With Napster Coming, Roxio Raises $22M
Ryan Naraine
Digital media upstart Roxio on Friday announced the completion of a $22 million equity financing round to be used for capital expenses. The funding comes as Roxio readies a reborn-as-legitimate Napster music download service.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based Roxio, which surprised many with the $40 million acquisition of online music service Pressplay, did not say whether the money from the private placement would be used on the Napster relaunch, which is scheduled for later this summer.
Roxio has projected it would spend $20 million to integrate Pressplay into Napster.
"The offering expands Roxio's stockholder base and adds to the Company's working capital as it continues to expand its activities in the digital media sector," the company said in a brief statement.
Company officials could not be reached for details on the timing of Napster's relaunch, which could come as early as July month-end, when Roxio CEO delivers a keynote at the 2003 Jupiter Plug.IN conference in New York City.
www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/2225291
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Look Where Wi-Fi Is Debuting In India!
Sudhir Chowdhary
So, Wi-Fi networks are all about state-of-the-science offices and hotspots where technocutives can roam around with their notebooks and still stay connected to their corporate LANs, hmm?
Maybe. And maybe not. India’s first pilot Wi-Fi project – involving the linking up of computers to networks without using wires – is taking place not in a hi-tech organisation but in the Dodabalapur district of Karnataka.
Essentially, a van roams around the district, stopping at different villages long enough for the local computer to connect to it wirelessly and transfer the data stored on it. From the van to the central database is also a Wi-Fi hop, thus resulting in a wireless end-to-end transfer of information – which is what Wi-Fi is all about.
The project – which involves creating an online database of land records - is being executed by the Karnataka Government in collaboration with the US-based technology consulting firm First Mile Solutions.
First Mile Solutions founder Amir Alexander Hasson, who helped initiate the project, told economictimes.com: “The benefits for common people are already emerging by using this low-cost wireless network that is easy to set up and maintain. They save time and money. Instead of having to pay to travel some 50 km to and from a taluka, wait in line all day with other villagers, and miss a day (or more) of work, they can receive the same service right from their village computer.”
Giving out the project details, Hasson said, “We are using IEEE 802.11b equipment at 2.4Ghz. We don't use base stations, but rather our custom DakNet Mobile Access Point (MAP) that is mounted on and powered by a vehicle. A laudable feature of the project is that the current implementation uses a Karnataka Roadways public government bus that transports the data to and from computers enabled with Wi-Fi cards.”
According to Hasson, “The network layer is ad-hoc peer-to-peer mode and not an infrastructure mode. Therefore, these are short point-to- point links that get established whenever the MAP comes within range of a kiosk or hub.” Omni-directional antennas are used on the bus and either directional or omni-directional antennas are located at each of the kiosks or hubs. Amplifiers are used to boost the signal and range for higher bandwidth applications.
“The speed of the connection between the access point and the kiosk or hub varies in each case. But on average, they can move about 21Mb or 42Mb bi-directionally per session. This is the period of time where the access point is within range of the kiosk or hub. The average goodput or actual throughput is 2.3Mbps,” Hasson pointed out.
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...ow?artid=33234
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SME Business Networking and International Trade
dhdeans
Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) truly crave the prospect of growing their business development opportunities via open access to international trading partners. In fact, the rapid rise of the membership in online business community networks, like Ryze in the U.S. and Ecademy in the U.K. is somewhat being driven by this interest.
These commercial matchmaking services are carving a niche for themselves in the marketplace, by lowering the barrier for entry, and ongoing participation (i.e. both services offer free basic membership, with additional services available for a fee). Utilizing the model of a centralized member profile database, both services can assist in the process of business partner discovery, qualification and dialogue initiation – all enabled by the Internet and the web.
But, there’s yet another complementary model that could equally enable SMEs to construct and nurture their own ad-hoc professional referral-oriented “communities of interest” and “communities of practice.” What if there was a software application that used an industry standards-based file format to help you define your own business capabilities and operating environment, and then what if this application ran on your personal computer? What if you were able to easily share those files, via the Internet, with your existing trusted business partners?
What if you and your partners then shared these files with a growing network of additional pre-qualified target business partners, globally, would this create incremental networking value? What if I could search across other people’s business network partner profiles, within a secure peer-to-peer network, would that add even greater value to this model?
Imagine what it would be like to utilize your preferred public online business community networks, and then selectively apply and combine them with your own private online business community network of trusted peers. Now, imagine if that organic network of business contacts spanned the planet earth? Well, the good news, you really don’t have to dream it to experience it.
Fueled by nascent open standards with cryptic names like RDF, FOAF, ebXML, UDDI and a whole host of other related standards developments, the building blocks are actively coming together to enable not only the next wave of online business networking, but also any resulting online business transaction processing requirements.
On this backdrop of evolving standards and creative applications activity, the GeoBridge Project was launched to aggregate the vast body of knowledge that’s already available from an eclectic substratum of topic resources – and to witness the eventual mainstream deployment of a viaduct for international trade. What are your related thoughts, or “what ifs?”
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comm...id=593_0_5_0_C
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Applications On The Bleeding Edge
Loretta Prencipe
"The power-saving advantages of mesh networks will become critical to cellular as high-speed data use grows," says Peter Stanforth, CTO and co-founder of MeshNetworks.
Innovative technologies, such as Web services and wireless, are taking root across the enterprise, and they're spawning even newer, bleeding-edge ideas. Leading the charge into the future of IT are Graham Class, who is developing service-oriented Java; Alexei Trifonov and Audrius Berzanskis, who are building quantum-encryption hardware; and Peter Stanforth, who is breaking new ground in mesh networks.
Graham Glass, chief architect at The Mind Electric in Addison, Texas, is leading the effort to bring Web services into the mainstream with two key innovations: Glue, which transparently publishes any Java class as a Web service; and the forthcoming Gaia, which includes the features necessary to deploy and manage true SOAs (service-oriented architectures). Gaia also provides a high-performance Web-services fabric that will transform small, brittle, ad hoc networks of unmanaged Web services into larger, dynamic, robust, coordinated networks of managed services.
"Gaia will make it faster, simpler and less costly for enterprises to build and deploy non-trivial systems out of Web services," Glass says. "This in turn will free up their development resources to focus on business instead of software infrastructure."
Taking security to a mind-blowing level are New York-based MagiQ Technologies' Alexei Trifonov, vice president of R&D, and Audrius Berzanskis, principal scientist. They have developed Navajo, a QKD (quantum key distribution) hardware box currently in beta, which in a sense encrypts the encryption key. Using photons, the key is changed randomly as many as 1,000 times per second. If any machine copies or reads the key before the intended recipient does, the photon polarity changes, and the intended receiver finds evidence of tampering.
This QKD is "unconditionally secure," Trifonov says. "The term came from the classical cryptography. It means that the security does not depend on the computational resources of the eavesdropper. The key management problem is the most difficult problem in modern cryptography, and the quantum cryptography gives an effective and ready-to-be-deployed solution to this problem."
For more than 20 years, Peter Stanforth, CTO and co-founder of Maitland, Fla.-based MeshNetworks, has been a pioneering force in the R&D of soft-switch technology and mesh networking. Now he oversees the commercialization of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) ad hoc peer-to- peer wireless technology.
MeshNetworks' enhancements to DARPA's technology include extending it beyond a closed network to one that can interconnect to the public telephone network and the Internet and scale to large sizes. These networks instantly form mobile broadband networks that do not rely on cellular-based networks and cost considerably less to deploy.
"The power-saving advantages of mesh networks will become critical to cellular as high-speed data use grows," Stanforth says. "If [the cellular industry] ignores mesh's advantages, it is possible that an evolution of 802.11 with ad hoc capabilities will create serious competition for them."
http://sci.newsfactor.com/perl/story/21774.html
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Abolish Due Process for Internet Piracy?
ORRIN Hatch is a full-time senator from Utah and part-time composer of inspirational music. This week, he hit a sour note.
In a pique over Internet piracy, the usually genial chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee hatched a demonic idea: a three strikes law for downloaders. It would give copyright owners like him the right to destroy the computers of those who steal songs over file-sharing networks.
Thieves would get a warning for the first two downloads. After the third, kaboom.
Steal Hatch's "One Gentle Lamb," and you'd get a digital wolf in sheep's clothing -- a virus or Trojan horse that might wipe out your hard drive or disable critical files.
To heck with due process and burden of proof -- or liability for damaging the novel you've written or research you've compiled. So what if it's a public library or school computer. Too bad if a record company targeted the innocent -- or if your kid was using the peer-to-peer network Kazaa without your knowledge.
As Hatch said, it might take "a few hundred thousand" fried computers for pirates on peer-to-peer networks to get the message.
Piracy of songs and movies is a huge problem, but Hatch's solution -- granting copyright holders exemptions from federal anti-hacking laws -- lacks rhyme or reason.
http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/news...d.asp?id=11174
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Which PC Has Your Data?
Enrique Castro
Imagine it’s the evening before the electronic presentation you volunteered to produce after the quarterly team building activity is
due. You have six networked PCs at your home, including a laptop, which enable you to share files, printers and the Internet connection. Your troubles started with the mixed media given to you by your colleagues: floppies, negatives, slides, and prints and now you are frantically trying to assemble the presentation from slightly different folders on each machine. It does not matter that all the data is at your fingertips. Try as hard as you might, a few pictures that you intended to remove from the presentation slip by, and some that you really wanted to show are nowhere to be found. The point of this example is that even in a fully interconnected world, there is a data management problem.
In another example, why can’t stereo equipment talk to a PC, and download or play MP3 files, and why can’t the music from a copy protected CD playing in the family room be routed to your PC in the home office where you are working?
Technology exists to address these integration problems in the “digital” home. The solution for data problems may lie in a distributed solution, with some functional specialization. Paradoxically, additional technical complexity and intelligence is applied to the system to present a simpler and consistent, always-on data view to the user.
Relief may come from technologies moving from the small business and the small office/home office (SOHO) markets to the home. To solve the user’s problem referenced in the introduction, as an example, workgroup servers and network attached storage (NAS) devices may follow shortly. These devices are much simpler to configure than a server, and are essentially hard drives with a single board computer and a network interface attached.
The data abstraction presented to the user is that of a file system directory, regardless of device or location. There are differences in quality of service (QoS) depending on the customer’s desire or willingness to pay. QoS parameters include performance, security and convenience features with little change to the underlying abstractions. The directory abstraction traditionally presented in a single PC is preserved in a peer-to-peer network. The customer can purchase an integrated backup application that stores additional copies of the data transparently. Offsite backup services can be purchased through a service provider. There is no need for manual backups anymore. The user sees the same file system, with the only change being the enhanced reliability.
The same directory abstraction can be provided through a WAN or even a wireless WAN through service providers. This enables the customer to access the data in the directory from any wireless hot spot connected to the Internet, or from a cellular phone or connected PDA.
New business models will become possible in this integrated home environment. For instance, consumers could rent some of their storage back to the service providers. This service provider-administered space can be used for caching, i.e., as staging area for downloaded content ordered by the consumer or by neighbors. This will lead to an extremely scalable network because the storage space grows with the network. A service provider with one million subscribers with an average of 100Mbytes per subscriber can count on an additional 100Tbytes of storage for content caching. This would be difficult to achieve with centralized storage. A popular movie can be served pieces stored in neighboring homes, lessening the load on the provider’s servers. This is already happening in an uncontrolled way: some of the “free” peer-to-peer file sharing programs for downloading content from the Internet hijack hard drive space unbeknownst to the consumer. This capability needs to be brought back into the mainstream. Service provider owned local space simplifies digital rights management (DRM). Rights (such as temporary viewing rights) can be revoked after the rental time because the content never really leaves the control of the content owner.
http://www.e-insite.net/electronicne...305849&stt=000
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Kill Criminal Computers
A key senator suggests destroying pirate computers ... hmmm, is he onto something?
Allen Wastler
"We have detected illegal music on your hard drive. Your computer will self-destruct in five seconds. Good-bye, pirate ..."(kick in old "Mission Impossible" theme music).
Hey, that may be the brave new world if Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah known for hanging on the way right side of the political aisle, gets his way.
Well, we take away cars used in drug trafficking and the like. Why not blow up computers used for pirating too? If it's against the law, it's against the law, right?
In case you didn't catch it, during a Senate Judiciary committee hearing this week on copyright abuse, the chairman -- that'd be Sen. Hatch -- endorsed technology that would twice warn a computer user about illegal online behavior, "then destroy their computer."
Nobody seemed to like his stance, which is a shame. Simple problem ... people steal songs using their computers ... simple answer ... destroy their computers.
Of course, there may be some unintended consequences. To download songs efficiently, you really need broadband connections. Sure, lots of people are getting that in their homes. But most folks ... well ... the office computer has a big honkin' Internet connection, right?
Of course, it's hard to tell how many are doing that. What do you do? Ask "everybody doing illegal music downloads at work, raise your hand."
But take this confidential memo recently circulated around Warner Music Group:
"If you have peer-to-peer software on your company computer, you must remove it immediately," General Counsel Dave Johnson wrote June 3. He even underlined the important part. "Failure to do so, and the failure to respect music copyrights may lead to disciplinary action, including termination. Beginning shortly, we will scan our computer network to detect the presence of file sharing software on company computers."
Now if a record company -- one of the companies at the forefront of the anti-Napster, anti-KaZaA, anti-you-name-it movement -- has to tell its employees to lay off the music downloads, well, what do you think the rest of the drones in Corporate America are doing? (The company, which is a corporate cousin of CNN/Money, declined to comment.)
Okay, so while we burn through the computers of long-haired grunge geeks staying up late in some dirty little garret downloading the latest from Disturbed, we also take out the corporate workstations of some button-down yes-man types listening to the Grateful Dead while they happily crunch numbers for their corporate masters.
Actually, there's probably just as many of the latter as the former. But hey, you get what you deserve. And if corporations need to replace a lot of computers it will up business spending and aid the economy, right?
Hey, I'm liking this solution. And it can take care of other cyber problems as well. Porn? Spam? Kill the offending computer. Even more opportunity to increase business and consumer spending.
Yeah, yeah. Some civil libertarians may object to the porn and spam thing. Freedom of speech and all that.
And some people (Steve Jobs at Apple, for instance) seem to think it may be easier just to offer people easy and cheap music downloads.
But c'mon ... destroying computers ... isn't that more fun?
http://money.cnn.com/2003/06/19/comm...tler/wastler/#
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Music-Sharing Program Wants To Set Standards
Jon Healey
The music industry has sputtered its way into the Internet Age, with technological innovation sidetracked by the battle between major labels and youthful geeks over free music.
Now, two music-loving programmers — alumni of the company that created the groundbreaking Gnutella file-sharing network — are trying to chart a path to peace between the labels and the geeks.
Their company, Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Mediacode, envisions a world of online services that work together to make music more valuable to consumers and more profitable for distributors.
By adopting the standards-based approach to the Internet, they argue, the music industry could create online opportunities that encourage programmers to promote the music business, rather than developing ways to steal from it.
"The goal here is to get the Linux hacker community to support the music community," Chief Executive Robert Lord said, referring to the zealous group of programmers working on an alternative to Microsoft's Windows software.
Mediacode has developed an online service to start the ball rolling. Dubbed Muse.Net, it lets people with high-speed Internet connections listen to the music on their computers from any other computer online.
The point of the service is to transform a consumer's music collection from something physical — a bunch of songs stored on a machine — into something virtual — a set of titles that can be played wherever their owner wants to play them.
That transformation would set the stage for more services that can plug into consumers' virtual collections, Mediacode Chief Technical Officer Ian Rogers said. For example, services could pump songs securely into a collection or help users pick what to play.
One key to Lord and Rogers' vision is the emergence of standard technologies that enable services to work with each other automatically. That is happening, largely because Microsoft is promoting a set of building blocks for Web services.
Another key is persuading copyright holders to embrace this approach and plug their products into the mix.
So far, the labels and Hollywood studios have followed a different muse, distributing music and movies online with electronic locks that don't work with virtual collections.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...ebmusic23.html
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Napster Case Pits Label vs. Label
Bertelsmann, sued for allegedly aiding music piracy, says its accusers are partly to blame
Joseph Menn and Jon Healey
Two years after music industry lawyers pounded Napster Inc. into submission, the major record companies are pointing fingers at each other over the flourishing of online music piracy.
AOL Time Warner Inc.'s Universal Music Group, EMI Music and a cadre of publishers blame Bertelsmann, claiming the German media giant abetted copyright infringement by supporting Napster financially in 2000 and 2001. Bertelsmann says its accusers are at least partly responsible because they missed the chance to turn Napster's song-stealing users into paying customers.
The companies are battling in federal court in New York, where record labels and publishers sued Bertelsmann this year, demanding compensation for the alleged assist the German company gave to copyright infringement. The case provides a rare look at the infighting spawned by the industry's failure to find an effective response to the Internet song sharing that the labels hold responsible for declining CD sales.
Recent interviews with Bertelsmann lawyers reveal an aggressive twofold defense: First, Bertelsmann can't be found liable because it didn't control Napster, let alone its users. Second, Bertelsmann had the right idea strategically, while others' refusal to license their music and otherwise support a legitimate version of Napster only drove the masses into the arms of ungovernable successors such as Kazaa.
Bertelsmann's ultimate goal in loaning money to Napster "was to create a licensed service that would provide users with the functionality they enjoyed in the old Napster service," said Bertelsmann attorney R. Bruce Rich. The company feared that consumers would flock to other free-music services if Napster didn't lead them away from piracy, Rich said, and "history has proved this to be absolutely correct."
Napster's estimated 40 million users scattered quickly to a new generation of file-sharing networks after federal judges forced the company to start cracking down on copyright infringement in March 2001. Those networks now attract an estimated 80 million users, according to anti-piracy firm MediaDefender Inc.
The relentless increase in piracy has infuriated record executives, whose courtroom victories have returned a fraction of the billions of dollars they claim to have lost to song sharing.
Bertelsmann will file a formal response to the suits within the next few weeks. But it already seems clear that both prongs of its defense will face difficulties.
For one thing, court documents show Bertelsmann executives planned to keep the original version of Napster running in order to convert the maximum potential audience to a copyright-friendly version the Germans and Napster planned to launch. And U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Griesa, who is presiding over the lawsuits in New York, may be unwilling to hear as much of the blame-shifting argument as Bertelsmann would like. The failure by the other labels to license music is hard to construe, at least in legal terms, as contributing to piracy.
Rich said his side will seek documents to show that at a minimum, Bertelsmann's rivals had contemplated striking deals with Napster before Bertelsmann beat them to the punch. The power of the Napster brand was evident last month when Universal and Sony acquired minority stakes in it. The companies sold their Pressplay music service to Roxio Inc. for Roxio stock. Roxio had bought Napster's name and technology at a bankruptcy auction and is expected to revise Pressplay by next year — and rename it Napster.
The original Napster, which launched in mid-1999, enabled users to copy songs for free from one another's computers. The major record labels and music publishers sued the company for copyright infringement late that year, and U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel issued a preliminary injunction against the service the following July.
Patel's order came as top Universal executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. was trying to negotiate a settlement with Napster that he said would have involved all the record companies taking an ownership percentage in the firm. Bertelsmann officials say Bronfman wanted Universal to have the biggest stake.
http://www.sunspot.net/technology/ba...logy-headlines
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Preserving That `Just-Released' Freshness
Corey Goldman
It is what every record label producer fears most: a hot new release showing up on a file-sharing service like Kazaa long before its official release date.
The radio stations get angry, the artists go into a tizzy, and the long, expensive process of marketing and releasing a song or album is derailed.
In the past year alone, songs from artists ranging from pop tart Britney Spears to rockers Lenny Kravitz and Radiohead have made their way on to the Internet — to the delight of millions of music junkies — long before making it on to the airwaves.
But if Musicrypt Inc. has its way, that will be a thing of the past. The Markham-based company is rolling out a new kind of desktop software application that allows record labels to securely ship their prized possessions — new releases — to radio stations, with a few simple clicks of the mouse.
"Leaks can be very, very damaging to the record industry," said Musicrypt president John Heaven. "There is a tremendous amount of money behind releasing singles for popular artists. When they get leaked and become available to a huge number of people, it destroys it for everybody — the labels, the radio stations and the artists."
Before MP3s, Napster and the Internet, record labels would produce single tracks, package them with promotional materials and courier them out to radio stations.
Nowadays, before being released, new recordings are burned to a master disc, then mass produced, labelled and couriered to thousands of radio stations, industry insiders and music critics around the world. En route, many different people end up handling the CDs. Some get "lost," only to mysteriously resurface on a file-swapping service.
Take the launch of Robbie Williams' album, Escapology, late last year. EMI Music London had sent out the usual advance copies of the album to journalists and other industry officials — copies that were specially marked with a digital code to make them traceable should one of the songs appear on a file-swapping service.
Sure enough, the album was leaked. And even though EMI London eventually traced the leak back to the source, the damage was already done.
Musicrypt says it has figured out a simple and inexpensive way to help record labels stop downloaders from getting newly released music before they're supposed to.
At the heart of its digital music distribution system, or DMDS, is a 1-million-bit encryption system; by contrast, most secure Web sites use 128-bit encryption to protect people's personal information.
"The same technology is used to log on to the NORAD defence system or to open missile silos," Heaven said. "It is a very secure technology that really hasn't had much use in the real world until now."
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=969048863851
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Reforming Copyright Is A Concern For Everyone
Michael Geist
Supporters and opponents of copyright reform paint very different pictures of the impact of the Internet and new technologies on copyright. Advocates, typically categorized as creators, seek new rules to stop both unauthorized copying and attempts to break encryption technologies that protect copyrighted works. They point to the seemingly unstoppable growth of peer-to-peer file sharing services such as Kazaa as evidence that the Internet currently represents the single greatest threat to copyright owners.
Opponents of this type of copyright reform, often characterized as users, argue that the Internet is actually the most promising opportunity for copyright owners as it creates new distribution channels and exposes a far broader audience to under-appreciated music and other work. In fact, opponents fear that the combined effect of new encryption technologies supported by additional legal protections will result in users enjoying fewer rights to use and access work to which they are entitled in the offline world.
While there are elements of truth in both of these positions, the emerging reality is that neither view reflects the Internet's most significant impact — the blurring of the distinction between creators and users such that soon everyone will be both creators and users. The days of content creation resting solely with a select few movie studios, music promoters, and book publishers is long gone.
In today's Internet, we all access traditional content on mainstream media sites, but alongside those activities we increasingly craft emails, maintain blogs or other Websites dedicated to a dizzying array of topics, publish our digital photos, contribute to community chat rooms, opinion sites, or open source software initiatives, and share our attempts at music creation with the world. In short, we both consume content and create it.
This new reality is spearheading a profound change in the world of copyright as the widespread realization that copyright matters grows. No longer an issue best left to lawyers, individuals are taking an interest in copyright policy as never before. This leaves policy makers with the challenge of balancing competing stakeholder interests in an environment where everyone believes that they too are stakeholders.
Consider the recent controversy involving a small provision inserted into a bill dealing with the Library of Canada archives. The provision called for the extension of the term of copyright for unpublished works of deceased authors. Ten years ago, the topic would have generated scarcely an acknowledgement, much less a major policy debate. Today, hundreds of individuals caught wind of the proposal and quickly mobilized into action.
Dubbed the Lucy Maud Montgomery Copyright Term Extension Act — referring to a controversial copyright term extension bill in the United States that was passed with the active support of the Disney Corp., which sought to delay Mickey Mouse's entry into the public domain — the Canadian bill arose at the request of the heirs of author Lucy Maud Montgomery of "Anne Of Green Gables" fame, who wrote 10 volumes of diaries during her lifetime that were not published until after her death. When it became clear that those works would enter into the public domain in 2004, the heirs sought a copyright extension from the government to maintain exclusive control over her works until 2018.
Any hope that the bill would sail through under the public's radar screen quickly vanished. Historians, copyright fairness advocates, and individuals all spoke out against the extension, noting that it did little more than transfer the value of the work from the general public to Ms. Montgomery's heirs while failing to create any new work or providing society with any tangible benefit. In addition, opponents feared that this legislation was the start of something ominous, foreshadowing a U.S.-style copyright term extension.
Those concerns seemed to resonate with a parliamentary committee considering the bill since it agreed to effectively drop the provisions just before the House of Commons recessed for the summer. Celebrations by opponents of the bill proved premature, however, as last week, with opposition MPs now out of town, several Liberal MPs, who perhaps have yet to appreciate the changes afoot in copyright, decided to go ahead with the legislation leaving the extension provisions intact.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=969048863851
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Ipod Cuts A Wide Swath
Limited catalog of iTunes a shortfall for tiny unit that holds up to 7,500 songs
Stephen Williams
If Steve Jobs is indeed King Arthur come to remake the stuttering, slumping record business into a musical Camelot, the new iPod is his Excalibur.
Sharp? As a Gillette Mach 3 blade. Sexy, like Antonio Banderas in Broadway's "Nine." Snow white and silver, the colors of purity. Sufficiently hip to make the redesigned iPods -- despite their premium prices -- the No. 1 MP3 music player in the United States.
But Jobs, Apple's silky-smooth chief executive, thinks he's got the "complete solution" for the record industry's woes, even as he insists that Apple is neither a media company nor a music company. ("We're just Apple," he recently told an interviewer from Esquire, apparently with a straight face).
If Apple's new iTunes Music Store, combined with the appeal of the iPod, isn't the Great White-and-Chrome Hope of the labels, it's the closest, best thing they've got.
I've got my hands on one of the new iPod-with-docking-station players, but first an update on the Music Store (
www.apple.com/music/store), a cyber-shop fronted with slick Apple-esque graphics.
Since Apple is usually reluctant to release vital stats about any of its operations, it's difficult to quantify the project's success since it was introduced April 28.
According to a BBC report, based on info leaked from a June 5 closed-door meeting at Apple, more than 3.5 million songs had been sold since the service was launched, and the company is moving a half million tunes each week.
Of course, Jobs would like you to assume the best way to listen is via one of the redesigned iPods, which are priced from $299 to $499. He's got a point.
The new iPod is different from its predecessors. It maxes out (at $499) with a 30- gigabyte model, capable of storing 7,500 songs.
The light-touch backlit buttons are tres chic, the docking cradle (included with the two high-end models) downloads music and charges the internal battery, and includes a line-out jack for direct connection to a sound system.
With rounded edges and a slimmer profile, the "NewPod" boots up with smarter software as well. It now is able to compile and program playlists on the fly -- without connection to a computer -- and an alarm clock function can wake you up to Dylan (or any song), and there are even three games on board.
Sound quality is terrific, amplification robust (even through demanding headphones), and battery life is ample, more than five hours.
So is all this coming from a media company or a music company or a computer company? "We're just Apple," Steve Jobs says.
Whatever that means.
http://www.thehollandsentinel.net/st...62203075.shtml
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Excerpts
Techno Clouds Threaten “CONGLOMOSAURS”
James P. Pinkerton
The Federal Communications Commission has been criticized for allowing media companies to further conglomerate themselves. But eventually, the critics will notice that the real story isn’t the politics of media conglomeration, but rather the technological change that is eating the future of these “conglomosaurs.”
It’s no surprise that few companies want to expand their holdings in broadcast TV and newspapers, two of the media categories covered by the FCC’s June 2 decision. Why? Because both broadcasters and newspapers continue to lose market and mindshare. As the FCC notes, separate from broadcast TV are the 69 million households subscribing to cable, each with growing access to the 230 national cable networks and 50-odd regional networks.
Consider, for example, the fate of some acquisition-crazed combines. The stock price of Disney, owner of ABC, is down by a half in the past five years. Vivendi-Universal, purchaser of EMI music, is down by more than 70 percent in just three years. And perhaps the most spectacular conglom-catastrophe has been the merger of AOL and Time Warner, which has cost shareholders $200 billion.
What went wrong? Part of the answer is plain old competition, made all the fiercer by the proliferation of “new media.”
And, meanwhile, huge techno-clouds loom on these corporate horizons. One storm is TiVo, the system that lets consumers “zap” TV commercials. But an even bigger shadow-caster is file-sharing — or, if one prefers, piracy — over the Internet. Napster, the pioneering file-sharing system, was sued out of existence by the recording industry two years ago. But while Napster is gone, a slew of follow-up companies using even sneakier technology have moved in to fill the same file-sharing demand. These rascals are costing the corporate dinosaurs billions; compact disc sales are down some 20 percent in the last four years, with no uptick in sight. And now movies and videogames are the next target.
The basic business models of these conglomerates face extinction. It’s not necessary to pity these companies, although one might sympathize with their artists. But the point is that despite their partial success at the FCC, these conglomosaurs are seemingly helpless, watching Jurassic-ly as rodent-like geeks, hackers and neo-Napster-ers consume their copyrighted eggs via the Internet. And it’s only a matter of time before most reporters get wind of this story.
http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?C...&ID=105789&r=0
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Music Marketers Now Dependent On Internet
Online Exposure Crucial for Artist and Album Promotions
Tobi Elkin
On a chilly spring night, hundreds of 20-something fans of Staind packed a New York City concert hall to mark the band's return after a two-year hiatus and the impending release of its new album, 14 Shades of Grey. The concert bore all the typical trappings -- a mosh pit, sporadic bursts of body- slamming and bodies suspended over the crowd like petrified mummies. But this one was broadcast live, in real-time to broadband subscribers on America Online's AOL Music.
Record labels are now aggressively doing deals with online providers such as AOL Time Warner's America Online, Yahoo!'s Launch and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN in an effort to pump up sales for their artists. And the sites are anxious to showcase those artists as a way to keep people coming back and entice them to pay for premium services.
Avril Lavigne, a virtual unknown until early 2002, offers a testament to the power of online marketing. The rocker's single "Complicated" debuted on AOL Music's Artist Discovery Network, a showcase for emerging artists, on March 8, 2002, before the track had even hit radio. "Complicated" logged more than 350,000 digital streams in a month's time, helping to greatly boost demand for her first album Let Go, released on June 4 of that year.
"As a whole, these [online] services are tremendously helpful to us," said Adam Lowenberg, vice president of marketing for Arista, which also represents Pink, Dido and Sarah McLaughlin. "The fact that it's so difficult to break new artists especially, any leg up you can gain goes such a long way these days." The 350,000 streams even helped him persuade radio stations to put "Complicated" on their play lists.
Staind's label, Elektra Records, has done online promotion for the band before, but not to the extent of its current AOL program. "This was something different -- doing Artist of the Month and doing a live Webcast was a cool component," said Camille Hackney, vice president for strategic marketing and new media at Elektra. "It was a big, concerted effort that pushed the needle."
Indeed, between BroadBand Rocks! Special Edition concert, exclusive performances via Sessions@AOL, the First Listen and CD Listening Party franchises, Staind had more than 600,000 streams of its music on AOL in the five days leading up to the release of its new CD.
The push may have helped 14 Shades of Grey debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart for the period May 20-27, translating into sales of 221,000 CDs in a week. Staind also grabbed the No. 1 slot as the most-streamed artist on AOL properties during the week of May 16-22, beating out sexy songstress Beyonce, rapper 50 Cent and Pink.
Record labels are anxious to score all the online promotion they can for both emerging and well-established artists. With radio airplay harder than ever to secure and reality programming flooding the MTV schedule, labels are desperate for creative outlets to break new artists and music videos, as well as launch singles, albums and other content.
"It's vital when we book major TV shows. When you look at the audience reach that AOL has and Yahoo! Launch, it puts them up there in a competitive position with TV outlets and radio and all the rest of it," said Nikke Slight, senior vice president for new media at Atlantic Records. "[Online] is a critical part of our marketing plan. We have to be there."
J Records' Tom Corson, executive vice president of worldwide marketing and sales, agreed: "It's like radio play or press ... everything is an impression in a highly competitive environment. You want to get as many impressions for your artist in the right way as you can."
A division of BMG, J Records, like the other labels, is an equal opportunity promoter: It works with Lycos, Yahoo! Launch, MSN, Listen.com, AOL and others to push its stable of artists. "They all have different products and different approaches," Mr. Corson said.
For the online sites, especially subscription-based ones like America Online, offering exclusive access to artists is a way to entice users to spend more time online. In AOL's case, the race is on to convert the thousands of streams to MusicNet premium subscriptions and ultimately to broadband subscriptions. AOL needs to flog its music offerings in order to move millions of narrowband subscribers to broadband.
"Our mantra is 'discover, experience, own'," said Bill Wilson, senior vice president and general manager for AOL Entertainment. The biggest opportunity for labels is in CDs, DVDs and VHS sales. By the fourth quarter, Mr. Wilson said, AOL will offer digital singles for 99¢ apiece, much like Apple Computer's iTunes does, though providers like RealNetworks' Rhapsody have already undercut that with 79¢ singles. This summer, AOL will add a $13.95 price tier for unlimited music streams, downloads and five CD burns, as well as upgrading search, purchase and recommendation features. Since launching in late February, MusicNet on AOL has more than 70,000 subscribers, adding about 1,000 subscribers per day, according to people familiar with the situation.
Most analysts maintain that the music labels will probably never completely kill free music download and file-sharing services. Kazaa averages about 14 million visitors a month while the music channel on AOL logged 10 million unique visitors in April, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=38007
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Truth is a powerful solvent.
Stone walls melt before its relentless might.
The Internet is one of the most powerful agents of freedom.
It exposes truth to those who wish to see and hear it.
It is no wonder that some governments and organizations fear the Internet and its ability to make the truth known. The phrase "freedom of speech" is often used to characterize a key element of democratic societies : open communication and especially open government. But freedom of speech is less than half of the equation.
It is also vital that citizens have the freedom to hear and see.
It is the latter area in which many governments have intervened in an attempt to prevent citizens from gaining access to information that their governments wish to withhold from them. Vinton G. Cerf
http://www.rsf.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=378
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Internet Sparks a Copyright Fire
Robert MacMillan
Buying an album or watching a film used to mean going to the music store or the movies, renting a video, maybe checking out the Columbia House catalog.
Those were the '90s, the good old days, before the Internet's takeoff.
Now, millions of people worldwide purchase and download the goods from Web sites. But big business didn't rush to embrace the Internet as a medium for selling music and software. Rather, that spark was lit by the oddly named, yet irresistible Napster.
Napster, created in 1999 by the 20-year-old Shawn Fanning, was startling in its simplicity -- users could download the software, make songs saved on their computers available to other Napster users for downloading and vice-versa. It brought the digerati and the technophobes online in record numbers to "share" their music collections.
Based on popular response (at its peak, 60 million songs were being swapped per day on the service), Napster was a brilliant idea. The availability of millions of free songs via a simple software program and a few mouseclicks and keystrokes seemed too cool to be legal.
And it was.
Napster users were violating copyright law, which says artists -- or the companies that own artistic work and other intellectual property -- are entitled to compensation for their work, and that they have a say in how it's distributed.
Musical Shares
Until the Internet became the icon of a putative economic revolution, "copyright" was a term most people encountered while typing footnotes for their term papers. But to book publishers, song writers and scores of other creators of intellectual property, knowing a lot about copyright can be the difference between making money and standing in the bread line.
The clash between ordinary consumers and the music and movie industries heated up in the 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of cheap audio cassette and VCR players -- prompting perhaps its most visible icon, the FBI warning included at the beginning of rented videos. Industry ultimately learned to live with issuing a few stern warnings while average consumers taped albums or movies for friends. It was still relatively difficult for average consumers to engage in piracy on a huge scale.
The Internet and the availability of cheap, powerful computers changed all that. Technology now allows unlimited, near-perfect copying of digital files. On the Internet, Picasso's "Guernica," Microsoft's Windows XP operating system and the White Album are nothing more than easily copied bytes.
There were more than 5 billion music files downloaded from peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks in 2002, and there are 57 million users of file- sharing technology in the United States, according to the Boston-based Yankee Group research firm. The same research firm said 8 percent of U.S. Internet users downloaded at least one movie during a three-month period in 2002. San Diego-based Websense, a developer of employee Internet management software, said in January that P2P use had increased more than 300 percent in the preceding year.
The entertainment and software industries have assembled a formidable arsenal to fight the problem, from tough laws to Internet posses who trace the origins of piracy, and a phalanx of lawyers going after the pirates and the businesses that run file-sharing networks like Napster. Its leaders are the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major labels, and the Motion Picture Association of America.
Music was the first commodity that Internet users could easily share, elevating the once little-known RIAA -- and its chief, Hilary Rosen -- to arch- villain status among many Web users, as the industry group aggressively campaigned to stamp out online piracy.
The scorn comes from consumer rights advocates, freewheeling programmers and other believers in the germinal spirit of sharing and openness that characterized the Internet in the pre-commerce era. The Internet, they say, was never intended to be a profit center. Corporate copyright owners want to halt the free flow of information in the name of profits, their argument goes, adding the charge that if the entertainment moguls can strengthen copyright law for themselves by perpetually extending the length of copyright terms, creativity will be stifled and the concept of a public domain for cultural progress destroyed. A chief gripe is that Corporate America is trying to get rid of "fair-use rights" -- a vague loophole in copyright law that gives consumers limited rights to copy or repurpose protected materials.
Among copyright holders themselves, opinions vary. Some music groups stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the recording labels in the war against online piracy. Some "indie" label and unaffiliated artists say unrestricted distribution of their work is good marketing. Even some big name acts are joining the line of thinking that the RIAA does not speak for them on the Internet and copyright. Rock group Pearl Jam left Sony's Epic label as soon as its contract was up, and now is a prominent member of the independent music scene with no other means of distribution right now than the Internet. The heavy metal band Metallica, whose members once were vocal opponents of online music piracy, have surprised many by recently releasing some songs for free online.
Some intellectual property attorneys, programmers and artists sick of the entire copyright system have started proposing alternative distribution and compensation methods to explore ways to work around it while allowing artists to continue making a living.
One of the most famous is Creative Commons, started by Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig, who also founded Stanford's Center for Internet and Society and stands at the forefront of the copyright debate. Creative Commons set up shop in 2001 with the aim of getting copyright owners to distribute their works for the public to use, more or less, as they see fit -- like sampling music or doctoring photographs in various ways.
Then there are the millions of children and adolescents who make up the first generation to grow up with file sharing and downloads as the norm, rather than a novelty. This means that the conglomerates must master the Internet and its challenges or else watch their profits vanish.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?nav=hptop_tb
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Down the Hatch
Douglas Wolk
When most people propose technology that can destroy other people's computers remotely, they're called cyberterrorists. When Orrin Hatch calls for that technology, as he did June 17, he's just doing his job as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a hearing on peer-to-peer systems, Hatch suggested that copyright owners should be freed from liability for damaging computers. If users exchange files online and ignore two warnings, "then I'm all for destroying their machines. . . . There's no excuse for anyone violating copyright laws," he said. By "copyright laws," he appears to mean exclusively the ones that cover music and film; the entertainment business has been the fourth largest industry among Hatch's campaign contributors over the past six years, and he has never proposed, say, destroying photocopy machines on which newspapers or books are copied. (The next day, Hatch offered a non-clarification clarification: "I do not favor extreme remedies—unless no moderate remedies can be found.")
But hardware isn't all the Recording Industry Association of America has been trying to destroy lately. On April 3, the RIAA filed high-profile, high-ticket lawsuits against four students who had built search engines that could be used for file-sharing at three universities; it subsequently settled the suits quickly and brutally. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Jesse Jordan agreed to pay the RIAA $12,000 —his entire savings—and Aaron Sherman got hit for $17,500. Daniel Peng at Princeton settled for $15,000, as did Joseph Nievelt of Michigan Tech.
The point of this exercise, of course, wasn't for the RIAA to sue people for their life savings ($12,000 is chump change to them), or even to collect $97.8 billion—the total of the initial suit against Nievelt alone (at $150,000 per song) and yes, that's a b. It was to pick on small fry, to make them fold quickly instead of taking it to the courts, regardless of the legal merit of the lawsuits. (Arguably, since at least a couple of the defendants' programs were search engines rather than Napster-like networks, they were protected under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act against claims for "contributory infringement.") Ultimately, it was to create a chilling effect for file traders —and for service providers and schools, and anybody who uses their networks for any reason. Eight days after the RIAA announced its lawsuits against the students, Columbia University sent out a message threatening to cut off network access for copyright violations and pointing users to instructions for disabling several peer-to-peer programs.
Technology remains three steps ahead of the recording industry anyway. Even as Apple's new iTunes Music Store was getting ecstatic press last month, savvy users discovered that iTunes 4.0, the program that makes it work, could be used to share music between users across the Internet. Apple promptly released an "upgraded" version, 4.0.1, which limited sharing capability to local networks; shortly thereafter, maverick programmer James Speth released iCommune 401(ok), which makes iTunes think the rest of the Internet is on its local network. But don't expect the RIAA to pick on Apple; expect them to pick on you.
On June 4, Verizon lost a legal appeal and was forced to give the RIAA the names of four subscribers who appear to have downloaded copyrighted music files. (Earthlink, which had agreed to abide by the Verizon decision for a similar case, turned over another name.) It was the first test of the DMCA provision that allows any copyright holder to subpoena Internet service providers for users' identities by filling out a one- page form, without bothering to get a judge's signature—or any other kind of due- process protection. At a hearing on April 1, RIAA lawyer Donald Verrilli said, "We have no choice but to go after the users. . . . We are going to issue very substantial numbers of subpoenas." According to Sarah Deutsch, VP and associate general counsel for Verizon, "Any website you surf, any private communication, is subject to an automated shortcut to obtain your identity. . . . The recording industry could potentially obtain access to every Internet service provider's customer database. In fact, when we met with them, they asked if they could hook their databases directly into Verizon's, so they could just push a button and extract their information instantly." Verizon's next appeal comes to trial in September.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0326/sotc.php
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How’s 10 Gigs per second grab you?
Sun, Network Appliance Boost File-Sharing Speed
Clint Boulton
With rising interest in ramping up the file transfer rates between computers, Network Appliance (NetApp) (Quote, Company Info) and Sun Microsystems (Quote, Company Info) have embarked on a technical collaboration to accelerate data exchange rates for file-sharing up to 10 gigabytes-per-second.
In their quest to update outdated standards in data exchange, Sun and NetApp will bring Network File System (NFS) , a distributed file system created by Sun that allows users to access files and directories located on remote computers and treat those files and directories as if they were local, up to 10Gb/s with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities.
One of the qualities that makes InfiniBand as fast as it is, RDMA is a network interface card (NIC) feature that lets one computer directly place information into the memory of another.
Computing companies such as Santa Clara, Calif.'s Sun and storage-centric outfits such as Sunnyvale, Calif.'s NetApp have been increasingly recognizing the need for faster interconnects, such as InfiniBand, and methods of transfer to meet increasing demands for faster computers in the future. With such technological advancements, Sun and NetApp hope to help customers protect their existing investment, while moving data center migration to a standards-based computing environment.
"NFS technology was developed and introduced by Sun almost two decades ago. It has since then become an industry standard for network file sharing. RDMA file access is fundamentally important for mission-critical data center environments," said Glenn Weinberg, Director of Software Engineering at Sun Microsystems. "RDMA technology will enable Sun to further accelerate NFS to achieve lightning fast data sharing. We are delighted to be working so closely with Network Appliance on a range of important initiatives."
Sun and NetApp are working with the Internet Engineering Task Force on speeding up NFS, but the collaboration has roots for both companies. Sun currently works with the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) on RDMA for NFSv3, while NetApp works within the DAFS Consortium on the Direct Access File System (DAFS) protocol.
Together, the companies also work within the DAT Collaborative and the Open Group Interconnect Software Consortium on platform-independent APIs for RDMA transports.
For Sun the move highlights its intense focus on high-speed interconnects. A staunch supporter of InfiniBand, which connects networks at 10Gb/s with the help of RDMA, members of the company were on hand at the InfiniBand Trade Association last week to discuss the status of that formative open standard.
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news...le.php/2226601
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Online Piracy Frightens Movie Moguls
David McGuire
Slasher flicks may be good for a thrill, but when movie studio chiefs really want to scare themselves, they ask to see the latest financial statements from their comrades in the recording industry. Music remains a very profitable industry, but illegal music file downloads are cutting away at recording firms' bottom lines, prompting them to wage an aggressive fight against a host of villains guilty of perpetuating music piracy.
Movie studios aren't in any danger of going bankrupt in the short term either, but their executives say if they don't learn from the record industry's experience, they'll also wind up as victims in the piracy horror film.
"In three to five years we could be in exactly the same place as the music industry," said MPAA Senior Vice President and Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy Ken Jacobsen.
To date, the size (huge) and quality (poor) of most of the pirated movies and television shows available online have dampened their popularity among casual "peer-to-peer" file swappers. The same high-speed Internet customer who downloads dozens of digital-quality songs every hour may have to wait several hours to get one grainy, cheaply recorded copy of the latest Hollywood release.
The MPAA conservatively estimates that there are 400,000 illegal movie downloads occurring every day, a relatively small number compared to the countless millions of music downloads. But that will change, movie industry officials contend. Computers are getting faster, hard drives larger and broadband Internet connections more ubiquitous. At the same time, television and movie creators are experimenting with digital filmmaking technologies that could generate a slew of clean, digital copies early on in production cycles.
To prevent that from happening, movie studios have gone on the offensive, developing their own online distribution services, researching technological anti-piracy measures, attacking file-sharing networks in court, and pushing an aggressive legislative agenda aimed at limiting the availability of technology that can be used to steal movies.
It's those efforts that have civil liberties advocates questioning the studios' motives in raising the specter of peer-to-peer piracy.
"In the video world, nothing worth anything can be downloaded in any reasonable length of time," said Public Knowledge Senior Technology Counsel Mike Godwin. "What they're using is the hysteria over Napster as a way of pushing legislators' buttons over video piracy."
Free speech proponents say the movie industry's anti-piracy efforts disguise the more sinister goal of controlling computers so that consumers must watch movies when and how the movie studios choose.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?nav=hptop_tb
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From The Bureau of National Affairs:
U.S. SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS CIPA The US Supreme Court has upheld Children's Internet Protection Act, which requires libraries to filter Web content or lose certain federal funds. Opponents said CIPA violated the free-speech rights of adults and could prevent minors from getting information about topics such as breast cancer or the Holocaust. In a 6-3 decision, the Court said that libraries could turn off the software upon request, so that people could have more access to Web material. Decision at
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/02pdf/02-361.pdf
Coverage at
http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-1019952.html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59359,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/politics/24INTE.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/24/politics/24LIBR.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Jun23.html
WATCHDOGS RELEASE STUDY ON NET BLOCKING IN SCHOOLS The EFF and the Online Policy Group have released a study documenting the effects of Internet filtering in US schools. The study found that blocking software over blocked state-mandated curriculum topics extensively. For every Web page correctly blocked as advertised, one or more was blocked incorrectly. Study at:
http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Censor..._block_report/
Coverage at:
http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Censor...623_eff_pr.php
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World's First WiFi Nation
Press Release
ALOFI, Niue, The South Pacific -- The Internet Users Society – Niue (IUS-N), today announced that it has launched the world’s first free nation-wide WiFi Internet access service on the Polynesian island-nation of Niue. This new free wireless service which can be accessed by all Niue residents, tourists, government offices and business travelers, is being provided at no cost to the public or local government.
"WiFi is the prefect fit for the Island of Niue, where harsh weather conditions of rain, lightning, salt water, and high humidity cause major problems with underground copper lines," said Richard St Clair, Co-Founder and Technical Manager at The Internet Users Society - Niue and Chairman, Pacific Island Chapter ISOC. "And since WiFi is a license free technology by International Agreement, no license is needed either by the provider or the user."
WiFi, 802.11 or IEEE 802.11 is a type of radio technology used for wireless local area networks, based on a standard developed by the IEEE for local and wire networks within the 802.11 section. WiFi 802.11 is composed of several standards operating in different frequencies.
A substantial portion of Niue’s tourism comes from visiting yacht traffic during the non-cyclone season. Yachts with onboard computer equipment with WiFi cards and external antennas will be able to park in the harbor and access full Internet services from their vessels as an open node, also free of charge. Other visitors, consultants and tourists to the island who carry laptops with either built in WiFi or as an add-on, will also have the ability to connect to the open node free of charge for the duration of their stay. Local Internet users with recent-vintage laptops will find the built in wireless features useful as more areas are covered with RF, and users who may be in the more congested telephone circuit locales such as Alofi central will also benefit from the new technology. One government office is already hooked up to the WiFi service and it is expected others will join in as soon as the appropriate hardware is installed.
IUS-N continues to be a leader in developing appropriate technologies to enable low-cost, dependable Internet services for all, for small nations like Niue. IUS-N technology is a model for other providers to use in developing nations that face the same hostile weather environments and where there are restrictions on the older technologies for wireless Internet services or where license costs are very high. Because these are low-power RF (Radio Frequency) transmitters, plus they consume small amounts of electricity, the technology is appropriate for smaller nations like Niue.
WiFi is the latest free service offer by the IUS-N to all the people in Niue. In 1997, the IUS-N first introduced free Email services to the nation and subsequently launched free full Internet access services in 1999. Earlier this spring free broadband Internet services were deployed at its Internet Café in Niue.
For more information and a topographical network map please see:
http://www.niue.nu/images/Nuiepaper38.pdf
http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=35876
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Quintuple Platinum
Apple Sells 5 Million MP3s
Agence France-Presse
APPLE Computer says it has sold five million songs from its online music store in the eight weeks since its launch.
Apple jumped into the controversial online music business on April 28 with the new venture called the iTunes Music Store that allows customers to download for US99c per song, without subscription fees.
Apple said in a statement that 46 per cent of the songs have been purchased as albums, and 80 per cent of the 200,000 songs available on the online store have been purchased at least once.
"The iTunes Music Store is changing the way people buy music," said Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive.
"Selling five million songs in the first eight weeks has far surpassed our expectations, and clearly illustrates that many customers are hungry for a legal way to acquire their music online."
The venture makes Apple an alternative to the free music-swapping services that the industry has been trying to shut down and those operated by the major labels, so far with little success.
Since the Apple launch, RealNetworks has launched a similar music venture and AOL Time Warner has indicating it is planning a new service.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html
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AU Democrats Blocking FOI Net Rules
Simon Hayes
THE Democrats are blocking controversial amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, declaring they will not support moves to tighten FOI rules to exempt information on internet censorship.
The Communications Legislation Amendment Bill is designed to stop FOI applications on internet content from the Australian Broadcasting Authority, the Office of Film and Literature Classification and the Classification Review Board.
The legislation aims to block applications from the likes of civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia, which has been using the Act to track the operation of the internet censorship regime.
Democrat communications spokesman John Cherry said the party would move to have the FOI provisions deleted from the Bill.
"We wouldn't support any diminution of Freedom of Information Act access," he said. "I can see the arguments for and against this, but our principle is you don't want to encourage any government authority to shield its activities from the public."
The FOI amendments would block applications for material, including documents, containing the names or URLs of banned websites or news groups.
EFA executive director Irene Graham said the group had no intention of publicising child pornography websites, but may publish URLs of content referred for classification but subsequently not banned.
"There's a fear if we get this stuff we'll publish it and kiddies will go and look at it," she said. "As if kiddies can't go to Google and get it. We have no intention of publishing bulk URLs."
The EFA has been using FOI applications with names of URLs blacked out to gather information on the workings of the government's internet censorship regime. It released a document showing some content referred by the ABA to the OFLC that was later classified G.
In 2002, the EFA lost an appeal before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal against a decision by the ABA to block out site names from documents it released. The Communications Legislation Amendment Bill passed the House of Representatives despite opposition from Labor.
The Government said it was disappointed by the Democrats' decision.
"This Bill is extremely important to us," a spokesman for Communications Minister Richard Alston said.
"We believe the restriction of the availability of highly offensive material, primarily child pornography, via the ABA's blacklist is extremely important.
"We think Australian families would be horrified to learn Labor and the Democrats support the availability of pornography by these means."
http://australianit.news.com.au/comm...=date&Intro=No
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Open Source Laws Likely For SA
Simon Hayes
LEGALLY-mandated open source software is a step closer in South Australia, with a private members Bill that requires government departments to use it "where practicable" likely to pass the upper house.
Backed by Democrats MLC Ian Gilfillan, The State Supply (Procurement of Software) Amendment Bill calls on public authorities to use open source in preference to proprietary software.
"Wherever practicable, a public authority should use open source software in preference to proprietary software," the Bill reads.
http://australianit.news.com.au/comm...nbv%5E,00.html
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The right to reproduction, which includes the right to copy books and CDs, is expected to remain.
Japanese Agency To Revise Copyright Rules
Yomiuri Shimbun
The Cultural Affairs Agency plans to rewrite the Copyright Law and simplify the language of its text with the aim of creating better public understanding of copyright protection rules, sources said Sunday.
The agency decided to amend the law as the spread of personal computers and the Internet has made it easier to duplicate and transmit copyrighted works, such as music compact discs and software, they said.
The agency plans to submit the amendment bill to the ordinary Diet session as early as next year, after the cultural affairs council, an advisory body to the education, science and technology minister, has studied pertinent issues.
The Copyright Law prohibits people other than copyright owners from exploiting such copyrighted materials as theater, film and television works, musical works and visual works without the copyright owners' permission. The current law distinguishes between rules governing copyrighted material based on the works' means and forms of communication.
Rules concerning theater, film, television and musical performances, for example, allow copyright owners to prohibit others from performing plays and musical pieces. Rules on showing visual works apply to films, while public transmission rules govern the Internet and broadcasting.
In an attempt to make these rules clearly understandable to the public, the agency will integrate the separate regulations into one public transmission right that prohibits nonowners from transmitting copyrighted works without owners' permission, they said.
The right to reproduction, which includes the right to copy books and CDs, is expected to remain the same as in existing provisions, the sources said.
The agency is to repeal the current regulation on the right to use secondary works, such as films based on novels. The law currently stipulates that such works' rights belong to authors even when copyrights are transferred to other persons.
In the revised bill, concerned parties such as authors and publishers are expected to negotiate contracts governing the use of secondary works.
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20030623wo32.htm
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Businesses Battle for Song Sharers
David McGuire
Antoine, a sound engineer and part-time musician in Chicago, stays tuned into underground electronic music by downloading the latest mixes from techno DJs.
Dan, a Web developer in Arlington, Va., downloads hard-to-find radio shows.
Jim, a public relations professional in Washington, D.C., prowls peer-to-peer networks for '80s pop songs and snippets of movie dialogue to play at his house parties.
Despite being well employed, with plenty of disposable cash, they feel little guilt or apprehension as they regularly use the Internet to violate copyright law. Millions of other Internet users worldwide have the same attitude, prompting a wave of music piracy that artists and recording companies say threatens their very existence.
But if the recording industry gets its wish, Antoine, Dan, Jim (each asked that his full name not be printed) and millions like them will form the core of a lucrative new market for legal, user-friendly music download services.
It's become an article of faith among many in the file-sharing debate that "peer-to-peer" services like KaZaa, Morpheus and the now-defunct Napster never would have attained stratospheric popularity had there been an array of cheap, legal alternatives for consumers who wanted to buy digital music, rather than steal it.
That theory has taken hold in Silicon Valley, where technology companies are pouring money and manpower into developing a new breed of music services that are slicker, cheaper and less restrictive than the pay-to-play services that emerged in the immediate wake of Napster's demise.
In his forays onto Napster about three years ago, Antoine mainly used the program to preview new songs. A musician and sound engineer, Antoine was always interested in the latest tracks from his favorite artists. If he liked what he heard, he'd go out and buy the CD.
But as he probed deeper into the enormous catalog of songs available from the computers of millions of Napster users, Antoine realized that there was music on Napster he wouldn't be able to find in any store. A fan of electronic music, Antoine found DJ sets, unreleased recordings and remixes from the techno and other genres that were thriving in Europe, but barely saw the light of day in music stores in the United States.
"The real appeal to me is that there's this wealth of music that you couldn't go to the store and buy," Antoine said. He hasn't experimented with iTunes, but he wonders whether it will be able provide the breadth of material available on the peer-to-peer systems he uses.
His skepticism may be well founded.
Rhapsody and iTunes offer more than 200,000 tracks (Rhapsody's catalog tops 300,000), including most of the songs on the Billboard Top 40. Their catalogs expand almost daily, but they have a long way to go before they can match the breadth of material available to file-sharers, said Grokster's Rosso. "We have 4.5 million people [online] at any given time, and even if they are sharing just 10 files each, I think that dwarfs any music service," he said.
RealNetworks Chief Strategy Officer Richard Wolpert questioned the need to have millions of available songs, saying "80 to 90 percent of the songs people download [on free services] are the same couple hundred songs."
If pay services can provide most of the songs people are looking for, and do it in a safe, user-friendly environment, typical consumers will use them, he added.
But for Dan, the Web developer from Arlington, that's a big reason not to bother with paid services. Dan was drawn into file sharing because he could find old-time radio shows, and said that even the best pay services lack the "flea-market" essence that made Napster, and later Kazaa, so appealing.
When Dan downloads music from Kazaa, it's usually something that's out of print and not likely to be on an industry-sanctioned site.
"I don't think the pay services would cater to what I'm looking for in the first place," he said. "If it became every single album [ever made] then -- oh yeah -- I'd go for that."
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