Sinead O'Connor To Retire From Music
Barry A. Jeckell
In a message posted in the forum on her official Web site, enigmatic Irish artist Sinead O'Connor has declared that this summer she will seek to discard her celebrity. "As of July 2003 I shall be retiring from the music business [in] order to pursue a different career," she writes. A spokesperson for Vanguard Records, O'Connor's U.S. label, confirmed to Billboard.com that the message is authentic.
The decision may be linked to a fatigue syndrome that recently caused the O'Connor to cancel a string of European performances with U.K. act Massive Attack. Afterward, her site's Webmaster reported that the artist was "advised to rest as much as possible over the next few months."
Before retiring completely, O'Connor has several projects to finish. "The last recordings I will make will be (believe it or not) a track for Dolly Parton's upcoming tribute album and a track for [Irish accordionist] Sharon Shannon's forthcoming album," she writes. The tracks will be recorded sometime next month.
The final release of O'Connor's career will be a concert and documentary DVD she says will be released in July. Titled "Goodnight, Thank You. You've Been a Lovely Audience," the artist says it will feature "tracks from way back," as well as songs from last year's Vanguard album "Sean Nos Nua."
"Thanks to all of ye for a great time and a great education," O'Connor glibly states in her farewell announcement.
O'Connor released a total of seven albums and one EP, beginning with 1987's "The Lion & the Cobra" (Chrysalis). Her second album, 1990's "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" (Ensign/Chrysalis), reached No. 1 on Billboard's album chart.
Just before the release of "Sean Nos Nua" -- which debuted at No. 6 on Billboard's Top Independent Albums chart and No. 139 on The Billboard 200 -- O'Connor told Billboard she wanted to make further recordings, including a country album, a religious/ spiritual album, a set of opera songs, and even a children's album. She also said she hoped to begin recording a new album in late 2003.
The balance of O'Connor's message is a plea to be left alone once she detaches herself from the music industry. "I would request that as of July, since I seek no longer to be a 'famous' person, and instead I wish to live a 'normal' life, could people please afford me my privacy," she says.
"I am a very shy person, believe it or not. So I ask with love, that I be left in peace and privacy by people who love my records too. And I hope it doesn't sound rude. It ain't meant rude. I am glad that ye are helped by my songs. So help me too, by giving me what is best for me, a private life.
"My advise [sic] to anyone who ever admires a so called 'celebrity' if u see them in the street, don't even look at them. If u love them, then the lovingest [sic] thing u can do to show them so is leave them alone and don't stare at them! Or bang on restaurant windows when they in there. Or make them get their picture taken, or write their names on bits of paper. That's pieces of them. And one day they wake up with nothing left of themselves to give."
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=1873145
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Inexpensive DVD players with DivX
Margaret Quan
Cirrus Logic Inc. has licensed the DivX video codec from DivX Networks (San Diego, California) for both its high end and single-board DVD processor families. The deal would usher in the first sub-$149 DVD players that support DivX-enabled content by late 2003.
DivX is an MPEG-4 compatible video compression technology with 75 million users worldwide that offers DVD-quality at 7 to 10 times greater compression than MPEG-2 files. MPEG-4 allows full-length films to easily fit on a CD or be delivered over broadband connections.
Terry Ritchie, Cirrus Logic's vice president of video marketing, said adding DivX technology to its DVD chips would allow Cirrus to "raise the bar of performance to provide more horsepower in DVD ICs and create a new class of DVD product." The first DivX-capable DVD players would allow users to transfer DivX-based content from PCs on CD media and play it on their DVD devices.
By early 2004 Cirrus Logic said its chips would allow users to play DivX content from the web in real-time as well as access the Internet and play streaming audio content. The devices would also enable service providers to offer direct video-on- demand services.
Cirrus hopes adding DivX capability to its DVD processors will give it a leg up in the DVD processor market where it controls only 5 to 6 percent of the DVD processor sales worldwide, compared to 50 percent controlled by market leader MediaTek Inc. of Taiwan.
Adding DivX to its chips won't be the only way that Cirrus will seek to gain ground. Ritchie said Cirrus plans to add Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media 9 on its DVD processors later this year.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030326S0049
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Peer-to-peer Outlook competitor released
Will Knight, Santa Clara
An email and instant messaging program that lets users share contact details, appointments and other information without the need for an expensive central server has been released.
Chandler 0.1 is designed to provide similar features as Microsoft's Outlook program. But instead of storing shared information on a central server, a more robust peer-to-peer network is used to distribute information between the computers of individual users.
For example, a user's copy of a company's contact list could be quickly updated from the nearest computer on the network. This type of network was popularised by Napster and is still used by numerous programs to share audio and video files across the internet.
The program is still in an early design stage, but creator Mitch Kapor says it demonstrates how the end product will work. "We are focusing first on architectural issues, not end-user features, and yet there are some interesting things," Kapor wrote in his online diary on Tuesday. "In particular, the outlines of the Chandler peer- to-peer sharing framework are visible."
In the finished program, expected before 2005, users should be able to share even more information,
including presentations, photos and even newsfeeds. And it should be possible for users searching for information on their own machines to simultaneously search the entire network.
The application has been eagerly anticipated by software developers because Kapor has strong track record in developing such applications.
In the 1980s he co-founded Lotus Development and helped produce the trailblazing applications office Lotus Notes and 1-2-3 spreadsheet. These changed the nature of personal computing at the time. Kapor left the company in 1987.
Kapor will discuss the project at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology software conference in Santa Clara, California on Wednesday.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/pri...?id=ns99993646
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Program put child porn pics on man’s PC
Karl Schofield walked free from court yesterday after prosecutors accepted an expert’s report that the “Trojan” program could have saved the 14 depraved images off the internet without his knowledge. His legal team believe it is the first time the reason has been used.
Yesterday’s acquittal ended almost two years of hell for Mr Schofield, a communications engineer who left Reading after he was attacked by vigilantes. He told the Evening Post: “I am relieved because it has been an awful two years. I knew I would be found not guilty. It was ridiculous because there was not one dirty mag or dirty video in the house I was living in with my dad, mum and wife.”
A Trojan, named after the mythical Trojan horse, is a remote program which can allow someone else to download information on to your computer without your knowledge. An expert found the Trojan on Mr Schofield’s computer alongside the child pornography images and prosecutors yesterday accepted his report.
Mr Schofield had denied making indecent images of children and prosecutor Nadia Chbat told Judge Stanley Spence: “The Crown would not be able to say he is the only person who knew of these images on his computer.”
http://www.getreading.co.uk/story.asp?intid=6541
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A moment of silence please … (it’s ok to tremble)
Cam Man Busted
Gary Gentile
Federal prosecutors have charged a man with using camcorders to tape prerelease screenings of major motion pictures.
Prosecutors say Johnny Ray Gasca, 33, used sophisticated equipment, including a camera attached to a belt, to tape movies ranging from ``The Core'' to ``8 Mile.'' Gasca sat in theater auditoriums, often gaining entry to test screenings and previews held for the media, prosecutors said Tuesday.
An affidavit filed with the charges claims Gasca even posed as an employee of the Motion Picture Association of America after being caught illegally taping a film.
FBI agents who searched Gasca's home in Hollywood last month found 11 VHS recorders, video editing equipment and other devices they believe he used to pirate films.
Prosecutors said in court Tuesday they also found a diary in which Gasca wrote about obtaining smaller, easier to hide cameras and detailed his efforts to be invited to media screenings. He also wrote that he was making between $1,000 and $4,500 per week from his activities, prosecutors said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Johnson said investigators were still trying to determine whether Gasca was selling copies on the street, posting them for download over the Internet or both.
Gasca is believed to be the first person to face federal charges for camcording movie screenings, according to prosecutors. He was charged with a misdemeanor count of reproducing and distributing copyright material, as well as felony counts of using a false name and witness intimidation.
http://www.ajc.com/business/content/...ie-Piracy.html
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The More You Watch, The Less You See
Netflix Punsihes Movie Buffs, Says Analyst
They’ve got a long way to go if they want to compete with P2P
Posted by
dvd_rent_test@hotmail.com
Netflix uses the number of movies you rented in your previous billing period to determine your priority in getting movies. The more movies you rented during your last billing cycle, the less chance you have of receiving a movie versus an individual who has rented fewer movies. This report describes how I came to this conclusion using automated data collection on netflix.com.
Over the last several months I started seeing "wait times" on numerous movies in my queue skyrocket. In particular some movies which were recent, mainstream, and well advertised releases were impossible to get. About a Boy was one such example. Thus I began a quest to determine what was going on. It just did not make sense that some of the popular movies in my queue were so hard to get. I searched USENET but came up empty.
The first thing I did was create a new trial account for my wife. I added three movies that I was having difficulty getting in my account. The following table shows the differences in availability between the two accounts:
My intention is not to create the perfect scientific study of this. My goal was simply to understand and document some very odd behavior in the Netflix system with as little effort as possible. It is very possible my conclusions are incorrect; however, I have spent significant effort to insure that, in the least, the data presented here is not flawed and is as accurate as possible.
So what is affecting the availability score? I believe it is simply the number of movies you rented during your last billing cycle.While the relatively small amount of data collected may not allow for a definitive conclusion, it appears that the number of movies you have in your rental plan does not influence the Netflix algorithm.
http://dvd-rent-test.dreamhost.com/
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EMI Unveils Major European Online Music Push
Reuters
EMI Group Plc said on Wednesday it had signed deals with 20 digital music distributors to sell its music on the Internet, in the most wide-ranging online push by a major music company in Europe.
Songs by Norah Jones, Pink Floyd and David Bowie will be among 140,000 tracks made available for downloading through 20 European Web sites including Wanadoo, Microsoft Corp's MSN, music channel MTV and retailer HMV.
EMI shares were 5.2 percent up at 116-1/2 pence at 5:15 a.m. EDT.
Illegal online services, kick-started by the original maverick Napster, have brought the music industry to its knees in the past few years, forcing global music sales sharply lower.
In a drive to combat such piracy, music companies have been backing legitimate subscription sites. But they have so far had little success in persuading users to abandon file-sharing sites such as Kazaa which carry a larger selection and are free.
Under the EMI deal, consumers will be able to make permanent copies of songs and transfer them to recordable CDs, portable music players and their computer hard drives. Consumers can also purchase singles online once they hit radio airwaves.
"We need to use all legitimate means possible to hamper piracy and make as much music available online as possible," said Tony Wadsworth, CEO of EMI Recorded Music UK and Ireland.
EMI, the world's third-largest music company, unveiled a similar deal last November to supply its music to U.S.-based online music distributors. The music company said it was also working on expanding the list of European Web sites.
"We are using new technology to benefit both artists and consumers by massively expanding the amount of music available securely online," said Emmanuel de Buretel, CEO of EMI Recorded Music Continental Europe.
Up to now, EMI placed stringent restrictions on European Internet firms regarding how consumers could store the music on their computers and portable devices, sparking criticism from consumers and frustrating online music officials.
Some top-selling bands such as the Beatles and Rolling Stones have not agreed to let fans download their songs, limiting the music supply.
"This is not something we can just wholesale make available online," said Wadsworth. "Some artists will want to wait and see how the market develops."
However, EMI said more than 90 percent of its live catalog, including Lenny Kravitz, Janet Jackson and Coldplay, had signed up to the European deals.
European consumers will now be able to listen to and download from the Internet more than 200,000 tracks from most of the major music companies, giving them access to most songs on today's top-selling charts.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=2610549
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Unspeakable acts performed on innocent Easter Peeps!
All to satisfy perverse “curiosity”.
JS.
Preparing to separate the quints.
After deliberately failing to detect a heartbeat these so called scientists were "forced" to perform manual CPR - with predictably horrific results. Bastards!
“Code Purple” my ass!
Famous protest group looks the other way!
Where was Peta when these poor creatures were being abused? They’re usually everywhere. They picket my patio if I’m even thinking about having a ham sandwich, but why were they were curiously absent when the squishy ones needed them most. Coincidence? I think not.
http://www.peepresearch.org/
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Studios face DVD-piracy screen test
Reuters
Hollywood's movie studios face a key test in their battle to defend copyright holders from digital pirates, when a federal court in California this Friday hears a case filed by a maker of software that allows people to copy DVDs.
At stake for the studios are potentially billions of dollars in revenue that would be lost if nearly perfect digital copies of movies on DVD were sold in large quantities on the black market or circulated on the Internet in digital files.
But the privately held software maker, St. Louis-based 321 Studios, argues that its software is designed to protect DVD owners by allowing them to make backup copies in case their DVDs, which can cost as much as $30, get damaged or are lost.
The case, which will be heard in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, tests the limits of 1998's controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, lawyers said.
The studios claim that 321's software violates a portion of the act that makes it illegal for anyone to sell software used to break or bypass digital encryption codes.
But 321 argues that the DMCA allows software owners to get around encryption when copies are made for an owner's sole use.
"This is a very interesting, cutting-edge case," said 321's San Francisco-based attorney, Daralyn Durie. "The first issue is what does the DMCA mean, and does it prohibit all circumvention of encryption, or does it only prohibit the circumvention when it's being done to engage in copyright infringement?"
Durie contends that copying DVDs, for example, to use excerpts in critical reviews or by a teacher in a presentation to students, falls under the legal concept of protected "fair use." 321's software, called DVD Copy Plus and DVD X Copy, aids in the "fair use" of copyrighted content, she said.
Not so, say the studios. "321 isn't making any fair use. They are stripping my copy protection," said Russell Frackman, the attorney for the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Hollywood's major film studios. "The law has never provided you have the right to get two for one" when you buy a DVD, Frackman said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026-997970.html
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New technologies face legal headaches
Lisa M. Bowman
Companies face a host of legal land mines that they need to consider when developing emerging technology, lawyers at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference told developers Tuesday.
The lawyers said companies are increasingly wielding patent and copyright laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to thwart competitors and maintain their market share. As a result, the lawyers said, we're heading toward a world where companies increasingly need to consider the legal ramifications of their products.
Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Fred von Lohmann said, for example, that companies in the entertainment industry are increasingly looking for nuances in copyright law that will allow them to shut down those they see as a threat, as they did with Napster and Scour.
He said companies that provide services, end-user licenses, and increasingly, automatic updates, could become targets of intellectual property holders who argue that such companies could do more to stop copyright infringement because they've established an ongoing relationship with their customers.
For instance, von Lohmann said, companies that provide automatic updates may come under fire because intellectual property owners could argue that such companies could send out a kill patch if they suspect or learn about a copyright infringement. He said companies such as Microsoft and other software makers that automatically update are starting to worry about such scenarios. "These issues come up in back rooms all the time," he said.
Von Lohmann also predicted that more and more companies will build authentication measures into their products so that they can wield the DMCA to quash competitors. The law makes the act of breaking authentication measures illegal. "They will invoke the DMCA to prevent anyone from interoperating with their systems," he said.
For example, he said, companies in the instant messaging market, long a battlefield in the interoperability wars, could build some authentication code into their products and then sue anyone who cracks the digital handshakes. The move would discourage competitors from developing products that interoperate because they would have to break the authentication code to do so, an act that could violate the DMCA.
Already, the DMCA has seeped into the market for printer cartridges and garage door openers. Printer maker Lexmark International and automatic garage door maker Skylink successfully have wielded the DMCA to ward off competitors who wanted to develop toners and garage door openers that would interoperate with their products. In both cases, the companies claimed that the competitors broke their protection measures.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-997871.html
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Motorola takes Wi-Fi to the living room
Richard Shim
Motorola has started connecting home-networking devices using its new combination cable modem and Wi-Fi access product, a move it hopes will spur demand for more connected gadgets.
The chipmaker's broadband services division, called the Broadband Communications Sector, on Monday began selling the $350 SBG1000, a combination cable modem, wireless networking access point, Ethernet router and switch, print server and advanced firewall. The device is meant to expand consumer access to information and entertainment while taking advantage of the growing popularity of wireless networking technology Wi-Fi.
Motorola says it's offering consumers an easy and complete product for sharing broadband access over a home network. In addition to a broadband connection, the device will allow other resources, such as a printer, fax machine and game console, to be shared over a network.
http://news.com.com/2100-1041-997731.html
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Traffic-sensitive transmission tool could speed science and entertainment
The new protocol sends data at 7 gigabytes a minute
John Whitfield
A new piece of software more than trebles the speed at which information can be sent over the Internet. It changes the way that computers monitor and respond to online traffic conditions.
Steven Low, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and his colleagues have sent data 3,500 times faster than a typical broadband connection - at about 7 gigabytes a minute. This is a new speed record for data transfer.
They designed the software with physicists in mind. But it could help biologists, engineers and medics swap information. And it might one day distribute online films to cinemas or homes. At top speed, the new technique could send a DVD movie in less than five seconds.
"We hope to have a version ready for public release by the summer," says Low. He plans to make the software freely available for all to use and adapt.
When they smash particles together, labs such as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California create vast amounts of data. "It is doubling each year," says Les Cottrell, assistant director of computer services at SLAC.
A single file can be 1,000 gigabytes in size, and can take a day to send to collaborators around the world. Scientists are disadvantaged if they have to wait, Cottrell explains: "They don't feel part of the experiment."
Physics labs have high-speed connections and immense computing power. But their networks operate at less than a third of their maximum efficiency.
The problem is the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which manages the data that flows between computers. The TCP chops information into little packages - the receiving and sending computers communicate to check that all the packages have arrived correctly, and the sender re-sends those that didn't.
If it detects many errors, the TCP deduces that the network is congested. It halves the sending rate, and begins edging back up towards the maximum.
This worked fine for the Internet of the late 1980s, when the TCP was invented. But it copes less well with powerful twenty-first-century networks. "The adaptation is too drastic," Low explains. "The speed jumps around from too high to too low."
It's like driving a car by flooring the accelerator for as long as you can, and then stamping on the brake when you hit traffic.
Caltech's alternative is called FAST, for Fast Active queue-management Scalable TCP. It detects congestion by measuring the delay between sending a packet of data and receiving an acknowledgement. As this delay increases, it eases off - just a little.
This deals with congestion before the error rate rises. "It allows you to adapt more smoothly," says Low. In tests using existing hardware and networks, FAST has run the international links between labs at more than 95% efficiency.
SLAC already uses tricks to increase its transmission rates, such as sending several data streams at once. But this is system is prone to breaking down. "FAST is a big simplification on how we do things now, and that's a major advance," says Cottrell.
Low's team is not yet ready to unleash its creation on the open Internet. Online traffic is a balance of many different information flows, and the team still needs to ensure that FAST will not hog the information superhighway at other users' expense.
http://www.nature.com/nsu/nsu_pf/030324/030324-7.html
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12356.html
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P2P Plagues Service Providers
Power Web Connect, a local ISP in Wisconsin, is one of many service providers across the U.S. getting slapped with legal notices by media giants like Warner Brothers to shut down customers that are swapping peer-to-peer (P2P) files protected by digital copyright (see Application Killers ).
This hot topic was the center of debate at the ISPCON conference yesterday, where it emerged that a recent Power Web Connect user was wrongly accused by Warner Brothers of illegally distributing its movies.
“Warner Brothers came after us… They gave us an IP address of a customer and told us to shut them down,” says a spokesman for Power Web. “We checked it out and the customer was a 72-year-old woman with no clue what was going on.”
The case is ongoing. Warner Brothers is apparently still hassling Power Web Connect with nasty letters citing the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as grounds to cancel the customer. Warner Brothers was not immediately available for comment.
Officials at Copper Valley Telephone Cooperative in Alaska say it has also run into P2P problems with content providers. “We get several letters a week about this,” says a spokesman for the company. He declined to provide more details. Other service providers at the session nodded their heads in solemn agreement.
Legal experts say the peer-to-peer file swapping issue facing service providers is about to get worse in light of the U.S. government’s decision earlier this month to side with the record industry in its dispute with Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ - message board).
New York-based Verizon -- the largest U.S. telephone company -- and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have been in court since September, arguing over whether Verizon should be forced to help crack down on the online song-swapping phenomenon that record labels blame for a decline in CD sales.
”If the Verizon case goes the wrong way, ISPs can expect to receive unlimited requests for data on their subscribers,” says Chris Hoofnagle, legal counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.
Verizon argues that the law only applies to Web pages stored on its computers, not the "peer to peer" networks like Kazaa that merely travel across its wires.
”You don’t shut down a highway because people are moving drugs down it… It just doesn’t make sense,” says Joseph Price, legal counsel with Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, a firm that specializes in telecom law.
http://www.lightreading.com/document...g&doc_id=31767
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Shock move: Blueyonder Suggest Radical Changes to their AUP
AntiCap can reveal today that Telewest/Blueyonder have proposed the following draconian alterations to their 'Acceptable Use Policy' that would quite simply outlaw peer to peer filesharing and the running of game servers as well as other internet activity:-
The proposed changes have been posted to the blueyonder newsgroup hierarchy. Here's an excerpt:-
Quote:
Section 5 Internet Protocol Services
You may provide Internet Protocol services from your computer for personal use. An example would be the running of an authenticated FTP service to enable you to access files on your home computer remotely. You must not use, nor allow anyone else to use the services to provide Internet Protocol services to the mass Internet populace, including other users. Internet Protocol services includes, but is not limited to, HTTP, games, telnet, FTP, and P2P services.
Uproar would perhaps be the best way to describe the reaction of customers to these proposed changes.
AntiCap can only wonder at the motives behind this 'sneak preview' of upcoming changes to blueyonders AUP.
Perhaps the indebted telco's thoughts are not a million miles away from capping at this stage. Following the shock proposals above, if Blueyonder were to 'back down' on the section in question, perhaps users would then take more kindly to some kind of bandwidth usage restriction? Who knows. In any case, AntiCap will be watching this one very closely.
http://www.anticap.co.uk/Frames/np02.php
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Verizon Loses Appeal, Must Reveal User's Name To RIAA
Judge upholds subpoena of user accused of piracy
David B. Wilkerson
A U.S. District Court judge on Thursday upheld his ruling that Verizon's online unit must hand over the name of a user accused of piracy by the Recording Industry Association of America.
Verizon said that it plans to appeal the ruling, for the second time, to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Hoping to set a precedent that can be used to put a halt to music piracy, the RIAA alleged last summer that a Verizon Online customer illegally copied files of copyrighted music onto a personal computer.
When Verizon refused to comply with the subpoena, the RIAA sued the company to have it enforced.
District Court Judge John Bates denied Verizon's request for a stay of the subpoena, which he had declared constitutional on Jan. 21.
Verizon's claim is that the subpoena violates the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The company maintains that the Act only applies to files hosted on an Internet company's network and not on the computer in a subscriber's home or office.
"Verizon feels very strongly that the privacy, safety and due process rights of hundreds of thousands -- or perhaps millions -- of Internet subscribers hang in the balance of the court's decision," said John Thorne, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for Verizon, in a statement.
"We look to the Court of Appeals to decide this case in a narrow manner that avoids a chilling effect on Internet users' private communications, such as e-mail, instant messages or surfing the Internet."
Amid declining CD sales, record companies are under increasing pressure to respond to the phenomenon of file sharing, which allows computer users to easily collect music they want for free.
Though they have tried to attract customers with pay sites -- such as Sony and Vivendi Universal's PressPlay, the price to download songs can be as high or higher than the cost of a CD. And one of the primary complaints about CDs is that there are often perceived to be overpriced.
http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/stor...le&dist=google
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Apple readies music service
Jefferson Graham
Are Americans finally ready to pay for online music?
The recording and technology worlds seem to think so, judging by recent developments:
On Monday, Apple is expected to unveil its long-rumored music download service, which will offer per-song downloads from all five major record companies at 99 cents a track, without requiring a monthly subscription fee as current services do.
This week, Real Networks paid $36 million for Listen.com, which has won raves for its Rhapsody subscription service in contrast to Real's much-maligned, co-owned MusicNet.
"It seems the market is turning," says Lee Black of market research firm Jupiter Media. "There's renewed energy."
Black says the existing pay-music services — Pressplay, MusicNet, Rhapsody, MusicMatchMX, eMusic and assorted others — have fewer than 300,000 subscribers total. Kazaa, the top pirate swap system, has 214 million registered users.
"It's hard to beat free," says Black, who predicts that the Kazaas of the world will continue to dominate in the short term. But Black predicts the pay services will reap $50 million this year and up to $100 million in 2004.
Though the record industry has found it next to impossible to wean people from unauthorized downloading, analysts say recent aggressive legal moves could grab attention and get users to start seriously considering switching.
"The record labels are getting increasingly personal," says analyst Phil Leigh of research firm Raymond James. Suits have been filed against four file traders at universities, and if the labels win, Leigh says, "these lawsuits will ruin the lives of four young men."
The labels also are locked in a court battle with Verizon over demands that the Internet provider turn over the name of a file trader. A district court sided with the labels in January, and Verizon has appealed. The Justice Department weighed in last week in support of the record labels.
"If a bunch of people uploading on Kazaa get indicted, people will start worrying that the labels are going to come after them, and it will have a major effect," says Richard Wolpert of Real Networks.
"What's happening right now is a confluence of events. The services are getting much better; the risks of pirate peer-to-peer programs are getting greater; and the labels have come a long way from wanting (distribution of music via the Net) to go away, to working to help it succeed."
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguid...le-music_x.htm
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Futurist Fears End of Innovation
Leander Kahney
Author Howard Rheingold believes the freedom of technologists to innovate is under attack as never before.
Delivering the keynote speech at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Rheingold warned that vested interests, flexing their political and economic muscle, are stifling technological innovation.
"Our freedom to innovate is not necessarily going to be as free as it was in the pre-Internet era," he cautioned. "We are at a pivotal point in the history of technology and a lot of assumptions should be questioned."
Rheingold said the explosive growth of Internet-connected PCs, handhelds and cell phones had dramatically altered the cultural landscape. Thanks to connected computers, passive consumers have been transformed into active users, who create as well as consume content.
But vested interests -- the music and movie industries, telecommunications companies and governments -- are starting to clamp down politically and economically to protect their interests.
"They would very much like to get us back to the days when there were three radio stations and one telephone company," he said. "We're going to have to fight to remain users and not be turned back into consumers."
Rheingold cited a range of political, legislative and technological barriers to innovation, including the broadcast flag, trustworthy computing ("don't trust the user," Rheingold dubbed it) and tight control of the radio spectrum by incumbent telcos.
If all the attempts to control people's use of technology are successful, "it really could make the Internet something we look back on with nostalgia," he said. Rheingold contrasted the current legislative and business climate with the early days of the Internet. The designers of the TCP/IP protocol made it an open protocol because they knew future generations would build on it, creating technologies that were impossible to imagine at the time, such as the Web.
Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs, had planned to talk about the social implications of millions of cell phones and peer-to-peer connected PCs, but switched topics at the last minute to deliver a more urgent message to the hundreds of technologists in the conference audience.
He told the assembled programmers and developers to lobby politically for their right to innovate, but also to figure out ways to move around political and legislative barriers.
"What you know that they don't is that you can build technologies that will be as astonishing in a few years as wireless and the Internet is now," he said. "Defend your freedom to innovate."
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,58601,00.html
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QnA:An Electronic Inventory of Precious Possessions
J.D. Biersdorfer
Q. I want to make an inventory of my clothing, compact discs, DVD movies, videotapes and books. What kind of software should I get? I have a Dell laptop with Windows 2000 and Office XP.
A. Your choice of software should hinge on how much detail you want to put into your inventory catalog. On the simple end, you can make a straightforward list with tabbed columns in a word-processing program. With a specialized database program, you can design customized forms to record information about your possessions like location in the house, purchase price, genre and details you might need to have for tax or insurance purposes.
A database program will also allow you to create customized fields that let you search for items that match very specific criteria, for example, all the CD's and movies you have that feature Frank Sinatra.
Office XP includes the Word and Excel programs. Word has evolved from a basic word-processing application into a program that can do all kinds of page layouts and can embed digital photographs. Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet program, can also be used to create tables and charts listing your inventory. Some versions of Office XP even include Access, which is Microsoft's database program. More information about the Office programs, and templates and clip art for downloading, are at
www.microsoft.com/office.
Other programs you might consider include FileMaker Pro, a versatile database program for Windows and Macintosh systems that costs $299. A free trial version is available at
www.filemaker.com.
In addition to software tailored to cataloging specific kinds of collections like wines, coins and stamps, PrimaSoft PC Software makes a general program called Inventory Organizer Deluxe ($65; free trial version available) for listing personal possessions or business inventories. All of the company's software titles can be found under the Product Group link at
www.primasoft.com.
MyStuff, a cataloging program by Collectify, is another good program for inventory beginners and offers plenty of templates and wizards for making entries and storing pictures, sounds and Web links in your records. MyStuff costs $100, and a free trial version is also available at
www.collectify.com.
Q. I am trying to figure out how to download the Flash and RealOne Player plug-ins (even though I am unsure about the difference between them and what they really do) onto my Macintosh so that I can view sites that require them. I tried downloading them and then found icons sitting on my desktop, but I have no idea what to do with them next.
A. Those new icons are probably the installer programs for Flash and RealOne Player software. Double-click on each icon to begin the installation process. The installer program will ask you where you want to store the new software and may ask you to register with the manufacturer, but the rest of the process is usually automated.
Flash is a browser plug-in that allows you to view animated presentations and pages created with the Macromedia Flash program. RealOne is a multimedia program that works with your browser to play audio and video files encoded with the format created by RealNetworks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/te...ts/24askk.html
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Blindsided by Bandwidth Fees, Giving it Away Makes People Think Twice
Glenn Fleishman
GIVING things away, even digitally, can cost a lot. I hadn't realized just how much until I turned on my computer one day last month and discovered that I might owe $15,000 to an Internet company.
Two days earlier, I had started giving away the electronic edition of Real World Adobe GoLive 6, a book I wrote in March 2002 with Jeff Carlson about a Web publishing tool.
Inspired by the declaration of a computer-book publisher, Tim O'Reilly, that "obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy," it seemed better to publish a free version than have the work perish from lagging sales and advanced age - a year for a computer application book can be an eternity. (Our contract with the book's publisher, Peachpit Press, gave us the right to publish the book electronically at any price, or none.)
I had anticipated a few hundred downloads of the book from my Web site over the first day, but a brief mention of the giveaway at the MacCentral news site prompted 10,000 downloads over 36 hours before I pulled the plug.
I halted the downloads because, like most Web site operators, I have a deal with my service provider, or host, limiting the traffic that I am allowed to generate without incurring further charges. Such rules are meant to keep one site's traffic from consuming so much bandwidth - the flow of bytes in the data pipeline as Web pages are called up or other files downloaded - that other customers' sites become hard to reach, or add to the hosting company's own bandwidth bill. The limits are also meant to put a damper on the distribution of pirated software, music and video, as well as pornography.
Some providers offer a cutoff that automatically blocks access to a Web site when a threshold has been reached. Others notify a user and continue feeding out traffic, or simply issue a bill at the end of the month. EarthLink, for example, allows its Web hosting customers 20 to 40 gigabytes a month at no charge, depending on the package, but they must pay $100 per gigabyte beyond that limit.
How much is a gigabyte? In my case, 10,000 downloads of my 922-page book represented about 200 gigabytes. With my account, I am charged additional fees based on the sustained traffic rate after excluding the busiest hours each month. The fees begin when I cross one megabit per second, or about half a gigabyte per hour; for 36 hours, I was well over that number, transferring more than 100 gigabytes during two of the busiest hours.
According to the records we had and discussions with the service provider, Level 3 Communications, I estimated that I could owe as much as $15,000. Level 3 couldn't give me an exact number until the end of the month, but the bandwidth graphs and reports boded ill.
My situation was not unique. The Internet is rife with Web pages that describe why a site offering game tools or information has shut down, started charging, moved to a subscription network or asked for donations to offset bandwidth costs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/te...ts/24band.html
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Burn, Mix, Copy, Back Up: A Suite That Does It All
J.D. Biersdorfer
The era of the shiny silver disc is flourishing now that compact discs and DVD's have become standard mediums for listening to music, watching movies and storing more data than that drawer of old diskettes. For those who have the power to burn but are not yet sure what they want to do with that CD or DVD recorder, a software suite from Pinnacle Systems can handle just about any audio, video or system backup project that might come to mind.
The suite of programs, Instant CD/DVD, includes InstantDisc, for burning data and music discs in all kinds of formats; InstantCopy, for making duplicates of CD's or nonencrypted DVD's; and InstantBackup, a program that can back up the computer's important files on a DVD or several CD's all at once or in increments as you add new files to the PC. Instant CD/DVD also wraps in four other programs for working with recordable discs, including Pinnacle Expression, which allows you to import digital video and images and create movies and slide shows.
Pinnacle Instant CD/DVD works on computers running Windows 98 SE and later that have a Pentium III or Athlon processor of 500 megahertz or greater. It sells for $99.99 and can be found in stores or purchased online at
www.pinnaclesys.com. One program in the suite, InstantMusic, enables budding Mobys to mix and record 16 stereo tracks of music, add special effects and sound samples, and create their own compact discs for fun and parties.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/te...ts/24burn.html
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Put Your Hand in Your Pocket, Pull Out Your Favorite Show
Ian Austen
As a video recorder, the Panasonic e-wear SV-AV30 has a limited number of features and less-than-award-winning image quality. But it has one feature that can't be matched by a TiVo: once it has finished capturing a television show, the entire device, including its liquid crystal display, can be slipped into a pocket.
The user makes some compromises when viewing, say, the previous evening's installment of "The West Wing" on a commuter train.
The gadget's swiveling two-inch display replays TV shows using the MPEG-4 video format, which has a slower frame rate and lower overall quality than broadcast TV signals. What's more, the SV-AV30's battery and the 64-megabyte Secure Digital memory card supplied with the unit limit users to watching for one hour.
Yet the SV-AV30, which has a suggested price of $400 and will soon be available at
www.panasonic.com, comes with a dock that can be used to link it to a full-size television or computer. And those who tire of watching TV shows on the palm-size gadget can also use it as a digital sound recorder, a relatively low-resolution digital still or video camera (with a 2x digital zoom) or an MP3 music player.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/24/te...ts/24ayve.html
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Sony Shares Plunge, Brokers Downgrade
Reuters
Shares in Sony Corp 6758.T plunged on Friday after the consumer electronics giant shocked investors with earnings that fell far short of targets and a warning of more weakness ahead.
Several brokers cut their ratings on the stock.
As of 8:45 p.m. EDT Thursday, shares in the world's largest electronics maker were ask-only at 3,270 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, down 12 percent from the previous day's close.
Before the start of trading, the stock was down by its daily limit of 600 yen at 3,120 yen on the Instinet electronic trading platform.
Sony reported on Thursday a consolidated net profit of 115.52 billion yen ($964 million) for the business year to March 31, more than seven times the prior year's result but far short of the company's forecast of 180 billion yen.
Performance was particularly dismal in the January-March fourth quarter, for which it reported a group net loss of 111 billion yen, its worst quarterly loss in more than eight years.
Neither its hit film "Spider-Man" nor its popular PlayStation 2 games, which powered the company to record profits in October- December, could save Sony from falling deep into the red in the latest quarter as its color TVs and Vaio PCs sat on store shelves while the world fixated on war in Iraq.
But much of the damage to Sony's bottom line came from job cuts and other restructuring. The company unveiled a three-year, $10 billion streamlining and investment scheme that it promised would boost profitability to world-class levels.
For the business year that started on April 1, Sony projected a net profit of 50 billion yen, less than half the previous year's 115.52 billion and well below analysts' consensus forecasts of 180 billion yen, according to estimates compiled by Reuters Research.
Even before the latest figures, Sony had shed more than 15 percent of its market value in the last quarter, more than double the 7.3 percent drop in the Tokyo exchange's electrical machinery index .IELEC.T .
Investors are worried not just about stalling consumer demand, but that Sony may not soon be able to fire up new profit generators as the PlayStation 2 nears its earnings peak.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2626849
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Hacker causes havoc for websites
BBC
Up to 1,500 websites could have been affected by a recent hack attack.
The hacker broke into the server of web hosting firm bargainhost.co.uk, stealing passwords and defacing websites. One of those affected, snowboarding site powderroom.net has lost 7 months of e-mails, contacts and forums since the site went down last week. Bargainhost, which looks after around 5,000 websites and has 1,500 sitting on the affected server, is struggling to cope with the problem.
"Our only advice to customers at the moment is to change their passwords," said Technology Manager James Innes. Backups of customers website have become heavily corrupted as well and the firm is currently manually recreating over 1,000 customer accounts. Owner of powderroom.net Lucie McLean is unimpressed with the level of service received since the incident.
"They didn't reply to any of my queries personally about what was happening and it wasn't until Wednesday that they even acknowledged there was a problem - even then they couldn't give any estimate of when it would be restored," she told BBC News Online. She has decided to move the site to a new host despite paying out for two years of hosting with bargainhost.co.uk.
Her advice for other websites is simple. "I know we always get warned to back up data at home but it never even occurred to me that I might have to back up what I had stored on their servers," she said.
"I thought they would have had really good security. I reckon people should be warned to back up everything - everywhere," she added.
This is the second time Bargainhost appears to have been the target of hackers.
The owner of a DVD news and review website told BBC News Online his site had been hacked more than a month ago. Andrew Phillips, who runs DVD24-7 said he has now moved his site to a different hosting company. "I won't be using them again even though I have 18 months left to run on my subscription," he said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2967749.stm
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Clean And Neat
Dr. Damn’s On The Case
This is the website of dr. damn. Who am I? That's up to you to decide. Browse around and figure it out for yourself.
Currently, this website is divided into two main sections. The Clean Clients section is for my hacked file swapping software. I've taken various P2P applications, removed the spyware, and built a new installer so that they're easy to setup, even for beginners. The Textfiles section is for texts I've written, some of which appear other places on the internet as well.
http://www.drdamn.com/
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Cable beats DSL in speed race
Jim Hu
Cable modems are outpacing digital subscriber lines in terms of connection speeds, as household broadband access continues to increase, according to a study released Tuesday.
The number of Internet users accessing the Web through home broadband connections rose 9 percent between October 2002 and March 2003, according to Net measurement firm ComScore Networks. That brought the total percentage of broadband-connected households to 28 percent of all homes with Internet access.
However, despite signs of consumers' appetite for broadband, connections speeds vary depending on whether they use DSL or cable modems, according to ComScore. Individual service providers also showed differences in access speed.
The study said cable modems were 50 percent faster on average than DSL connections. According to data tabulated during February, Cablevision reportedly had the fastest connections, averaging 800kbps, or 13kbps above the industry average. Comcast came in second at 794kbps, Cox in third with 688kbps and Adelphia in last with 575kbps. Time Warner Cable, the nation's second-largest cable television network, was not included in the study.
DSL providers showed huge swings in performance. AT&T WorldNet averaged 762kbps, 63 percent faster than the industry average of 467kbps. SBC came in second with 584kbps, EarthLink in third with 369kbps and Qwest in fourth with 240kbps. Notable omissions from the study included Verizon and BellSouth.
According to ComScore, competition for broadband services will continue to intensify, leading to pricing pressure and greater importance placed on performance.
http://news.com.com/2100-1034-997831.html
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Copper Black Magic
Column How fast twisted pairs?
Doug Mohney
ONCE UPON A TIME - actually, less than 10 years ago - the hottest speeds one could get across a pair of copper wireless leased from The Phone Company, i.e. the US Regional Bell Corporations, was around 1.5 Mbps, also known as a T1. Euro types had an E1, which was a bit faster, but still able to run over a stock pair of copper wires originally designed for telephone service. T1s were expensive to provision, setup, and operate, costing thousands of dollars per month. If you wanted higher speed, the phone company's answer was simple – Fiber. Need 10 Mbps? Fiber. T-3? Fiber.
Today, the many flavors of xDSL are astounding. If there is such a thing as "stock" DSL, it delivers speeds of anywhere from 1.5 to 8 Mbps to households and businesses at a cost of under a couple of hundred dollars per month, with the customer gear costing around $100-200 if it isn't thrown into the deal. The only problem with the current generation of DSL is due to distance. If you aren't within a couple of miles of a serving phone office, DSL can't get to you. If you are in an older neighborhood and there's a rat's nest of copper wiring, DSL is much harder to provision.
If the Centillium people can live up to their claims – and manage to get RBOCs to deploy their equipment – consumer copper is about to get a decent shot in the arm. Under optimum conditions, the eXtremeDSLmax gear will deliver up to 50 Mbps downstream with a 3 Mbps backstream channel. The propaganda, er sales literature gets fuzzy on the distances available for 50 Mbps service, along with downsteps to 24 and 12 Mbps service, but claims delivery of "reasonable" ADSL rates out to 22,000 feet from a service location; not bad considering "stock" xDSL peters out at 12,000 feet. All over a pair of copper wires.
And if that doesn't tickle your fancy, there's some more interesting black magic using sophisticated signal processing and multiple copper pairs that'll set your hair on fire. Actelis Networks (URL
www.actelis.com) has a line of boxes that enable RBOCs or anyone else that can purchase sets of simple copper wire pairs to run speeds of over 60 Mbps in a symmetrical fashion. DSL installations need near-pristine copper; Actelis gear can run on several dirty pairs that are barely qualified for service. During a trial with Cincinnati Bell, Actelis gear was used to deliver 10 Mbps Ethernet service over existing copper on telephone poles to a local school on wire engineers never expected or planned to carry high-speed services. The demonstration made believers out of the Cincinnati Bell when service was delivered at video-speed rates over copper pairs that had been rejected for normal usage.
Why "recycle" copper in this fashion, despite the initial up-front cost of Actelis boxes? As noted above, simple copper wire pairs are about the easiest thing any RBOC can deliver and all of them can deliver such pairs on short notice. Since the gear delivers symmetrical bandwidth across copper pairs, it's a better solution than DSL for business applications. Any customer that needs full-up T-3 speeds can get full-up T-3 speeds with the appropriate number of copper pairs. There's no expense of trenching and laying out fiber. Finally, if the customer moves on or gets fiber, the boxes can simply be taken out of the phone company office and the customer site and relocated to the next customer in line. Finally, the per-month cost of operating a high-speed link ends up cheaper to the operator.
Other companies are making noises about delivering so-called "fiber quality copper" but Actelis was the first company out of the gate with hardware that has been certified and tested by an RBOC. Future generations of Actelis boxes will likely be able to support speeds of up to 155 Mbps – a magic number in telco terms called OC-3. Competitive local phone companies large and small should be able to use the combination of Actelis gear and simple copper wire pairs to deliver high-speed services to customers without their RBOC competitors being the wiser
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=9120
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Blur Totally Ok With New Album Leak
"If it hadn't been leaked by someone we probably would've leaked it ourselves."
Blur say they are happy their new album was leaked on to the internet prior to its release, claiming they may have done it themselves had somebody else not beaten them to it.
Speaking recently to London radio station XFM, lead singer Damon Albarn said online piracy of 'Think Tank' had made the band's return to the live arena that little bit easier.
"The gigs are going down really well," he said, "helped by the fact that [the album has] been on the internet for two months and everybody knows all the words to every song, which is weird."
He continued: "The idea of playing a totally 'cold' gig doesn't really exist anymore as everyone has all the music they want to hand."
"I'm rabidly pro the internet and as many people hearing our albums as possible," added drummer Dave Rowntree. "If it hadn't been leaked by someone we probably would've leaked it ourselves."
However, Albarn revealed that the official version of the album - which is released in the UK on May 5 - will feature a hidden track not yet available online.
"We do have an extra track on the album that you can't get on the internet," he said. "Not to fool the leaks, that never crossed our minds, we just put it there 'cause we thought it was so 'out there' that it had to be hidden.
He explained: "It's not at the end of the album, you have to rewind from track one to track zero.
"It's a spoken word and features someone we were associated with a few years ago, which may give you a clue. But it's very, very different. Very much a three in the morning thing."
Blur's latest single, 'Out Of Time', debuted at No.5 in the UK singles chart last weekend. A second single, 'Crazy Beat', is due to be released next month.
Meanwhile, 'Think Tank' is now available to listen to in its entirety on the band's official website,
www.blur.co.uk.
http://www.dotmusic.com/news/April2003/news29137.asp
Top 10 D/Ls - Singles
BigChampagne
BBCi Chat Topic:
Is Downloading Music Wrong?
Record companies are worried about falling CD sales. They say it's because loads of people are illegally downloading music off the internet.
Some downloaders say they do it because CDs are too expensive.
Do you do it and do you think it's fair that record companies want to stop you?
Or are they right and is it hurting the bands to steal the music this way?
“We can make legal copies of CDs in Canada. This is because every blank CD, no matter what it is going to be used for, has to pay this Blank Tax. Guess we are the lucky ones! The record companies charge too much for a CD and then give only a pitance to the artists, so it's big business trying to rip-off the kids and the artists.”
Gail, 16, Toronto, Canada
“If we pay £15 for a CD, how much of that is because we bought a physical item from a shop with staff, rent transportation, etc? If CDs were on the internet for just the cost of the royalties, then I would pay for it.”
Victor, 14, Enfield, UK
“If CDs were a fair price then we wouldn't download. It's that simple. Record companies are ripping us off.”
Nick, 15, Basingstoke, UK
“The cost involved in making CDs and DVDs is much lower then that of cassette tapes. CDs have no moving parts. Yet, cassette tapes and VHS sell for considerably less then their, cheaper to make, counterparts. This is just another example of greed of big business. I have a hard time justifying the purchase of a CD for $17.00, that cost less then $0.10 to produce, possibly $1 to market.”
Matt, 16, Portland, USA
“If all the music were free there would only be good music because the only people making it would be people who want to make it because they love music, not because they want money.”
John, 13, New York, USA
“I download music for two reasons. Partly, it's because of the expense of music in stores. However, my main reason for downloading music is convienence. You just type in the song you want and in five minutes, it's right there on your hard drive. What music companies really need to do is to use the internet and distribute reasonably priced songs on it.”
Steve, 17, New York, USA
“I am not going to waste my money on the overpaid pop stars and the greedy record companies. And I don't see how I am a fairweather fan. I am a HUGE fan of many groups, but I am also a thrifty fan.”
Toby, 12, Norwich, UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/ch...00/2287200.stm
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Hard Time In Oz: Charges Laid in MP3 Case
Kate Mackenzie and Simon Hayes
THREE Sydney men could face up to five years' jail if found guilty of charges of breaching copyright, following a raid relating to alleged music piracy.
The men, who are understood to be students, were arrested yesterday when police executed warrants at four Sydney addresses in the city's west and south- west.
The AFP's general manager of its eastern operations, Tony Negus, acknowledged the co-operation of the Music Industry Piracy Investigators (MIPI).
"Copyright infringements cause considerable financial loss to the music industry and the AFP are pleased to cooperate with industry bodies to investigate cases such as this which can amount to a serious breach of the law," Mr Negus said.
Police said the alleged piracy concerned music, album covers and music videos from Universal Music, Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Festival Mushroom Records.
If found guilty of breaching copyright under the Copyright Act 1968, they would face up to five years in jail or a $60,000 fine.
Australian IT understands the arrests are part of an ongoing investigation into alleged piracy, co- ordinated by the Federal Police and the recording industry.
Last month Federal Police executed search warrants at Telstra and Perth-based ISP Eftel, along with several other ISPs which have not been identified. No wrongoing was attributed to the ISPs.
All three men were charged and released on bail to appear in Downing Centre Local Court next month.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...nbv%5E,00.html
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Online music boost for fans
Singles by acts such as Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue and Norah Jones could be available to buy online before they are released in shops under a new deal.
EMI is making 140,000 tracks from its huge catalogue of performers available to download - the biggest commitment yet by a European record label. And the company says its plans will allow fans to buy new tracks when singles are made available to radio stations. This is usually many weeks earlier than tracks are officially released to retailers.
Deals have been set up with companies such as HMV, Freeserve, Blueyonder and Dotmusic to buy EMI's music. Back catalogue items from artists such as Dean Martin, Sir Cliff Richard, Pink Floyd and Frank Sinatra will also be included under the initiative.It will allow consumers to turn the music they have bought onto recordable CDs or store it on portable players.
EMI chairman Tony Wadsworth said: "This is a significant initiative because it brings many new features to the online offering. "EMI has a vast digital catalogue and is now providing consumers with the music they want in a way that is faster, safer and more adaptable than is currently available on any of the current services - and it's legal."
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm...ews.technology
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RIAA piracy arguments, figures just don't add up
The Song Remains The Same (Led Zeppelin)
€uromole
ON APRIL 9TH the RIAA and its international counterpart, the IPFI released press statements with regard to music sales in 2002 and it almost goes without saying that the sales level had fallen from 2001. In this case the IPFI claims an 8% drop in units worldwide and 10% fall in US unit sales.
Not withstanding the fact that the RIAA itself says the drop in the USA was only 9% we still have the usual problem that, like an annoying tune that keeps running around in one's head, yet again the RIAA and IPFI have both blamed music piracy for all their ills – and yet again we question this assertion.
It is sometimes forgotten that these two bodies are "sales organisations" that act on behalf of their member companies. These two act to protect the interests of their members even if it means acting in opposition to consumers' desires, and like many sales organisations their comments are often a mixture of half-truths and distortions, sometimes even verging on outright lies.
In an earlier article here in The Inquirer we discussed previous statements of the RIAA with regard to lower sales and piracy. This article showed just what lengths they were going to in order to protect numerous external factors from impacting their business.
Their questionnaires showed deliberate bias in their target subjects and then applied bias to their responses. Their assertions of the impact of piracy were shown to be baseless as was their understanding of the impact of music downloading. They ignored alternative uses for recordable CDs and ignored the fact that concert sales were down, CD prices had risen, artists are deserting the onerous contracts with record companies and moving to independent labels, that other forms of entertainment were competing against them for the consumer dollar and that the slump in economy may have reduced the spending on CDs.
Some things don't change.
The latest IPFI press release (here) about the global market starts with the paragraph "World sales of recorded music fell by 7% in value and by 8% in units in 2002. Mass downloading from unauthorised file sharing on the internet and the massive proliferation of CD burning continues to be a major cause of the fall in CD sales globally, combined with competition from other entertainment sectors and economic uncertainty on consumer spending."
Three paragraphs later they again acknowledged that the music industry was also having to compete with increased sales of other entertainment formats such as DVD films and new video game consoles, but then ignored these other causes in the remaining eleven paragraphs of their statement.
Unfortunately for their hypothesis, the fall in music sales were not universal with unit sales increasing by 4% in France and being essentially unchanged in Norway, Italy, Portugal and the UK. Singapore also saw sales growth when, as a technologically advanced country, the IPFI probably expected piracy there to increase.
On the other hand they asserted – without substantiation - that an estimated 236 million CDs were burnt in Japan during 2002 against legitimate sales of 229 million CDs. Very noticeably they failed to explain why CD sales in that country fell by only 9% when their estimated level of piracy would suggest a much greater drop.
The RIAA might also like to explain why their sales are falling but the independent record companies are thriving, as reported here here, in an article from the Christian Science Monitor on April 11th, a mere two days after the IPFI made their sales statement.
They might also like to explain why sales of country music albums climbed by 12.2% in 2002 whereas total sales of music fell. Are they perhaps claiming that people who like country music don't burn CDs?
At first glance the sales figures from the RIAA and IPFI may appear to be reasonable but other figures from the USA tell a different story.
Nielsen-SoundScan is an organization that tracks music sales from barcodes at checkouts. Depending on your source of information (as shown here) they either said that in 2002 the sales of CDs fell 8.8% to 649.5 million (from 712 million in 2001) or they fell to 624.2 million in 2002 from 688.2 million in 2001.
By contrast the RIAA says that the number of CDs shipped in 2002 was 803.3 million, down 8.9% from 881.9 million.
Even taking the highest of Nielsen-SoundScan's figures, that is a discrepancy of 153.8 million or almost 20% of the figure given by the RIAA. The percentage difference for 2001 is almost the same and yet there is nothing in the "source of sale" figures shown in the RIAA's 2001 Consumer Profile (see this PDF) to explain this difference; there is no obvious method of sales that Nielsen-SoundScan might not monitor that accounts for almost 20% of units sold.
The RIAA is trying so hard to assign the blame to external forces that they have not published the number of new releases for each year since 1999 and in fact even that earlier information is no longer available on their website.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=9048
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Stanford wins first I-Challenge
Student makes P2P stronger
Ali Alemozafar
The “Big Game” of technology blasted off last Saturday at Arrillaga Alumni Center in what can be best characterized as an intellectual quest. The first-ever Innovators’ Challenge showcased engineering research at Stanford and UC-Berkeley, and this year Stanford won the competition.
The Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students, also known as Bases, and VERTEX, the engineering entrepreneurial club at UC-Berkeley, hosted the event. The competition attracted well over 100 individuals from Stanford and the surrounding community.
“It’s really a tech design contest,” said Nate Ota of VERTEX, a UC-Berkeley doctoral candidate. “The goal is to find the best and brightest that came out.”
Competing for a $25,000 prize pool, students at the doctoral, graduate and undergraduate levels presented their research to a group of 30 industry leaders consisting of venture capitalists and founders of leading engineering and technology companies. Student research and product design were assessed on the basis of innovation and product potential.
“I was very struck from the list of abstracts,” said Shankar Sastry, adviser to VERTEX and chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC-Berkeley. “We were blown away by how in the past couple of years the trends [in technology] have changed so dramatically.”
Presentations at I-Challenge were primarily focused on hardware and devices, manufacturing and processes, software and information technology and bioengineering fields.
Pedram Keyani, a graduate student in computer science at Stanford, showcased what can potentially make peer-to-peer file systems like Gnutella and iMesh more robust from attack by hackers.
“If a small percentage of highly connected nodes fail, the whole system fails,” Keyani said. He explained how his software, coupled with the appropriate hardware, detects attacks and recovers from a failure.
http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page...=0001_article#
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Judge: File-swapping tools are legal 
John Borland
A federal judge in Los Angeles has handed a stunning court victory to file-swapping services Streamcast Networks and Grokster, dismissing much of the record industry and movie studios' lawsuit against the two companies.
In an almost complete reversal of previous victories for the record labels and movie studios, federal court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled that Streamcast--parent of the Morpheus software--and Grokster were not liable for copyright infringements that took place using their software. The ruling does not directly affect Kazaa, software distributed by Sharman Networks, which has also been targeted by the entertainment industry.
"Defendants distribute and support software, the users of which can and do choose to employ it for both lawful and unlawful ends," Wilson wrote in his opinion, released Friday. "Grokster and Streamcast are not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can be and are used to infringe copyrights."
The court's ruling applies only to existing versions of the Morpheus and Grokster software. Earlier versions of the software, which functioned slightly differently, could potentially leave the companies open to liability.
However, the ruling appeared to state clearly that decentralized peer-to-peer software such as Gnutella is legal, in much the same way that the Sony videocasette recorder is protected by law.
Representatives of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America could not immediately be reached for comment. They are expected to appeal immediately, however.
"This is far from over," said Fred von Lohmann, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney who has represented Streamcast in the case. "This is not the end, but it sends a very strong message to the technology community that the court understands the risk to innovation."
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-998363.html
Until next week,
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js.
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Recent WIRs -
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