an I.P. address and time more than a month old, they may be unable to answer the request.

Verizon, by contrast, generally keeps its I.P. logs indefinitely.

"Verizon keeps that sort of information for traffic management and to help law enforcement," said Sarah Deutsch, a Verizon vice president and associate general counsel.

Mr. Oppenheim from the recording industry association said he was generally pleased with the level of cooperation his organization has received. Nonetheless, executives at several Internet providers that are cooperating with the association expressed privately some discomfort with the process.

"We fully understand that copyright protection is a legitimate goal," said one executive at a major Internet provider. "That being said, it doesn't seem like the consumers' privacy interest is really being balanced out here in this process."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/16/bu...rtne r=GOOGLE


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Yale Should Consider New File-Sharing Options

Since last spring, when the Recording Industry Association of America announced its intention to scare illegal file-sharers out of the habit by filing waves of lawsuits over the course of this school year, we have wondered when -- not if -- someone from Yale would be caught, and what the University would do about it. We were happy to see that Yale students survived the latest batch of 261 subpoenas served last week. But as recording industry executives would have us believe, it is only a matter of time.

Our concern ultimately is not with the RIAA's tactics, ill-conceived and alienating of college students though they may be, but with Yale's response to a problem that it can no longer avoid. It used to be the University and its general counsel did just enough to keep Metallica at bay and itself out of the courtroom, which meant, in essence, booting students off of Napster five years ago. Otherwise, the University has been laissez-faire in the extreme, and rightly so.

But now, what seemed too good to be true finally is.

Contrary to recording industry and perhaps University officials' sentiment, we are not a generation that genuinely believes music is free. But we do have college-sized wallets, and we do know how to work our computers. So until someone provides a viable alternative -- not a threat or a lawsuit or a letter to our parents -- students will continue to download music, legally or otherwise.

Rather than seeing how long they can do virtually nothing, University administrators now have the opportunity to consider ways of legally providing students with access to music online. We hope Yale will continue its policy of protecting Internet users' privacy while beginning to evaluate alternatives for the not-too-distant post-litigation era, when peer-to-peer file-sharing is no longer limitless and digital music is no longer free.

This summer, an RIAA committee on higher education suggested a variety of steps universities could take to prevent students from pirating movies and music. As many other schools did in August, Yale added a presentation on illegal downloading to the computer portion of freshman orientation. We strongly doubt that any moralizing, intellectualizing or otherwise instructing students on the technical and legal ramifications of illegal file-sharing will do much to dissuade the practice. At this point, music downloading is so rampant we believe it is beyond the University's control.

Fortunately, file-sharing does not have to be illegal. Among the RIAA committee's other suggestions were subscription services that would allow students with university IP addresses to have access to any music they want without having the ability to download it onto their computers.

In the same way student tuition and board fees go to pay for cable television and access to Lexis Nexis, the cost of Yale might someday include subscription to such a site. Far better than the looming penalties, mandatory tutorials or seminars about illegal file-sharing many universities are implementing this year, this option seems at least to have the possibility of curbing illicit file-sharing on campus.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/article....asp?AID=23092


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Recording Industry's Missteps
Michael Booth

The best-selling "Chicago" movie soundtrack is available on CD starting at $13.86.

The actual movie, with the soundtrack songs included, of course, plus additional goodies ranging from deleted musical numbers to the director's interview and a "making-of" feature, can be had for precisely $2.12 more.

Therein lies the problem for a critically wounded music recording industry: The "Chicago" CD looks like a rip- off, and the DVD looks like a steal.

Nearly everything the record companies have done wrong in the age of downloading has been done right by the movie studios.

America's love for movies is stronger than ever, while the nation listens to music with smoldering resentment.

While movie companies escort happy customers to newly-installed recliner stadium seats, the music companies escort their biggest fans straight to the courthouse. There is only so much time for entertainment in a busy day, and people will spend their leisure where they meet the path of least resistance.

For every slight by the music world, there's a smarter parallel move by the cinema promoters:

Not until 20 years after the introduction of the CD in the United States did a record label announce across-the- board price cuts that acknowledged consumer anger at paying $19 for one decent Justin Timberlake song. Universal will now drop prices on many CDs to below $10, a breaking point many buyers seem to accept.

In contrast, the movie studios saw the threat from pay-per-view cable and satellite in 1997, when DVDs first arrived here, and slashed prices immediately. DVDs started between $19 and $24; today hundreds of great titles are available in the $10 range. With "Pirates of the Caribbean" still taking in great business in theaters, a two-disc DVD version will arrive before Christmas for $18.

People listen to the average CD many more times than they watch a DVD. Yet CDs are languishing in stores and DVDs are flying off the shelves. How to see this other than sheer music industry incompetence?

Music companies stood by while one of their primary conduits to the public, radio stations, consolidated and grew numbingly homogenized. The variety of music stations offered to the public shrank drastically. Many listeners in their 30s and 40s gave up on trying new material.

In the 1990s, the movie industry increased its product outlets across a wide range of styles. Multiplexes overbuilt to the point of bankruptcy, but the result for the consumer was convenient playing times and a near disappearance of daunting ticket lines.

Art houses expanded screens in many cities, providing venues for truly obscure intellectual adventures as well as extended runs for word-of-mouth hits not big enough for the 'plexes. Thus you can still see megahit "Bruce Almighty" for a buck or the acquired taste of "Winged Migration" three months after it opened.

Movies operate largely from the same why-fix-if-it-ain't-broke box office.

The concert business has Ticketmaster. Enough said.

Threatened over the past decade by various forms of piracy, the movie industry chose to go after profiteering international crime rings while letting the local cable companies take on illicit home descramblers with low- key enforcement action.

The record labels, not satisfied with infuriating a younger generation with high prices and legal threats, is now enraging clueless middle-aged parents forced to pay $3,000 to $15,000 settlements over individual downloading lawsuits. Record companies pursued an act of Congress for the right to invade the privacy of Internet companies and customers in search of burners' personal information. For good measure, the labels forced a New York 12-year-old to pay a $2,000 fine, taking customer relations to a new level.

Through a combination of intelligent design, lucky accident and the good sense to follow the consumer's lead, movie companies settled on the VHS video format for 25 years before gently introducing a DVD alternative. It then let the DVD win out by making it more attractive rather than cynically undercutting VHS. The minor distractions of laser disc and Beta video, which could have irritated consumers if allowed to fester, were dumped.

But the music industry instead allowed format changes to drive its business model.

The CD format saved the business for 20 years because consumers had little choice but to replace vinyl or tape copies with CDs to keep their libraries relevant. CD makers knew they were borrowing from the future the day the last Bob Seger 8-track gave way to a new CD, but did nothing to expand their market on radio or among new buyers.

Even the blank CD formats are mired in confusing infighting over CD-R and CD-RW. Many store-bought CDs can't play in computers or other older components. Mini-disc, anyone?

Record label missteps are legion. But solutions are at hand: Let go of whole-disc sales and create a dollar-per- song online service as good as Apple iTunes. Make it universally available, with all the independents signed up.

Bring Ticketmaster to heel and make live music accessible and fun again. Allow file sharing for a $50 to $100 annual license. Woo 40-year-old buyers as if they were 16.

Most of all, spend less on lawyers and more on creative thinkers. You can't subpoena success.
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,...26541,00.html#


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Blame Canada
Jay Currie

A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago. In Canada.

"On March 19, 1998, Part VIII of the (Canadian) Copyright Act dealing with private copying came into force. Until that time, copying any sound recording for almost any purpose infringed copyright, although, in practice, the prohibition was largely unenforceable. The amendment to the Act legalized copying of sound recordings of musical works onto audio recording media for the private use of the person who makes the copy (referred to as "private copying"). In addition, the amendment made provision for the imposition of a levy on blank audio recording media to compensate authors, performers and makers who own copyright in eligible sound recordings being copied for private use."
-- Copyright Board of Canada: Fact Sheet: Private Copying 1999-2000 Decision

The Copyright Board of Canada administers the Copyright Act and sets the amount of the levies on blank recording media and determines which media will have levies imposed. Five years ago this seemed like a pretty good deal for the music industry: $0.77 CDN for a blank CD and .29 a blank tape, whether used for recording music or not. Found money for the music moguls who had been pretty disturbed that some of their product was being burned onto CDs. To date over 70 million dollars has been collected through the levy and there is a good possibility the levy will be raised and extended to MP3 players, flash memory cards and recordable DVDs sometime in 2003.

While hardware vendors whine about the levy, consumers seem fairly indifferent. Why? Arguably because the levy is fairly invisible - just another tax in an overtaxed country. And because it makes copying music legal in Canada.

A year before Shawn Fanning invented Napster, these amendments to Canada's Copyright Act were passed with earnest lobbying from the music business. The amendments were really about home taping. The rather cumbersome process of ripping a CD and then burning a copy was included as afterthought to deal with this acme of the digital revolution. The drafters and the music industry lobbyists never imagined full-on P2P access.

As the RIAA wages its increasingly desperate campaign of litigation in terrorum to try to take down the largest American file sharers on the various P2P networks, it seems to be utterly unaware of the radically different status of private copying in Canada.

This is a fatal oversight, because P2P networks are international. While the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may make it illegal to share copyright material in America, the Canadian Copyright Act expressly allows exactly the sort of copying which is at the base of the P2P revolution.

In fact, you could not have designed a law which more perfectly captures the peer to peer process. "Private copying" is a term of art in the Act. In Canada, if I own a CD and you borrow it and make a copy of it that is legal private copying; however, if I make you a copy of that same CD and give it to you that would be infringement. Odd, but ideal for protecting file sharers.

Every song on my hard drive comes from a CD in my collection or from a CD in someone else's collection which I have found on a P2P network. In either case I will have made the copy and will claim safe harbor under the "private copying" provision. If you find that song in my shared folder and make a copy this will also be "private copying." I have not made you a copy, rather you have downloaded the song yourself.

The premise of the RIAA's litigation is to go after the "supernodes," the people who have thousands, even tens of thousands of songs on their drives and whose big bandwidth allows massive sharing. The music biz has had some success bringing infringement claims under the DMCA. Critically, that success and the success of the current campaign hinges on it being a violation of the law to "share" music. At this point, in the United States, that is a legally contested question and that contest may take several years to fully play out in the Courts.

RIAA spokesperson Amanda Collins seemed unaware of the situation in Canada. "Our goal is deterrence. We are focused on uploaders in the US. Filing lawsuits against individuals making files available in the US."

Which will be a colossal waste of time because in Canada it is expressly legal to share music. If the RIAA were to somehow succeed in shutting down every "supernode" in America all this would do is transfer the traffic to the millions of file sharers in Canada. And, as 50% of Canadians on the net have broadband (as compared to 20% of Americans) Canadian file sharers are likely to be able to meet the demand.

The Canada Hole in the RIAA's strategic thinking is not likely to close. While Canadians are not very keen about seeing the copyright levy extended to other media or increased, there is not much political traction in the issue. There is no political interest at all in revisiting the Copyright Act. Any lobbying attempt by the RIAA to change the copyright rules in Canada would be met with a howl of anger from nationalist Canadians who are not willing to further reduce Canada's sovereignty. (These folks are still trying to get over NAFTA.)

Nor are there any plausible technical fixes short of banning any connections from American internet users to servers located in Canada.

As the RIAA's "sue your customer" campaign begins to run into stiffening opposition and serious procedural obstacles it may be time to think about a "Plan B". A small levy on storage media, say a penny a megabyte, would be more lucrative than trying to extract 60 million dollars from a music obsessed, file sharing, thirteen year-old.

If American consumers objected -- well, the music biz could always follow Southpark's lead and burst into a chorus of "Blame Canada". Hey, we can take it….We'll even lend you Anne Murray.
http://techcentralstation.com/081803C.html


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Hollywood Faces Online Piracy, but It Looks Like an Inside Job
John Schwartz

When "Hulk" hit the small screen early, Hollywood hit the roof. Two weeks before this summer's film adaptation of the angry green giant opened in theaters in June, copies started showing up on file-sharing networks around the world. The film cost Universal $150 million to make and distribute, but anyone with a fast Internet connection, a big hard drive and plenty of time could see it free.

Hollywood is desperately worried that it will soon face the widespread illegal copying that has bedeviled the music industry — and that prompted record companies to file lawsuits last week against 261 people accused of illegally distributing copyrighted music online. Piracy of works in digital format, like DVD's or high-definition television is, in theory, so simple that whole movies could be zapped around the globe with a click of a mouse — a prospect that Jack Valenti, chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, has told lawmakers "gives movie producers multiple Maalox moments."

But the early debut of "Hulk" was not the work of the armies of KaZaA-loving college students or cinephile hackers. The copy that made its way to the Internet was an almost-complete working version of the film that had been circulated to an advertising agency as part of the run-up to theatrical release. And "Hulk" is not alone.

According to a new study published by AT&T Labs, the prime source of unauthorized copies of new movies on file-sharing networks appears to be movie industry insiders, not consumers. The study is "the first publicly available assessment of the source of leaks of popular movies," according to its authors.

Nearly 80 percent of some 300 copies of popular movies found by the researchers on online file sharing networks "appeared to have been leaked by industry insiders," and nearly all showed up online before their official consumer DVD release date, suggesting that consumer DVD copying represents a relatively minor factor compared with insider leaks.

"Our conclusion is that the distributors really need to take a hard look at their own internal processes and look at how they can stop the insider leaks of their movies" before taking measures that might hamstring consumers' technologies and rights, said Lorrie Cranor, a researcher at AT&T Labs and lead author of the study.

The production and distribution process provide a better choke point, Ms. Cranor said, than antipiracy measures that could hamstring consumer electronics devices and computer networks. "If you're not going to worry about the insiders, it's kind of pointless to worry about the outsiders," she said.

The insiders might be workers in production or promotion, or even Academy Awards screeners, to whom the studios send thousands of advance copies of DVD's each year. "The movie industry ought to treat everybody within its influence equally, from studio executives and investors, down through movie editors, truck drivers and out to the critics," concluded Ms. Cranor and her coauthors, AT&T Labs researchers Patrick McDaniel, Simon Byers and Dave Kormann, and Eric Cronin of the University of Pennsylvania.

Ken Jacobsen, senior vice president and director of worldwide piracy issues for the motion picture association, said he had not yet seen the report, but added that its conclusions seemed off.

"The industry experience is the awards screeners are a source for piracy," he said, but primarily during the Oscar-judging season. "The industry experience also is, on a rare occasion, a copy gets out of a postproduction house and enters the pirate marketplace. And the industry experience is that a majority of movies enter the pirate marketplace as a result of illegal camcording" in theaters. Digital piracy, he said, is "a serious problem for us now."

Still, large-scale swapping of high quality, full-length films and HDTV programs is out of the reach of all but the most wired consumer because the files are gargantuan, said Raffi Krikorian, a graduate student in the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has researched the difficulty of digital copying.

However, Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, cautions that when the technology does grow robust enough for movie trading, consumers will almost certainly do it. In a recent survey of 12- to 20-year-olds published by the company, 20 percent said that they had downloaded a feature film. "I'd have to say when one out of five young people has downloaded a full length movie from a file sharing site, you do have a problem here," Mr. Bernoff said.

But the downloads were probably of low quality, he said, and the economic effect is "basically nil — there's no evidence whatsoever that people are not going to the theater or not buying DVD's or not renting videotapes because of this activity." Solid figures are hard to come by, but estimates in recent studies put the daily movie downloads between 350,000 and 400,000.

Like many experts in the field, Mr. Krikorian said that consumers were still several years away from being able to zip large digital video files to each other. Hollywood, he said, "shouldn't worry about Internet piracy now, because that's not feasible," he said. Instead, he suggested that the industry learn from the mistakes of the music industry and focus on building business models that will allow the companies to give customers what they want, "so they don't have to look like the bad guys, suing 12-year-old kids."

Much of that planning is already going on, Mr. Bernoff of Forrester said. Studio leaders "are absolutely determined that they will not allow to happen to them what has happened to the music industry," he said. They see video-on-demand through online distribution — if made easy to use and priced right — as being far more attractive than the hassle-filled process of video file swapping, he said. Studios might have to be willing to release movies to the Internet earlier than they would like to compete with pirates, he said, but a good industry strategy will "shut down the illegal distribution" by making it irrelevant.

While Hollywood is supporting new laws to toughen penalties to fight online piracy, it is also imposing better control over internal security. The case of the premature "Hulk" turned out to be a success story because federal investigators traced the online copy back through identifying numbers. The person who put the movie online, Kerry Gonzalez, had received an early copy from a friend at an advertising agency. He pleaded guilty to copyright infringement in June.

Ms. Cranor and her colleagues acknowledge that the industry has taken some steps, but concluded that substantially more could be done.

To Mr. Bernoff, those moves are crucial to any industry strategy for fighting digital piracy. "They have to mind their own store," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/te...b891c8c65eeec6


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An Appealing Case: RIAA, Verizon Head Back to Court
Roy Mark

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Verizon return to court Tuesday when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia hears Verizon's appeal of a January ruling requiring the telecom giant to comply with a subpoena request by the RIAA to reveal the identities of customers who allegedly infringed copyrights using peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks.

The subpoena was issued through a provision of the 1998 DMCA that allows copyright holders to issue subpoenas that have not been reviewed by a judge and requires no notice to, or opportunity to be heard by, the alleged infringer.

Unlike a usual subpoena, which requires some underlying claim of a crime, under the DMCA a subpoena can be issued by a court clerk who only checks to make sure the subpoena form is properly filled out.

Verizon originally argued that the DMCA subpoena only applied in cases where an Internet service provider (ISP) stored the copyrighted material on its servers. Because people using P2P networks store the material on their own hard drives, Verizon said it was exempt from the DMCA subpoena.

Since then, Verizon has expanded its case to the actual constitutionality of the DMCA subpoena, privacy rights violations, the potential dangers of the subpoena being misused by non-copyright holders and even the future growth on the Internet.

The RIAA contends the DMCA subpoena is perfectly legal and was agreed to by Internet service proviers (ISPs) during the 1998 negotiations over the DMCA. One of the central issues then was the liability of ISPs for the possible copyright infringements of their customers.

The DMCA gives ISPs liability protections in exchange for assisting copyright owners in identifying and dealing with infringers who misuse the service providers' systems, including complying with an expedited subpoena process for copyright owners who want to pursue legal action against infringers. Neither side ever anticipated the development and explosive growth of peer-to-peer networks.

In January, a U.S. District Court ruled in the RIAA's favor and ordered Verizon to turn over the names. Verizon then sought a stay in order to protect the names while the company appeals the decision. In April, U.S. District Judge John Bates rejected Verizon's stay request but granted a temporary stay until the Court of Appeals could decide the matter, which ruled in June that Verizon had to turn over the names.

Since then, the RIAA issued more 1,500 subpoenas. Those subpoenas led to 261 civil lawsuits being filed by the RIAA last week against alleged copyright infringers.

Both sides agree the case is probably heading to the Supreme Court.
siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/3077801