Q&A With Spyware Remover Dr. Damn
Everyone hates spyware, but where does spyware come from and how does it get on your computer? Any filesharing fanatic will tell you that one of the most notorious sources of spyware infection is from downloading and using file sharing software such as Kazaa and iMesh.
There are many alternatives to these clients that are hacked to remove the spyware from them, so-called cleansed file sharing clients are made by hackers such as DrDamn. Geeknews sent a quick Q&A to DrDamn to get his thoughts on the file sharing scene and more.
Geeknews: You have released several filesharing clients after modifying them to remove spyware and ads, can you explain a little bit about how this is done and why you do it?
DrDamn: Basically, I just install the software, delete all the spyware (sometimes this can be more complicated than it should be) and then then I write a new installer for the software from scratch. In the case of iMesh, I had to crack the EXE so that it wouldn't notice that the spyware was missing.
Geeknews: Can you explain which filesharing client(s) you like the best and why?
DrDamn: I tend to be very pragmatic with these types of choices. I mostly use SoulSeek and eMule (although if Mike would fix the crash bugs I'd probably switch back to Shareaza) but I've also been using BitTorrent quite a bit lately. It really has a strong community following, despite being the most unusual file sharing client around (i.e. the lack of any search function.)
Geeknews: Do you have plans to release other *cleansed* filesharing clients? If so can you go into detail on which ones and which ones you may do in the future?
DrDamn: I'll keep releasing them as long as I need to. I'm hoping my efforts, along with the efforts of many others, will eventually raise awareness of spyware to the point where the companies that write spyware applications can't stay in business.
Geeknews: What do you think about AOL pulling the plug on Nullsoft's WASTE distributed networking program?
DrDamn: I can't say I'm surprised. AOL did the same thing when Nullsoft released Gnutella several years ago. I haven't yet tried Waste myself, but I probably will soon. It certainly sounds like a cool concept, though.
Geeknews: How do you feel about industry advocates such as the RIAA and ASCAP?
DrDamn: They represent a failed business model. Seriously, if they want to stay in business they're going to have to offer someting that wouldn't be so easy to distribute for free, such as mult-channel, 24 bit audio. If the RIAA could set standards for record players back in the day, I don't see why they couldn't say that CDs are dead and DVD- audio is the new standard.
Geeknews: What is your background and where do you want your online ventures to take you?
DrDamn: I guess you could say I'm your typical college student with various computer- related hobbies. My main goal is to educate people about spyware, and I do that through the distribution of spyware-free filesharing clients. People often want me to make clean versions of other software, but I really just don't have the time.
More:
http://www.geeknews.net/index.php?pg=15
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Hollywood's Box Office Slump Continues
David Germain
This year's movie superheroes are getting licked by last year's.
While The Matrix Reloaded, X2: X-Men United, The Hulk and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines had big weekend openings, Hollywood revenues lag behind the record pace of 2002, when Spider-Man and Star Wars ruled the summer.
Since early May, when X2 kicked off the summer blockbuster season, domestic revenues are at $2.11 billion US, down 3.3 per cent from summer 2002, according to box- office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
For the year, revenues are $4.65 billion US, a 4.5 per cent drop from 2002, when movie grosses hit an all-time high of $9.32 billion.
The picture is even worse factoring in this year's higher ticket prices. With an average admission cost of $6.03 US, up from $5.80 in 2002, Hollywood has sold about 772 million movie tickets this year, off 8.2 per cent from 2002.
Moviegoers seem less enchanted by this summer's crowd of explosive action flicks, none of which has approached the $400 million-plus performance of Spider-Man and $300 million payday of Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones.
Audiences may be a bit worn out by the onslaught of comic-book adaptations such as The Hulk, X2 or Daredevil, and by Hollywood's record number of sequels -- about two dozen this year.
In summer 2002, fans were still buzzing about Spider-Man when the low-budget sleeper My Big Fat Greek Wedding grew into a blockbuster on audience word-of-mouth alone. Moviegoing tends to breed more moviegoing, but this summer, the films are not catching people's fancy in quite the same way.
"Maybe this is just my esoteric theory, but it could be that people just feel like doing something else than going to the theatre," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations. "Maybe they did so much moviegoing last year that they're burned out."
This year's most anticipated movie, The Matrix Reloaded, came in second behind Spider-Man among best weekend debuts ever and grossed $135.8 million in its first five days. But unlike the staying power of Spider-Man, Matrix Reloaded earned mixed reviews and so-so word-of-mouth, with revenues falling steeply in subsequent weekends.
The animated fish tale Finding Nemo swam past Matrix Reloaded last weekend to become this year's top-grossing movie, at $274.9 million and counting.
Other big action flicks have opened strongly then nose-dived, most notably the The Hulk. Second-weekend revenues plunged 70 per cent from its $62.1 million debut.
Meantime, Finding Nemo and other lighter tales such as the heist caper The Italian Job or the comedies Bruce Almighty, Bringing Down the House and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days held up better week after week.
Despite lagging revenues, a few surprise hits could be enough to put Hollywood on track to overtake last year's record box office.
This year's advantage is a solid lineup of potential hits in the second half of summer, traditionally a quieter time at theatres than the stretch from Memorial Day to the Fourth of July. Summer 2002 closed with a whimper, while this season has a chance to go out with a bang.
http://www.canoe.ca/JamMovies/jul8_slump-ap.html
1. "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," $44 million.
2. "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde," $22.9 million.
3. "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," $14.2 million.
4. "Finding Nemo," $11 million.
5. "The Hulk," $8.2 million.
6. "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas," $6.8 million.
7. "28 Days Later," $6.1 million.
8. "The Italian Job," $4.3 million.
9. "Bruce Almighty," $4 million.
10. "2 Fast 2 Furious," $2.4 million.
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Spike Lee and Viacom Settle Lawsuit
Spike TV won't be getting spiked after all.
Filmmaker Spike Lee and Viacom settled a dispute Monday that allows the media giant to rebrand its TNN network as Spike TV, ending a lawsuit that contended the new moniker was a deliberate attempt to hijack Lee's image.
Lee, director of Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing, had obtained a temporary injunction in June that prevented the name change, but on Monday state Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub lifted the order.
The ruling means Viacom, which also owns CBS and MTV, can proceed immediately with plans to call the network Spike TV, the "first television network for men." Details on the settlement were not disclosed.
TNN shows reruns of The A-Team, Baywatch and Miami Vice and sports entertainment such as pro wrestling and American Gladiators. The network also carries an animated series featuring Pamela Anderson as the voice of Stan Lee's Stripperella, an undercover agent who is also a stripper.
Lee, whose real name is Shelton Jackson Lee, said he objected to being associated with low-brow programming.
The judge initially ordered Lee to post a $500,000 US bond June 13 after he issued a temporary injunction against Viacom's plan to rename TNN. But after a hearing two weeks ago, the judge raised the bond to $2.5 million and gave Lee until Monday to post it.
The additional $2 million was never posted, and the judge vacated the injunction after both sides reached the agreement, said one of Lee's lawyers, Terry Gross.
"We have settled the case with Viacom," Gross said. "It's obviously good when parties settle."
During the hearing Monday, TNN vice- president Kevin Kay said the network had lost millions of dollars since the injunction and stood to lose millions more if the bar continued.
Viacom officials didn't immediately return telephone calls seeking comment on the judge's order.
While the case was pending, Lee was in Los Angeles filming Sucker-Free City for Showtime, a cable network owned by Viacom.
http://www.canoe.ca/Television/jul8_spiketv-ap.html
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A New Nuclear Age
Planners design technology to withstand the apocalypse
William M. Arkin
The Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review, approved by President Bush in January 2002, outlined steps the U.S. should take to ensure its future ability to "defeat any aggressor." Included was a mandate for an "assured, survivable and enduring" communications network, one that would remain functional even after a full-scale nuclear attack.
Defense Department documents recently made available to the Los Angeles Times describe how the government is now moving ahead with a number of new programs toward that end, including a $200-million, eight-year effort to expand and streamline nuclear war planning. Concurrently, the same commercial technologies used in wireless communications and personal computing are being enlisted to achieve a long-standing nuclear war fighter's dream: systems able to operate even during a protracted nuclear war.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology
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How to Make a Sonic Purée From Pop Snippets
Matthew Mirapaul
Elvis Presley sounded all shook up. As his music streamed from a computer's speakers, he sang, "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog/ don't be cruel." Then, after urging listeners to avoid contact with his blue suede shoes, he crooned, "Hallelujah."
This mangled medley was not remixed by a mischievous D.J. Instead, the mismatched music was generated by new software. N.A.G., as the interactive program is called, works like a cross between Google, the Morpheus music file-sharing network and a Cuisinart kitchen appliance.
It allows users to search for words — like "Presley" and "love" — in areas of the Internet where MP3 song files are, for the most part, illicitly swapped. But the program is not designed to play complete tunes. As N.A.G. retrieves song files labeled with the selected words, it slices off audio snippets and blends them into sonic collages.
The results are generally closer to sound art than conventional music. Searching for "Madonna," for instance, spawns a staccato string of song excerpts, some as short as one-twentieth of a second. But chance can yield a mellifluous outcome, as when overlapping versions of "Yesterday" by the Beatles, James Taylor, Boyz II Men and José Feliciano produce a near fugue.
N.A.G. was created by Jason Freeman, a 25-year-old New York composer and media artist, who put the program online last week. It can be downloaded from
Turbulence.org, the Internet-art site of New Radio and Performing Arts, a new-media arts organization that commissioned the work.
Despite the recent announcement by the recording industry that it intends to sue computer users who illegally share large numbers of music files, N.A.G. users are unlikely to be targets. Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America, said, "I'm concerned about anything that relies upon infringements to succeed." But he added that he did not expect the program to be responsible for widespread copyright violations.
Mr. Freeman said he became intrigued by the file-sharing networks once he began to appreciate the vast music library they contained. But the notion of simply downloading songs bored him, he said, so he decided to develop a tool that would roam the networks, using them not so much to steal music as to render something new.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Freeman described N.A.G. as an instrument that plays the Internet. "I just love the serendipity," he said. "It's not that things always line up in really interesting ways. But when they do, it's all the more exciting."
N.A.G. is an acronym for Network Auralization for Gnutella. Gnutella is a set of technical specifications that allows individual computers on the Internet to exchange data like MP3 song files. It underlies Morpheus, LimeWire, Bear Share and other file-sharing networks.
But the work's title also alludes to Mr. Freeman's nagging doubts about how the battle over file-sharing will affect musical creativity. As a composer, he is concerned by how easy it is for file-sharers to violate musical copyrights. Yet he is also troubled by the music industry's efforts to impose limits on how digital music can be copied, redistributed and, ultimately, transformed.
Mr. Freeman wondered what would happen if commercial music were exclusively distributed this way. "Would the virtuosic techniques of D.J.'s still be possible?" he said. "Would teenagers still be able to make mash-ups or remixes to share with their friends? And, of course, will works of art such as N.A.G. still be possible?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/ar...ic/08MIRA.html
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Music in the Mind
C. Claiborne Ray
Q. Why should I experience the constant repetition in my mind of melodies that I heard either long ago or recently?
A. Studies of brain activity reported last year by researchers at Dartmouth pinpointed an area of the brain that specializes in processing melodies.
This area has links to short- and long-term memory, as well as to emotions. It is also involved in assimilating information that is important to an individual and in handling interactions between emotional and nonemotional information. Because of the links and the function, remembering a melody may have much in common with remembering an emotion.
The researchers, led by Dr. Petr Janata, a psychologist, identified the region as the rostromedial prefrontal cortex, just behind the middle of the forehead. The study traced magnetic resonance images of blood flow in the brain.
In part of the study, musically trained subjects listened to a melody that cycled through the 24 major and minor scales of Western music. Especially when a test note that did not "belong" in some of the keys was heard, discernible changes occurred. As the keys changed, brain activity traced a doughnut-shaped area in the region.
Though the study was conducted using Western scales, the priming of the brain with any other set of organized musical information would have the same effects, other scientists suggest.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/08/science/08QNA.html
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New Zealand Police Get Tech Crime Powers
Correspondents in Wellington
POLICE and security agencies in New Zealand have been given broad powers to intercept electronic communications after the passage of new legislation that also boosted hacking laws.
The Crimes Amendment Act extends existing police powers to tap phone lines with the approval of a High Court judge. It was overwhelmingly approved by 111 of the New Zealand parliament's 120 members.
The new law takes effect October 1 and gives police, the Government Communications and Security Bureau and the Security Intelligence Service additional power to intercept emails, faxes and text messages with High Court approval.
New Zealand has passed a raft of new security and anti-terror laws and beefed up domestic security since the September 11 2001 terror attacks in the United States. The new legislation reflected changes in technology, crime and law enforcement since the country's Crimes Act was passed in 1961, Justice Minister Phil Goff said.
But all nine Green Party legislators, who opposed the measure, called it a further invasion of privacy. The party's co-leader, Rod Donald, said it was "an extension of the surveillance state".
Mr Goff said the law also bolsters privacy by making it illegal for unauthorised people to intercept emails and faxes not intended for them. Previously only unauthorised phone taps were illegal.
Controls on hackers were toughened by making it illegal, without proper authorisation, to intercept, access, use or damage data held on computers, Mr Goff said. It will also be illegal to sell, distribute or possess computer hacking programs.
"People attempting to put an Internet site off-line, or change or delete someone else's data, will face maximum sentences of seven years" in prison, Mr Goff said.
http://australianit.news.com.au/comm...=date&Intro=No
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Plan for VHF Internet Trials
Simon Hayes
VACATED VHF television spectrum could be used for high-speed internet access in rural areas, if an Australian National University trial is successful.
ANU's BushLAN project - which uses channels one and two on the VHF band to provide internet access - will be tested at Wollongong on the NSW south coast in the next couple of months.
With funding from the ACT Knowledge Fund and the Australian Research Council, the graduate student program will use VHF antennas linked to multiple homes by 802.11b wireless LAN technology to deliver internet from a transceiver at the ISP to the users.
Twenty ANU honours students have been working on the project.
Gerard Borg from ANU's Plasma Research Labs said spectrum could become available for other uses as television stations vacate VHF in favour of digital transmission.
"In the ACT and Wollongong these channels are not being used, but there has to be a long-term question as to who has the best use for these frequencies," he said. "It will always be up in the air.
"We will leave it up to others to decide if this is the best use of the spectrum."
Once up and running, BushLAN will deliver between 100Kbps and 1Mbps up to 100 km from an ISP.
Up to 1000 users could be served on 20MHz. "This is off-the-shelf VHF equipment," Dr Borg said. "We are looking at Linux as an embedded system."
With transceivers operating at 25MHz to 70MHz on a single channel, BushLAN will use WiFi to connect users to antennas.
VHF telecommunications would be a cheaper option than satellite.
"In terms of ongoing costs and set-up costs, this will be cheaper than satellite," he said.
"It doesn't have the latency of satellite and it's a bit more reliable than satellite because the user has total control of the equipment."
Any future commercialisation of the system would depend on the future use of the spectrum, and the commitment of commercial users to the system, he said.
Metropolitan television stations are due to leave VHF in eight years.
"There are companies out there that support us and think it's a brilliant idea that's worth the risk," Dr Borg said.
"If one day it turned out it was a (permitted) use of the spectrum, then they could make it happen."
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...nbv%5E,00.html
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Court Backs Thumbnail Image Linking
Stefanie Olsen
Search engines' display of miniature images is fair use under copyright law, a federal appeals court ruled Monday, but the legality of presenting full-size renditions of visual works is yet to be determined.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision is a partial win for defendant Arriba Soft--an image search engine now known as Ditto.com--in its case against photographer Leslie Kelly. Kelly sued Arriba Soft in April 1999 for copyright infringement when the company's software had recorded miniatures, or thumbnails, and full sizes of Kelly's digital photos and made them accessible via its search engine.
The court ruled that use of thumbnail images in search engines is legal, confirming an earlier ruling by the same court from February 2002. But the court withdrew a previous decision on the display of full-size images, which it had deemed out of the bounds of fair use because it was likely to harm the market for Kelly's work.
That part of the ruling held Arriba Soft liable for copyright infringement for opening a new window to display full-size images, a practice known as in-line linking or framing. Other visual search engines use this technique, including Google, Lycos and AltaVista. The case is now ordered to go to trial.
"As to the first action (on thumbnails), the district court correctly found that Arriba's use was fair. However, as to the second action, we conclude that the district court should not have reached the issue because neither party moved for summary judgment as to the full-size images," according to the opinion.
Steve Krongold, the plaintiff's attorney, said that despite the ruling, he is confident that they will win in a trial.
"We do not agree that displaying full-size images, which were taken from another person's Web site and used to sell products and services at Arriba Soft, is a fair use of that image," said Krongold, an attorney with Turner Green, based in Costa Mesa, Calif.
Although Ditto.com could not be immediately reached for comment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which filed a brief urging the court to permit Web linking to copyrighted images, viewed the ruling as a victory.
"Web site owners can rest a bit easier about linking to copyrighted materials online," EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann said in a statement. "By revising its ruling, the court removed a copyright iceberg from the main shipping lanes of the World Wide Web."
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-1023629.html
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Searching for a Dial Tone in Africa
G. Pascal Zachary
The Internet bubble has long since popped in the United States, Europe and Asia. But in parts of Africa the Internet is serving as a powerful force for change, primarily by allowing companies and individuals to make international telephone calls far less expensively than through conventional channels.
Calls in and out of sub-Saharan Africa have long been among the world's most costly, strangling business opportunities and burdening ordinary people. Services have been tightly controlled by government-owned telephone companies, many of which are rife with corruption and incompetence. Governments also imposed high tariffs on international calls, seeing it as a lucrative source of revenue.
But now, thanks to what is called voice-over-Internet, phone alternatives are flourishing, sharply lowering costs and expanding opportunities for business and consumers in some of the poorest places on earth — even as they pose a competitive threat to government-sanctioned telephone companies.
Sending telephone calls over the Internet is gaining ground in Africa because it makes possible a range of new services, linking the sub-Saharan to the world's major industrial centers in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. And better digital connections, mostly via satellite, are raising the hope that Ghana — the most peaceful country in a West African region besieged by civil wars and ethnic strife — may become the regional hub for an information-technology industry.
"As Ghana improves its connectivity to the outside world, it has the potential to become for Africa what Bangalore became for India," said Paul Maritz, a former senior executive at Microsoft who recently visited Accra to survey the nascent high-tech scene here.
Last Thursday, at a United Nations conference in New York, the secretary general, Kofi Annan, delivered a message that developing countries also need to include wireless access, known as Wi-Fi, in building an Internet system.
"It is precisely in places where no infrastructure exists that Wi-Fi can be particularly effective," Mr. Annan said, "helping countries to leapfrog generations of telecommunications technology and empower their people."
As the movement advances, though, many government-owned telephone companies, which dominate wired service in most African countries, are fighting a rear-guard action.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/05/bu...ss/05VOIC.html
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Stop Me Before I Become Anonymous
John C. Dvorak
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) may become indirectly responsible for our inability to stop the next terrorist attack on the US. Hear me out on this one. The association's recent move to bust individuals, mostly students, for music trading will spark a movement toward anonymous computing unlike anything we've ever seen. Already two anonymous music swapping systems have appeared: Filetopia and Blubster. This is just the beginning.
We can expect to see the development of new stealth technologies that will be used routinely by everyone. A massive trend toward true Net anonymity will have repercussions that are all bad. Child porn rings will be harder to uncover. E-mail sources will be harder to find. Spam will rule. Virus coders will remain in the shadows. Terrorism can flourish in such an environment. And the RIAA still won't win the battle over file swapping. But it will have set off a bad chain of events.
There have been bursts of activity concerning anonymity on the Net, with paranoid users finding ways to hide themselves from any sort of scrutiny. There are still a few remailers out there through which you can send anonymous e-mails. You might do this to prevent your e-mail address from being harvested by so-called spam bots. It's also handy for writing poison-pen letters to the boss or whomever. Many of these anonymous remailers were compromised by various governmental security agencies (or so it was believed) and their use has declined recently. Also, the general public didn't seem to have a serious interest in extreme anonymity, since the openness of the Net didn't seem to be causing anyone's exploitation.
Some years ago, you could even subscribe to an anonymity service that would route all your surfing and even IRC activity through various routers and servers in such a way that you could never be tracked by either IP address or MAC address/serial number. The service cropped up during the dot-com era. A few years ago, I saw the CEO of the company that had provided the service, and he told me that people simply weren't interested enough to subscribe.
That was then and this is now. Nobody was subscribing to the anonymous Net because there was no fear. There would have been no groundswell of technological change to protect a child porn ring. This is not the case with kids in college who are computer science majors. Especially when the kids like swapping MP3 files around the campus. I would recommend to the RIAA that if it is going to bust people for music trading as a way of making money, it should file as many suits as it can in the shortest amount of time. Anonymity technology is coming on fast.
None of this is new. Concern about anonymity has simply been moribund until now. In 2001, for example, the CIA took up with Oakland-based SafeWeb to implement Triangle Boy—a software system that could keep the Net activities of CIA employees anonymous. The public-at-large saw no particular value in this.
What I'd like to see is some research on Net users that will show how many of them have downloaded even one song illegally. Just one. During the heyday of Napster there were millions and millions of users. With new software coming from Microsoft and others that will allow just about anyone to peruse your hard disk remotely, I can see the public at large getting a little more cautious, especially when it sees the RIAA bankrupting students with legal action.
And you can be certain that the ISPs out there—all of them—will do whatever they can to help users implement anonymity strategies. They fought against the RIAA when it wanted them to give up user names. This is not because ISP's care about protecting users. It's a huge pain for ISPs to have to police the users and do extra paperwork for the benefit of some outsider. Screw that.
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article/0...a=44323,00.asp
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Privacy In Peril
Steven Musil
Wal-Mart Stores shoppers can breathe easier knowing that an experimental wireless inventory control system won't be tracking them and their purchases from the store to their homes.
Wal-Mart unexpectedly canceled testing for the system, ending one of the first and most closely watched efforts to bring controversial radio frequency identification technology to store shelves in the United States. A Wal-Mart representative said the retail giant would not conduct a planned trial of a so-called smart-shelf system with partner Gillette that was scheduled to begin last month at an outlet in a Boston suburb.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology uses microchips to wirelessly transmit product serial numbers to a scanner without the need for human intervention. The technology is seen as an eventual successor to bar-code inventory tracking systems, promising to cut distribution costs for manufacturers and improve retailing margins.
Backers of the technology foresee billions of packaged goods tracked using in-store RFID systems that might one day help prevent shoplifting and speed shoppers through automated checkout lines. But the technology has drawn attacks from consumer privacy groups that worry about potential abuses if product-tracking tags are allowed to follow people from stores into their homes.
The news isn't so good for file swappers. Those hoping to share music and other works online without exposing their identity to the prying eyes of copyright enforcers face a tough choice.
Hiding on a file-sharing system is hard for a very simple reason: Peer-to-peer networks are designed for efficiency, not anonymity. They rely on a straightforward mechanism that is ruthlessly efficient at trading files. But, by broadcasting the contents of shared folders, the system leaves people vulnerable to identification and, therefore, to possible legal action.
On a peer-to-peer network, files are directly swapped between computers, each of which has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address that can be traced back to the Internet service provider, corporation or university to which it belongs. Because computers on a peer-to-peer network transfer files without going through an intermediary, the IP address of one person on the network is generally available to everyone else.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued the parent company of Puretunes, a Spanish site that briefly offered inexpensive music downloads. Puretunes emerged in May, claiming that it had won rights from several Spanish licensing agencies that gave it the ability to distribute major- label music legally online.
Label representatives said the site was operating illegally because Puretunes had not acquired the permission of labels, artists or song publishers.
However, the service went offline last month. The RIAA suit comes after several weeks of complaints from angry Puretunes customers. Puretunes' plan was to give visitors all-you-can-download access to a vast music library for time periods such as one night, one weekend or one week.
On the other side of the copyright fight, a group representing small Webcasters is threatening to sue the RIAA on antitrust grounds, fearful that hundreds or thousands of stations will be pushed offline.
The Webcaster Alliance, a group representing about 300 Net radio stations, says royalty agreements negotiated last year at the behest of Congress and the Library of Congress threaten to put a number of small stations out of business. The group's members have not paid royalties to copyright owners under any of several possible payment schemes, one of which was passed last year by Congress in an attempt to protect the economic viability of small Net radio stations.
In another corner of the copyright battle, a federal appeals court ruled that search engines' display of miniature images is fair use under copyright law, but the legality of presenting full-size renditions of visual works has yet to be determined.
The court ruled that use of thumbnail images in search engines is legal, confirming an earlier ruling by the same court from February 2002. But the court withdrew a previous decision on the display of full-size images, which it had deemed beyond the bounds of fair use because it was likely to harm the market for a photographer's work.
http://news.com.com/2100-1083-1024849.html
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P2P's Little Secret
Declan McCullagh
File swappers hoping to share music and other works online without exposing their identity to the prying eyes of copyright enforcers face a tough choice.
Popular peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa, where the lion's share of online trading of music and other files takes place, are designed such that participants who wish to remain completely anonymous must pay a severe price in terms of convenience and usability, experts warn.
"There is no good system out there for hiding identities," said Randy Saaf, president of MediaDefender, a Los Angeles-based company that investigates peer-to-peer networks for the music industry. "If they're sharing content, they're wide open--they're running the risk. It's hard to anonymize people on a big public network."
There are plenty of incentives for Web surfers to try to cloak their identity these days. Recently, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) pledged to sue individuals who infringe copyrights, and it won a court order forcing Verizon Communications to divulge the identity of a Kazaa user. The RIAA has already filed suit against four university students, and some schools have disciplined students for inappropriate file-swapping.
So far, the RIAA's threats of litigation have had no effect, said Wayne Rosso, president of peer-to-peer company Grokster. "As far as I can see, nobody really cares," Rosso said. "Our downloads are up, traffic is holding steady. Come on, users know they can't sue 60 million of them. Who are they kidding?"
Hiding on a file-sharing system is hard for a very simple reason: Peer-to-peer networks are designed for efficiency, not anonymity. They rely on a straightforward mechanism that is ruthlessly efficient at trading files. But, by broadcasting the contents of shared folders, the system leaves users vulnerable to identification and, therefore, to possible legal action.
On a peer-to-peer network, files are directly swapped between computers, each of which has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address that can be traced back to the Internet service provider, corporation or university to which it belongs. Because computers on a peer-to-peer network transfer files without going through an intermediary, the IP address of one person on the network is generally available to everyone else.
Typically, a copyright holder can unmask a suspected infringer by sending a subpoena--which invokes a controversial section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)--to the company or university providing network connectivity to the IP address in question, asking it to reveal the identity of the suspect. Once it knows the suspect's name, a copyright holder has the option of filing a lawsuit or simply sending a cease-and-desist notice.
Products that offer privacy for activities such as Web surfing and e-mail have been available for some time, although most have been greeted with indifference by consumers. That attitude could change, however, with the RIAA's new policy of filing lawsuits against individuals, potentially sparking a renaissance in anonymizing tools for peer-to-peer networks.
If large copyright holders begin to target privacy-protecting Internet services, advocates worry that the tiny industry may not be able to survive the eventual fusillade of laws and litigation. (In October 2001, Zero-Knowledge Systems, a pioneer in the type of identity-shielding technology that would be a boon to peer-to-peer networks, closed its flagship anonymity network, Freedom.)
Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says that anonymity should remain the default condition both online and offline. "It is in many different contexts in the physical world, whether it's travel or commerce," Rotenberg said. "The burden typically falls on organizations that want your personal identity to justify their reason."
Given the RIAA's history of lawsuits, Rotenberg said he fears the worst. "To the extent that anonymity appears on the RIAA radar screen--as have P2P and other technologies that stand in the way of copyright enforcement--you can be sure that RIAA attorneys will launch a frontal assault, regardless of the constitutional implications," Rotenberg said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1029-1023735.html
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Digital Music For Adults
MP3s have appealed mostly to people with more time than money -- until now.
Pat Regnier
On a rainy afternoon in April, I dropped into the record store -- excuse me, CD store -- across the street from my office in Manhattan.
I didn't buy anything. I just wanted to remind myself one more time of what a CD store looks like, before they go the way of soda fountains and men's hat shops.
This fit of future-forward nostalgia was brought on by the launch that morning of Apple's new iTunes 4 with Music Store, an online service that lets you download songs for just 99 cents each and whole albums for $10.
Music Store will have a limited audience at first -- you need a Mac running the OS X system to use it -- but it's pretty clear now that the music industry is ready to give up on the CD.
Disembodied digital music has gone mainstream. For those of us old enough to still use terms like "record store" (I'm all of 31), this is going to take some getting used to.
Up to now, the digital music boom has been driven largely by the tastes of teenagers. Most grown-ups just don't have the time to skulk around online looking for "free" pirated music files with software like Kazaa and LimeWire. (At least some of us still have scruples about stealing.)
What's more, we don't want to listen to our music only on PC speakers or Walkman-like portable MP3 players; many of us have invested over the years in decent stereo systems.
We've also put a lot of money into our CD collections, and I for one am reluctant to abandon my CDs for anything that doesn't sound as good, or close to it. But the dirty secret about MP3s, the most popular new format, is that they can sound terrible -- particularly if you listen to jazz or classical or, really, anything more musically sophisticated than Britney Spears.
Still, going virtual is worth it. Over the past couple of months, I've tried out more than a dozen new digital music devices. I'm convinced that this new technology is something adults can love.
Apple's deservedly popular iPod is just the beginning. With a new breed of surprisingly inexpensive stereo components called digital audio receivers, you can now access your entire music collection anywhere in your house.
You'll even find that you listen to music in new ways. Recently the Talking Heads' sublime "Heaven" popped up on my jukebox in random play mode; I'd owned the CD for years but hadn't played it much and never noticed this amazing song. That kind of discovery happens all the time now that my music collection has been liberated from shiny plastic disks.
Ready to join the revolution? Here's what you need to know.
http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/24/pf/s...nups/index.htm
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Metallica Disses Apple iTunes
Jerry Del Colliano
News sources including CNN are reporting that Metallica has opted not to sell its songs on Apple’s newly successful iTunes 4 pay-per-download service claiming that they want to sell their entire album not just the individual songs. This decision comes after Metallica’s public opposition to Napster and other peer to peer file sharing systems that allow people to swap copywritten music files without paying per download. Apple allows users to buy a limited amount of albums on its iTunes 4 system but representatives from Metallica’s management company tell CNN that Apple’s policy is to only sell albums from artists who allow them to sell their singles too.
Other popular bands are reportedly not completely enthused with selling their songs on iTunes including the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Green Day and Linkin Park. This causes some users to feel even more compelled to try to find the songs for free elsewhere on the internet. Still to this day, ripping songs from a CD to MP3 can be completed in just minutes which can then allow the songs to be immediately posted on file swapping systems.
Searching for “Metallica” on Limewire, a peer to peer file sharing application that runs on the Gnutella network, resulted in 223 different tracks from the band including every song from their latest album, St. Anger. For young fans, the temptation to steal many of the tracks and rip them onto a $0.10 CDR might prove to be stronger than the threat of a lawsuit from the RIAA. Apple’s iTunes is far from a perfect solution, however it does offer music enthusiasts an opportunity to buy music the way many of them want to enjoy it. If bands were looking for new ways to make albums more compelling, they might want to look at copy protected new formats like DVD-Audio which provide higher resolution surround sound mixes, small music videos and hidden feature “Easter eggs.” DVD-Audio discs are priced comparably to CDs and play back perfectly (not in MLP surround however) on DVD-Video based game machines like Sony’s Playstation II and Microsoft’s Xbox.
http://www.audiorevolution.com/news/...etallica.shtml
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Patent Bending
James Surowiecki
The American newspaper business as we know it was born on September 3, 1833, when a twenty-three-year-old publisher named Benjamin Day put out the first edition of the New York Sun. Whereas other papers sold for five or six cents, the Sun cost just a penny. For revenue, Day relied on advertising rather than on subscriptions. Above all, he revolutionized the way papers were distributed. He sold them to newsboys in lots of a hundred to hawk in the street. Before long, Day was the most important publisher in New York.
One thing that Day did not do was patent any of these innovations. Soon after the Sun appeared, penny papers made their début in Boston and Baltimore; in New York, James Gordon Bennett started the Herald, mimicking the Sun’s price and sales methods. By 1840, the Sun and the Herald were the country’s two most popular dailies.
This is how American business worked until very recently. Innovators came up with new ways of selling products, handling suppliers, running organizations, or managing information. If the ideas were good, the innovators got rich, but they also got imitated, which made them less rich than they might have been. It was great for everyone else, though. The competition lowered prices and increased quality; the new ideas spread and were improved upon. The mail-order catalogue, the moving assembly line, the decentralized corporation, the frequent-flier mile, the category-killer store—none of these radical ideas were patented.
Those were the days. Now the first thing someone with a good notion does is press the government to protect it. Priceline patented its reverse-auction method for selling cut-rate airline tickets. I.B.M. patented a method for keeping track of people waiting in line for the bathroom. Last month, Netflix, a company that runs an online DVD-rental subscription service, got a patent covering, among other things, the way its customers request titles and the way it sends out DVDs. And eBay is now in court appealing a verdict that it infringed on a Virginia man’s patent. The crime? Selling auctioned items at a fixed price. What gall.
For most of American history, it was next to impossible to get a patent on what the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office called “a mere method of doing business.” A business method was considered to be an idea—selling newspapers in the streets, delivering packages overnight—and ideas of this sort were not patentable. But in July, 1998, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit did away with that principle. The case, State Street v. Signature Financial, involved software that Signature had written to enable it to administer mutual funds more efficiently. But the court’s language was broad enough to embrace any business process (as long as it was new and “nonobvious” and had a “useful, concrete, and tangible result”). The gates opened, and in the past five years thousands of business-method patents have been granted. One inventive soul won a patent for a system of using pictures to train janitors. Another got one for describing a way to cut hair with both hands.
All patents, of course, stifle competition. That’s why inventors like them. But business-method patents have an especially chilling effect, in that novel approaches to commerce can be ruled off-limits to others. What eBay was accused of copying was a concept, not a computer code. As James Boyle, a law professor at Duke, put it, “Under this logic, one could get a patent on the idea of fast food—not a different way to broil the burger but the idea of fast food itself.”
Although intellectual-property experts like Boyle have loudly criticized the State Street decision, Congress has shown little interest in doing anything about it. (In fact, lawmakers have proposed bills that would make things even worse, such as allowing sports “techniques” to be patented. Imagine pitchers paying a royalty every time they threw a forkball.) That has left the matter of business-method patents in the hands of patent judges and the staffers at the Patent Office—people who spend most of their time working with patent-seekers, and who are therefore more sympathetic to their interests than to the public’s. (Economists call this phenomenon “regulatory capture.”) The office says on its Web site that its role is “to grant patents,” but surely its role should be to distinguish between innovations that are worth patenting and those that are not.
Americans have traditionally been chary about intellectual-property rights. Thomas Jefferson, who served on the nation’s first patent board, wrote, “If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea.” Although we have always had a vibrant patent system, we’ve managed to strike a balance between the need to encourage innovation and the need to foster competition. As Benjamin Day, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton might attest, American corporations have thrived on innovative ideas and new business methods, without owning them, for two centuries. In the past decade, the balance has been upset. The scope of patents has been expanded, copyrights have been extended, trademarks have been subjected to bizarre interpretations. Celebrities are even claiming exclusive ownership of their first names (consider Spike Lee’s objection to Viacom’s cable channel Spike TV). The new regime’s defenders insist that in today’s economy such vigilance is necessary: ideas are the source of our competitive strength. Fair enough. But you don’t compete by outlawing your competition.
http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?...alk_surowiecki
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Lessig
Leaving The Copyright Lane For The Public Domain
Kim Scarborough sent
this (warning: large mp3) wonderful radio show from the Columbia Workshop in 1937 about characters leaving the “copyright lane” for the “public domain.” It is a brilliantly complex and funny tale that reveals an understanding about the value of the public domain that would be hard to recognize today.
More Walt Disney Creativity
Eric Hughes sent me a great piece about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which will be released this Friday. As he points out, every character in the movie (which the ads call “the most innovative film of the summer,” and “when our future is at stake, they will be our last hope”) is a character in the public domain. As WALT Disney before (and as Disney, Inc has apparently forgotten now), the creators of this movie have used the public domain to produce creative new work. For those who defend the idea of (effectively) perpetual copyright: Do you think there would be more of these works if there were a gaggle of rights holders to clear permissions with?
Here is Eric’s list of characters, with the caveat that this is a work in progress. Send corrections to me.
From Eric:
The movie is based on a wonderful comic by Alan Moore, the best comics author alive. I had read the original a few years ago, but now there’s a film out. So I got curious about where Allan Moore got all the extraordinary gentlemen from. Here’s the list.
Allan Quatermain: A character from H. Rider Haggard stories, the most famous of which is King Solomon’s Mines, 1885. There’s an interesting profile at here. King Solomon’s Mines was written on a bet that he could write something better than Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Thomas Sawyer: Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer, 1876. Huckleberry Finn came later. Character added for the movie; he’s evidently the only American.
Dr. Henry Jekyll / Mr. Edward Hyde: R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886.
Captain Nemo: Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, 1870.
Rodney Skinner. H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, 1897. I have been unable to confirm whether this was the character’s name in the novel.
Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890.
Mycroft Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Greek Interpreter, 1892. I’m not sure if this is the first appearance or not.
Mina Murray Harker. Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897. Jonathan Harker’s wife.
Declaration Of Independence — Copyrighted
JD Lasica has a nice catch. Apparently, the Boston
Globe has copyrighted the Declaration of Independence. But see
17 USC §506(c).
What Declan Doesn’t Get (finally, we’re back)
I’m relieved to find myself again in disagreement with
Declan. In the simple world that images just two choices — regulation or no regulation — Declan thinks Microsoft is behaving inconsistently. Microsoft has argued (rightly and wrongly, depending upon the case, imho) against various examples of regulation. But Declan is now aghast to discover that Microsoft has been now lobbying to get the FCC to impose a different form of regulation. Oh my gosh! Imagine that!
The problem here is not Microsoft’s. The problem is Declan, and the simple-isms that continue to reign in Declan-thought. No one serious opposes all regulation. No one serious supports all regulation. The only serious debate is whether a particular regulation makes sense.
The particular regulation that Microsoft has endorsed does, in my view, make lots of sense. As Microsoft described in FCC hearings, increasingly, cable companies are beginning to assert the right to decide which applications will run on their cable networks. Microsoft faced this when they tried to deploy Xbox technology. Tim Wu has other examples of this control
here.
Declan quotes many who say, hey, no reason to worry. There’s no good evidence that there is any significant discrimination — yet.
But this is the part of this argument that convinces me Declan is spending too much time in Washington, and should go back to his CompSci roots. The issue here is not “regulation vs no regulation”; the issue here is the continued viability of any end-to-end architecture to the Internet.
If in fact networks are allowed to decide which applications and content can run on the network, then “the Internet” is dead. Sure, there will be a network out there — the cable network, or whatever you want to call it — but it will no longer be “the Internet” that
Saltzer, Clark and Reed wrote about.
And, more importantly, and completely contrary to the non-thought that now reigns in Washington about this: the very possibility that this is the future of the Internet is having an effect on investment right now.
The point is obvious (save to those who inhale the DC air): Investments in technologies for the Internet are being made today, based upon the expectations about what the Internet will be in 3-5 years. If cable companies are allowed to decide what applications and content gets to run on that network, then the cost of innovation has been increased right now. If everyone with an Xbox technology needs permission to use the Internet, then what everyone should begin to recognize is that only Microsoft — and others with their money and power — will have permission to use the Net.
Maybe that’s ok with Declan and the Cato types. After all, they’re fighting for a principle — “no regulation.” Ah yes. “No regulation.”
What planet do these guys come from?
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/...7.shtml#001335
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Behind a Hacker's Book, a Primer on Copyright Law
Seth Schiesel
ANDREW HUANG, an engineer and programmer in San Diego, has written a book called "Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering." It has also been an introduction to copyright law in the digital age.
Wiley Technology Publishing, a unit of John Wiley & Sons, agreed last year to publish the book. But after Mr. Huang delivered the manuscript five months ago, the publisher backed out over concerns that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 made it illegal to disseminate information about how to circumvent copyright protection.
"We put it through our own internal legal vet, and our lawyers came back with a red flag and said that based on at least one chapter and perhaps several, we may be in a position where we might be in violation" of the law, Robert Ipsen, vice president and executive publisher of Wiley Technology Publishing, said in a telephone interview. "We felt that we had a really solid, edgy book that was going to walk the line from a legal perspective but which we thought would have keen interest in the marketplace.''
"We were excited about it,'' he added, "and were somewhat chagrined that he had clearly wandered off into no-man's land in one or two chapters that in our legal counsel's opinion were clearly violating the spirit and letter" of the copyright act.
A spokeswoman for Wiley said that the company would not ask Mr. Huang, who is known online as "bunnie," to return the small advance he had received.
Rejected by Wiley, Mr. Huang had the book printed himself and began selling it by mail order, shipping copies from his garage.
With help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil-liberties group based in San Francisco, Mr. Huang recently found a new publisher, No Starch Press in San Francisco. Bill Pollock, No Starch's president and publisher, said his company expected to publish the book this month.
The digital copyright law "is a very wrongheaded, stupid act, and it's got a lot of people scared,'' Mr. Pollock said. "When it gets to the point where people are canceling publishing of books, it's very scary. It's a sort of censorship.''
Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a telephone interview that he anticipated similar issues in the future. "It's a problem that more people in the computer science and security field are going to run into," he said. "Even if what they are finding is probably perfectly legal, publishers don't want to risk expensive litigation to find out."
Mr. von Lohmann would not discuss details of the Wiley situation but said, "This is exactly the sort of chilling effect on publishers that we're worried about."
Mr. Ipsen said Wiley often worked with Microsoft to publish guides for Microsoft products, like the Xbox. Susan Spilka, a Wiley spokeswoman, said that Wiley's Microsoft relationship played no role in the company's decision not to publish Mr. Huang's book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/te...ts/10book.html
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The Numbers
Music Biz Seeking Profits at 99 Cents
Brian Garrity
The music industry may have begun to figure out how to sell digital downloads, but making money from them is another story.
As the 99 cent digital singles model begins to take root across the industry through services like Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store, Liquid Audio, Rhapsody and a host of others set to bow for the PC this fall, industry executives and artist representatives are questioning whether the pricing model makes sense financially.
With all parties involved angling for nickels and dimes in the average download sale, labels, artists and service providers all agree on at least one thing: No one is getting rich from singles sales at this point.
"Even though sales look like they're doing fairly well through the iTunes situation, you still have to be doing an enormous amount of downloads for that to become a real income stream," says Whitney Broussard, an attorney with entertainment law firm Selverne, Mandelbaum & Mintz.
Still, digital distribution advocates say the long-term potential is there.
If the industry can figure out how to sell downloads numbering in the tens of millions, labels can theoretically scale back their physical manufacturing costs and enjoy a healthy alternative revenue stream to the CD.
Despite being limited to the percentage of Mac users running OSX, the iTunes service has sold more than 5 million downloads since its April 28 bow. It has average sales of about 500,000 tracks per week, according to sources.
Artist representatives say overall digital download sales must surpass 20 times that 500,000 weekly volume for the pay-per-download business to become economically meaningful once larger PC services kick in.
"Most of these services are not profitable," the head of a leading digital music service acknowledges. "Right now, we're just trying to get people used to paying."
Labels are doing their part by dropping the per-track wholesale price charged to digital services and, in some cases, simplifying royalty payments to artists.
But it's all a work in progress.
Despite encouraging signs from iTunes, high-ranking major-label sources say it is too early to speculate what share of the market downloads will eventually capture.
In an effort to help drive volume, some services are trying lower prices. Listen.com, for instance, has dropped the price of its burnable tracks to 79 cents.
"We think on an ongoing basis the price point would be better off being somewhere between 50 cents and $1, not necessarily a dollar," listen.com chief executive Sean Ryan says.
But Listen's offer is in the context of a subscription service. For a la carte download stores, there is little room for price elasticity.
Looking at the revenue split on a typical 99 cent download sale, it is clear that all parties have thin margins.
On average, the label is taking home 47 cents per track before accounting for production, marketing, promotion and other costs; the service provider is grossing 34 cents per track before technology, processing and distribution costs; and the artist takes 10 cents before paying out to producers and other collaborators. The publisher/songwriter share is 8 cents.
That's assuming the label is selling tracks at a 65 cent wholesale rate and that the artist is receiving an album royalty rate with no deductions applied.
Those conditions can vary, depending on the label, the artist's deal and the service provider.
Apple, for instance, pays a straight 65 cent wholesale rate for tracks, sources say.
With other services, the situation is not as cut-and-dried. The major labels are wholesaling tracks to them for as low as 52 cents and as high as 80 cents.
Some labels wholesale at a fixed rate; others have variable prices.
In the latter case, tracks from superstar acts and prerelease radio singles can wholesale at premium rates north of $1. The price then slides based on availability at retail of a physical single and length of time in the market.
There are also variables with the service provider in terms of distribution model.
For example, Yahoo and Best Buy, which serve as distribution affiliates, typically take 10-15 cents on the sale of each track.
Credit card transaction processing fees also help determine how much the service provider nets from download sales.
When consumers purchase a single track, or even a small number of tracks, the service provider loses money on the sale because the base processing fee for each purchase is at least 25 cents. The fee drops on a per-track basis as transactions get larger.
To address this, services encourage bulk purchases or mandate the purchase of prepaid bundles to spread out credit card transaction costs.
The labels' profit is likewise dependent on wholesaling strategies, artist deals and other expenses, including publishing fees.
Under copyright law, the labels must pay the full mandated per-track mechanical rate to publishers and songwriters for digital singles.
Also, tracks longer than five minutes receive a larger publishing royalty.
Additional potential expenses include digital rights management technology fees, the digital equivalent of co-op advertising and bad debt.
"People look at downloads and say, the record company is making out, because they don't have to manufacture a record.' But in fact, the margin can be lower for a download than a record," says a senior VP at one major-label group.
As far as artist payments are concerned, some labels pay out on the artist's album royalty rate--typically a 15% royalty on the wholesale price. Others give artists a royalty rate for singles sales, which is 12% on average.
It also differs from label to label whether deductions are taken on technology (typically 20%), packaging (20%) and free goods (15%) before paying royalties on a permanent download. Such deductions are standard with sales of physical CDs.
Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group are considered to be at the forefront of progressive wholesale and compensation efforts.
Both label groups announced last year that they would not deduct such fees in digital singles sales.
Artists also have to split up their take with producers and other collaborators.
For example, if a hip-hop song features a star producer, samples and guest vocalists, the artist can be left with only a few cents.
"It can be a very small amount of money," Broussard says. "Even with respect to the artist getting the state-of-the-art, artist-friendly provisions, we're still talking about a few pennies."
To date, download economics have not been an area of much concern for artists and their handlers because of the limited revenue opportunity.
But artist representatives warn that the jury is still out on the economic model for downloads, as far as artists are concerned.
Veteran manager Irving Azoff points out that many digital distribution deals are short-term licenses and that "there are going to have to be renegotiations later."
He adds, "If this thing really connects, they're going to have to go back to artists and pay more of the 50/50 model than the 80/20 model they're trying to do right now."
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=3043640
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Overheard by James Grimmelmann
"If the record industry promised to listen to every song and enjoy it, that might make a difference."
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Major Publishers File Copyright Infringement Suit Against Collegiate Copies
HarperCollins Publishers, Pearson Education, Princeton University Press, SAGE Publications, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Sue Indiana Coursepack Producer
Press Release
Five major publishers have filed a copyright infringement suit against Collegiate Copies, Inc. and its owners, John E. Seeber and Thomas Seeber. HarperCollins Publishers, Pearson Education, Princeton University Press, SAGE Publications, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. allege that Collegiate Copies has engaged in routine and systematic reproduction of materials from the plaintiffs’ publications without seeking permission to reproduce the content either directly or through Copyright Clearance Center. The publishers’ complaint was filed recently in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
Collegiate Copies provides coursepacks to local universities in Indiana, including Indiana University at Bloomington. The contents of a typical coursepack include journal articles, excerpts from books, and other printed materials, selected by the instructor of a course as required reading for that course. The copy shop obtains copies of the books and other materials in the syllabus from a library, copies the portions identified by the instructor, and binds large numbers of them for students’ use. The copy shop then sells these coursepacks to students at a profit.
“Copyright law ensures that rights holders are fairly rewarded for their work and investment,” said Roy Kaufman, Associate General Counsel of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. “We actively promote compliance through various education initiatives. Lawsuits like this are the last resort in minimizing copyright infringement, yet we are willing to take this step when needed to protect our interests.”
“Increasingly, publishers want to address the serious problem of copyright infringement,” said Allan Adler, Vice President, Legal and Governmental Affairs, of the Association of American Publishers. “Businesses and academic institutions can eliminate their risk by securing permissions from the various rightsholders individually or through Copyright Clearance Center as a one-stop licensing service.” The Association of American Publishers is the principal trade association for the U.S. book publishing industry. The protection of intellectual property rights is among the association’s primary concerns.
Copyright Clearance Center, the not-for-profit copyright licensing and management company, helps businesses, academic institutions, copy shops, print centers and other users of protected materials comply with copyright law through its convenient licensing solutions. Royalties collected by the company are distributed to the publishers, authors, or other copyright owners who have engaged Copyright Clearance Center as their rights management agent.
http://www.copyright.com/News/PressRelease2003July8.asp
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Slouching toward Armageddon
Dr. John Logie
In a now infamous New York Times article from January, 2002, Jack Valenti, President of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), likened his organization’s efforts in opposing peer-to-peer downloads of motion pictures via the Internet to a military engagement. Valenti said, "We’re fighting our own terrorist war," adding, "the great moat that protects us, and it is only temporary, is lack of broadband access" [1]. Valenti’s remarks position his industry as both a victim and a target, and span centuries of military history. The timing of Valenti’s comments makes it clear that his reference to a "terrorist war" was meant to be understood in the context of the United States’ response to the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Valenti was inviting readers of a newspaper serving the city hardest hit by these attacks to understand the film industry as having endured a parallel trauma. By contrast, Valenti’s description of the industry as temporarily protected by a "great moat," positions the MPAA as, at best, a medieval protectorate, and at worst, the sort of plutocratic castle-keep regularly targeted by Robin Hood.
Valenti’s remarks are especially striking given the recent successes of his constituents. For the United States motion picture industry the 2002 Memorial Day holiday weekend was among the most lucrative in history. American moviegoers stampeded box offices, spending over US$200 million on admissions. In June, 2002, Business Week Online reported that "box office receipts are 21 percent ahead of last year’s pace" [2].
But Jack Valenti was not happy. According to the Boston-based "digital solutions" corporation Viant the year’s 21 percent increase in box office receipts was paralleled by a 20 percent rise in illicit downloads of films, with roughly half a million copies downloaded each day [3]. These statistics prompted Valenti to observe, "It’s getting clear — alarmingly clear, I might add — that we are in the midst of the possibility of Armageddon" [4].
Valenti continued: "Eight out of 10 [movies] have to go to airlines, to hotels, to Blockbuster, to HBO, then to basic cable — to get their money back. If you are ambushed in the early days of your theatrical exhibition, the chances of you recouping in a world that is mostly broadband would be very, very different" [5]. Valenti’s "Armageddon" is thus understandable as a "mostly broadband" world in which secondary and tertiary revenue streams for Hollywood films are threatened by Internet-enabled piracy. These comments reflect a loss of perspective all too common in Hollywood. But Valenti’s biography reveals that he has more than a passing acquaintance with the kind of apocalyptic threat his language trivializes.
Valenti is a decorated veteran of the Second World War. He was a close associate of Lyndon Johnson, and served Johnson as the United States ramped up its involvement in the Vietnam War. In short, prior to his assumption of the Presidency of the MPAA in 1966, Valenti was a true Cold Warrior, writing and supervising the bulk of Johnson’s speeches. He no doubt played a key role in the Johnson administration’s withering attack on Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican nominee for U.S. President. Goldwater had a well-earned reputation as a hard right-winger, once defending himself by claiming that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Valenti seized on this, arguing behind closed doors that "we ought to treat Goldwater not as an equal, who has credentials to be president, but as a radical, a preposterous candidate who would ruin this country and our future" [6]. Valenti’s successful deployment of his argument is testified to by the "Daisy" commercial, which ran once during the 1964 Presidential campaign, but nevertheless is generally understood to have had a devastating effect on the Goldwater campaign.
Given Valenti’s history as an architect of Johnson’s media messages, Valenti’s invocation of "Armageddon" should almost certainly be seen as a calculated statement from a man familiar with the particularities of both public speaking and political conflict.
Even so, it remains tempting to dismiss Valenti’s statements as rhetorical excesses of a man predisposed to hyperbole. Valenti did, after all, claim in 1983 that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" in sworn testimony before the United States Senate [8]. But Valenti’s rhetorical performances are far from anomalous in the ongoing debates over peer-to-peer downloads, in which the use and transmission of copyrighted materials are often recast as tactical warfare.
This paper offers critical analysis of recent discourse on peer-to-peer file transfers, illustrating the degree to which participants in the debates over the legality of Napster and its successors position themselves as combatants. Further, this paper maps this debate against the model of the Cold War (a model expressly invoked by Valenti and other participants in the debate) in part to point up how distant copyright questions are from actual warfare, and partly to illuminate the relative immaturity of the peer-to-peer debates. This point is underscored when the peer- to-peer debate is evaluated in terms of stasis theory, a classical rhetorical technique that, despite its vintage, provides a specific diagnosis for the impoverished discourse that has, to date, characterized this important public policy debate.
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/iss...gie/index.html
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Dissertation Could Be Security Threat
Student's Maps Illustrate Concerns About Public Information
Laura Blumenfeld
Sean Gorman's professor called his dissertation "tedious and unimportant." Gorman didn't talk about it when he went on dates because "it was so boring they'd start staring up at the ceiling." But since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gorman's work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives -- if they could get their hands on it -- would find a terrorist treasure map.
Tinkering on a laptop, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and a soul patch goatee, this George Mason University graduate student has mapped every business and industrial sector in the American economy, layering on top the fiber-optic network that connects them.
He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where. He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: "If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?" In the background, he plays the Beastie Boys.
For this, Gorman has become part of an expanding field of researchers whose work is coming under scrutiny for national security reasons. His story illustrates new ripples in the old tension between an open society and a secure society.
"I'm this grad student," said Gorman, 29, amazed by his transformation from geek to cybercommando. "Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined I'd be briefing government officials and private-sector CEOs."
Invariably, he said, they suggest his work be classified. "Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD?" he said. "They're worried about national security. I'm worried about getting my degree." For academics, there always has been the imperative to publish or perish. In Gorman's case, there's a new concern: publish and perish.
"He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade -- and then they both should burn it," said Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House cyberterrorism chief. "The fiber-optic network is our country's nervous system." Every fiber, thin as a hair, carries the impulses responsible for Internet traffic, telephones, cell phones, military communications, bank transfers, air traffic control, signals to the power grids and water systems, among other things.
"You don't want to give terrorists a road map to blow that up," he said.
The Washington Post has agreed not to print the results of Gorman's research, at the insistence of GMU. Some argue that the critical targets should be publicized, because it would force the government and industry to protect them. "It's a tricky balance," said Michael Vatis, founder and first director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center. Vatis noted the dangerous time gap between exposing the weaknesses and patching them: "But I don't think security through obscurity is a winning strategy."
Gorman compiled his mega-map using publicly available material he found on the Internet. None of it was classified. His interest in maps evolved from his childhood, he said, because he "grew up all over the place." Hunched in the back seat of the family car, he would puzzle over maps, trying to figure out where they should turn. Five years ago, he began work on a master's degree in geography. His original intention was to map the physical infrastructure of the Internet, to see who was connected, who was not, and to measure its economic impact.
"We just had this research idea, and thought, 'Okay,' " said his research partner, Laurie Schintler, an assistant professor at GMU. "I wasn't even thinking about implications."
The implications, however, in the post-Sept. 11 world, were enough to knock the wind out of John M. Derrick Jr., chairman of the board of Pepco Holdings Inc., which provides power to 1.8 million customers. When a reporter showed him sample pages of Gorman's findings, he exhaled sharply.
"This is why CEOs of major power companies don't sleep well these days," Derrick said, flattening the pages with his fist. "Why in the world have we been so stupid as a country to have all this information in the public domain? Does that openness still make sense? It sure as hell doesn't to me."
Recently, Derrick received an e-mail from an atlas company offering to sell him a color-coded map of the United States with all the electric power generation and transmission systems. He hit the reply button on his e-mail and typed: "With friends like you, we don't need any enemies in the world."
Toward the other end of the free speech spectrum are such people as John Young, a New York architect who created a Web site with a friend, featuring aerial pictures of nuclear weapons storage areas, military bases, ports, dams and secret government bunkers, along with driving directions from Mapquest.com. He has been contacted by the FBI, he said, but the site is still up.
"It gives us a great thrill," Young said. "If it's banned, it should be published. We like defying authority as a matter of principle."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2003Jul7.html
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Google Cache Raises Copyright Concerns
Stefanie Olsen
Like other online publishers, The New York Times charges readers to access articles on its Web site. But why pay when you can use Google instead?
Through a caching feature on the popular Google search site, people can sometimes call up snapshots of archived stories at NYTimes.com and other registration-only sites. The practice has proved a boon for readers hoping to track down Web pages that are no longer accessible at the original source, for whatever reason. But the feature has recently been putting Google at odds with some unhappy publishers.
"We are working with Google to fix that problem--we're going to close it so when you click on a link it will take you to a registration page," said Christine Mohan, a spokeswoman at New York Times Digital, the publisher of NYTimes.com. "We have established these archived links and want to maintain consistency across all these access points."
Google offers publishers a simple way to opt out of its temporary archive, and scuffles have yet to erupt into open warfare or lawsuits. Still, Google's cache links illustrate a slippery side of innovation on the Web, where cool new features that seem benign on the surface often carry unintended consequences.
The issue is particularly relevant at Google, a company that prides itself on creativity and routinely floats trial balloons for new features and services. Its culture of innovation may become increasingly risky as Google, which draws millions of visitors to its site daily and redirects them to others through secretive search formulas, cements its position as one of the most popular and powerful companies on the Web.
At the heart of Google's caching dilemma lies a thorny legal problem involving a core Web technology: When is it acceptable to copy someone else's Web page, even temporarily?
"Many of us copyright lawyers have been waiting for this issue to come up: Google is making copies of all the Web sites they index and they're not asking permission," said Fred Lohman, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "From a strict copyright standpoint, it violates copyright."
"Most people agree that the caching exception in the DMCA is obsolete," Lohman said. "I don't think it would cover Google's cache. Google is not waiting for users to request the page. It spiders the page before anyone asks for it."
Still, other lawyers argue that Google's practice would be protected by fair-use laws. A judge might look at the market impact of Google's caching and find that it's valuable, given that it could ultimately drive traffic to the cached site. Or the reverse could be true, depending on the nature of the page.
For its part, Google is confident that the service is within the law. "We've evaluated this from a legal perspective, including copyright law, and have determined that Google's cached page service complies with the law," a Google spokesman said.
A similar issue has played out in the courts in an image-searching case, Kelly v. Arriba Soft, filed in April 1999. Leslie Kelly, a photographer, sued the company for copyright infringement when its visual search finder cataloged thumbnails and full-sizes of his digital photos and made them accessible via its own search engine.
The court initially ruled against Kelly based on the "established importance of search engines," but Kelly appealed and won. In Feb. 2002, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that Arriba's use of thumbnail images of Kelly's photos was fair use, but its display of full-size images was not fair use, because it was likely to harm the market for Kelly's work by reducing visits to his Web site and by allowing free downloads. But the opinion on full-size images was remanded by the 9th Circuit Court this week and is set to go to trial in the lower court of central California.
Judith Jennison, defense lawyer for Arriba Soft, said that one of the issues in the case is that Arriba Soft, in its process of indexing the Web, made copies of Kelly's photos and saved them for 24 hours in its servers. The 9th Circuit Court agreed that creating that copy is fair use under copyright law, she said, adding that there would be a slightly different analysis in a case related to Google. Also, the fact that the search site has an opt-out program would likely illustrate that the market for original copyrighted works can be protected, which is a significant factor in fair-use analysis.
"In Google's case, the result would likely be the same, because the temporary caching for indexing purposes would be fair use per Kelly v. Arriba Soft," Jennison said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1038-1024234.html
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Efficiency of the Market
Richard Menta
The other day I came across a portable CD and it caused that odd little ripple to run through my senses. The player itself was not anything special, just the opposite in fact. It was produced by Memorex and sold for $29.99. A simple, basic device to play music with.
But the way my mind was working that day this was the thought that immediately popped into my head. "Gee, for that much money I can buy to play on it - one-and-a-half CDs"?
The iRiver iFP-195T is a 512MB Flash unit and is available on Amazon
This elicited a pause and I picked up the blister pack encased device.
I stared at the player while my mind proceeded to mentally take that CD player apart. I thought of its myriad of parts - memory chips, relays, a mechanism to spin the CD, a laser to read the 1s and 0s contained on it, a small processor to convert those 1s and 0s into audible sound, etc. All of these parts, each with a crucial role to perform, are assembled into a single unit and sold for a penny under thirty bucks retail.
My mind then held up a CD. The answer was a simple one - a flat, shiny disc.
Now I must add it's a flat shiny disc with music on it. Music that is produced through the sweat and toil of thousands of artists, their producers, the 40- story skyscraper housing the executives and studio staff, and the marketing department. A lot of what we call fixed costs there.
Memorex has a marketing department too. It also has a large office filled with product managers and engineers developing the latest devices. It has an assembly line filled with employees to put together the hundreds of parts that make up each product. Electronics manufacturers also spend considerably on R&D to invent the products that will hit store shelves a few years from now.
CDs are just stamped out in one quick swoop.
So why are CDs relatively so much more expensive relative to the electronic products that play them? If you think about it, the person who purchased the Memorex unit above probably did so because they felt the $45 player (equal to 2 1/4 CDs retail) was too much.
The answer is the industry is run inefficiently. This naturally happens when a few conglomerates control an industry because executives seem to always find some way to spend the excess. It is also what makes such supposedly powerful and controlling industries vulnerable to change. Inefficient operation exposes such industries to the significant schisms in the market that inevitably occur every 20 to 30 years, changes that effect even efficient industries. For example, when was the last time you used a typewriter?
The record industry has been able to control the distribution channels to effectively push prices up. It has limited competition to the mass market to a point where its members - members who viciously compete with one another - could still effectively collude to fix retail prices. They were caught, but the price of CDs went up further. List price today is $20. Street price is something a little less.
Rock historian Dave Marsh once commented that the record industry would prefer to sell you only one CD a year for a hundred bucks rather than five for that price because it would further reduce their costs and make them even more money. The fewer artists to promote, the lower the expense. They have no desire to sell you twenty CDs for $100, even when it's popular music a decade or more old.
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2003/efficiency.html
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RIAA Sues Puretunes.com Music Web Site
Reuters
A recording industry trade group said on Wednesday it has filed a lawsuit against a Spanish company that operates Puretunes.com, a music download service launched in May.
The lawsuit, filed last Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., against Sakfield Holding SA, alleges the company engaged in copyright infringement and unfair competition.
The lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group representing the music industry, also claimed that Puretunes had defrauded its customers into believing that its service was licensed by record companies.
A representative for Puretunes could not be immediately reached for comment on Wednesday.
Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president for business and legal affairs for the RIAA, said the group was seeking damages and an injunction against the Web operator.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. federal court because the service operated as a business in the United States, selling U.S. recordings to U.S. consumers, he said.
The RIAA is a trade group for major labels Sony Music, AOL Time Warner's Warner Music, Vivendi Universal's V.N Universal Music, Bertelsmann AG's BMG, and EMI.
The group has been increasingly aggressive in its efforts to crack down on online piracy as fans have turned to such unauthorized services for music and the industry struggles with a steep decline in CD sales.
Javier Siguenza, a Madrid-based lawyer representing Puretunes, told Reuters in May the new company abided by Spanish copyright laws.
Puretunes had also previously said it was a legal service operating under licensing agreements from various Spanish trade associations representing performers and recording artists.
Unlike other download services such as Kazaa, Puretunes manages a music library and says it will pay royalties to performers. Eight hours of downloads cost $3.99 while unlimited downloads for a month cost $24.99, a steep discount from industry-sanctioned services such as Pressplay and those operated by Britain's OD2.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=3064487
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And Now for Something Completely Different
How DTMD Could Save Your Local Phone Company
Robert X. Cringely
I promised to explain how we could expand our current copper phone network to offer unprecedented bandwidth -- the kind of bandwidth that makes some industries and destroys others -- and I mean to deliver, but first we need some context. Sadly, the context isn't so much technical as economic and political. There is a grand struggle taking place just now in the U.S. telecom market. Elephants are dancing and the grass -- which is to say we the customers -- risks getting trampled. Once again the issue is between the traditional phone company -- the Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC) -- and an interloper generally labeled as a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC). Only the CLECs this time around have different names than before and are fighting a very different battle. Today's CLEC combatants are AT&T and MCI, and the battle they are taking to the ILECs isn't over Internet service but over a package of local voice, long-distance and Internet services. These CLECs are offering flat-rate plans with totally unmetered local and long-distance calls, and it is driving the ILECs crazy. The ILECs in turn are offering the same kind of flat rates to compete, and the result is that nearly all the profit is being driven out of the phone business. Something has to give.
What is giving are the phone lines, themselves. Though nobody but me seems to be saying it, at the heart of the problem lies a rapid decline in the number of dedicated fax lines, each of which produces a lot of profit for the ILECs, and the decline of fax is being driven by the success of the Internet. People send e-mails with attached files rather than faxes. This loss of revenue, while it appears small, is crucial.
The ILECs are in trouble because their average revenue per phone line is slowly decreasing. They had hoped to make up this revenue loss through gaining the right to sell long distance service, but the profit is falling there, too. That's why ILECs and CLECs alike need to steal business from each other. And that's why they both like DSL, which is one of the few sources of real additional revenue in years for the phone companies. But DSL has only 25 percent of the U.S. broadband market -- compared to more than 65 percent for cable modems. And DSL has a revenue limit since most data is free and DSL lines aren't fast enough to compete with cable TV, another big revenue source that has started competing for local phone service. This year in America, five million families get their telephone service from their cable TV company and the number is growing. For phone companies, these signs are not good.
The last time the CLECs and ILECs were fighting what gave were the CLECs because they were financially weaker than the ILECs, and the ILECs were playing paperwork games to keep it that way. But AT&T invented all those games and can't be so easily fooled. And since the company sold its cable TV operation to Comcast, it has both the resources and the concentration to make life hard for even the biggest ILEC. This has the ILECs looking for a loophole, and they think they have found one.
A couple months ago, the three strongest U.S. local phone companies -- Verizon, Bell South, and SBC -- decided to coordinate their long-delayed build-out of fiber-to-the- home, which is the very stuff that I claimed last week isn't really happening. The three ILECs agreed to cooperate on technical standards and purchasing with the idea of streamlining the fiber roll-out and really making it work. This kind of cooperation is legal, by the way, because the three companies do not have overlapping service.
This cooperation agreement has yielded a Request for Quotation (RFQ) in which suppliers will bid on doing the actual work of taking fiber into the walls of tens of millions of American homes. The whole project is worth approximately $100 billion, which is also conveniently the number usually assigned as the value of the copper network that is being replaced. This balancing of numbers is no accident.
So the RFQ is out there and companies are preparing their bids. But as a guy who has in the past bid on such projects, won them, then found that the project never materialized, this version of future reality is not necessarily the final version of future reality.
These three ILECs have a plan and that plan is to build out the fiber, then sell their old copper network, maybe for the service it can provide, maybe for the copper in your walls, they don't care. What they do care about is being out of the copper network business because doing so is their way of responding to the threat posed by AT&T and MCI. You see new rules from the Federal Communication Commission issued in February say that ILECs have to share with CLECs only their existing network. If they build a new network, then they won't have to share that. So the ILECs have decided to take their ball and go home. By building a new fiber network, they hope that they can abandon MCI and AT&T, taking their local phone customers along with them. At the same time, the new fiber will allow the ILECs to compete with cable TV to bring video into our homes. At least, that's the plan.
But $100 billion is a large price to pay for such freedom if there is a better way to accomplish the same thing for a lot less money.
Now we're at the part where I explain how to send HDTV over normal phone lines.
Some readers were quick to point out this week that several Japanese ISPs have started installing DSL circuits running up to 26 megabits-per-second, which makes my argument last week for 20 megabits look pretty lame. But not all megabits are created equal. What's being installed in Japan is VDSL, which is very fast indeed, but not as well suited to the U.S. phone market where most of my readers are. Quest does have some VDSL lines deployed in the Midwest. VDSL requires a pristine phone line and even then supports that 26 megabit speed over a maximum of only 4,000 feet, and practically, over less than 1,000 feet. ADSL2+, which is another follow-on to current DSL, is slower still. Both it and VDSL are best suited to networks with fiber to the curb, or at least, fiber to the neighborhood. And many such places exist, just not where I live.
What I want is very simple. I want 20 megabits-per-second (HDTV speed) over a single twisted-pair phone line, and that line should be afflicted with taps, loading coils, and crosstalk, which is to say it should be an average copper phone line circa 1964. I want that 20 megabits to run for at least two miles from the Central Office and preferably three. Out where I live, at 36,000 feet from the CO, I'd like to still see at least seven megabits-per-second on an all-copper network that simply requires swapping out the DSLAMs.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030703.html
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Direct Connect Upgrade Released
Author: Jon Hess
Program Type: Freeware
Direct Connect offers a community-oriented, open, user-controlled network. Moreover, its network architecture is built on a peer-to-peer foundation; users run, control, and maintain the network. Users are able to share any type of file - absolutely no restrictions. These files are easily viewed through a familiar organized windows-explorer interface. To conveniently access the plethora of files, advanced searching capabilities and filters are provided. All of these features are integrated into Direct Connect's unique communal file-sharing system.
Note: Direct Connect 2 is for Windows NT4/2000/XP only.
Changes in Current Version:
· The application now supports a ‘DC’ description tag - Configurable
· The application can hide other users description tags - Configurable
· 'Grant slots' was added to the user context menu. If a slot is granted to a user, that user may connect to you even if you are 'full' if they have not already done so
· You can now refresh the public list from the connect window's toolbar
· Operators now have icons
· The application auto reconnects to servers it has been disconnected from after 5 minutes
· The GUI display of the bandwidth cap is fixed to an 8x multiplier for upload/download ratio
· Application now minimizes to the system tray
· The operator commands from the redirect menu have been fixed
· Operators always sort to the top of the list
· You can now set the program to auto connect to a hub on launch
· The application no longer beeps when you type a new message
· You can now enter mutli-line message via cut and paste or shift+enter
· Enter can be used from any text field in the search window to initiate a query
· Search columns are re-orderable
Info, reviews:
http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail...fid=1056966453
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Wise Move?
James Plummer
Flush with its victory letting it pry the names of computer users from their internet service providers, the Recording Industry Association of America is on the attack again. With a full-page ad in the New York Times Thursday, RIAA has kicked off a high-profile and risky campaign against those who dare to share digital music files online. The trade group has announced plans to file suit against Internet users -- including "kids" -- who trade a "substantial" number of music files on line.
Using tough talk in their ad, the RIAA was joined in their crackdown announcement by a coalition of other trade associations and unions in the music business. A number of individual artists, including the Dixie Chicks, also expressed support for the RIAA's upcoming legal offensive as well, in remarks posted on the RIAA's website. RIAA president Cary Sherman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that they plan "at least several hundred lawsuits to start, but that's only the beginning."
Is this really the wisest move? Probably not.
RIAA is playing coy about what they even mean by the word "substantial." If RIAA plans to focus their action against "supernodes" who offer thousands of music files on university or industrial quality super-broadband connections, consumers will understand the rationale. But RIAA could be stepping in it if they decide to scare the love of copyright into peer-to-peer users at large by including among the planned "hundreds" of defendants some who only share a handful of songs.
Such an overreach would be intruding upon what is considered by many fans to be a fair use of a purchased product -- sharing a song or two from entire albums purchased here or there. A full-court press against such Internet users could result in a customer backlash. Besides the obvious prospect of consumer boycotts, RIAA could also find the dockets turned on them and face lawsuits for malicious prosecution. RIAA should tread very carefully here.
The rationale behind RIAA's offensive is apparently that, by going after users of the P2P networks, consumers might be driven to the new authorized online music services that have been popping up recently. If RIAA can keep control of themselves by targeting and discouraging the small percentage of P2P users that provide the majority of copyrighted files, and use that legal strategy in conjunction with other techniques such as seeding the networks with fake files and clogging the system with slow downloads of real files, they may be somewhat successful. Increasing the time costs of average music consumers who use P2P networks without threatening jail time and ridiculously large fines will encourage music downloaders to look at alternatives with relatively low costs in both time and money, such as the new authorized music downloads, as well as used CDs available online at places like Amazon.com. The big labels may also want to consider taking advantage of the publicity by cutting retail prices on new CDs in order to make the P2P option even less attractive.
But a whole-hog offensive would just speed the move to more advanced peer-to-peer systems such as EarthStation5 or NullSoft's Waste which makes use of, respectively, anonymizing techniques and smaller trusted communities of file-sharers. RIAA will have a much harder time penetrating these systems, and if their actions result in Internet users flocking towards them, they will probably regret overplaying their hand rather than trying to find a way to work with peer-to-peer networks to market and sell music.
The victory in the Verizon v. RIAA case gives the music industry broad legal powers to administratively subpoena the identities of computer users without even the approval of a judge. If the belligerent tone adopted in the Times ad and other recent pronouncements translates into overly aggressive action against music consumers who engage in casual file-trading, RIAA can expect their sales to slip that much faster as consumers move file-sharing further underground and perhaps even -- horror of horrors -- take a closer look at independent artists, many of whom have themselves been speaking out against the crackdown on P2P.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/10...D=1051-070103A
Top 10 D/Ls - Singles
BigChampagne
File Swappers 'Buy More Music'
BBC
Music fans who download songs from the internet go on to buy more albums, a survey has suggested.
The survey's findings oppose the music industry's long-standing argument that internet downloading is responsible for a slump in CD sales, with album sales falling 5% in the last year.
Market research company Music Programming Ltd (MPL) said 87% of its respondents who downloaded music admitted they bought albums after hearing tracks through the internet. An MPL spokesperson said: "Downloading is actually a 'try before you buy' tool for a significant amount of people. "It allows people to sample new music and decide whether or not to buy it - it is not necessarily a replacement for purchase."
However, downloading tracks did lead to a significant drop in the number of singles being bought, with just 13% of the 500 people surveyed saying they went on to buy singles in shops after getting them on the internet.
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) told BBC News Online there was "an element of truth" in the survey's findings, but that it was "disingenuous" to suggest downloading could boost album sales.
"We did a survey in April that asked people the reasons why they downloaded, and 65% said because it was free," a BPI spokeswoman said. "That's just human nature."
The BPI wanted to "educate" people to use legitimate downloading sites that paid royalties to artists, she said, adding it was "unlikely" to push for prosecution of heavy "uploaders" of music.
This strategy is currently being pursued by the US music industry.
The survey also said 41% of its respondents declared themselves "heavy downloaders" - accessing more than 100 tracks - but that 34% of them still felt they bought more albums than they did a year ago. Asked why they download music, the respondents were most likely to say it was "to check out music I've heard about but not listened to yet" (75%) and "to help me decide whether to buy the CD" (66%).
MPL said its survey suggested people used the internet as a way of finding out about new music, and that the industry should use it as a way of promoting new artists.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3052145.stm
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Global Illegal CD Market Swells
The battle to stem pirate music appears to be failing as the total number of illegal CDs sold worldwide topped the one billion mark for the first time in 2002.
A report published by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) shows that the illegal music market is now worth $4.6bn (£2.8bn) globally. It believes two out of every five CDs or cassettes sold are illegal. The IFPI said much of this money is going to support organised criminal gangs, dispelling the myth that it is a "victimless crime". Jay Berman, chairman of the IFPI, said: "This is a major, major commercial activity, involving huge amounts of pirated CDs. "What we have faced in the last three years is an explosion worldwide in the number of unlicensed optical disc plants."
Peter Jamieson, executive director of the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), said that that one in three CDs sold in Britain was a pirated copy. "If you factor in unlicensed downloads then only one in three music products in the UK is authorised."
Despite the increase in the amount of CDs illegally produced and sold around the world, up 14% on 2001, there has also been a rise in the amount of CDs and recording equipment seized. The number of discs seized on their way for public sale was more than 50 million, a four-fold rise on the previous year.
For the first time the IFPI has published a list of the top 10 countries where it wants a crackdown on piracy.
The 10 priority countries
Brazil
China
Mexico
Paraguay
Poland
Russia
Spain
Spain
Taiwan
Thailand
Ukraine
There are two types of products that worry the industry, which tend to be concentrated in different regions. Of the estimated total number of illegal music copies sold, 40% originate from factory production lines which produce professional- looking products but without paying any money back to the industry or artists. Asia and Russia have been identified as hot spots for this.
There is also the growing problem of CD-R piracy, where albums are created using CD-burning computer software which can allow mass production relatively cheaply and discreetly. Action was taken against Ukraine, including US trade sanctions which are still in place, because of its failure to bring an end to rampant piracy, but the problem has now moved across the border to Russia. The IFPI predicts 32% of illegal products on the market are produced this way with Latin America and southern Europe identified as the biggest offenders.
Copied cassettes account for 20% of the total market but this is in decline as the demand for the format slides.
There was a global rise in the number of CD copying machines seized in 2002 from 4,000 to 7,000, with a capacity to produce 250,000 illegal discs.
The IFPI is now calling on governments worldwide to aid the fight against piracy by enforcing copyright laws and regulate optical disc manufacturing. It also wants countries to aggressively prosecute offenders, seize their equipment and to seek compensation for copyright holders as a deterrent.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3053523.stm
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Hi-Tech Babble Baffles Many
BBC
Most people are confused and flummoxed by the jargon used to describe new technology, says a survey.
Terms such as MP3 and Bluetooth are only understood by a small number of people, a report by a consumer research group found. The findings are bad news for the industry, as it suggests that the baffling terms are putting people off buying the latest gadget.
"The technology industry must simplify its vocabulary so that consumers around the world can better understand the benefits technology can bring to their lives," said Patrick Moorhead, chairman of AMD's Global Consumer Advisory Board, which commissioned the study.
More than 1,500 people in the US, UK, China and Japan took part in the survey, which looked at how far consumers understood jargon used to described new gadgets. The results showed that people were perplexed by many of the terms routinely bandied around by technology firms.
Just 3% of those surveyed got a perfect score on a quiz, which included terms such as MP3 - a digital audio file - and Bluetooth - a short-range technology which uses radio waves instead of wires. Even the word megahertz, commonly used in advertisements for home computers, mystified many.
Only slightly more than half correctly identified the definition of megahertz - a measurement of frequency which can be used to measure how many times a part of the processor, called the clock, ticks every millionth of a second.
Even people who knew about technology where baffled by some words. Only a third knew what a DVR was. DVR stands for digital video recorder - a gadget that records shows on a hard drive instead of video tape and usually allows you to pause live TV.
The survey makes gloomy reading for an industry which is counting on consumers snapping up new gadgets. It showed that many people are delaying buying products such as digital cameras because it is all seen as too complex and difficult to understand. Instead nearly two-third said they "wish to have things work and not spend time setting up."
"The hi-tech industry is spending more than $10 billion a year in the US alone advertising the speeds and feeds of the products," said Mr Moorhead, "but the industry is not getting the full value of their advertising dollars."
The study did offer are some signs of hope for the technology industry. It suggested that people who already have home computers were likely to buy most gadgets such as DVD players.
The survey was commissioned by a research group set by chip maker AMD.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3054210.stm
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U.S. Court Blocks Washington Video Game Sales Law
Reuters
A federal judge on Thursday issued an order postponing enforcement of a Washington state law designed to restrict the sale of violent video games to minors.
U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the law, which was set to take effect from July 27 and would have imposed a $500 fine on anyone who sold a video game depicting violence against "law enforcement officers" to minors under age 17.
"Plaintiffs have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of House Bill 1009 and the balance of hardships tips in their favor," Lasnik wrote in his order from the court in Seattle.
In a statement, Doug Lowenstein, president of plaintiff the Interactive Digital Software Association, praised the judge's finding that games are a form of protected speech like music and movies.
"In so doing, the Court made clear the very high burden that governments face when they try to regulate such protected speech," Lowenstein said.
Washington state Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, the Democrat who wrote the law, had said recently that any injunction would only be preliminary and that she expected the case to go to trial.
"It has very little bearing on the final outcome of the case," Dickerson said.
A federal appellate court in St. Louis recently struck down a St. Louis County law that would have fined retailers who sold or rented violent video games to minors. In that case, in which the IDSA was also a plaintiff, the court held that games were protected speech under the Constitution.
The Washington law was criticized from the start by game industry groups who said it was too vague and unconstitutionally restricted the free expression of game publishers.
A bill is also pending in the U.S. House of Representatives that would make it a federal crime to sell or rent violent games to minors. Industry executives have said they thought the bill had no chance of passing. (Additional reporting by Ben Berkowitz in Los Angeles)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=3071726
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Copyrights and Wrongs
Matthew Baldwin
It’s been a good year for comic-book fans, cinematically speaking. Such luminaries as Spider-Man, Daredevil, the X-Men, and the Hulk have all rampaged across the silver screen in the last 12 months, and today we get one more: the highly anticipated LXG.
Here’s a primer for those of you who haven’t TiVo’ed every episode of the Superfriends. LXG is based on a comic book entitled The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which hit the shelves a few years back and chronicled the adventures of a late-19th-century crime-fighting team composed of the most remarkable literary characters of the Victorian Age: Allan Quartermain, hero of King Solomon’s Mines, H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, and the legendary Captain Nemo. Together they travel the world, interact with the fictitious creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, and even come to loggerheads with the Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. It was a series that caused a stir amongst the comicati because it had it all: intelligent writing, literary allusion, and guys with superpowers punching the crap out of each other.
The book’s author, Alan Moore, was able to create this literary-parallel universe because the protagonists are all within the public domain, and so are not owned by any one person or corporation, and thus available for anyone to use without having to pay royalties. This is why you can watch low-budget Sherlock Holmes mysteries on PBS, buy a copy of Alice in Wonderland for under five bucks, and see Shakespeare in the park for free.
But here’s what you won’t be seeing anytime soon: my masterpiece, The League of Extraordinary Rodents. It was going to star Stuart Little, Algernon, Batman, and Mickey Mouse as the greatest mammalian crime- fighting team the animal kingdom had ever seen, and we’d follow them on thrilling adventures as they fought such evildoers as the, uh, the Federation of Felines and, um, Sergeant GlueTrap and, uhhhh…Well, to be honest I never really fleshed out the details. But trust me: It would have been awesome.
And it would have been legal, too – if the US still adhered to its original copyright laws, which set ownership limits at 28 years. Unfortunately, all four of my Leaguers are contraband under current copyright law. Congress, you see, has extended copyrights no less than 11 times over the past 50 years, most recently in 1998 when it enacted the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act (SBCEA) and tacked a whopping two decades onto the existing limits. Now copyrights held by corporations last for nearly a century; those owned by individuals persist for 70 years after the creator’s death.
Curiously, many of those who fought the hardest for the SBCEA were those who had benefited the most from the public domain. Disney, afraid of losing exclusive control of Mickey Mouse (who first appeared in 1928 and would have gone public this year), lobbied vigorously for the 20-year extension, despite having made billions off such classic characters and stories as Cinderella and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Also in favor of the extension was the Motion Picture Association of America, the same institution that oversaw the production of the aforementioned LXG, a film that adds Tom Sawyer and Dorian Gray to the comic book’s original roster.
Although the SBCEA was passed by Congress overwhelmingly, it was not without its opponents. Foremost amongst them was Eric Eldred, a bookmonger from Massachusetts who wished to continue providing free texts to his Web site’s visitors. He eventually brought suit against the federal government, and the Supreme Court heard his case, Eldred v. Ashcroft (née Eldred v. Reno), earlier this year.
Eldred and other opponents of the SBCEA (including The American Library Association and Dover Books) pointed out that the Constitution allows Congress to set copyright terms ‘for limited times’ only, and that by extending the term every time Mickey Mouse is imperiled, Congress is in effect creating a ‘perpetual copyright,’ clearly counter to what the Constitution’s framers desired. Proponents of the extension – a consortium largely comprised of the same media and entertainment giants who had pushed for the SBCEA in the first place – argued that a lack of sufficient copyright protection gives artists no incentive to create.
Disney’s arguments notwithstanding, I find it hard to believe that Steven Spielberg or John Grisham would change vocations knowing that their great-great-great-grandchildren would miss out on some royalty checks, or that J.K. Rowling would scrap her series without reassurance that Harry Potter wouldn’t guest star in a comic book within 69 years of her own dying day.
And at some point lengthening the copyright term surely stifles more creativity than it fosters. Just think: If just anyone could make a James Bond movie, MGM might invent some new heroes instead of churning out 007 flicks every 16 months; if Disney’s canon was turned into open game it might come up with some new material instead of plundering its own theme parks for movie ideas, in the case of the current Pirates of the Caribbean Johnny Depp vehicle.
Contrawise, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – one of the most inventive comic series in recent memory – was made possible by the original copyright laws that recognized the public domain as a boon to artists, not a burden. Alas, the 2003 Supreme Court didn’t see it this way – it upheld the SBCEA, thereby keeping Mickey Mouse in his cage for another generation.
So while you’ll still be able to catch LXG this weekend, don’t bother looking for The League of Extraordinary Rodents in your local comic-book store – it looks like it will remain off the shelves until 2018 at the very least.
http://www.themorningnews.org/archiv...d_wrongs.shtml
Until next week,
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js.
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Recent WIRs -
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16830 July 5th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16759 June 28th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16705 June 21st
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16638 June 14th
The Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.