[JackSpratts]

Is RIAA Targeting You?
Mark Joseph Edwards

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is hot on the heels of file swappers, namely those who trade music files with popular programs such as KaZaA. If you, or someone on your network has been swapping loads of music files, the RIAA might deliver a subpoena in an attempt to force network operators (including colleges, businesses, and ISPs), to disclose who was using a particular IP address or screen name while logged on to a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing network.

RIAA has either obtained, or is trying to obtain, hundreds of subpoenas in an effort to stop the file swappers who trade the most files. The company is seeking damage payments from people who obtain artist's music without paying for it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) thinks RIAA has gone overboard in its attempts to litigate a solution. EFF is monitoring RIAA to detect any invasions of privacy through misidentification. The foundation has also provided a database so people can try to determine whether RIAA might be targeting their networks or find people using similar screen names.

"The recording industry continues its futile crusade to sue thousands of the over 60 million people who use file sharing software in the U.S.," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "We hope that EFF's subpoena database will give people some peace of mind and the information they need to challenge these subpoenas and protect their privacy."

"EFF is also documenting the scope of privacy invasions committed by the RIAA," explained EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "EFF's subpoena database will help document the damage done to innocent people misidentified as copyright infringers in the RIAA's overzealous campaign."

An EFF spokesperson said in a press release that "a username appearing in the database does not confirm absolutely that the RIAA has issued a subpoena seeking the name of a particular person, since file sharing services support duplicate usernames as well as allow multiple people to use the same account or same computer. Nor do the records in database reflect all subpoenas issued, due to lags between issuance and entry into the court's electronic record system by court employees. The EFF subpoena database also permits people to check if the recording industry named their Internet address, known as an IP address, in a subpoena."

EFF has also partnered with the US Internet Industry Association and other organizations to help develop what they call the Subpoena Defense Alliance, which is designed to assist ISPs and consumers who are faced with RIAA subpoenas.

People who wonder whether their IP address or screen name might be in the EFF database can visit the foundation's Web site to perform a search.
http://www.secadministrator.com/Arti...rticleID=39724


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Study Finds Most Youngsters Surf The Web Unsupervised
Ananova

More children are being allowed to surf the internet without adult supervision despite repeated warnings of the dangers.

The majority of boys and girls in the age groups 12-13 and 14-15 said they went online without ever being supervised by an adult, new research has found. The last three years have seen the proportion of girls aged 12-13 who said they were "never" supervised while browsing the Internet jump from 33% in 2000 to 53% in 2002. And 71% of boys aged 14-15 said they were never supervised by an adult while using the internet.

Dr David Regis of the Schools Health Education Unit, which carried out the research, said the results were "striking".

"I would hope that people are aware of the dangers - predatory paedophiles, swindles and scams and all the rest of it," he said.

The full study, entitled Young People in 2002, is expected to be published later this year.
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...ews.technology


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One side anyway…

White Paper –

The Impact of Peer-to-Peer File Sharing on a Service Provider Network - by Sandvine Inc.

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Nero 6 Recode Introduces 'Bug' That Could Wipe Hard Drive
Posted by Jan Willem

An Chang used our news submit to tell us that the German online magazine PCwelt.de reports that Nero 6 contains a 'bug' that could delete your entire harddrive. The bug is introduced with the Nero 6 Recode project. Bug might even not be the correct word for it, it seems more that Ahead forgot to limit the feature to empty the destination folder for temporarily files.

If this destination directory is set to the root of a disc (e.g C : ) and if the question: "Destination folder is not empty, do you wish to clear it" is answered with yes, all files will be deleted.

Description (badly translated withBabelfish):

Who clicks now over-hurried on "Yes" and had selected as goal file a root listing, short time experiences later its blue miracle: not only a "Video_ts" file put on in the goal file in former times is deleted, but also all other files and file on the partition concerned are deseamed within seconds by the plate. The user is nevertheless asked still whether he wants to delete the files.

A "Design error" is not however nevertheless. Because actually the user should assume "Nero Recode" means the existing "Video_ts" file in under "the target folder" indicated drive assembly and/or listing.

For now we would advise visitors to be carefull with this feature and to make sure to answer no on this question. There is no doubt Ahead will release a fix for this nasty feature soon. More information can be found on PCwelt.de .

Update: Ahead has posted on their website that it will release an update that will make sure this will no longer be possible.
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/7638


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Buymusic.com Misses The Point
Sandy McMurray

Apple's iTunes Music Store, launched in April of this year, provides a hassle-free way to preview, buy and download music on-line. Each song costs 99 cents (U.S.), and can be downloaded with a single click by U.S. customers. There are no subscription fees.

Since the service was launched, Mac users in the U.S. have downloaded more than six million songs. The iTunes Music Store debuted as a Mac-only service, but a Windows version is planned for this fall.

This week, a new download service called BuyMusic.com was introduced in the U.S. Like the iTunes Music Store, BuyMusic.com lets you download songs legally without a monthly subscription fee. Like Apple's store, BuyMusic.com makes high-quality previews of many songs available, so you can try before you buy. And just as iTunes works with Apple's iPod music player, BuyMusic.com is designed to work with digital music players from Creative Labs.

(Both services are US-only for now. Canadian record labels and musicians have to work out a host of legal details before the services can be launched here. BuyMusic.com prohibits sales outside the U.S.; Apple officially prohibits non-U.S. sales, but will sell to anyone with a U.S. billing address.)

Although BuyMusic.com advertises lower prices than Apple's service ("from 79 cents per song"), actual prices vary. Most tunes cost 99 cents (US) just like the iTunes Music Store, but longer songs like Don McLean's American Pie sell for $1.99 (U.S.).

Neither Apple nor BuyMusic.com uses standard MP3 files. Apple uses a format called AAC, which is part of an industry standard called MPEG-4. BuyMusic.com uses Microsoft's Windows Media 9 format. Each system offer better compression than MP3 files, which results in better sound quality in a smaller file.

More significantly, both AAC and Windows Media files also support digital rights management (DRM). In a major concession to music labels and other copyright holders, both the iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic.com restrict what you can and can't do with the music you download.

Apple's "FairPlay" rules attempt to strike a reasonable balance between the desires of the music industry ("No copying!") and customers ("No copy restrictions!"). Apple limits the number of CDs that can be burned using the same playlist, and prevents users from storing downloaded music on more than three Macs at one time.

BuyMusic.com has left the DRM decisions up to each label and copyright holder, which complicates the buying process. Some songs can be burned to CD just once; others can be downloaded, transferred or burned to CD an unlimited number of times. This is bound to create confusion when people attempt to make "mixed" CDs that combine music purchased from different labels.

Ironically, despite its name, BuyMusic.com does not actually let you "buy" music. The system's "Terms and Conditions" note that content is "sublicensed" to users, "and is not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms 'sell,' 'purchase,' 'order,' or 'buy.'"

Furthermore, this "sublicence" is limited to just one PC. The digital download can be played an unlimited number of times "on the same registered personal computer to which the digital download is originally downloaded." The music you download is chained to the PC used to make the purchase. The music you download is also your responsibility. If Windows crashes and wipes out your tunes, BuyMusic.com is not responsible for replacing it.

The iTunes Music Store has another significant advantage over BuyMusic.com: Apple's iTunes software. iTunes keeps track of purchased music, organizes tunes into handy playlists, balances music levels, and links with digital music players, including Apple's iPod.

BuyMusic.com offers Windows users an alternative to subscription-based services, but it fails to match the simplicity and consistency that make the iTunes Music Store an attractive alternative to other download services.

The iTunes Music Store introduced a new system that makes it easy, legal and affordable to download and use digital music files. Like the PC companies that responded to the iMac with egg-shaped PCs wrapped in blue plastic, BuyMusic.com fundamentally misses the point.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...y/TechReviews/


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Downloading Wars: The Audience

15-year-olds think buying music is for suckers. Middle-aged men can't remember the last time they purchased a CD. As the music industry begins its crackdown, GUY DIXON talks to fans who get their fix from their computers. The first in a three-part series
Guy Dixon

Canadian copies of Jane's Addiction's new album Strays, hitting stores this week, come with a small flyer thanking those who bought the CD. ''On behalf of the creators of this recording, we thank you for making this investment and hope you enjoy this music for years to come!''

It's a pleasant message, if a little stiff, and part of the industry's Value of Music campaign intended to remind buyers of the more than 40,000 people who earn their livelihood from the Canadian recording business. Implicit in the message is a big thank you for not copying the disc for free off the Internet.

But in a Toronto suburb, Mike, a 47-year-old father who can't remember the last time he bought a CD, has already been listening to the album for a month. He burned it from the Internet after someone, probably countless people, loaded it onto the hugely popular, free file-sharing service Kazaa. His copy of Strays is just another of the hundreds of albums he has made by downloading music and then recording it onto blank CDs using technically illegal peer-to-peer networks.

The qualifier "technically" is apt here. Canadian laws, some argue, are a little fuzzier than they are in the United States when it comes to the culpability of computer users of Kazaa and similar networks who access music directly from other users for free, without the record companies getting a cent.

Mike's 14-year-old daughter Rachel also uses Kazaa, although she tends to download singles. Recent choices included R&B and rap hits Baby Boy by Beyoncé and P.I.M.P. by 50 Cent. Does she consider it stealing? "I guess technically it is. But personally I think everybody is far too rich already, so if I want to download their song, it's not really killing them," she reasoned.

Like her dad, she doesn't buy albums either, but as she sees it, "if there weren't still people buying CDs, there wouldn't be music made any more. I don't personally any more, but someone has to." That's the message the industry is trying to get to teens through its flyers, a Web site and most of all with TV ads showing their peers enjoying music as if it were as central to life as eating and sleeping. Rachel says she has seen the ads, but doesn't think much of them.

The problem is that, to many, the message rings hollow. Katie, 15, who downloads songs and TV shows regularly from her home in Chatham, Ont., says that some of her friends believe that only suckers buy music. Leaning toward singer-songwriters such as Michelle Branch and James Taylor, Katie limits herself to two downloaded singles before going out and buying the album.

But she doesn't repent for the few songs she does download. "I don't feel bad about it or anything. If I'm just getting the one song, it's as if I was listening to the radio 24-7, only I don't have time to do that."

Habitual file sharers don't just consider the legal and business rationale. Talk to them, particularly older file sharers, and you hear them enthuse about finding pure treasure -- songs not yet released or long out of print or simply too hard to find at HMV. Many simply want to explore music they would never have bought. To talk to file sharers is to hear about the pure joy of music. There's an excitement in their voices. Their justification for doing it may sway between idealism and hedonism. But for those who file share, the huge selection of free music on offer is astounding. It becomes a drug, and to the industry's powers that be, it's just plain illegal.

The Recording Industry Association of America has thrown down the gauntlet and is in the midst of a major push to gather evidence against those who are sharing "substantial amounts" of copyrighted music. No one outside the RIAA is really sure just how much a "substantial amount" is, although the RIAA has issued close to 900 federal subpoenas in the United States this month as it unleashes its first rounds of suits directly against file sharers.

Already parents of children using the family computer to file share and college students in the United States are being issued subpoenas. The Associated Press found a 50-year-old grandfather who was given a subpoena for downloading what he admits are hundreds of files of hard-to-find European artists.

Ultimately, the draw is the ability to tap into an infinitely larger selection of music, downloaders say. It means circumventing the demoralizing world in which listeners are pulled to their local record chain store, only to find the same uninspiring selection of hit records.

But on the Internet, "everything's available. You can get what you want, when you want it," said Chris, a 42-year-old computer consultant in Toronto with a taste for 1970s jazz-fusion ranging from Jeff Beck to Allan Holdsworth and Chick Corea. The fact that this seems so utterly at odds with his love for Soundgarden's 1994 grunge-drenched Superunknown album only shows the kind of musical eclecticism that feeds file sharing.

He added: "With most of the stuff I've downloaded, I've bought it all once before, so I don't feel bad about downloading it." One study last year by polling company Ipsos-Reid found that 81 per cent of downloaders surveyed in the United States report buying the same amount or more music since they began downloading.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...ry/Technology/


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Grooving In Digital
Ian Johnson

In my last column, I mentioned that more and more people are connecting their stereos to computers so that they can listen to digital music beyond the confines of the desk. The result was a slew of letters asking how to transfer old vinyl, tape and CD collections to MP3 or WMA files, and what the benefits would be.

Well, the benefits are easy. At the top of the list: Instead of a mass of vinyl moldering away in the basement or a stack of hundreds of cassettes and CDs sliding around in a drawer, you can store an entire music collection on a few CD-R discs or a single hard drive the size of a paperback book.

For example, a basic 60GB hard drive that sells for less than $125 (Canadian) at the moment can hold roughly 15,000 songs - a month and a half of continuous music - when recorded at the popular 128 Kilobits per second (Kbps) setting. You can store all your music on your desktop or notebook computer's drive, or invest a couple of hundred bucks in a Firewire or USB hard drive so that your collection can be moved easily between machines. For those with a multi-gigabyte MP3/WMA jukebox player, the entire collection can go with you anywhere in a unit smaller than a personal CD player.

Besides portability, it's also quick and easy to find the songs you want when they're stored as MP3 and WMA files. My vinyl, compact disc and cassette collection is quite large, and it used to take me forever to track down the right album when I wanted to hear a specific song (usually because I'd gotten lazy and put the recording back in the wrong sleeve). When files are digitized, they suddenly become searchable by artist or album name, song title, type of music, and so on. You can have the computer or MP3 jukebox comb through a database of thousands of songs in about a second and start playing the track you want.

Durability is also a factor. Tapes get snarled and the quality steadily degrades the more they are played, while vinyl is prone to warping and to music-massacring scratches, and CDs are easily damaged. MP3s and WMAs are digital, so they don't wear out and the only way to hurt them is to hurt the hard drive or player itself.

Yes, hard drives are delicate and they don't last forever - in fact, I had a hard-drive based player fail on me just a few weeks after I bought it. But once you have all your music digitized, insurance is a simple matter of backing your tunes up on a second hard drive or a stack of CD-R discs in case of emergencies. Hit a few keys on your computer, back up the files and you can stop worrying. I've digitized my entire CD collection for disaster-recovery purposes. I have young children who can reach the CD player now and who think CDs are really cool, shiny Frisbees, so I like being able to keep my music collection safely out of the way inside a computer and backed up.

With everything digitized, I can also build my own custom playlists. At a dinner party, I can put on a playlist of several hundred songs that fit the mood of the evening and not worry about hearing Tom Cochrane's Boy Inside the Man or Big Country's Ships 20 times throughout the evening as I used to when my five-disc CD player was set to random-play.

Load the digital files onto a portable player and you get the added benefit of skip-free mobile music, even if you're listening while practicing your latest trampoline routine.

OK, so how's that for a quick outline of the benefits? Now for the caveat.

There is a quality argument that MP3/WMA files are inferior to original commercial recordings. There is some truth to this, but you have to make sure you're comparing apples to apples.

CD quality, and especially DVD-audio quality, is FAR superior to most MP3 or WMA recordings when you look at the raw numbers — the sampling rate, frequency response, and so on. This is because most of the MP3s on file-swap and download services are crummy digital copies or "rips" made on slow computers with bad software. They also tend to be recorded at 64-, 96- or 128-bit rates, which are sub-CD quality.

But MP3 and WMA can offer CD-like quality if you boost the bit-rate and make the files with a fast computer that can keep up with the data throughput load. If you crank the recording bit rate up to at least 160 Kbps (near CD quality), or even 256 Kbps or 320 Kbps, the difference is pretty much nil as far as the average listener is concerned. The tradeoff is that higher quality recordings mean larger files sizes.

Some may notice a difference between a CD and a 160-bit MP3 when wearing headphones, but there are very few people with ears sharp enough to notice the difference with higher bit-rate recordings - or even when you play 128-bit music back over a home stereo system's speakers for that matter, as long as the file is clean. I've got a midrange home theatre system - Yamaha amp, Paradigm speakers and subwoofer - and when I've got a clean 128-bit or 160-bit MP3 file, I honestly can't tell you whether I'm listening to the song on CD or MP3.

It really comes down to personal taste — sonic beauty is in the ear of the beholder. If you prefer CDs, vinyl and tape and can honestly hear the difference between them and high-bit-rate MP3/WMA audio, stick to traditional music formats and enjoy your collection as it was originally recorded. If digital files meet your listening needs, then they're an option with some benefits that traditional recording media don't have.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...y/TechReviews/


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China Plans Rival Format To MPEG
Posted by xix

The Chinese government is supporting an effort to develop a homegrown standard for compressing digital audio and video, in its latest attempt to assert its technological independence from the rest of the world.

The competing Chinese standard, known as AVS, will be proposed as a national standard in 2004, the China Daily newspaper reported, citing Huang Tiejun, secretary-general of the Audio Video Coding Standard Workgroup.

Chinese manufacturers licensing that technology would pay fees in the order of one yuan ($1=CNY8.28) per device, much lower than those for MPEG, the report said. If it becomes a national standard, products of foreign companies sold in China could also have to use AVS.
http://www.geeknews.net/?info=301


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Cableicious

By 2004, CableLab’s latest standard, Docsis 2.0, will be available in both cable modem and head-end equipment, and that will have a dramatic impact on the amount of bandwidth customers can access. 1.0 and 1.1 equipment is capable of a maximum upstream rate of 10 Mb/ s (and in practice, usually 5 Mb/s), compared to 30 Mb/s downstream. Docsis 2.0 equipment will enable 30 Mb/s rates in both directions, though for entire neighborhoods not individual customers. The improvement stems from better signal modulation and error correction.

While Docsis 1.1 helps enable real-time services, Docsis 2.0’s greater upstream bandwidth will make those services available to more customers, because there will be more bandwidth to share. 2.0’s new symmetric bandwidth—the same bandwidth in both directions—will let cable companies offer high-speed two-way services to businesses, which usually need to uplink as much or more information as they need to download.

Docsis 2.0-improved equipment will not only provide greater absolute upstream bandwidth, but it will also pack more information into signals in both directions. According to Rouzbeh Yassini, senior executive consultant at CableLabs and founder and CEO of YAS Broadband Ventures LLC (Andover, Mass.), Docsis 1.0 and 1.1 can transmit a maximum of 10 Mbps over a signal that spans six MHz. Thus, the 30-Mb/s downstream capacity of Docsis 1.1 systems requires a total of 18 MHz bandwidth (obviously, the bandwidth is not necessarily adjacent on the radio-frequency spectrum). With Docsis 2.0, one six MHz band can transmit 30 Mb/s—a tripling of capacity. That opens up huge opportunities for new Internet cable services, such as niche entertainment Web "channels" that cater to small audiences (like our fictional All-Scottish Sports Channel).

Cable companies expect to start deploying Docsis 2.0 equipment and services sometime in 2004. "Going from Docsis 1.0 to 1.1 is a big change, but 2.0 is extraordinarily important," says Craddock. "I can’t wait for it."
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY...g03/cable.html


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Radio Days: World Radiocommunication Conference Concludes Work in Geneva
Giselle Weiss

Spectrum is allocated for wireless local-area networks, high-altitude base stations

Geneva, 9 July 2003—Roughly every three years, expert delegations representing virtually every country of the world meet under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to re-divvy and re-allocate the radio spectrum to reflect changing needs. This time around, the World Radiocommunication Conference 2003—an important but rather arcane diplomatic event— took place from 9 June to 4 July in Geneva, with 2506 participants and 151 delegations attending. It was even more widely representative than the previous one, WRC-2000, which took place in Istanbul, and the number of agenda items this year was more than twice as large as three years ago. That made the job of getting work accomplished more challenging than ever [see "How the WRC Gets Things Done"].

The Istanbul conference, as IEEE Spectrum reported [link "reported" to http:// http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/special...00/index2.html] at the time, was dominated by a single huge issue, allocation of new frequency bands for use in IMT2000 third-generation (3G) cellular telephony systems. This year, in contrast, "there are many more issues, and many of them are small," observed Alan Jamieson, a spectrum allocation consultant based in Auckland, New Zealand, who managed the 3G negotiations in Istanbul. Still, some of the items on this year’s agenda also attracted considerable interest because of their commercial potential, as this reporter for Spectrum learned, pacing the corridors, dropping in on sessions, and button-holing delegation leaders as the opportunity arose.

Though security initially was rather tight, as the conference wore on precautions largely boiled down to a couple of guards checking badges. Delegates and the rare technically-minded reporter could move easily in and out of the conference headquarters, during what was the hottest June in Switzerland since 1753. As it happened, adjusting radio regulations for security and emergency relief—be it terrorism, heat and drought, flooding or earthquakes—was one of the more prominent conference themes.

Probably the most important decision making at WRC-2003 was in these areas:

· Harmonizing public protection and disaster relief radio services

· Readying spectrum for high-altitude platforms—for example, balloons—to serve, in effect, as cellular base stations

· Giving airline passengers broadband Internet access

· Getting more spectrum for wireless local-area networks like Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11)

How important are the treaty-force decisions adopted at the radio conferences? Do they actually make things happen, or merely set the stage and open possibilities? Asked about the 3G cellular bust that set in right after Istanbul, where negotiators were much influenced by a momentary 3G boom prompted by the runaway success of Japan’s iMode system, Jamieson emphatically rejected any notion that the WRC-2000 spectrum allocations for 3G were premature. If spectrum hadn’t been identified then, he argued, "We’d just be going through it now."

Even in India, where 3G is still considered a distant prospect, cellphone subscriptions are increasing at a rate of 800,000 per month, noted Bharat Bhatia, a member of the Indian delegation to WRC-2003. And it was India, Bhatia emphasized, which first got the subject of emergency relief added to the WRC agenda, in 2000—though it was an uphill battle—another example, he felt, of the radio conference anticipating important emergent needs.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY...jul03/wrc.html


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Senator Calls For Reports On Gov't Data Searches

Civil liberties groups throw their support behind the legislation.
Grant Gross

Civil liberties groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology are throwing their support behind a piece of legislation that would require U.S. agencies to report to Congress about the personal information they collect.

Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, introduced the Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act of 2003 on Tuesday. The bill would require federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to disclose when they subscribe to commercial databases of personal information.

Wyden's legislation would require reports from U.S. agencies including the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Department of Defense, and U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. The reports would have to disclose agency contracts to obtain commercial data, how the agencies analyze the data and the privacy guidelines used by the agencies.

The bill also prohibits all federal agencies from conducting searches of commercial data to create hypothetical scenarios of future terrorist attacks.

Wyden argued that no comprehensive privacy laws now exist that regulate the federal government's access to, or use of, public or private databases. "This legislation would hold the government accountable to Congress and the American people when federal agencies seek to dig through an American’s most personal information," he said in a statement.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...earches_1.html


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Conference Shows Doubts Still Plague Online Music

Divided music industry cannot even agree what the market's biggest problems are.
Marc Ferranti

Despite the fact that major music companies have finally joined Internet services to offer a much greater variety of authorized online music than a year ago, market growth is sputtering as the industry remains mired in legal and business problems, judging from what entertainment and Internet insiders had to say at the Jupiter Plug.IN Conference & Expo in New York this week.

Contention over publishing contracts, debate over how restrictive to make DRM (digital rights management) copy controls, continuing use of unauthorized file-swapping sites, and failure to capitalize on new marketing techniques made possible by the Web continue to curb growth, according to speakers here.

Jupiter kicked off the conference announcing that online CD sales in the U.S. will remain flat in 2003, at $750 million, or 7 percent of the entire recorded music market in the country. Less than $75 million of those sales will be for music that is downloaded, according to Jupiter, based in Darien, Conn.

Part of the problem is that difficulty over obtaining necessary publishing contracts is forcing online services to put a variety of restrictions on the ability of paying consumers to download songs and burn them onto CDs, some panelists here said.

"We want to give music to the people the way they want to have it, but the question is will the licensing and the lawyers get out of the way," said Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Digital Media Association (DiMA), a Washington, D.C.-based trade group.

Several panelists and conference attendees cited restrictions on Apple's iTunes Music Store, which allows consumers to burn songs onto CDs, but makes that service available only to users who can supply a valid U.S. billing address.

Looming over the debate, as it has been for years, is the specter of file-swapping services that let Web surfers trade unauthorized copies of copyright music. The extent to which copy controls should be implemented is still the subject of raging debate in the industry, and several heated conversations during panel discussions illustrated this.

"What would you do if your livelihood was threatened? Technology has to be part of the solution -- when cable companies made it more difficult for people to steal cable [TV], then the amount of people stealing cable went down. We don't need to eliminate piracy altogether, we could live with 5 percent, but technology needs to be part of the answer," said Ron Stone, co-founder and president of Gold Mountain Entertainment, based in Los Angeles, and a veteran manager of the careers of rock stars such as Neil Young.

But some industry insiders here said that attempting to stop piracy with legal controls on copying may be fruitless or at best a waste of time and money.

Rather than target ISPs with subpoenas and lawsuits in an effort to root out users of file-swapping services like Kazaa, the recording industry should work with network operators to come up with a fair flat fee that the service providers would pay for the file-swapping traffic, according to Jim Griffin chief executive officer of Cherry Lane Digital, a consulting company.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...nemusic_1.html


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Seizure Of Business Records Challenged

The measure has provoked strong objections from booksellers and librarians, who view it as an unwarranted intrusion into citizens' reading habits
Dan Eggen

The American Civil Liberties Union joined several Islamic and Arab American groups yesterday in filing a legal challenge to a key provision of the USA Patriot Act, which allows the government to seize business, library and computer records in terrorism investigations without publicly disclosing that it has done so.

The ACLU lawsuit, filed in federal court in Detroit, argues that the law violates free-speech rights and constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The plaintiffs, including a Michigan Islamic group and an Oregon mosque, also allege in the lawsuit that they have been targeted for investigation by the FBI because of their ethnic and religious characteristics.

"Ordinary Americans should not have to worry that the FBI is rifling through their medical records, seizing their personal papers, or forcing charities and advocacy groups to divulge membership lists," said Ann Beeson, the ACLU's lead attorney in the lawsuit.
http://www.mediareform.net/news.php?id=802


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Vivendi Remains Firm On Price And Fit
Tim Burt and Peter Thai Larsen

When Jean-Bernard Levy met Vivendi Universal investors recently, the chief operating officer of the French media and telecoms group was blunt. "The dream of creating a global content and communications empire has collapsed," he said. "We are engaged in a methodical process to divest assets, but they will be sold only at the right price."

This week, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided the price was wrong. The US film studios group withdrew an $11.5bn offer for Vivendi's US entertainment assets, saying: "The seller's current price expectation would not be consistent with our valuation of the assets."

MGM is the latest casualty in the auction of Vivendi Universal Entertainment (VUE), comprising Universal Studios, cable networks and theme parks.

Vivendi, which has embarked on a ?16bn ($18.3m) disposal programme, has rejected an approach from Universal Partners, a consortium led by Marvin Davis, the US oil billionaire. And it has warned the remaining bidders - Liberty Media, NBC, Viacom and a group led by Edgar Bronfman, the Vivendi board member - that it values VUE at about $14bn.

Vivendi is thought to favour a deal with General Electric, which would merge its NBC television unit with VUE to create a new media group, leaving Vivendi as a minority shareholder.

The NBC transaction is unlikely to include upfront cash, but it may be Vivendi's best hope of achieving the valuation it wants. As it involves merging two unlisted subsidiaries, bankers could tailor the valuations to help Vivendi claim a full price.

The issue is complicated by a $2.4bn liability for preferred interest shares in VUE, held by Barry Diller, the veteran US media executive, and his InterActive technology company. That liability dates to Mr Diller's sale of his USA Networks to Vivendi last year.

Concerns over such obligations prompted one adviser to warn: "The process is going a little sideways; a gap is emerging on valuations."
http://www.mediareform.net/news.php?id=801


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Internet Use Is Not Harmful to Kids' Health, Say Researchers
Mike Martin

Despite its dark reputation as a haven for porn-peddling pedophiles, the Internet may actually be good for kids - - very good, in fact, claim researchers with a National Science Foundation-sponsored project at Michigan State University (MSU).

Not only does Internet use have no negative effect on users' social involvement or psychological well being, it increases children's grade-point averages and standardized test scores, says MSU psychology professor Linda Jackson, the principal investigator on a recently completed three-year study aptly called HomeNetToo.

"We found no evidence that using the Internet at home reduces social contacts or undermines communication with family or friends," said Jackson. "Adult participants who used the Internet more were no more likely to communicate less with family and friends, participate in social groups, become depressed or to experience hassles or stress due to time conflicts than those who used it less or not at all."

Surprisingly, however, children -- not adults -- may experience the biggest net gains from Internet interactions, Jackson explained.

"HomeNetToo children who spent more time online using the Web performed better in school after one year than those who spent less time online," Jackson told NewsFactor. "It appears that the text-based nature of most Web pages is causing children to read more, resulting in improvements in grade-point averages and performance on standardized tests of reading achievement."

=
The researchers examined how the design of Web pages makes it easier or more difficult to understand and remember content. Their study focused on health information -- in particular on content about high-blood pressure, a serious problem in one study cohort -- the African American community.

Working with MSU's Media Interface and Networking Design (MIND) laboratory, the research team created interfaces adapted to users' preferred mode of information processing and used experiments to examine whether learning information about high blood pressure was easier with user- adapted interfaces or standard "magazine-style" Web page interfaces.

"Culturally adapted interfaces resulted in more favorable attitudes than the typical magazine-style interface," said Frank Biocca, Ameritech professor of telecommunication at MSU. "Learning was enhanced when interface adaptation matched the users' cognitive style.”
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22006.html


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Internet Song Swappers Say Legal Threats Won't Stop Them

Online song swappers say the fear of getting hammered with a hefty lawsuit has had little effect on their habits -- at least for now.
Edward C. Baig

Just 17% of swappers ages 18 and over say they have cut back on file sharing because of the potential legal consequences, according to a survey released by Jupiter Research at the company's annual Plug.IN digital music conference Monday. And 43% see nothing wrong with online file trading; only 15% say it's wrong.

The survey was completed after the recording industry began issuing a flood of subpoenas in an attempt to discover the identities of illicit song traders. Measurements have since shown traffic slowing on some of the most popular file-swap services on the Net.

But conference participants expect it will take a number of tactics to make a difference. "There should be a combination of a stick and a carrot," says Tsvi Gal, chief information officer at Warner Music. "The likes of [Apple's] iTunes proved that there is a market for people who want to be honest."

Adds Jonathan Potter, executive director of the Digital Media Association, a trade group: "Cable service theft stopped when you saw your neighbor walking down the street with silver handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit. How many subpoenas will they have to [serve] to grandparents and parents until the parent says to the kid, 'What are you doing on my computer?' They'll shut it off fast."

Overall, Jupiter remains bullish on the state of online music in the long haul, though it has slashed its forecasts because of industry doldrums. The "digital channel is still in its infancy," Jupiter analyst Lee Black says. The online music market is expected to reach $3.3 billion in 2008, about a fourth of the total U.S. consumers will spend on music that year, and quadruple the amount consumers are currently spending online.

Other predictions:

· CDs will not be replaced anytime soon. But offline sales will continue to sag as consumers increasingly move online to shop and retailers make room on store shelves for DVDs and video games at the expense of compact discs.
· File sharing will become marginalized as consumers are put off by poor quality, "spyware" and ads.
· Online sales will slowly shift from discs to digital downloads. That's because downloads are cheaper and more immediate, and buyers can pick individual tracks.

http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/21990.html


Top 10 D/Ls - Singles

BigChampagne


Backlash Predicted in File-Swapping Wars

James Maguire

Yankee Group analyst Mike Goodman told NewsFactor that "this is going to make a lot of people unhappy. And who do you think these people will turn to? Their congressman. At that point, all the PAC [political action committee] money in the world won't save you."

Responding to the music industry's threats of legal action against a mass of individual P2P users, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has created a Web page where users can check to see if they are being targeted by the RIAA, the industry trade group bringing the suits. The EFF's Web page enables users to check for their user names before a subpoena reaches them. At least two ISPs say that if a user responds within seven days, the ISP can deny the RIAA's subpoena and refuse to turn over personal contact information.

The move by the EFF followed a new offensive by the RIAA; the group has sent out over 900 subpoenas to ISPs since July 26th to gain the information necessary to file civil lawsuits against individual file swappers.

Although some industry observers say the RIAA's targeting of individuals will create a backlash, RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told NewsFactor the group's efforts are working. "If you look at the lawsuits we filed against four college students who were running mini-Napster networks, within days of that announcement nearly two dozen similar networks across the country came down."

But Yankee Group analyst Mike Goodman told NewsFactor that "this is going to make a lot of people unhappy. And who do you think these people will turn to? Their congressman. At that point, all the PAC [political action committee] money in the world won't save you.

"I would love to see the first time a senator's or a congressman's kid gets a subpoena," Goodman said.

At the EFF site, users can enter their file-sharing moniker to see if they are being subpoenaed. The site queries a database that includes a list of subpoenas filed in the Washington, D.C., district court.

If an individual's moniker is in the database, that does not necessarily mean they are being subpoenaed. Many file-sharing nicknames are used by more than one person.

For each nickname used, the EFF lists a link to the PDF file of the subpoena. This includes the ISP name, the IP address of the individual, and the list of songs an individual has distributed.

For those individuals involved, the Subpoena Defense Alliance lists attorneys and additional legal information.

The RIAA's new wave of subpoenas is intended to target heavy P2P users, according to the trade group. But what precisely constitutes a heavy user is unclear.

Experts say the action is most likely to target users who have a T-1 connection, keep their systems on continuously, and share thousands of files. Also most likely to be targeted are supernode P2P users, individuals whose systems are used as major network connection points for services like Kazaa.

Although such users are most commonly found in universities, any user with a high-speed connection may fit these profiles.

The RIAA will begin filing these suits in late August or early September, coinciding with the start of the new school year. As for the penalty, "we'll leave it up to the court to decide" dollar amounts, RIAA's Lamy said.

The RIAA's court filings show the organization is likely to use snapshots of a P2P user's shared file folder as evidence in lawsuits.

Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a copyright owner can issue a subpoena to force an ISP to turn over the name of suspected copyright infringer.

Verizon, an ISP, has been attempting to overturn this law. Verizon, along with another ISP, SBC Communications, has informed users that they seven days to challenge a subpoena. If the ISP does not hear from the user's attorney in that seven-day period, it will turn over the information to the RIAA.

"This is one of those wars where they're going to win every battle and lose the war," Goodman said of the RIAA's efforts to combat P2P piracy. "P2P networks are like cockroaches. As soon as you eliminate one, a dozen new ones come scurrying forth."
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/21976.html


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FTC Warns Against File-Sharing And Spyware

The US Federal Trade Commission issued an alert yesterday, warning consumers about the risks of file-sharing and spyware. The alert came only days after a bill was introduced into Congress requiring that spyware could only be used on a computer if the computer user had granted permission.

Using file-sharing software like KaZaA involves risks – and the music and movie industries will be only too pleased to hear the FTC warnings consumers about the increased risk of exposure to viruses, of unwittingly sharing private files with others, and of becoming "mired in legal issues" if downloading copyright-protected material.

The Recording Industry Association of America made clear late last month that it plans to sue thousands of individual users of file-sharing services. According to Nielsen// NetRatings, this had an almost immediate effect on the level of file-sharing activity: KaAaA and Morpheus, two of the most popular file-swapping services, had 15% fewer users during the week ending 6th July, according to the analysts.

The FTC also called for parents to discuss file-sharing with their families, to ensure that everybody is aware of the risks involved – because, it cautions, users "may unwittingly download pornography labelled as something else.”

The FTC also warned consumers about spyware.

Spyware is the term for software that is used to collect information about an individual or organisation without their knowledge. It can be deposited as an e-mail attachment or as a download.

According to the FTC:

“Spyware monitors a user's browsing habits and then sends that data to third parties. Sometimes the user gets ads based on the information that the spyware has collected and disseminated. Spyware can be difficult to detect and remove. Before you use any file-sharing program, you may want to buy software that can prevent the downloading of spyware or help detect it on your hard drive.”

In June this year AOL subsidiary Netscape Communications agreed to pay $100,000 and delete user data under a settlement over a feature of the company's browser that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer considered to be spyware.

The browser had a function which tracked web pages accessed by users, albeit there was no suggestion that Netscape used, or intended to use, the information gathered.

A bill was recently introduced into Congress that requires companies to inform PC users of their intent to install spyware, and to obtain permission before loading it onto a computer.

The FTC consumer alert is available here.
http://www.out-law.com/php/page.php?...6219&area=news


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Sales Of Pirated Music CDs Top One Billion Units

Global sales of pirate CDs have more than doubled in the last three years and now generate an illegal international business worth more than $4.5 billion, according to a new report published by the IFPI today.

Sales of pirate CDs are estimated to have risen by 14%, exceeding one billion units for the first time last year - meaning that one in three of all CDs sold worldwide is a fake - while the total value of the pirate music market, including cassettes, was $4.6 billion, up 7% on the previous year.

The figures mean that the global pirate music market, at $4.6 billion, is of greater value than the legitimate music market of every country in the world, except the USA and Japan.

Much of the proceeds from music piracy are funding organized crime syndicates, and the legitimate music industry in several of the worst-hit countries is threatened with collapse, says the report on Commercial Music Piracy 2003. The report, naming a list of top ten priority countries (with China as worst offender).

According to the IFPI's report, enforcement activity seized 50 million units last year, significantly more than ever before; but this is still only one in 20 of all the pirate discs sold worldwide.

The report also points to the huge losses piracy causes to investment, economies, cultures and tax revenues and calls for government reforms in three key areas: stronger copyright and enforcement rules; regulation of CD plants; and more aggressive prosecution of copyright crimes.
http://www.out-law.com/php/page.php?...4648&area=news


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Trade Marking HotSpot

Deutsche Telekom has made applications to register the word “HotSpot” as a trade mark, according to a report by Computing magazine – albeit the term is widely used as a generic word for an area where the internet can be accessed using wireless technology.

This won't deter Deutsche Telekom, which previously registered the colour magenta as a trade mark in the telecom and on-line services sector. In July 2001 the German telco warned book publishing web site my-favourite- book.com over the use of the colour on its site.

Computing notes that applications have been made to the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market; but the only results appearing in the search engines of both bodies are for figurative marks – where the word HotSpot is displayed as part of a logo, in Deutsche Telekom's distinctive magenta and grey colouring, which seems much more reasonable.

It is less clear if the company has separate pending applications for the word in isolation, as Computing implies. If so, it could face objections from Telefonica: the Spanish telco already does have a registration with the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market for the two-word variant "HOT SPOT" as a trade mark when used in connection with telecommunications or communications by computer networks or services. The registration was granted on 20th March this year.
http://www.out-law.com/php/page.php?...4767&area=news


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Greplaw Interview with Electronic Frontier Foundation Chairman Brad Templeton

Brad Templeton on Usenet Policy, Spam and Reinventing the Phone

Mr Brad Templeton should be no stranger to the long-time Greplaw readers. Still the chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation might be a new acquaintance to many Greplawers, and this CDA fighter's strong opinions on subjects ranging from spam, copyright policy and Internet regulation demand quite an audience. Greplaw is therefore happy to provide you with a fresh pick of Mr Templeton's brain.

# Who is Brad Templeton?

Well, with luck the web page explains that. My foundation is as a technologist. I've been lucky enough to play at the start of many of the recent technology revolutions. I was shown a mainframe computer for the first time as a teenager in 1976, and within a couple of years I was deep into early PCs and sold a game to Personal Software, the company that sold Visicalc. I joined on as their first employee and got to write more games, work a tiny bit on Visicalc and demo it at its launch. Then they hired me to write VisiPlot, the companion product for the PC. Funny thing is, to do all this, we needed Arpanet accounts, and I quickly realized that networking people was going to be the real application for these computers. In the 80s I played around a lot with that, wrote compilers and other tools, including many of the popular system tools for Commodore computers.

# Looking at the world around us, it seems like we're getting more filters, more censorship, more patents, more copyright and less freedom on the Internet. Has the EFF failed?

We've won a number of significant victories, some of which have been talked about in this interview, and many more recent ones which are outlined on our web site. We've also had significant losses, such as the 2600 case where the court ruled an online magazine could not publish the results of important reverse engineering of how to play a DVD.

But all these cases are coming because of a tremendous explosion of freedom that has been going on around us, thanks to the computer. This is a rare juncture in history. We're in the middle of a revolution and we know it. The main tide, in spite of the setbacks is still towards victory. I admit to getting a little more scared of late, after the Patriot Act and the DMCA. What we're doing is vitally important. Even those who would be champions of those laws would agree that it's vital to have a healthy campaign to oppose them and provide checks and balances. However, some of these laws and proposed new ones are so scary that we need to do more than provide balance. That's how we spend our member's money.

# Being around the Internet for so long - what is your greatest fear for the future?

I fear people will buy into the idea that there is an inherent tradeoff between fundamental rights and safety, so that everything that frightens us shifts that balance and takes away rights. A lot of people seem to believe this and say it. It's a scary world and it's going to get nastier for a while. Rights lost take a long time to come back, indeed they usually only come back in revolutions.

So many times when people make this tradeoff it's just because they didn't think hard enough how to keep rights and increase safety at the same time. We need a force in society to push for that, and it's a daunting task. Many people don't worry about lost rights or privacy until after they are taken away.

# And your greatest hope?

In spite of all these forces, great new media of freedom keep flourishing. Bloggers and WiFi and tunnels through the great Firewall of China. The opponents of freedom are on the defensive. It's nasty, because they tend to over-react and work to protect their established turfs. 9/11 showed them taking a forward leap, grabbing new powers when the opportunity arose. But mostly, these bad laws and bad situations are happening because some new freedom has sprung on the landscape that frightens certain powerful interests.

My great hope is that new things I haven't yet imagined will continue to bloom.

http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article....7207&mode=flat


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Abit Throws Gauntlet Down To RIAA, Governments

"Keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files"
INQUIRER staff:

A RELEASE FROM motherboard company Abit has made the strange claim that security technology on its motherboard will "keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files".

And in a further fit of either bravado or an attempt to be crazily cool, the firm says that its Secure IDE technology will "keep government supercomputers busy for weeks".

Secure IDE, says Abit, has a special decoder without a special key, and that means hard drives can "never be opened by anyone".

That means that even "hackers and information thieves" cannot access the data, even if it's removed from a PC.

It claims that passwords can be cracked in hours but Secure IDE is a different kettle of fish altogether.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10769


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UK 'Bans' iPod Radio Add-On
Tony Smith

Griffin Technologies' iTrip iPod add-on is illegal in the UK, British distributor A M Micro has said.

The iTrip connects to an iPod and transmits songs by FM radio to any radio receiver in the vicinity. While its operation in the US is permitted by the Federal Communications Commission, over here the device contravenes the UK Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949.

Unlike the 2.4GHz band in which 802.11b Wi-Fi operates, or 802.11a's 5HGz band, for example, the 87.7-107.9MHz band used by the iTrip is not licence-exempt spectrum, according to the WTA. As such broadcasters hoping to use that part of the spectrum need the permission of the UK's Radio Agency.

The rules state that UK broadcasters have unique access to the frequencies they have licensed, and that, say the RA, means the iTrip can't transmit on frequencies already taken in the FM band. A M Micro can't license a section of the band and dedicate it to iTrip users because all the available FM frequencies have already been licensed.

Cost isn't an issue - it's only £339 ($548) a year for VHF stations with under 100,000 listeners. That said, anyone using the iTrip would also need to cough up £500 ($808) a year to the Performing Rights Society to cover royalty payments to artists whose music is broadcast.

Of course, the iTrip broadcasts at very low power - the device itself draws all the power it needs from the iPod itself - but it's still enough to intrude on a broadcaster's licensed frequency, potentially interfering with listeners who have tuned into a specific station.

The bottom line, says A M Micro, is that using iTrip is an offence akin to operating a pirate radio station. If caught, the user faces prosecution, as does the dealer for selling him or her their iTrip. Not surprisingly, A M Micro wants to avoid that.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/32098.html


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Burn4Free 1.0.0.443

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Changes in Current Version:

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Download Burn4Free 1.0.0.443

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail...fid=1058031258


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Senator Launches Investigation Into RIAA Piracy Crackdown
Frederic J. Frommer

The chairman of the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations Thursday began an inquiry into the music industry's crackdown against online music swappers, calling the campaign "excessive."

"Theft is theft, but in this country we don't cut off your arm or fingers for stealing," said Sen. Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican who was a rock roadie in the 1960s.

The Recording Industry Association of America announced plans in June to file several hundred lawsuits against people suspected of illegally sharing songs on the Internet. Copyright laws allow for damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song.

In a letter to RIAA President Cary Sherman, Coleman criticized the group for issuing subpoenas to "unsuspecting grandparents whose grandchildren have used their personal computers" and others who may not know their computer is being used to download music.

"The industry seems to have adopted a 'shotgun' approach that could potentially cause injury and harm to innocent people who may simply have been victims of circumstance, or possessed a lack of knowledge of the rules related to digital sharing of files," Coleman wrote.

He asked the RIAA to furnish him with a list of its subpoenas; its safeguards against invading privacy and making erroneous subpoenas; its standards for issuing subpoenas; and a description of how it collects evidence of illegal file sharing.

"I recognize the very legitimate concerns about copyright infringement," Coleman said in a conference call with reporters. "This is theft. But I'm worried that the industry is using a shotgun approach."
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...ws/6428142.htm


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Sony Wins Australian Mod-Chip Case

Original verdict overturned by appeal judges
INQUIRER staff:

JAPANESE GIANT Sony has managed to overturn a decision by an Australian court last year which said it wasn't illegal to sell mod chips for the Playstation 2.

According to Australian IT, the decision by a federal court could hike up the cost of computer games and music CDs.

The original case found that Eddy Stevens hadn't acted illegally by distributing mod chips for the Playstation. Mod chips allow copy protection measures to be avoided and also break region codes used by Sony to sell Playstations.

But at Sony's appeal yesterday, the judges overturned the original verdict. Lawyers in Australia believe that the implications of the success for Sony could mean copyright owners can enforce DVD encoding and CD copy protection.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10784


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Subpoenas Sent to File-Sharers Prompt Anger and Remorse
Amy Harmon

A blizzard of subpoenas from the recording industry seeking the identities of people suspected of illegally swapping music is provoking fear, anger and professions of remorse as the targets of the antipiracy dragnet learn that they may soon be sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

The Recording Industry Association of America has obtained close to 1,000 such subpoenas over the last four weeks to more than a dozen Internet service providers, including Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, and several universities, including Boston College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, demanding the names of file swappers. Most Internet providers are notifying the unlucky subscribers by mail that they are legally required to turn over their contact information.

Those on alert include several college students, the parents of a 14-year-old boy in the Southwest, a 41-year-old Colorado health care worker and a Brooklyn woman who works in the fashion industry.

"They could have used some other way to inform people than scaring the bejiminy out of them," said a mother who received a copy of the subpoena last Wednesday, listing several songs that her 14-year-old son had made available for others to copy from his computer. "If someone had sent me a letter saying `this is wrong,' you can bet your sweet potatoes that would have gotten my attention. This just seems so drastic."

The ominous letters and a list of screen names culled from court filings that is circulating on the Web underscore the unusually personal nature of the industry's latest effort to stamp out online piracy, which it blames for a 25 percent drop in sales of CD's since 1999. Under copyright law, the group can be awarded damages of $750 to $150,000 for each copyrighted song that was distributed without authorization.

Some of the targeted Internet users expressed shock that they were singled out for an activity that tens of millions of Americans are believed to engage in. Others said they were unaware they were doing anything wrong. Most of those interviewed refused to be identified by name, citing privacy concerns and the potential impending legal action against them.

The mother of the 14-year-old boy said she had assumed that her son's file-swapping was all right because she knew that Napster, the company that drove the original wave of online music piracy, had been shut down after the record companies sued. Any other company whose software is used by so many of her son's friends, she reasoned, must have done something different to be allowed to continue operating.

After receiving a copy of the subpoena in the mail on Wednesday, the mother said she did some research and learned that though the software itself might be legal, the way her son was using it was almost certainly not. The 150 songs her son had on his computer have been deleted, along with his computer privileges for the rest of the summer.

"We've had extensive discussions about why it was wrong, and how it's kind of like plagiarism, taking someone else's words or someone else's music and not giving them credit for it," she said. She added that her son stayed in his room all day, while her older daughter worried that her parents would not be able to pay for college next year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/te...gy/28TUNE.html


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Tim O'Reilly interview: Digital Rights Management is a Non-starter
mrspin

At last year's Apple World Wide Developer Conference (2002) I was lucky enough to attend a very informative talk by Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly Publishing) in which he spelt out his theory of watching 'alpha geeks' in order to spot future trends and how web services, open standards and always on connectivity mean that the internet is replacing the desktop operating system. Just over a year on from that talk, Tim was kind enough to answer a few of our questions here on stage4.

We are going through a major paradigm shift in terms of the distribution of music and other digital content. What is your view on the future relevance of DRM technologies, Peer2Peer networks, and traditional media companies?

In the end, I think that DRM is a non-starter, at least as currently conceived. It's baffling to me that the content industries don't look at the experience of the software industry in the 80's, when copy protection on software was widely tried, and just as widely rejected by consumers. As science fiction writer William Gibson said, "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." The software industry was the first to face the issue that bits are easily copyable. It was also the first to try to create artificial boundaries to that copying. But because copy protection greatly inconvenienced customers, it slowed the adoption of any software that used it. We're seeing exactly the same thing now with music, where copy protection schemes have caused consumers to reject the crippled offerings of the commercial online music services.

And it's just foolish, because we have many counter examples of free services being replaced by higher quality paid services. A good example is the ISP industry. In the late 80's, many of us in the computer industry got our email and usenet news via a cooperative dialup network called UUCP. Users agreed to have their computers call each other at specified times to exchange mail and news; it took about 3 days for a message to propagate from one end of the network to another. But as soon as Uunet, the best connected site on the usenet, started to offer higher quality commercial connectivity, the free uucpnet vanished in a matter of months. And of course, once Uunet switched to offering TCP/IP networking, the commercial internet was born.

This isn't to say that some mild access controls might not be appropriate. For example, ISPs require you to have a subscription account, and to identify yourself by logging in. But there are no cumbersome controls on what you can do after that point.

For this reason, I believe that the content industries will flourish online once they stop fighting their users and start offering them what they want at a price they think is fair. That's the way it works in every other field of commerce! And we're already seeing this with Apple's music service, the closest yet to a system that users feel is fair and usable. As soon as Apple rolls it out on Windows (or as soon as competing vendors learn the lessons Apple is teaching), we're going to see a whole new ballgame.

And as the content industries are discovering, existing copyright law is quite enough legal protection for them to put a stop to the most serious of copyright infringers. This is much the same lesson learned by software vendors.

I'm also quite clear that the question isn't whether P2P networks will spell the end of media companies. The question is whether the companies that succeed on the new medium will be upstarts or existing players. We saw this same dynamic on the web, where folks like Yahoo! and Gooogle and MSN, and even AOL despite its troubles, built substantial businesses because they learned the rules of the new medium rather than trying to force users into their old business models.

I strongly believe that publishing, as a role, is driven by the sheer math involved in millions of potential producers reaching hundreds of millions of potential consumers. As a result, I believe that the new medium will eventually drive the development of new intermediaries who help people to find the content they want. (Think google and the web.) I also believe that the new medium will at worst place a small "tax" on the sales of the top artists, while producing far greater opportunities for mid-list and new artists. I wrote about this idea in a piece entitled "Piracy is Progressive Taxation."

Rather than let go of traditional revenue models - the Entertainment Industry seems determined to keep coming up with new copyright protection schemes and going after individual file traders. Who will be the eventual winners and losers of this trend and why? e.g. consumers, content providers or technology manufacturers?

Ultimately, the consumers will win, and the companies that discover how best to serve them. Along the way, there will be a lot of money for technology manufacturers. The only losers are going to be companies that try to play King Canute, holding back the tide.

That being said, they may also create some pain for users and innovative companies in the meantime. It's a real shame that Napster was shut down. It was a truly innovative company that should have been allowed to find its way to a partnership with the music industry. Now, the fruits of Shawn Fanning's innovation will go to others, as the music industry slowly gets over its heebie-jeebies.

Like off-shore banking, will we see off-shore web, file and webcast serving in an attempt to avoid new anti-piracy legislation. Will this lead to pirate internet radio?
http://www.stage4.co.uk/full_story.php?newsID=272


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Network Effects: Stan Liebowitz and the MP3 Debate
Miriam Rainsford

The past month has been one in which the attention of the music industry has focused with renewed interest on digital downloads, beginning with the success of Apple's iTunes Music Store and finishing on a sour note with the RIAA's announcement that they will now be pursuing lawsuits against individual file-sharers. In light of these developments, it is worth re-examining Stan Liebowitz's analysis of the impact of MP3 downloads on the music industry. Can we in fact ascertain whether actual damage has been done through the rise of peer-to-peer file sharing systems, or is the record industry simply afraid of change and too slow on the uptake of new formats?

Stan Liebowitz, professor of Economics at the University of Dallas, Texas, became a controversial figure during the Microsoft anti-trust trial, when he testified that "network effects," the phenomenon where market saturation determines consumer choice, were more likely to have been responsible for Microsofts' dominant position than anti-competitive practises.

He later found himself to be an unlikely ally of the file-sharing community, when he released a study commissioned by the Cato Institute asserting that file- sharing "should be causing the industry a lot of harm. But we're not seeing it". However, with his latest paper, "Will MP3 Downloads Annihilate the Record Industry? The Evidence So Far", he concludes that we are beginning to see an undetermined, yet detrimental effect of file sharing on music sales. On examination I am concerned by several obvious flaws in Liebowitz's logic and would suggest a revision: that there is as yet no clear evidence that can prove beyond reasonable doubt that MP3 downloads are solely responsible for the current downturn in CD sales.

I cannot categorically say that MP3 downloading has no effect on CD sales. Nor do I support the RIAA's claims that file-sharing is "killing the music industry." What I wish to emphasize, through analysis of Liebowitz's paper, is that we lack the proof to convict beyond reasonable doubt. And if we cannot convict MP3 downloads of this "crime" against the music industry with the same burden of proof that we would expect of a trial in a court of law, then it is unethical and indeed unconstitutional to pursue lawsuits against individuals for a crime which cannot even be established to exist.

If there is no body, one cannot be convicted of Murder One. Yet Jesse Jordan and the Princeton Four were charged with "killing the music industry," and gave their life savings in settlement fines, money which was to have paid for their studies. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the RIAA are obtaining wrongful convictions in their drive to sue students and now even children for compensation against monies that they cannot even prove they have lost.

And so to Exhibit One (PDF), the expert analysis of Prof. Liebowitz. Even from the start, concern should be raised regarding the sources Liebowitz has used to obtain his data. Rather than commissioning an independent survey, Liebowitz takes his data straight from the RIAA (p.4), an institution which he himself admits manipulates sales figures to show "the picture they wish to portray about the conditions of the industry." However, Liebowitz does present the various biases that may be read into this data.

Liebowitz attempts in his work to take an impartial position, his stated preference as an academic being "to let the data tell... what's actually happening." But despite these attempts, and his healthy skepticism of industry hype, he cannot escape letting his personal opinions show below the surface, and through the channels who commission his work. In letting the data "speak for itself," Liebowitz opens his statistics to many possible interpretations, yet he chooses to dismiss these quite plausible alternatives one by one through methods which are somewhat less than rigorous.

These arguments would be better strengthened by using a combination of both pure data and opinion polls, in the manner in which Tempo, an independent industry analysis group, has demonstrated [see link below]. This gives a more accurate picture of where sales may have been lost -- or indeed, gained -- rather than the conjecture which Liebowitz employs.

The RIAA's figures present a clear decline in sales over the period 1999 - 2002. Yet Liebowitz fails to mention Tempo's analysis demonstrating a growth in CD sales through MP3 file sharing, as users are introduced to new repertoire and eventually purchase the CD. Indeed CD sales did rise during Napster's first year, a phenomenon Liebowitz does attribute to increased exposure through downloading. It's noteworthy that his study does not include statistics on "legitimate" MP3 purchases, focusing only on the drop in CD sales during this period. Given that he later refers to "media change" and "librarying" (where consumers duplicate purchases in a new format) as being a source of revenue during the introduction of cassette tapes, it seems implausible that he could fail to incorporate data collected through the many licensed MP3 download services.

One of the key arguments in favour of MP3 file sharing is that such librarying does occur, when P2P users download new songs, decided that they like them and then buy the album. Dave Rowntree, drummer with UK "Britpop" band Blur, confirmed this in an interview with the BBC's Breakfast program. He claims that figures on the effect of music "piracy" given by the BPI (British Phonographic Institute, the British equivalent of the RIAA) show a definite bias, and that independent studies support the theory that downloaders, like home tapers before them, are using the service on a "try before you buy" basis. He feels that it is inaccurate for industry associations to tar downloaders with the same brush as professional CD duplicators, and that while allegations of links to organised crime may be true for professional "piracy" rings, it is somewhat far-fetched to apply the same claims to students swapping files.

Perhaps it is the RIAA themselves, through their latest offensive against music lovers, who are driving their own audience away. Any parent knows that the harder one continues to push and push in an effort to discipline an unruly child, the more they will rebel. It is better to invest trust, in the knowledge that it will produce tenfold returns in mutual trust and respect for the parent.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/p2p/...2p_debate.html


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

Snapster 2.0
This Time I Really Mean It

Robert X. Cringely

There was a moment toward the end of last week when I was receiving an average of one e-mail message per minute about Snapster -- the plan I had described to change the music distribution business and become obscenely rich in the process. That one-per-minute pace continued for several days, and I am still 1,200 messages behind. So I am sorry if you haven't yet received an answer to your message, and there is a real possibility you will never receive one.

I have a different idea I'm calling Snapster 2.0. This Snapster is still roughly organized the way I described last week as a mutual fund, and it still spends $1.4 million buying one copy of every CD. Here is where the lawyers tend to say that Snapster's millions of shareholders could copy or play that CD, but only one shareholder per song could be active at a time. Bummer.

Snapster 2.0 separates the concept of ownership from that of playing music or copying it. While those 100,000 CDs are still owned by all the shareholders, they really exist only as a central repository to simplify the sharing system from both a logistical and a legal standpoint. We are no longer claiming that fair use rights can be transferred in parallel to millions of users.

Instead, Snapster 2.0 shareholders gain the right to download music -- not only by buying a share of stock, but because they also have to contribute to the mutual fund usage rights for the CDs they already hold at home.

This concept works exactly the way that investors short stocks, betting that they will go down in value and making a profit from that decline. When you sell a stock short, it means that you sell it today expecting it to go down tomorrow. Then, when you buy the stock back for less money in a week or a month, the price difference represents your profit (or loss). But how do you sell a stock that you don't already own? By borrowing it. Stockbrokers borrow shares from their customers -- from you and me -- and these are the shares that are sold by the short investor who pays the broker a little fee for arranging the loan of stock. We get nothing for the use of our shares. If you turn up wanting to sell your shares that the short has already sold, the broker just borrows them from yet another customer, allowing you, too, to sell borrowed shares though you don't know that at the time. This is possible because one share looks pretty much like another -- they are a commodity.

For Snapster 2.0, then, the purchased copies act as masters that can be copied under fair use. But there can only be one copy in use at a time for every physical disk in the system. If 10,000 shareholders wanted to play the same song at the same time, we'd need to buy 10,000 CDs OR borrow 10,000 CDs. To do this (borrowing not buying), Snapster would have to be a big database that includes both music and ownership rights to that music.

Every time a shareholder wants to download or play a song, he or she must ensure that their download is matched on a one-for-one basis with a physical CD somewhere in the system. The database does that by locking and unlocking access records to the physical CD. The CD doesn't have to be in the possession of the shareholder, just under his or her control. The Snapster 2.0 database handles that by effectively borrowing control of the physical CD for a period of time, during which it is agreed that particular physical CD can't be played by anyone else. It is a token passing scheme, and only the shareholder with the token can play the song.

It is legal to loan your CDs and also legal to loan control of your CDs, thereby justifying possession of a fair use copy at a remote location. There is a cost for all this borrowing of ownership rights, and that is a transfer of some of the borrowing fee to the owner of the physical CD. In our $0.05 per song model from last week, perhaps a penny would go to the physical CD holder. Remember, these fees have to do with possession and control of the CD, not performance of the music, so it isn't technically a commercial system, just a system of ownership with associated overhead.

But is this automated scheme really fair use? I maintain that it is. The goal is not to deprive record companies of revenue, but to save money for music consumers. This is a critical point. Aiming to save money for people by making the system more efficient does not violate fair use. It does not violate the intellectual property rights of the artists or record companies. It just takes some friction out of the system. Automation is being used to make easy something that would otherwise be very difficult. If you wanted to play a copy of a song, you could run across town and make sure that the original was not being used by anyone else OR we can save the running and just do it electronically by locking access to the physical CD that sits far away. The more simultaneous users there are, the more CD copies there have to be in the system, but the CDs don't have to be centrally held, just centrally controlled.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030731.html










Until next week,

- js.









The Onion


Recent WIRs -


http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17051 July 26th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16975 July 19th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16893 July 12th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=16830 July 5th





Jack Spratts’ 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.