Hijacking Harry Potter, Quidditch Broom and All
Bill Werde
On Friday night "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" sold out theaters all over the globe. But in a makeshift screening room in a Brooklyn warehouse, more than 75 filmgoers paid $7 each to watch the first film in the series, "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." Sort of.
On the screen "The Sorcerer's Stone" played as it was released by Warner Brothers. But the original soundtrack, dialogue and all, was turned down and replaced by an alternate version created by a 27-year-old comic book artist from Austin, Tex., named Brad Neely. He calls his soundtrack "Wizard People, Dear Reader," and it is one more breach of the media industry's control of its products.
With Mr. Neely's gravelly narration, the movie's tone shifts into darkly comic, pop-culture-savvy territory. Hagrid, Harry Potter's giant, hairy friend, becomes Hagar, the Horrible, and Harry's fat cousin becomes Roast Beefy. As imagined by Mr. Neely, the three main characters are child alcoholics with a penchant for cognac, the magical ballgame Quidditch takes on homoerotic overtones, and Harry is prone to delivering hyper-dramatic monologues. "I am a destroyer of worlds," bellows Mr. Neely at one point, sending laughter reverberating through the warehouse Friday night. "I am Harry" expletive "Potter!"
Mr. Neely, a fan of the series, created his alternate soundtrack last summer after joking about the notion with friends in an Austin nightspot. "Usually those kinds of jokes just die in the bar," he said. This time Mr. Neely burned his creation to CD, sent copies to friends and gave some to local video rental stores; several bundled his soundtrack with rentals of "The Sorcerer's Stone."
The alternate soundtrack did not receive much attention until March, when it was shown at the New York Underground Film Festival. The festival's director, Kendra Gaeta, received a gift from her boyfriend weeks before the festival: a painting by Mr. Neely, who threw in a CD of his Potter narration. "It was just so funny," she said.
Among those attending that festival was Carrie McLaren, whose Web site, Illegal-art.org, functions as an online museum for copyright-infringing art.
Ms. McLaren has since offered the huge digital file of "Wizard People" for download and raved about the soundtrack on her site.
"We think Neely has crafted an as of yet unnamed new art form," she wrote, "one everyone should experience for themselves."
There is a brief history, at least, to alternative soundtracks. Woody Allen's 1966 movie "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" substituted Mr. Allen's comic dialogue and descriptions for the soundtrack of a bad Japanese spy movie. But while Mr. Allen bought the rights to the original film and distributed his new version in theaters, subsequent ventures in the digital era, like Mr. Neely's, have taken liberties without permission and let the Web take care of distribution.
In 2001, for example, an anonymous "Star Wars" fan was so displeased with the helium-voiced character Jar Jar Binks in "Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace" that he recut the film, removing the character, a stunt that became known as "the Phantom edit."
George Lucas, the creator of "Star Wars," initially was intrigued by the alternative version of the film. But when bootleg copies began selling at comic book conventions, and other edited versions began to trade online, his firm, Lucasfilm, sent letters to the news media indicating that it viewed such projects as copyright infringement.
A spokewoman at Warner Brothers said that the studio was unaware of "Wizard People, Dear Reader" and declined to comment further.
It is not clear that Mr. Neely's soundtrack violates the studio's copyright. Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said that while the copyright holder retains the rights to derivative works, it was possible "Wizard People" was protected under the rules that allow "fair use" of copyrighted works for purposes like criticism, comment and news reporting.
"The long-term strategic threat to the entertainment industry is that people will get in the habit of creating and making as much as watching and listening, and all of a sudden the label applied to people at leisure, 50 years in the making — consumer — could wither away," he said. "But it would be a shame if Hollywood just said no. It could very possibly be in the interest of publishers to see a market in providing raw material along with finished product."
Mr. Neely has not let the lack of legal clarity stop him from making plans to perform the "Wizard People" soundtrack live at an Austin theater July 23 through 25, as well as one night each in Seattle, Portland and Olympia, Wash., in August.
He is also working on his next project, a similar concept with a different style. The films need to have a lot of action, he said. "I'm thinking maybe `Jurassic Park.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/07/movies/07POTT.html
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Music Industry Readies Fresh Wave of Net Lawsuits
Bernhard Warner
A new wave of lawsuits is being prepared against the most prolific Internet song-swappers as part of an expanding global crackdown on Internet piracy, music industry officials said on Tuesday.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said it will sue 24 individuals in Denmark for trading music files online and it warned Britain, France and Sweden that they could be added to the list of target countries.
"It's inevitable," said Jay Berman, IFPI CEO, when asked of the likelihood those countries would be included. He added that Japan, the world's second largest music market, is also a strong candidate for lawsuits as recorded music sales there continue to slide.
The music industry has already sued 2,947 people in the United States and has announced more than 230 suits in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Canada.
"On the strength of the developments in Denmark, Germany and Italy, we can confirm there will be more legal actions in other countries in the near future," Berman said.
Carrot-And-Stick
The industry blames the extensive online trade of free music for contributing to a massive slide in recorded music sales.
A year ago it launched a multi-pronged effort to promote sanctioned online music stores such as Apple Computer Corp's iTunes while suing those who share their music collection with others on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as Kazaa and WinMX.
Berman said the carrot-and-stick strategy is showing signs of paying off with the number of infringed music files on P2P sites in decline, and awareness growing among consumers that file-sharing is a criminal activity.
The number of infringing music files available on file-sharing networks fell to 700 million this month, down 30 percent from the all-time peak of 1 billion in June, 2003, the trade group said.
And, according to an IFPI survey, 70 percent of those polled in France, Germany, Denmark and the UK were aware that the unauthorized trade of copyrighted music is illegal.
Despite the successes, the trade group intends to turn up the heat on lawsuits.
"You will continue to see that countries that were part of the first wave of announcements will continue to bring cases," Berman said.
The IFPI said it scored a recent victory in the German courts against a 23-year-old man caught with a collection of 6,000 pirated MP3 files on his computer hard drive and 70 CDs containing further files. The man had agreed to pay 8,000 euros ($9,855) in compensation.
In Italy, 30 individuals charged by a public prosecutor with copyright infringement are awaiting trial.
And 88 individuals in Denmark have either paid or agreed to pay compensation averaging 3,000 euros each for file-sharing. Another 23 Danes are negotiating levels of compensation, the IFPI said.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=5369388
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Song-Swappers Settle Out Of Court
BBC
Eighteen file-sharers in Europe have so far settled out of court as part of the music industry's legal action against 200 illegal song- swappers.
The International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI) began prosecuting in March.
Seventeen Danes and one German have settled at a cost of several thousand euros each.
In Italy 30 criminal cases are being brought against individuals by public prosecutors, the IFPI said.
An IFPI spokeswoman said that of the 88 Danish cases, another 23 were currently negotiating with authorities.
Cases are expected to start against the Italian defendants in the next couple of months, she said.
More litigation
Litigation had also been launched in Canada in March, but was currently on hold because of legal wrangles, she said.
More litigation against people who have downloaded or uploaded tracks were also announced on Tuesday, the first time since March.
"Individual countries have already said it is likely," she said. "France has already said it is more than likely, as had the UK."
The IFPI also said campaigns against illegal file-sharing had raised the awareness of people about the legality of sharing songs over the internet.
In a survey it said that 70% of people were now aware that it was illegal to download tracks unless it was from a legitimate music site such as iTunes or Napster.
It also cited the use of instant messaging software - which people use to chat in real time over the internet - as an important step in getting its message across.
More than 23 million messages have been sent out to instant messenger users in nine countries, with 175,000 sent out in the UK, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) said on Tuesday.
The number of legal music downloads recently passed the 500,000 mark for 2004.
At the same time, the IFPI has said the amount of illegal music files swapped over the internet has dropped to 700 million a month - a 30% drop compared to this time last year.
"Today's results show that litigation, combined with the rollout of new legal online music services, is having a real impact on people's attitudes to illegal file-sharing," IFPI chairman Jay Berman said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/3786547.stm
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Music Industry Launches Illegal Downloading Blitz
DPA
Germany's music industry has launched a blitz on illicit downloading with a German already fined and ordered to pay damages for illegal file sharing.
Police who raided his home found 6,000 MP3 files on his computer, which was connected to the KaZaa peer-to-peer network worldwide. The 23-year-old trainee was convicted in the eastern city of Cottbus early last month, but the case was not publicized till this week.
Analysts say peer-to-peer networks are characterized by many takers and few givers, and the recording industry hopes to destroy them by homing in on the givers in selected countries.
Officials in Cottbus confirmed the man had been slapped with a EUR 400 fine and had agreed in an out-of-court settlement to pay EUR 8,000 in damages plus court costs.
The German Phono Federation said police first picked up the accused's mother from work and made her open the apartment. He arrived home to find police searching his hard disk and checking his collection of 100 self- compiled CDs with 1,000 songs on them.
He was summarily convicted in the afternoon of the same day. Court officials said the modest nature of the fine was because he earned very little. He was identified after police approached his internet service provider to explain who was behind his IP address.
Every online device has an internet protocol address, but unlike domain names, IP addresses often shift within minutes or hours and can only be linked to users by using the log files on big servers.
Some US providers have refused to disclose customers' identities to Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) investigators, but in Germany, public prosecutors can require a provider to disclose such information.
The phono industry federation has filed official police complaints against 68 suspected copyright breachers in Germany.
It said Monday that two computers were seized last week from the home of a 57-year-old schoolteacher in the Stuttgart area of southern Germany.
On the drives were thousands of music files although the man only owned 25 shop-sold CDs which he could have legally copied for private purposes. He admitted downloading the other music illegally.
"We've set a precedent with the first case. There'll be more cases said Gerd Gebhardt, president of the federation.
He said surveys showed that most Germans knew that obtaining digital music from KaZaa and other peer-to-peer networks was mostly illegal. Surveys showed awareness of this at 79 percent, the highest in Europe.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the Germans, with their penchant for inventing and organising, are major contributors to the internet for better and for worse. Last month a German trade-school student was arrested for devising and releasing the Sasser virus on the Internet.
Web users who have signed up for high-speed DSL links by the hundreds of thousands routinely chat about how they have downloaded movies illegally and sales of blank CDs and DVDs to receive them have risen fast in Germany. The blanks are sold in most supermarkets.
The recording industry estimates 600 million songs were illegally downloaded in Germany in 2003 from the Internet.
While the industry maintains that downloaders are skinflints who refuse to spend money in music stores, many downloaders portray themselves as tasters who often listen to a song just once, find they do not like it but leave it on their computers for others to try.
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_...&story_id=8327
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Not all it seems
File Sharers Deserting Kazaa's FastTrack Protocol
John P. Mello Jr.
FastTrack, once the darling of online file-sharers, appears to be losing its popularity.
Reports in recent weeks -- as well as data gathered by Internet traffic tracker Alexa -- show a marked decline in files swapped on networks like Kazaa that use the FastTrack protocol.
According to information posted at the Web site of IT Innovations and Concepts (ITIC), a Canadian piracy-monitoring outfit, during the month of May the FastTrack platform was deserted by more than 16 percent of its active users.
Precipitous Drop
New favorites among online file-sharers are Overnet and eDonkey, ITIC said.
The ITIC findings are similar to those in a study released at the end of May by Canadian network-monitoring company Sandvine. That study showed Kazaa's share of traffic in the United States had dropped to 20 percent from 90 percent and in Europe had fallen to 20 percent from 70 percent.
In addition, Alexa shows Kazaa's traffic ranking dropping significantly in the last three months. The network's average ranking during that period was 2,835, while today it is 3,539.
P2P Pasha
Alexa also reports that Kazaa's reach -- the number of Internet users per million who use Kazaa -- has dropped 36 percent in the last three months.
Despite these apparent trends, FastTrack is still the pasha of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking , according to the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), an industry group located in Arlington, Virginia.
"Our data suggests that P2P usage is continuing to expand globally," DCIA CEO Martin C. Lafferty told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "While interim market-share adjustments clearly occur in response to specific promotions, new software releases, and other factors, there are no signs of seismic shifts in the overall industry structure."
Plagued with Problems
"FastTrack," Lafferty said, "continues to have the largest overall market share, and Gnutella and others comprise a strong and growing second entrant category."
According to industry insiders, though, Kazaa is plagued by several problems that are trashing its traffic numbers.
"I hear that the user experience has really degenerated," Wayne Rosso, former CEO of Optisoft, a P2P software maker located in Madrid, Spain, told TechNewsWorld via e-mail.
Too Greedy
"The network has been corrupted beyond belief," Rosso maintained. "It's become rife with garbage files and has slowed tremendously."
He noted that spyware packaged with Kazaa continues to be a sore point with users of the service.
"Kazaa has built a reputation for being full of bundled software," Greg Bildson, COO of LimeWire, a P2P software maker in New York City, told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "It seems like they became a little too greedy."
Technology Snags
Kazaa also has problems as a technology, Bildson asserted.
Its technology has been stagnating since its founders moved on to developing software for Internet phone calls, he contended.
"Kazaa has not done much in the way of innovation," he said. "At the same time, alternative file-sharing networks, such as Gnutella, have made major strides."
Closed System
According to Bildson, Kazaa, because it is a closed protocol, simply might be suffering an inevitable decline. "Open protocols are what tend to survive and thrive over the long term on the Internet," he argued.
"Open protocols benefit consumers by giving them more choice and not locking them in to one company that might insist that they install spyware," he explained.
Open protocols also entice developers from all over the world to participate in their evolution, which leads to greater innovation, he added.
Sue You Campaign
Of course, Kazaa also is afflicted with something else that competing networks have largely avoided. "FastTrack users have clearly been targeted by the RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] Sue You campaign," observed Rosso.
"We believe that our legal efforts have had a significant impact," RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told TechNewsWorld via e-mail. "Awareness that unauthorized downloading is against the law has doubled and the legal online music marketplace is beginning to take off.
"Additionally," he said, "according to many third-party analyses, traffic on pirate P2P networks has declined, at least in the U.S."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/34305.html
Ed: The very latest Fasttrack user statistics, measured today, suggest a vastly different scenario. Both users and shared-content remain decidedly elevated even by historic standards – with numbers close to the all time high recorded in July 2003. – Jack.
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Global P2P Jihad Claims Success
John Oates
The number of music tracks available through file-sharing networks has fallen 27 per cent compared to the same period last year.
The figures from the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) show there are 800m illegally copied songs or files available compared to 1.1bn in June last year. The research claims the number of infringing music files available on peer-to-peer networks has fallen to 700m in January 2004, compared to 1bn in June 2003.
The IFPI claims the fall in numbers is due to the success of legal download sites like Napster and increasing public understanding of the legal position of file-sharing. The IFPI sues individual file sharers and has taken action against 200 people in Denmark, Germany and Italy. It is taking legal action against another 24 people in Denmark. It claims seven out of ten Europeans now know file-sharing is illegal.
Jay Berman, chief executive of IFPI said: "Today's results show that litigation, combined with the rollout of new legal online music services, is having a real impact on people's attitudes to illegal file-sharing, and this in turn is affecting levels of file-sharing activity. We are not claiming victory yet, but we are encouraged by the way the market is developing, and by the shift we see in public opinion."
But not all observers are convinced that the figures smell of victory. It would take a large pile of CDs to store 800m songs. It is not clear if IFPI is looking at all file-sharing networks or just the big names like Kazaa which has been losing members in recent months.
Canadian researchers IT Innovations and Concepts point out that some users are blocking access to shared files because of fears of legal action. ITIC also ask how legal download sites, which they estimate as making up 0.1 per cent of illegal downloads, could absorb nearly a third of files. They estimate that the number of file sharers fell 3 per cent but that would not account for a 27 per cent fall in file numbers.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/09/fileshare_ifpi/
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He’s out, he’s in, he’s out…
Wayne Rosso leaves Optisoft
p2pnet.net News
Wayne Rosso, former president of Grokster, is now also the former president of Spain's Optisoft.
Rosso resigned after he and Optisoft founder Pablo Soto had major disagreements over strategic decisions, the direction in which the company's Blubster and Piolet p2p file sharing applications should go, "and other issues," he told p2pnet.
Rosso turned Grokster into a major presence in the commercial p2p file sharing arena, leaving the company last October to run Opstisoft.
One of the p2p industry's more flamboyant characters, he says he's now involved in a new p2p venture and is, "in the midst of putting it together".
He told p2pnet he couldn't go into detail because of a number of confidentiality agreements but, "this will change the entire p2p landscape in a new and positive way".
He and his new partners "are very high on this," he says, adding:
"We have our eye on some technology and concepts that'll reach far beyond the file sharing that we have
today."
A music and technology industry veteran, Rosso was a founding member of P2P United, the trade association for the peer to peer technology community.
http://p2pnet.net/story/1630
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History Of The Internet: Origins Of The Web
The world wide web is now a part of our everyday lives, but do you know who first thought of it, and how it became the revolutionary technology it is today?
Webactive staff, vnunet.com
What is the greatest British invention of all time? The steam engine, electric motor, the television? Each of these has made an enormous impact on our everyday lives, but nothing has had quite the same instant global impact as the web.
The internet set about changing things almost immediately ... for everyone. Businesses depend on it, communication networks are built on it, and thousands of terabytes of vital information are shared over it every day.
The word 'revolution' is bandied about perhaps a little too often these days, but there are few words strong enough to describe the effect that the internet has had on our world, and the relative speed with which it has made itself indispensable.
Curiously, the origins of such a monumental invention are a little difficult to pin down. When we think of the birth of flight, we remember the Wright Brothers, while the discovery of the theory of evolution is attributed to Charles Darwin.
But what about the web? Well, many people would probably name Tim Berners- Lee - recently knighted and still more directly involved in the development of the web than he originally planned.
But even Sir Tim points out in his book, Weaving the Web, that much of the hard work had already been done before he even showed up. And, although everyone remembers his groundbreaking work, there are plenty of others whose crucial contributions are already being forgotten.
Definitions
What exactly is the world wide web? This is not the dumb question it first appears - the average web user will probably find it fairly hard to define exactly what the web is, how it works or what it does. Even Tim Berners-Lee paints it in somewhat vague terms as "an abstract space of information".
This, however, is the way it was intended. When we turn on the TV, most of us have no idea how many elements, both in and out of the box, come together to produce the picture we see - all that matters is that it works. So it is with the web. It brings you the information you seek, while hiding how it does so extremely effectively.
In the simplest terms possible, the web is a vast collection of data files and resources, coded in its own Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) and transferred using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (the 'http' that's mentioned at the start of most web addresses). When you click on a link, your client (or browser) accesses the web server (host computer) where that page is stored, but to reach you the data has to ride the complex series of gateways, nodes and addresses that make up the internet.
The web as we know it today is a much more user-friendly version of a network that has been in operation for decades. Before the web, you needed a degree in computing to do almost anything online - now you can start clicking and trust your mouse to guide you. That's why it's so hard to define and so easy to use.
The web today
By current estimates, the internet contains at least four billion pages of information, pumped out by around 50 million hosts to nearly a billion users worldwide. It has created massive new brands (Amazon and eBay to name but two), and the net shows no signs of slowing down.
Could the web ever sprawl out of control? It's a difficult beast to tame but, although it's largely left to its own devices, there are web watchdogs of a sort; laws controlling what you can and cannot do online (although enforcing them is a different matter), and bold new initiatives to wipe out some of the most obvious problems.
Only recenntly Bill Gates vowed to eradicate spam within two years, although how much this will cost the consumer remains to be seen. And, at the very top of the tree, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been around since 1995, examining ways it could run better and faster. Fittingly, it is here that you can still find the web's creator.
Nevertheless, some might argue that the net has turned out nothing like Tim Berners-Lee originally intended. For something that was meant to be a free, global databank, unrestrained by big business, large parts of it are now devoted to sleaze, while much of the respectable bits are being tamed by corporate forces intent on using the web as another in a long line of marketing tools and a way of generating more profit.
So how did it get this way? Let's delve back into the past to find out.
The internet: the early years
The science of computing began well over a century ago, but took off in the 1940s, primarily for defence and intelligence purposes. Telecoms, meanwhile, has roots dating back to the mid-19th century and was more about sharing than concealing information. It was only when these two technologies got together that anything resembling a world wide web could happen - and this took a lot longer than you might imagine.
From the 1960s the US government, in partnership with some key universities, began exploring the potential of networking computers. There were half a dozen of these networks by the late 70s, all talking to different users and often in deliberately different languages. After all, what was the value in making something like Arpanet - designed to protect Western intelligence against a Soviet nuclear strike - available to the wider world?
It took people with vision, prepared to work hard for almost no reward, to change these attitudes.
One example of this is Project Gutenberg, the brainchild of a computer operator named Michael Hart, who decided in 1971 that the best use of Xerox's million- dollar mainframe was not to do number-crunching for its clients, but to type in the US Declaration of Independence and make it available to anyone who wanted it.
To its credit, Xerox not only accepted the argument but the project is still around today, publishing a new e-book daily, totally free of charge. It typifies the new attitude to knowledge that developed as the Cold War ended.
But there were technical obstacles, too. The only way the networks of the 1970s could communicate with each other on a wider scale was if someone devised a new language capable of talking to them all. And in 1979 someone did - a key breakthrough that Berners-Lee himself stresses: "If you are looking for fathers of the internet, try Vint Cerf and Bob Khan who defined the 'Internet Protocol' (IP) by which packets are sent on from one computer to another until they reach their destination."
Thanks to Cerf and Kahn, by 1983 the internet - the global network itself - was up and running, after which the big ideas came thick and fast. In the mid 1980s the University of Minnesota started a text-based information server known as Gopher, while File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the forerunner of today's peer-to- peer culture, arrived just a few months before a chap called Tim Berners-Lee uploaded data to the very first web server in August 1991. At the time, few were hailing it as a revolution.
"I didn't find lots of people willing to get excited about the idea of the web," recalls Berners-Lee. "They quite reasonably asked to know why it was different from past, or other hypertext systems."
But different it most certainly was - in effect, this was the moment that the web was born. All in all, the transition from the internet to the web as we know it today took place in the decade from 1982-1992.
Unfortunately, not even the web's biggest fans can claim it has been an unmitigated success. Yes, it has given us access to billions of pages of information and a 24/7 digital culture, but it has also given us unfortunate side effects, such as cyberstalking and grooming, and has become an effective platform for viruses, hackers, scammers and spam.
And although it has provided business with profitable new opportunities, it also created expensive new headaches. Cybersquatters and hackers need to be prevented, while online piracy threatens to eat into profits, and consumers face mounting problems with credit card fraud and identity theft.
And the influence of the web must not be underestimated. A recent report by the National Children's Society, for example, suggests that what certain people see and do online might directly affect how they behave in the real world. We are only beginning to learn what its true long-term effects might be.
Whatever next?
Most people will admit that the world is a much better place with the web than without it. And the beauty of it is that the web is constantly evolving. New applications arrive all the time, and new technologies help to make them run faster and better.
Where once there was only one 'language of the web' (namely HTML), now there are Java, Shockwave and XML. Similarly, where once there was only email, now we have quicker ways of communicating, such as instant messaging and P2P.
So despite its problems, the web is, thankfully, here to stay ... at least until something better comes along. Scarily, at current growth levels there are apparently only enough URLs (unique web addresses) to last us until just past 2050. But with billions now invested in making the web work, there is little enthusiasm to reinvent the wheel and do it all over again.
But by then the highly adaptable web will have undoubtedly evolved to cope.
http://www.vnunet.com/features/1155696
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History Of The Internet: 1812-Present
From the earliest 'computer' to the knighthood of Tim Berners-Lee, our timeline covers the milestones of the history of the internet.
Webactive staff, vnunet.com
1812
Charles Babbage designs (but never builds) a mechanical calculating machine that becomes the blueprint for all computers.
1876
Alexander Graham Bell patents (but does not invent) the telephone. It was actually Antonio Meucci, 20 years previously.
1927
First transatlantic telephone service between New York and London.
1958
US responds to the launch of Sputnik by forming the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa).
1959
Robert Noyce designs the first integrated circuit. He later co-founds Intel.
1962
AT&T launches the first commercial modem, with a speed of 300 bits per second. J Licklider of MIT proposes the idea of a 'galactic network'.
1968
First sighting of the computer mouse.
1969
Arpanet launched to share research data between four university nodes.
1972
The first email message arrives.
1973
The first big network crash occurs on Christmas day.
1979
The Usenet creates online newsgroups and bulletin boards.
1983
TCP/IP leads to the rise of the Internet. Microsoft launches Windows.
1990
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) makes it easier to exchange files online.
1991
The web is launched, and begins to spread via universities.
1993
Mosaic, the first commercial browser.
1994
E-shopping arrives. The web is still only the second most popular internet application after FTP.
1995
The 'browser wars': Internet Explorer vs Netscape Navigator. Explorer wins.
1998
First murder directly linked to the web.
2004
The web reaches one billion users. Tim Berners-Lee knighted.
http://www.vnunet.com/features/1155695
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New Service by TiVo Will Build Bridges From Internet to the TV
John Markoff
The Internet, in jumping past the personal computer and into the living room television set, is starting to give viewers the possibility of bypassing traditional cable and satellite services.
TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.
The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs.
"This is the fourth electronic video service, and it is an alternative to cable, satellite and broadcast television," said Tom Wolzien, an analyst at Bernstein Investment Research and Management. Those traditional services, Mr. Wolzien said, "have been the monster gatekeepers, but this is a way for content providers to get past them."
In the new world of Internet-connected television, viewers will not have to worry about when a show is scheduled or from where it comes.
"We're fully committed to developing an entertainment experience you can't get over normal broadcast television," said Michael Ramsay, chairman and chief executive of TiVo. "This is what we think the future of television is."
A timetable for introducing the video service has not been set, nor has its price.
TiVo sustained a big blow Tuesday when DirecTV, the satellite television provider and the biggest source of new subscribers for the TiVo service, said it had sold its entire equity stake of 3.4 million shares in TiVo. Shares of TiVo dropped more than 14 percent to close at $6.41.
There is some speculation in the industry that DirecTV is moving toward developing its own digital video recorder. Several analysts suggested TiVo is moving toward Internet downloading as a way to insulate itself against potential competition from DirecTV.
Last year TiVo, which has 1.6 million subscribers who use its digital video recorder with cable or DirecTV, acquired Strangeberry, a small Silicon Valley start-up that had developed a new technology to view Internet video streams. TiVo is now developing that technology and plans to integrate it into the TiVo system next year. Video distributors like Netflix, RealNetworks and Blockbuster are also starting to explore the possibility of delivering feature-length movies via the Internet to users for viewing later.
"We're no longer in a world where innovation is stopped because somebody is the only game in town," said Rob Glaser, chief executive of RealNetworks, a Seattle-based company that now streams audio and video to computer users through the Internet.
The idea of downloading and storing video for conventional television viewing has until now been pioneered by a small group of technology companies like Akimbo, a maker of an Internet digital video recorder that is based in San Mateo, Calif.
Because most Internet connections do not yet reliably support data speeds needed to view television-quality video as it is streamed, a number of the Internet video services require that programs first be downloaded and stored on a hard drive before viewing.
Now, as broadband Internet becomes widely available in homes and new wireless video networks make it simpler to move video data and streams inside the home, bigger players are starting to emerge.
For example, Microsoft demonstrated a service called IPTV at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this year. The company believes that it is possible to deliver television to rival today's cable programming by using commonly available standard telephone lines, as part of what are called digital subscriber line, or D.S.L., services. It is running two small trials of the technology in Canada and Switzerland, and sees a broad potential.
"We sort of expect that TV will shift to where everyone will watch what they want when they want," said Peter T. Barrett, chief technology officer for Microsoft TV.
Microsoft executives argue that the technology would be a boon to telephone companies who are now searching for new revenue streams in the face of increasing pressure on their traditional voice-calling businesses. "Every single phone company has to be thinking about video," said Lynne Elander, general manager of marketing for Microsoft TV.
But executives at telephone companies said they were not moving quickly to deploy the Microsoft technology.
Both Verizon and SBC are engaged in trials and deployment of fiber optic networks, which offer significantly higher speeds than existing D.S.L. services. "The jury is still out on IPTV, we have to see how it works," said Eric Rabe, a spokesman for Verizon.
Smaller firms, however, are not waiting for competition to grow in this field. On Monday, Broadband Networks Inc., a start-up based in Los Gatos, Calif., introduced a service it called TimeshiftTV. The new service, using a $299 digital video recorder, will initially focus on offering video programs in eight foreign languages when it is available in December.
Broadband's chief executive, Bob Burke, said the company would try to license its technology to other companies.
The main challenge facing Internet video distribution is that streaming DVD and HDTV-quality video will require data rates above 5 megabits a second. That is far beyond most D.S.L. network speeds today, which generally range from 300 kilobits to 1.5 megabits.
Indeed, even downloading and storing high-definition video for later viewing at most D.S.L. speeds may not be economical. Sending the data stored on a DVD disk over the Internet at those speeds might take several days, making it a poor competitor for "sneaker-net" services like Blockbuster, which require the viewer to walk or drive to the store.
But for standard video quality, the economics may already work, according to a recent Bernstein Research report. It costs just 15 cents an hour to stream standard video across a D.S.L. connection, Mr. Wolzien said, and those costs are falling.
Whether Internet delivery of programming will be a serious threat in the near future to traditional broadcasters remains a matter for debate among industry executives. In any event, they also expect to capitalize on the new technology. As Steve Burke, president of Comcast Cable, the nation's largest cable operator, said recently in a phone interview, "We're big believers that the Internet is the future."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/te.../09net.html?hp
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WIPO: Day 1
Submitted by davidt
Broadcasting
The 11th Meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights kicked off with a discussion of a WIPO Database Treaty, and then moved on to the main event: the draft broadcast treaty.
EFF and UPD collaborated on these blow-by-blow notes, written in the same document at the same time using wi-fi, Rendezvous, and SubEthaEdit.
http://www.public-domain.org/?q=node/view/39
Day 2
Cory Doctorow, David Tannenbaum
Public-domain dedication:
On June 8, 2004, Cory Doctorow, Wendy Seltzer and David Tannebaum (The Authors) dedicated to the public domain the work "Notes from the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting, day 2, 8 June 2004." Before making the dedication, the Authors represented that they owned all copyrights in the work. By making the dedication, the Authors made an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights under copyright law, whether vested or contingent, in "Notes from the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting, day 2, 8 June 2004."
The Authors understand that such relinquishment of all rights includes the relinquishment of all rights to enforce (by lawsuit or otherwise) those copyrights in the Work.
The Authors recognize that, once placed in the public domain, "Notes from the World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting, day 2, 8 June 2004" may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001597.php#001597
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European Launch Set For iTunes
Apple Computer will announce next week the European version of the iTunes online music store, according to sources.
The announcement will be made June 15, said sources familiar with the necessary licensing negotiations between Apple and music labels.
An Apple representative in Holland declined to comment. However, Apple issued a statement Monday that it will host a press conference in London on June 15. Apple billed the event: "The biggest story in music is about to get even bigger."
Traditionally when Apple announces a new product or service, it is available immediately, which means the service may go live next week.
Apple launched iTunes in the United States over a year ago, capturing a commanding lead in the nascent market for music downloads.
At its peak, Apple sold 3.3 million downloads in a single week and more than 70 million in its first year. In contrast, a collection of legal download services in Britain sold 500,000 between January and mid-May.
Unlike the United States, where Apple pioneered and effectively defined Internet music retailing, in Europe it will be entering a brutally competitive market, which was opened up by Microsoft over the past two years.
In addition, Roxio launched Napster in Britain last month, and Sony said it will launch its Connect store in Britain, Germany and France by the end of June.
Apple will also face Europe's most established download provider, OD2, which has three dozen retail partners including Microsoft's MSN and Coca-Cola.
Analysts, however, expect Apple to catch rivals quickly in Europe.
"iPods are just selling through the roof. To launch on top of that, I should think it will do well for them over here," said Simon Dyson, an analyst with London-based Informa Media.
The iPod is the only available portable music player that plays songs from the iTunes music store.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5227553.html
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Beatles Catalog Headed For Digital Distribution?
John Borland
Talks have begun that could finally make the songs of The Beatles available for sale online, sources familiar with the situation said.
Representatives for The Beatles have spoken with numerous online music providers, ranging from small companies to Microsoft, which is planning to open an Internet music store this year. The Beatles' side is asking for a considerable sum in return for providing exclusive online distribution rights, perhaps for as long as a year or more.
"They are looking for someone to come up with the ideal way to put The Beatles online," one digital music executive told CNET News.com.
That interest could lead to a milestone in the short history of digital music. Online music services are struggling to prove they can offer more music than a brick-and-mortar store, and the lack of songs by rock and roll's premier group has been an oft-cited gap in their appeal.
The Beatles broke up more than three decades ago, but their music continues to sell in high volumes.
"One of the things that has held back digital music online has been lack of availability of very popular artists, notably among them The Beatles," said Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg. "If they are able to come to some sort of licensing terms, it bodes very well for the online model and would probably pave the way for some of the other holdouts to come online."
But it may be some time before "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Let it Be" are sold on Apple Computer's iTunes or on Napster. One idea being considered is a Beatles-branded store that would be the only place online where the group's music, videos and other multimedia products would be sold, sources said. The store could be operated by one of the existing online music services.
Some other marquee bands have pursued this strategy, but it has not been adopted widely. Musician Dave Matthews maintains an exclusive online store on a site operated by MusicToday, a company associated with his manager.
Other big-name artists still waiting on the digital sidelines, to one degree or another, include Led Zeppelin and Madonna.
The current round of discussions is being led by The Beatles' representatives rather than the group's record label, EMI, sources said. EMI owns The Beatles' master recordings but has sought the artists' permission before putting the songs online.
"We've had several discussions with them, because we think it would be terrific to make all The Beatles' work available in digital services," said EMI spokeswoman Jeanne Meyer. "We would be delighted if they made that decision."
In an earlier technology shift, and another example of a cautious approach, The Beatles catalog appeared on CD well after most of the music world had already made the transition.
Any exclusive deal--especially if the music is distributed in a proprietary copy-protected format from a company such as Apple or Microsoft--could spotlight the growing problem of the lack of interoperability between services, digital music formats and portable devices, analysts said.
The Apple factor
If The Beatles songs were to appear in Microsoft's format, they would not be directly playable on Apple's iPod, which does not support Windows Media. If the tunes were to appear in Apple's copy-protected format, they couldn't be played directly on any digital music device other than the iPod, since Apple has not licensed use of its FairPlay digital rights management (DRM) tools to rivals.
The long shadow of The Beatles has already touched the world of digital music. Apple Corps--the company formed by The Beatles in 1968 to manage their business interests--sued Apple Computer in a dispute over the use of the Apple name and logo after last year's release of the iTunes song store.
The two companies had tussled once before, in 1989, when Apple Corps objected to Apple Computer's name and logo after the computer maker's expansion into music- related products such as digital music software. Apple Computer settled the case for $27 million and agreed to avoid using the similar trademarks in most music-related contexts.
In a statement released after The Beatles' company brought suit last year, Apple Computer said "Apple and Apple Corps now have differing interpretations of this agreement and will need to ask a court to resolve this dispute."
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5228914.html
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1st Circuit Issues Copyright Statutory Damages Decision
ILN News Letter
The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a decision that involves an analysis on the appropriate method of calculating statutory damages for copyright infringement. The court ruled that damages should be assessed by infringed work, rather than infringing copies. Case name is Venegas-Hernandez v. Sonolux Records.
Decision at
http://laws.findlaw.com/1st/032014.html
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Net needs Law Enforcement, Author Says
Grant Gross
The Internet is a "god-awful mess," but few U.S. government officials are willing to take action against virus writers, spammers and other scammers, author Bruce Sterling said at the Gartner IT Security Summit on Tuesday in the US.
Disorder and corruption are winning on the Internet, and computer users need the U.S. government to crack down on the thieves preying on the Internet, said Sterling, author of futuristic novels "Heavy Weather" and "Islands in the Net" and the nonfiction book "The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier."
"We had a digital revolution in the 1990s -- now we've slid into digital terror," Sterling said during his hour-long critique on the state of cybersecurity. "Today's Internet is a dirty mess -- it's revolution failed. E-commerce was extremely inventive for a while, but the financing model was corrupt. There was poor governance in the financial systems, there was worse industrial policy; the upshot was a spectacular industry-wrecking boom and bust."
Most of the advancements in Internet commerce since the dot-com bust have been illegal, Sterling noted, including spamming, identity theft, and "phishing," which is theft of credit card numbers or other personal information by directing customers to bogus Web sites to change their account settings. "If you advance into mayhem, that's not advancement, that's driving into a ditch," he added.
Sterling offered what he called a little good news about cybersecurity, the recent arrests of a handful of virus or worm writers, including the arrest in May of the 18-year-old German man who allegedly wrote the Sasser worm. "The world is never going to run out of disaffected teenagers," he said.
But Sterling said he's not overly worried about bored 18-year-old worm writers who are unsophisticated enough to get caught; instead he's concerned about the authors of such malicious code as Slammer, Code Red, and Witty because they haven't been caught.
The authors of the Witty worm targeted users of Internet Security Systems Inc.'s products, while the Bagel and Mydoom virus authors attempted to turn infected computers into spam-sending machines, Sterling said. "Bagel and Mydoom are the future of virus-writing because they have a business model," he said. "Those are organized crime activities. ... These are crooks."
Virus and worm writing will grow as a weapon for terrorists and warring nations, he predicted. Terrorists operating in places with little central government control will begin to see cyberterrorism as an effective weapon because of a lack of international cooperation on cybersecurity enforcement, he said. He listed a dozen such countries, including Somalia, Bosnia and the Philippines.
"This is the birth of a genuine, no-kidding, for-profit ... multinational criminal underworld," he said. "I don't see any way it can't happen. We're going to end up getting pushed around by bands of international electronic thieves in a very similar way to the way we've been pushed around by gangs of international Mafia and international Mujahideen terrorists."
The new tools of terrorists and criminals will be "oil, narcotics, guns and broadband," he said.
With cyberthreats likely to rise, the U.S. government needs to focus on enforcement of existing laws, including antifraud laws, Sterling said. He praised New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who prosecuted Buffalo spammer Howard Carmack earlier this year, as well as other white collar criminals. Although virus writers and many spammers break existing laws, most prosecutors seem reluctant to take on computer cases, Sterling said
"In my opinion, we need a thousand guys like (Spitzer)," Sterling said."We've got a ridiculous amount of computer laws."
Efforts such as the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, passed by Congress in late 2003, are "phoney-baloney gestures," Sterling said.
Instead of weak laws, the U.S. government needs to sponsor a multistate computer crime task force that enforces existing laws, he said. He also recommended that the U.S. post names of spammers and other Internet scammers on a Web site for everyone to see.
Sterling also praised parts of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, released by the Bush administration in February 2003, calling it "modest and feasible." The document recommended that nations work together to combat cyberthreats, and such cooperation is needed to fight borderless cyberterrorism, Sterling said. But the strategy is likely to go nowhere after former Bush cybersecurity chief Richard Clarke criticized his former boss' counterterrorism efforts in a book released earlier this year, Sterling said.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/inde...5;fp;16;fpid;0
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Breaks even faster
New Self-Destructing DVD Launched
Jan Libbenga
A French company has developed a disposable DVD, or DVD-D, which self-destructs after a few hours. Like the classic DVD, DVD-D is made of polycarbonate, but it contains an extra layer of coating that reacts to an oxidisation process which begins as soon as the disc is exposed to air. The self-destruct process can be pre-set to occur between eight and 24 hours.
It is not the world's first suicidal DVD. Last year, Flexplay Technologies, based in New York, announced a DVD with a 48-hour viewing window. Like the DVD-D, a Flexplay- enabled DVD works in all players, DVD drives and gaming systems designed to accept a standard DVD. The makers of the DVD-D claim their product is much cheaper to produce. The company also says there are no ways to repair the disc after the weathering process has made it unreadable. Solutions to repair the disc would be extremely complex.
Both DVD-D and EZ-D target the home entertainment rental market. The products would give consumers easy access to recently released titles, both movies and music, without worrying about returns, late fees or scratched discs.
Buena Vista Home Entertainment last year released some products on EZ-D - the first movie to be available on DVD-D will be Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, which won two prizes in Cannes 2003 and the 2004 Oscar of the Best foreign film. Seven hundred other movies will also soon be available on DVD-D.
Despite the growing interest from big film studios, disposable DVDs haven't been much of a success. According to some reports, demand for EZ-D has fallen completely flat, and the retail chains carrying the discs have decided to stop stocking the format.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06...structing_dvd/
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Welcome to HALLOWEEN, ALASKA.
Work has commenced a new disc. We like to think it'll be out in September. Meanwhile, reviews and features on the self-titled debut disc (released in December of 2003) can be found in Amplifier, OpusZine, City Pages, Splendid, MusicEmissions, Pulse, and on Minnesota Public Radio's "State of the Arts" (the Halloween, Alaska segment begins at 20:25). You're also welcome to read our own amorphous list of sometime role models.
Anything else, just ask.
Download and share these tracks as you wish. More music will be added in the coming months.
http://www.halloweenalaska.com/mp3s.htm
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WinMX MP3 Music Sharing Software Review
From Paul Gil,Your Guide to Internet for Beginners.
Joanna Gurnitsky
1) Overview of the WinMX software: This product is designed to trade songs and videos across the Internet using "peer to peer" (P2P) networking.
It works like this: thousands of users install WinMX on their PCs, and willingly open their hard drives to each other. As these thousands of people log on to the Net using WinMX, the pool of available WinMX hard drives changes moment-to-moment. Every WinMX user is empowered to search for songs and movies, and then begin downloading and uploading music files to each other. Equitable sharing of music and movies is promoted, and people will often share gigabytes of files with their fellow WinMX users.
This WinMX P2P network system employs its own custom file sharing client software, created by FrontCode Technologies. The current version of WinMX is 3.31, and is free to download here:
http://www.winmx.com/
2) Warning: WinMX is a highly controversial software because of copyright laws, and WinMX users do risk possible fines and lawsuits.
3) What You Need to Run WinMX (System Requirements)" : Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / XP. Pentium166 with 64MB of RAM or better recommended. MacIntosh "grey-market" versions are available for around $50USD.
3) Why WinMX is a Good P2P Software: WinMX is simple to install, easy to use, available for free, and is the only no-cost P2P software that is free of malignant spyware. In short, if you choose to participate in P2P file sharing, WinMX is the friendliest and cheapest choice available.
4) The Downsides of WinMX: Other than in Canada, it is a copyright infringement in most countries to share music and movie files. WinMX users risk being fined or even sued everytime they trade music files.
Next: The Legalities of Using WinMX Music-Sharing Software:
Related article: Canadians can legally download music!
Part 2: Legalities and Technicalities
6) The Legalities of Using WinMX Music-Sharing Software:
True WinMX software is FREE, but you must decide if you will risk being sued for copyright infringement. The only country that legally sanctions Internet music- and video-sharing is Canada. If you are in the USA, the UK, Mexico, Australia, or elsewhere, you do run a risk of being caught and fined for sharing music.
Example of an American User Being Fined: On May 6th, 2004, a woman from Connecticut was fined six thousand dollars for downloading copyright-protected music from the Internet, and was barred from downloading, uploading or distributing copyrighted songs over the Internet. (Article here)
7) Warning About a Consumer Scam: some P2P networks will unethically sell you paid versions of various file sharing software, including WinMX, and claim that this paid software absolves you of copyright responsibility. This is a lie. While the software itself may be legal (you paid for it), the copyright aspect is not addressed by these surchages.
These unethical scammers will obscure the issue with hazy statements like: “Due to the nature of peer-to-peer software, we are unable to monitor or control the types of files shared within the peer-to-peer communities”. In the end, despite what these unethical vendors will tell you, you are still liable for music sharing copyright regardless if you pay for the software or not
8) Technical Concerns for Using WinMX P2P Software:
a. Always check your files with a good anti-virus program.
b. If you are behind a router-firewall and are curious how to set up your file sharing, go here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/j.bucha...l?routers.html
This website contains detailed information you can use to “open up” certain ports on your router to allow the “in” and “out” file sharing traffic.
c. Personal comment: I would highly recommend that you get acquainted with some tips and tricks that will make your WinMX-life easier. These tips include: how to avoid downloading fake files, and what to do if the movie you just downloaded refuses play on your computer. You can also find a lot of information about the fine-tuning of your transfer speeds and other WinMX expert features here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/candyst...llingWinMX.htm
Related Link: US copyright law:
http://www.copyright.gov/
9. Final Comments:
If you are willing to assume the risk of copyright infringement, then I highly recommend WinMX over its competitors. The software is free, it is quite stable, it is free of malignant spyware, and the interface is quite friendly.
http://netforbeginners.about.com/cs/...nmx_review.htm
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Adobe Unveils File-Sharing Products
San Francisco, June 9: Adobe Systems Inc, known for its Acrobat document- sharing software, on Tuesday introduced a new set of products aimed at making corporate document sharing quicker and more secure.
The San Jose, California-based company said the new products would help companies automate the flow of digital documents in its Portable Document Format between staff, customers and suppliers.
Security features in the "intelligent document" software offering are also intended to prevent document tampering after the files have been stored, Adobe said.
Another product, called Document Control and Security service, is intended to give companies more power to control access to information, create audit trails of usage records and certify document authenticity with digital signatures.
Pricing for the document security software, which runs on computer servers and is available now, starts at $50,000 per microprocessor, a standard pricing arrangement in the software industry.
"It's not just a question of how to store things efficiently, but how do I assure that people can't change documents once they've been stored," said Eugene Lee, vice president of Adobe's product marketing, about the new products.
Adobe bought Canadian-based Accelio Corp in 2002 as part of a strategy to capitalize on the growing use of electronic forms by corporations and governments.
New laws passed in recent years have required companies to strengthen internal controls that protect consumers' personal information.
Health-care companies, for example, will have to ensure by April 2005 that electronic patient data is stored in a confidential and secure manner, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.
Banks and other financial-services groups face similar demands under the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=32322
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All Multiple P2p Network File Sharing Software Are Not The Same: TrustyFiles 2.2 update adds Bit Torrent access and delivers the fastest and most results and download sources with 100% native code.
Press Release
RazorPop, Inc. announced the release of TrustyFiles 2.2 Personal File Sharing software at
http://www.TrustyFiles.com. The performance-driven update cements TrustyFile’s position as the leader in Multi-P2P network software. TrustyFiles 2.2 features 100% native code and adds Bit Torrent network support. TrustyFiles continues to be FREE with NO spyware and NO additional bundled software.
RazorPop announced the release of TrustyFiles 2.2 Personal File Sharing software at http:/ /www.TrustyFiles.com. The performance-driven update cements TrustyFile’s position as the leader in Multi-P2P network software. TrustyFiles 2.2 features 100% native code and adds Bit Torrent network support. TrustyFiles continues to be FREE with NO spyware and NO additional bundled software.
TrustyFiles now searches and shares files with the Kazaa, Gnutella, Gnutella 2, and Bit Torrent file sharing networks. The TrustyFiles 2.2 update provides more search results, more download sources, greater stability, and more features than the previous version.
"File sharing software is quickly evolving," said RazorPop founder and CEO Marc Freedman. “In the post-Napster era, the first leader was Morpheus and Gnutella. Then it was Kazaa. Now there’s a host of networks, each with its own strengths and diehard users. The latest generation of P2P software is the multi-network client. File sharers are no longer forced to use just one network. Now they can combine results and download files from multiple networks. They can take advantage of a much larger pool of users and files being shared.
"Of course there's a catch. It’s not easy. Adding each new network is like developing and integrating a new software application. There are several developers offering multi-P2P network clients with Kazaa and Gnutella. But they all use the same generic open source software. Only TrustyFiles features its own 100% native code. We wrote it. We tuned it. We optimized it. Unlike everyone else we didn’t take the easy way out. Writing the software ourselves was the only way to guarantee high performance.
"It's all about results. We challenge P2P users to compare TrustyFiles with any other product. They'll absolutely see the difference. TrustyFiles generates thousands of search results … with multiple download sources … in only a few seconds … from all our networks."
TrustyFiles is three products in one. With Public File Sharing, search and download hundreds of millions of files from TrustyFiles, Kazaa, Grokster, Morpheus, Limewire, Bearshare, Shareaza, and other Fast Track, Gnutella, Gnutella2 and Bit Torrent network users.
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/6/emw131700.htm
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Dual Bills In Congress Target File Sharing
If passed, civil charges could be levied against copyright infringement
Nancy Su
College students may soon feel pressure from more than the recording industry to stop illegal file sharing as Congress considers two bills that would extend the federal government's authority to prosecute copyright violators.
The proposed Piracy Deterrence and Educational Act of 2004, is the pairing of two bills, one now in the Senate, which would allow the Justice Department to bring civil charges against illegal file sharers. Under current law, the attorney general can only file criminal copyright charges against illegal file sharers, which require a high standard of proof.
The Piracy Act would allow the federal government to file claims that could include damages and restitution without criminal penalties.
The bill in the House, provides for educational programs about copyright violations and would also lower the standard required to prove copyright violators guilty of criminal crimes.
Under the act, criminal infringement can be defined as copyright violations by distributing copyrighted work with "reckless disregard of the risk for further infringement." Reckless disregard can be proven if more than $10,000 worth of copyrighted material is shared, 1,000 copies of one or more copyrighted works are made, or if copyrighted pre-release works are distributed.
Currently prosecutors have to show that suspects acted "willfully" by intending to profit from their actions despite knowing their conduct is illegal.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, co-sponsored the bill. Leahy said the Piracy Act is just one step in solving the challenges presented by the digital age, which includes protecting intellectual property while not impeding the development of technology and digital content.
Leahy added that the bill allows the government to take action "to ensure that more creative works are made available online, that those works are more affordable, and that the people who work to bring them to us are paid for their efforts."
While the recording industry has offered support for the bills, opponents have expressed concerns regarding funding for the anti-piracy effort. Under the Piracy Act, the Justice Department would get $2 million to handle copyright infringement cases.
"Tax dollars will go to protect an industry that already has a great deal of money," said Annalee Newitz, policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that educates the public about civil liberties issues related to technology.
Newitz said consumers who are already having difficulties making personal copies of music or playing DVDs on their personal computers will end up paying for the copyright lawsuits.
"Taxpayers will have to pay for their own torture," she said.
Some students seem to think the bills will not have a large effect on file sharing.
Xiu Fang Lou, a first-year undeclared student who stopped downloading songs when the record industry started to sue copyright violators, said though the bill's intentions are good, they do not address the fundamental reason why students download files illegally.
"(The Piracy Act) is actually a pretty good idea because singers will not earn any money if everyone downloads and no one buys the CD. But at the same time, the reason why people download is because CDs are too expensive," Lou said.
Second-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student Joyce Wu, who said she does not download music illegally, also said she thinks the bills would probably not stop people from continuing to download illegally.
"It's pretty hard to enforce. I'm pretty sure they don't have enough money to prosecute every teenager. The people who aren't afraid of being sued (by the Recording Industry Association of America) will probably not be afraid of being sued by the government," Wu said.
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/...s.asp?id=29449
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Spaminator
Inbox
Wed, 09 Jun 2004 21:36:42 -0800
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http://www.filesharetoday.com/ref3.html
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They get letters
File-Sharing Does Not Stifle Creativity
William Heath
Sir, David Munns (Letters, June 8) is an expert running EMI while I am just a punter who in the past signed two recording contracts. But anyone can see that the headline "Stealing music online is just like shoplifting" is wrong. You can share music at home at midnight. It is far more convenient than shoplifting.
When you share music online, you do not delete the original file (whereas the shoplifter leaves a tell-tale gap on the shelf). You can explore and experiment with a hugely diverse choice. If you like what you hear you can buy CDs, concert tickets or tee-shirts. If you don't like it, you can delete it.
We are taught from an early age that it is good to share. If we love particular recording artists or songwriters it is a pleasure to reward them with our money. File-sharing may be proved incontrovertibly illegal, and if so we must accept it is defined as theft. But lending books, and copying - not for profit within fair use provisions - is, I believe, not illegal, and perhaps file-sharing is not.
Sharing files does not stifle creativity any more than playing an artist's music on radio does. If it really did reduce the financial rewards for manufactured boy-bands and made-for-TV pop idols this would be a strong point in its favour, but I doubt it does. Sharing their files today does nothing to diminish the creativity of Jimi Hendrix or Count Basie.
If innovation is insufficiently rewarded that is a problem created by the recording industry. Little Richard may have got rich, but he made many others far richer. If this is all about creativity would David Munns stand back happily and see artists rewarded directly by punters online, without the tedious overhead of having to pay EMI and others?
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentSe...=1086445559081
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Microsoft's New Media Player: Paranoia, Pop-Ups and Horticulture
Allen Voivod
Microsoft released a technical beta of Windows Media Player 10 for "enthusiasts," Wired Magazine's umbrella jargon for white-, grey - and black-hat hackers. Said hackers are eager to preview the privacy, piracy and security concerns they'll be facing when the final version of the player debuts this fall.
Microsoft's R&D Department, code-named "Apple," laid the groundwork for the WMP 10 beta, which until now has been known by its alpha version code name, "iTunes."
Speaking via videoconference from a Wi-Fi-shielded bunker, Microsoft founder Bill Gates hailed the release by stating, "It's not reverse engineering if you invested $150 million in the company, right?" At that, a nearby lawyer stepped forward and pulled Gates down from the podium by the earlobe.
Of particular note is WMP 10's new digital rights management technology, code-named "Janus." Rumors from disgruntled Microsoft employees border on the megalomaniacal, but the general picture that emerges is of a piracy solution that encourages file-sharing on the one hand, but tracks and transmits all such activity on the other.
The code, buried in a bundled adware executable, sends the data to a hardened Unix server farm, which resides in the 72-story building that houses the Legal Department of the Recording Industry Association of America.
Also integrated into the beta is a first look at Microsoft's "Digital Media Mall" concept. Designed to replicate the authentic experience of shopping in a Sam Goody or Suncoast Motion Picture Company store, users will find themselves assaulted with pop-ups for licensed merchandise related to any DVD or CD viewed in WMP 10's browser window. Help functions for this feature will be comprised of surly Goth-attired teenagers giving monosyllabic answers in streaming video.
Early reviews of the technical beta have been mixed, but the most positive review came from High Times magazine's technology columnist Detlef Burr. Mr. Burr reports that the new visualizations offered in WMP 10 are trippier than those in version 9, even when the user "is bummin' 'cause all you got's the seedy bud in your disaster stash."
http://www.deadbrain.com/news/articl...06_06_4548.php
Until next week,
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js.
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