[JackSpratts]

Forward, Into The Past

On Thursday a little and little known software company called 321 Studios found itself in court fighting a battle, or maybe even a war, for the rest of us. This is the company that makes the software that lets your DVD copier do what you bought it for; copy DVDs. Unlike say a cassette recorder or a Xerox machine the DVD burner hardware doesn’t automatically take over when a disc is placed inside the machine. Specialized sets of instructions are needed to figure out how to move all those ones and zeros from the master disc to the blank in such a way that the finished product will be recognizable as a movie or a TV show when it’s put back into a player. Without this software that expensive burner is nothing more than a 21st century paper weight, but a paperweight is exactly what Hollywood wants it to be. In yet another in a seemingly endless series of assaults on the rights of Americans to do what they want with the things that they own, Hollywood is trying to turn back the clock to stop our right to make back-ups of the programs we’ve bought and paid for, something we’ve already been doing with video tapes for decades. And Hollywood isn’t stopping there. They want to stop us – by law – from being able to record shows off our TVs too.

So here we have this essentially unknown software outfit in court in front of a judge who’s about to decide whether we can indeed keep doing the things we already know we can do. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in some weird parallel universe. Kind of like waking up to find they banned fax machines all of a sudden - for no particular reason except, you know, people were sending faxes.

Who knows what resources this small company has, what kind of representation, how willing they are to take these matters on. Are they up to the task? After all they brought the suit, they forced the issue. Obviously Hollywood would’ve gotten around to it sooner than later but they could’ve stalled and bought some time - for us. This is serious. If we lose the right to make copies a lot is going to change, and not for the better. Think about that. About a world in which making a mix tape or a dub or a copy of a TV show is a felony. Not a place I’d like to call home.

Sure 321’s making money off the products they sell and have a strong financial interest in the outcome of the case but like file sharing, another crucial technology Hollywood tried to kill, this is one of those things that’s so important it shouldn’t be left up to some small outfit trying to protect a business plan. This is so important you’d think the U.S. Government itself would be in that courtroom making sure our rights were protected. Standing up to a grasping and greedy, overreaching media industry.

But that’s not going to happen. If Jefferson came back from the dead maybe, otherwise it’s hasta la vista baby, you’re on your own. You want that DVD? Buy it. The kid breaks it? Buy another. You want to play one in the car, upstairs, at the camp? Buy three. Make a dub? Go to jail.

Edison invented the phonograph so that ordinary people could make “back-ups” of their lives. In the nineteen fifties tape technology made it easier than ever and still, with all this backing up going on, the media companies became rich and powerful and so too did an army of recording artists and actors. We’ve all enjoyed the technology and the benefits it’s brought to our lives, financially and personally, and we’ve never looked back. Until now. If the movie companies win this fight we’ll be looking back alright, at our grandparents, and regarding them with envy.








Enjoy,

Jack.









Current Week In Review.









Major Labels Caught Stealing $100m a Year
Record Clubs Get a Smack Upside the Head by Federal Judge
Moses Avalon

Artists and songwriters trying to track "lost sales" might want to look carefully in flea markets. This past month saw several busts at neighborhood swap meets. Vendors, using fake names and addresses, join record clubs, (the buy one CD and get 10 CDs for a buck companies) and take the 10 "premium" CDs and resell them at flea markets. Think this is small potatoes? This month a New Jersey scam was busted and confessed to redistributing almost 50,000 units in this manner. Most were from BMG and Columbia House Music Club (owned by Sony Music), the very same companies that lost a second important defeat in a class action suit by songwriters. (Ory v. Columbia House Music Club, Case No. CV 02-02342 SJO. Los Angeles)

On April 22, 2003, the U.S. District Court based in Los Angeles, dealt a serious blow to BMG and Sony, deciding that the two major-label-owned "record clubs" had no leg to stand on to get the case thrown out of court, and would have to attempt to prove to a jury that they just "forgot" or were really going to pay songwriters "when they got around to it."

The court found that the record clubs failed to pay for mechanical licenses on the premium records given away. (Roughly 6-8 cents per song, per copy sold.) Songwriters' lawyers estimate that the record clubs ripped off their clients to the tune of about $100 million dollars a year.

All this makes you wonder why the RIAA (who is funded by companies who own both major publishing houses and record clubs) scream bloody hell over Kazaa and Napster, and yet ignore this? Could it be to distract us from the fact that their constituents were actively involved in collusion that was costing artists and songwriters far more than the file-sharing services? Or were they just jealous that file sharing services were ripping off their artists better than the majors were.

Glass houses, people. Glass houses.

A trial has been set for January 13, 2004. Stay tuned. This is one to follow.
http://musicdish.com/mag/?id=8048

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Disk Frisk
Simon Crerar

In a whirlwind few weeks, three groundbreaking developments have the music industry all shook up. First, Australian police closed down a music piracy website and arrested three Sydney university students after an alleged copyright scam. The three are accused of offering music files for free download at website Mp3/WMA Land without the permission of record labels. They are believed to be the first individuals anywhere to be charged for such an offence.

The defendants will appear in court later this month to face copyright infringement penalties that could include up to five years' jail and/or a $60,500 fine.

Since the meteoric rise and fall of the music file-sharing service Napster in 2001, the major record labels have been eyeing their revenue streams nervously. CD sales are declining for the first time, threatening profits. Why? Because thousands are choosing to download music free online rather than pay $30 for an album. To counter the threat, the majors launched two rival distribution websites of their own: Pressplay.com (Sony/Universal) and MusicNet.com (EMI/BMG/AOL Time Warner). By charging up to $30 a month subscription and severely limiting how you use their music, it is no surprise these services have bombed spectacularly.

After successfully leading the charge to close down Napster, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has waged war on similar websites, accusing them of aiding the distribution of child porn and computer viruses alongside free music.

So it was shock when a Los Angeles judge ruled last week that peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing websites Grokster.com and StreamCast should not be banned simply because theycan be used to swap material covered by copyright.

What are the implications? The LA judge found P2P sites "not significantly different from companies that sell home video recorders or copy machines, both of which can and
are used to infringe copyrights". If upheld, the ruling means RIAA members will have to take on pirates individually, instead of the site's helping them swap music illegally. Most law-abiding citizens are not comfortable with the prospect of litigation, however unlikely, and many would be prepared to cough up for a realistically priced alternative.

With impeccable timing, Apple's new iTunes Music Store (www.applemusic.com) was launched to rave reviews last week. Within 24 hours, the site had sold more than 275,000 tracks at 99 US cents ($1.56) each, says Billboardbulletin.com. This dramatic success was generated by Mac owners alone, a mere 3 per cent of overall computer users. (And, incidentally, only owners in America - Apple has yet to announce when the service will be available to Australians.)

What is the secret of Music Store's success? A genuinely usable product helps, as does transparent pricing and a 200,000 track-strong library backed by all five major record labels - with exclusives from the likes of Eminem, Massive Attack and David Gray.

For vinyl junkies, the store is a boon. A New Yorker admits: "I spent $US40 in 10 minutes the first night, buying rare James Brown, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane tracks. My girlfriend spent $US50. Three days later we'd spent another $US150. It's almost too easy to buy music this way. I download hundreds of megabytes of free tunes on P2P, but I'm still willing to pay for good music."

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs plans to make iTunes PC-compatible by the end of the year, and Billboard reports that two major labels have already signed-up. Whoever creates an accessible, realistically priced product first will win the wallets of the vast numbers of music fans deterred by the furtive and often cumbersome P2P music swappers.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...280425590.html

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Grokster's Victory for Innovation
Lawrence Lessig

In 1998, in a string of judicial decisions, courts in the United States found Napster responsible for the copyright infringement that occurred on its file-sharing network. The burden of these decisions effectively closed down the company. Last month, a district court held that neither Streamcast (which distributes "Morpheus") nor Grokster could be held responsible for the copyright infringement that occurred on the file-sharing networks they supported. (They both initially supported the "FastTrack" network; Streamcast now builds its client on the "Gnutella" platform.) Thus, Napster: bad; Grokster/Morpheus: good.

This decision has surprised commentators. From 10,000 feet, the two file-sharing networks look very much alike. But they are technically quite different, and that difference clearly mattered to the court. Yet more important than the technology is the difference in judicial attitude that the district court displayed. It is this difference that would really matter if upheld on appeal.

Grokster and Morpheus run on peer-to-peer networks, which means that content is shared not between them and their users but between the users of the network themselves. This was true of Napster as well. The difference is that Napster kept a central list of all the available files, which enabled it to control who got access to what content. That meant that Napster could be held responsible for copyright infringement happening on its network. Because Napster benefited from the infringement and had the opportunity to stop it, the courts held Napster responsible.

The design of the Morpheus/Grokster networks, however, means that the defendants do not have the same opportunity. Because there is no central list of files that can be shared, neither Grokster nor Streamcast are able to control the content that users access. There is therefore no way for either company to take steps to block infringing sharing.

No doubt, the court observed, these companies benefited from the sharing. And no doubt, it went on, peer-to-peer networks were designed in part to avoid the ability to block infringing sharing. But because the law requires that there be both a benefit from the infringement and an opportunity to do something to stop it, District Court Judge Stephen Wilson was not willing to find either company responsible.

The reason the court hesitated is a good one. As the district court reminded us, the practice in copyright cases has not been for courts to expand liability in response to new technologies. It is instead that any such expansion be done by Congress. This principle was the basis upon which the Supreme Court decided that Sony was not responsible for the copyright infringement that the VCR enabled. As the Court reasoned, no doubt Sony could have designed the VCR to disable the ability of users to record shows from the air. But whether Sony should have been so required was a decision for Congress. The only question that a court should ask is whether the technology has the "potential for a substantial non-infringing use". If it does, whether its use should on balance be considered infringing is a question for policymakers, not courts.

In the VCR case, Congress eventually decided that the use should be permitted - even though, without doubt, many people were copying copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright owner, and, no doubt, Sony benefited from that copying. But as Congress and the courts well recognise, copyright law is not absolute. The lines that Congress draws must balance the interests of users and copyright owners to the end of spurring innovation. That balance is inherently political. And therefore, when a new technology changes the balance, the appropriate role for a court is to leave it to the political branch to decide whether the change is to be allowed or to be remedied through new legislation.

The wisdom of this rule is something innovators in Silicon Valley are increasingly coming to see. When courts intervene to maintain copyright's balance, the inevitable consequence is that innovation is harmed. If every innovator with technologies affecting content must bear the burden of a lawsuit before his innovation can be allowed, there will be many fewer innovations in the distribution and creation of content. That in turn will harm artists and technologists alike. Better to let the innovation happen, and then consider whether the change caused by the innovation is so significant as to require new legislation by the legislature.

Judge Wilson's decision is the first sign of a thaw in the winter that has stopped the technology revolution cold. Everyone would benefit if the wisdom of this lower court could percolate up through the federal judiciary. Within the limits of the constitution, the balance that is copyright protection is not meet for judicial review. The costs of the inappropriate review that has defined the past half-decade should remind the courts of a lesson they should have learned long ago.
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentSe...=1051389898745

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Uncorking What's Top in Pop
Company Tracks Online Song Swaps for Radio Play
Lindsey Arent

Times have changed for most radio stations, including San Francisco's Live 105. Fewer listeners, stiffer competition from other media, and the online downloading craze have pretty much thrown everyone in radio for a loop.

It's the job of program director Sean Demery to figure out what people want to hear. One new way is by monitoring what file swappers are searching for and sharing most.
And he does it with the help of a market-data software company called Big Champagne.

"It basically gives me pretty much what's happening in the mass culture," Demery said. "It tells me what's popular."

Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, compares what his company does online to what the Nielsen rating system does for television.

The company analyzes billions of search requests and song downloads with proprietary software that lives on public peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as KaZaA and Morpheus. Clients then get categorized lists of online music trends, right down to the city in which downloaders live.

"What our technology does is take advantage of the fact that in particular, the exchange of media is dependent on information published by each person connected to the Net," Garland said.

That data is proving to be priceless.

In the weeks before rapper 50 Cent's new album Get Rich Or Die Tryin' hit stores, Big Champagne saw his songs were queried and swapped like crazy, prompting Interscope Records to release the album five days sooner. The album is now a huge hit.

"We have a demand curve that precedes the introduction of new content," Garland said.

Translation? Your searches and your song swaps count. Literally. For Live 105's Demery, the information helps, to a degree. But it also reveals a surprising quirk of the music industry.

"When you really boil it down to what's hot on the downloads," Demery said, "it's the same stuff people are buying, the same stuff people are requesting, the same stuff the radio stations are playing."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scite...spy030509.html

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Labels Ramp Up Web Piracy Offensive
Brian Garrity
Reuters

In recent months, the major labels have been stepping up the practice of spoofing -- populating peer-to-peer (P2P) networks with decoy music files -- in an effort to discourage unlicensed file sharing.

Providers of spoofing services, like New York-based Overpeer, say their business has increased as much as 20 times in less than a year.

Finding ways to make the P2P experience less palatable is viewed by the labels as a key to creating consumer interest in commercial digital music as services like Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store begin to take root.

Alternatives to litigation also figure to play an increasingly important role in the recording industry's fight against digital piracy. A recent federal court ruling that P2P networks like Grokster and StreamCast are not breaking copyright laws by distributing their software has clouded the effectiveness of pursuing such services in court.

Labels are so far stopping short of engaging in technological sabotage, recording industry sources tell Billboard.

A recent report in The New York Times said that the major labels are financing the development of covert anti-piracy software programs -- some of them potentially illegal -- that affect the performance of computers engaging in downloading activity, divert downloaders to other sites, and, in some cases, delete files from the user's hard drive.

Major-label representatives maintain that they are only engaging in "legal technical measures."

Sources familiar with the situation say the majors are more interested in expanding the scope of spoofing to include more catalog and international titles rather than engaging in potentially illegal anti-piracy methods.

Overpeer CEO Marc Morgenstern says his company is not involved in any activity that affects the computer desktop or beyond.

He notes that spoofing efforts "do not have to go across the line" to be effective.

Morgenstern maintains that current practices -- which center on injecting slow-downloading, silent, and fragmented files into P2P systems -- work well enough and do not require more aggressive technological methods.

Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., last year introduced a bill in the House that would remove liability from copyright holders that employ technological measures to address piracy.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml...toryID=2715553

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Comcast: DSL won't sever cable's lead
Ben Charny

Comcast's broadband unit is sitting pretty despite playing catch-up in a price war between cable and DSL providers, said the division's top executive.

Comcast Cable Communications is looking forward to drawing customers away from broadband rivals, not losing them, unit president Stephen Burke said during a conference call with analysts Thursday.

His comments followed a first-quarter earnings report in which Comcast said its broadband unit added 400,000 new customers in the past three months. However, the Philadelphia-based cable company posted a first-quarter net loss of $297 million, or 13 cents a share, compared with a loss of $89 million, or 9 cents a share, a year earlier.

"We don't see a major change in the competitive environment," Burke said during the analyst call. "We would ultimately like to gain subscribers from DSL" (digital subscriber line) providers such as Verizon Communications and SBC Communications, he added.

Earlier this week, Verizon slashed its monthly rate for broadband access by 30 percent to $35, undercutting Comcast's price by about $15. Analysts believe that Verizon's price cut should help it sell more high-speed Internet service, which it offers via DSL connections.

Although cable broadband is more expensive than DSL, it remains the dominant technology choice for broadband access in the United States. This lead is credited to cable's fast download speeds and its availability in nearly every major U.S. market. About 10 million U.S. homes get broadband access from cable providers such as Comcast, while about six million use Verizon and other telephone companies' DSL services.

The price wars between cable and DSL providers began a year ago, according to Burke, when Verizon and SBC offered promotional $35-a-month DSL subscriptions in about 75 percent of Comcast's markets. (Verizon's price cut is now its standard rate.) Comcast answered back, offering promotional plans that cut its usual $50-a-month subscription rate in half to about $25.

The results, Burke said, are in, indicating last quarter's rise in new subscriptions. Comcast said it expects to add even more customers for the fiscal year 2003 than previously estimated.

The price cuts at Verizon underscore the technical challenges that keep DSL in the background, Burke said. While cable operators have no trouble providing Web service at speeds of 1.5mbps or higher to all of their customers, DSL networks are notoriously less successful at offering that same Web surfing experience to homes or offices more than 12,000 feet from a DSL network core.

Verizon spokeswoman Bobbi Henson said the carrier is addressing that speed problem by adding remote terminals to push the DSL signal well beyond the 12,000 foot range. "The technology issue is a thing of the past," she said Thursday.

"Cable's 70 percent market share is no secret," she said. "They have some immense advantages, but that's starting to change."

SBC spokesman Michael Coe said DSL subscriptions have been on the rise in general. In some markets, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, DSL subscribers now outnumber cable broadband subscribers. "Making DSL affordable is a very important step to take in this process," he said.
http://news.com.com/2100-1034-1000615.html

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Microsoft, Best Buy accused of scam
Reuters

A Los Angeles man has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Best Buy and Microsoft, accusing them of scamming customers by charging them for online services without their knowledge.

The suit, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims the alleged scam stemmed from a promotion in which customers at Best Buy, who paid for purchases with credit or debit cards, were given free compact discs that allowed them to try Microsoft's online service, MSN.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, and Best Buy, the largest consumer-electronics chain, were partners in a pact dating back to 1999 to promote Microsoft's money-losing MSN Internet access service.

"We haven't yet received the complaint and therefore have no comment," a Microsoft representative said. Best Buy representatives were not immediately available for comment.

Plaintiff Samuel Kim said he unwittingly became a victim in February after making a purchase at a Best Buy store in Los Angeles with his debit card. At checkout, a store employee scanned Kim's debit card and, without any explanation to him, scanned a trial MSN compact disc and placed it in his shopping bag, the lawsuit said.

When Kim asked why the compact disc had been scanned, the employee allegedly said it was to keep track of inventory. But Best Buy apparently sent Kim's debit card information to Microsoft, which activated an MSN service account in his name without telling him, the lawsuit said.

Kim did not use the compact disc but discovered after receiving his bank statement that Microsoft had deducted a monthly service charge from his account, the suit said. He has not been unable to get a full refund from either company, said Anthony Lee, his attorney.

The lawsuit asks a judge to stop the alleged scam and demands a refund for Best Buy customers that were involved.

"The ability of companies to charge people and actually take money from them without their knowledge is an interesting development and one that we are seeing more often, particularly through debit cards," said attorney Eric Gibbs, who also represents Kim.

Best Buy's shares fell sharply last October when it warned that it could lose its contract to market MSN, which provided advertising money and profit sharing to Best Buy, a major retailer of Microsoft products.
http://news.com.com/2100-1026-1000393.html

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But do you trust them?
Radio ID chips to come with kill switch
Richard Shim

Manufacturers and a key industry group expect to introduce a kill switch for controversial radio frequency identification tags before the inventory- tracking chips are shipped in products to retail shelves.

The Auto ID Center, which is helping to develop the radio frequency identification (RFID) specification, said last week that chips incorporating a kill switch are due this summer from manufacturers including Philips Semiconductor, Alien Technology and Matrics.

Philips already has prototypes available, and the chips and will be in full production by the end of the year, according to Dirk Morgenroth, marketing manager for smart labels at Philips. The tags will not be able to be reactivated once they've been disabled, Morgenroth said.

If the tags make it into retail products, consumers will be asked if they want to have identification features disabled when they leave a store, professor Sanjay Sarma, a founder and chairman of research at the Auto ID Center, said in an interview with CNET News.com.

"We have taken privacy seriously for three years, and we've been working to add an opt-in and -out feature to chips," Sarma said.

RFID tags could help to streamline and improve inventory management by allowing manufacturers to more efficiently track the flow of goods. For example, RFID technology could allow a company to add a box of goods to its inventory systems by scanning them all at once, as opposed to having to unpack the box and checking one piece at a time.

But privacy groups have expressed concerns over what the chips could be used for once retail products have left stores.
http://news.com.com/2100-1039-999794.html

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Embedded Linux powers "first hand-held software radio"

Vanu, Inc. is demonstrating what it claims represents "the first hand-held software radio" at the technology showcase of the "Wireless Innovations: New Technologies and Evolving Policies" conference in Washington, DC today. The demonstration basically consists of a standard XScale-based Hewlett-Packard iPAQ PDA running an embedded Linux operating system; a prototype 100-475 MHz radio transceiver is housed in a standard iPAQ expansion pack, and Vanu's "Software Radio" technology, running on the iPAQ, implements the required signal processing functions.

The current configuration of the device is said to support commercial analog FM radio services, including Family Band Radio as well as the public safety APCO 25 digital standard, with future prototypes under development that will include operational capabilities of up to 900 MHz and support for cellular and PCS standards such as TDMA and GSM. The Vanu RF card electronics is shown in the photo on the right.



According to Vanu, unlike traditional hardware radios, which are limited to one specific type of communication service, "software radio" technology enables a single wireless device to implement multiple radio standards and frequency bands, thus eliminating the need for multiple hardware radios when communication with multiple radio services is required. For example, in the public safety community, decentralized purchasing decisions, legacy systems, and continual technical advancements often leave first responders unable to communicate with each other at an emergency scene -- a problem which could easily be remedied via handheld software radios capable of operating among multiple standards and frequencies.

The photo on the left shows an early prototype of Vanu's iPAQ Software Radio, whereas the current version (shown on the right) has the added radio transceiver built into a standard iPAQ expansion pack and implements the signal processing natively on the XScale processor.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7890250038.html

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Let’s go to the videotape!
Codec shoot-out 2003

Phew. For the past 3 weeks I've literally spent every free minute in preparation for a new codec comparison. The new comparison was supposed to be the biggest one so far, increasing the number of sources and codecs to a previously unseen level. I also meant to include a H.264 (AKA MPEG-4 AVC) codec into the test, but having spoken to the developers of the prospective candidate (Vanguard Software H.264 beta2) I decided to postpone the test because this codec currently does not have any postprocessing, and does not correspond to the latest revision of the standard (the standard has been finalized a few weeks back). Beta3, which should fix those "issues" was supposed to be released in time for the comparison, but is still not out at the time I'm writing this. This left me with 7 codecs to be tested on the two well known sources and a new one: Futurama (an animated series from the creators of the Simpsons).

Now a quick overview of what has happened since the last comparison:
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-103-1.htm

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Group hopes to leapfrog 802.11 for wireless video
Rick Merritt

SAN MATEO, Calif. — A working group quietly kicked off an effort this week to bring the 1394 protocol over 802.15.3 wireless networks. Backers hope the approach could leapfrog efforts on 802.11 to provide a route for consumer electronics companies to send high quality video signals over wireless home networks.

The group hopes to get official blessing for its efforts from the 1394 Trade Association when it meets in Oxford in July and finish its work in about 12 months. Members of the group include Sony, Philips, Pioneer and several startup chip and software companies.

"A lot of OEMs have tried to send video over 802.11, especially 802.11a, but the video wasn't at the level where they felt comfortable putting out a product in the market," said Alan Heberling, the chairman of the new study group.

Heberling, who heads up protocol development at ultrawideband chip set developer XtremeSpectrum Inc. (Vienna, Va.) hopes the group's work with pave a route for those OEMs to put video over wireless ultrawideband and 802.15.3 networks which can use the same underlying media access controller. The 1394 interface is a key interconnect for sending copy protected digital video between TVs, set-tops and other systems.

Developers in the 1394 Trade Association suggest efforts to put 1394 over 802.11 have become bogged down while the new group is gaining momentum. Nevertheless, Heberling said the new group would develop a protocol adaptation layer for 802.15.3, following the model set by the existing 802.11 group in the association. If successful, existing 1394 applications code should run without change over the wireless net.

Heberling is also working with the 802.15.3a committee attempting to set standards for an ultrawideband physical layer chip that could transmit at data rates of 100 Mbits/second initially but be upgraded to versions at 200 and 400 Mbits/s, albeit at ranges of 10 meters or less.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030502S0060

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Microsoft Security Could Be A Powerful Tool For Protecting Peer-To-Peer Networks
Dennis Fisher

Record labels and movie studios are eagerly anticipating the potential file protection capabilities of Microsoft Corp.'s Next-Generation Secure Computing Base technology, but new research contends the architecture's security features may also help pirates and file swappers protect their ill-gotten gains.

At the heart of the issue, according to a paper due to be published this week by researchers from Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass., is a key feature of NGSCB called remote attestation. The technology lets one piece of code digitally sign another program or a piece of data to assure the recipient of the signature that the code was built by a cryptographically identifiable software stack.

Microsoft and its partners envision this system being used to verify the identity of software running on remote machines and make certain the software hasn't been modified since its manufacture.

This kind of protection is seen as central to the types of advanced digital rights management systems sought by content owners as a countermeasure against piracy. However, this chain of trust can be turned around and used by the people doing the illegal copying and distribution, according to the paper's authors.

If the operator of a peer-to-peer network such as those commonly used to post and trade music, movies and other media files wanted to ensure that only authorized users—and not representatives of record labels or movie studios—were on the network, the operator would simply need to require that every client application entering the network be certified by an authority that the operator controls. Thus, every user would be individually authorized.

"Though this technology was envisioned to thwart pirates, it is exactly what a peer-to-peer system needs to ensure that no client application can enter the network unless that application, and the hardware and operating system it is running on, has been certified by an authority trusted by the existing clients," conclude graduate students Stuart Schechter (pictured left) and Rachel Greenstadt and a Harvard professor of computer science and electrical engineering, Michael Smith. The trio will present the paper at the Workshop on Economics and Information Security at the University of Maryland, in College Park, at the end of this month.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1053278,00.asp

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Marx's Nightmare
Arnold Kling

Frequent TCS contributor and fellow economist James Miller has written an unfortunate screed on the topic of file-sharing. He takes the view that a recent court ruling has made it more difficult to stop consumers from trading music files. Miller heaps rhetorical scorn on the file-sharing phenomenon, calling it "digital communism... theft... piracy... Karl Marx's dream..."

In his peroration, Miller asks us to imagine "the fate of stores if there were no effective laws against shoplifting: Theft would drive them to bankruptcy... Of course, copyright holders could still find a few ways to profit in a world of rampant piracy. Movies could be financed by the sale of action figures and musicians could profit from concerts. It's difficult to see how authors could profit, however, except, perhaps, by begging for tips."

What Miller fails to allow for is any middle ground between the technology-hostile position of the recording industry and Hollywood on the one hand and communist nihilism on the other. This is a false dichotomy, as several in the blogosphere have tried to explain.

Siva Vaidhayanathan wrote, "First, no one who understands the value of reasonable copyright is seriously arguing against copyright. But no one should be suckered into believing that just because some copyright is good [that] maximal copyright is better... Jack Valenti et. al. opposes copyright. He and the industry he represents want to [install] technocratic regulatory systems that would be clumsy, counterproductive, and futile."

Ed Rescorla points out that only a noisy minority directly opposes intellectual property. On the other hand, many people are what he calls Pragmatists, who "view Intellectual Property as a necessary evil. The traditional economic analysis of IP is that it's required to incentivize people to engage in the kinds of intellectual effort that produce content... In the view of the Pragmatists, the amount of protection given to IP has gone beyond the point of efficiency and so should be reduced. See the 'economist's brief' in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case for a pretty good exposition of this view."

(Rescorla also alludes to economists Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, whose work I discussed in A Metaphor's Metaphors.)

In an exchange with Rescorla, Ed Felten writes, "I would instead label the three factions (which he calls the IP Lobby, Pragmatists, and Idealists) as the 'Big-IP', 'Small-IP', and 'No-IP' factions.

"So far, the Big-IPs have done a pretty effective job of cementing the alliance between the Small-IPs and the No-IPs, most notably by treating the Small-IPs as if they had taken No-IP positions."

In particular, I believe that it is not constructive to take the metaphor of "intellectual property" completely literally. As Dan Bricklin points out, "Each copy of a videotape, book, or computer program in a department store is separately bought and paid for by that store from a wholesaler before being put on the shelf. Each shoplifted copy is not just a missed sale, but it is also out-of-pocket money paid without a return... Software is different. Buying software legally online is almost just as easy as pirating it today. Software has been susceptible to piracy for decades, yet, according to the BSA (an anti-piracy group) 'the commercial software industry... [is] the fastest growing industry in the world.'"

Bricklin makes the point that shoplifting imposes real costs on stores to replace lost inventory. Online piracy only represents a theoretical lost sale. He argues that "if we are basing our laws on the belief that online sharing is the same as shoplifting, we are making a mistake."

I continue to believe that the best metaphor for file sharing is movie popcorn. As I put it two months ago, "Music publishers who go after file swappers are like movie theater owners who won't let you bring your own popcorn to the theater. They are simply alienating their customers while trying to protect a revenue stream that they were not going to get, anyway."

So who is it that threatens the free enterprise system as we know it? Is it the file-swappers, as James Miller claims? Or is it the lawyers and lobbyists for the recording industry, who treat the greatest feature of free markets - the ability to encourage, incorporate, and apply technological innovation - as a bug?
http://www.techcentralstation.com/10...D=1051-050903B

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Harmony on the Stage, Solo at the Bank
Geraldine Fabrikant

WHEN they stepped onstage at the Grammys ceremonies in February to accept the Legend Award, Barry and Robin Gibb, the two remaining Bee Gees, gave a touching tribute to their brother Maurice, who died a month earlier at the age of 53. Barry Gibb told the audience that "the measure of a man is his family" and gracefully handed the gold statue to Maurice's son, Adam.

It was an appearance that cast the Gibb family as close-knit. But it masked a dispute in recent years among the three brothers, whose falsetto singing in the soundtrack of the film "Saturday Night Fever" came to symbolize the harmonies of the disco world in the late 1970's. That soundtrack, which once sent polyester partyers swooping onto dance floors around the world, turned the Gibbs into megastars.

Though they continued to work together on albums and their families live within minutes of one another in Miami, Barry Gibb, the oldest, has at times been unhappy with his brothers, in part over the management of the Gibb business interests.

By January of this year, his relationship with Robin had so deteriorated that Barry did not even know that Robin had made "Magnet," his first solo album since 1985, until it was released. And Barry said he was "devastated" to learn that Robin, in that album, had altered a classic Bee Gees song, "Wish You Were Here."

Although Barry Gibb's rapport with Maurice was better, in 2001 Barry severed ties with Michael Eaton, a British lawyer who represented the group for over 30 years.

Maurice and Robin Gibb, who were fraternal twins, stayed with Mr. Eaton. But Barry hired his own team to direct his business affairs. And in a striking divergence from decades in which the trio acted as one, Barry decided last year to have Warner/Chappell Music, a part of AOL Time Warner, handle his interest in the song publishing business. His brothers stayed with the group's longtime publisher, the BMG unit of Bertelsmann.

The turmoil among family members has been resolved in recent weeks, Barry Gibb said in a telephone interview last Wednesday. But the differences among the Bee Gees, which he discussed during an interview earlier this year at his Miami mansion, offer insights into how complex family dynamics can affect what amounts to a successful family business.

"What changed for me was a midlife crisis," said Barry Gibb, who is now 57. Sitting in the living room of the mansion he has owned since 1981, and dressed casually in sports slacks, a blue shirt and a gray cardigan, he talked softly of the unhappiness that led him to rethink how his affairs were handled.

Mr. Gibb, whose songwriting skills were responsible for many Bee Gees hits, said that about five years ago he began to look hard at how the group's music was being promoted and how his own finances were managed. He didn't like what he found. He didn't feel that the publishing rights to the group's songs were promoted aggressively enough in a time when popular songs are used not only for advertising but also in other commercial applications like background music on telephone systems. "They were stagnating," he said.

Mr. Gibb also wanted a better handle on his investments, which were spread between Britain and the United States.

WHEN you get to 50, you change," he said. "I gained a fascination for the business, for understanding it, for archaeology, for ancient civilizations. You just reach an age where other things really start to interest you."

Barry Gibb also had issues with a contract that his lawyers had negotiated with Universal. He found that the records were "cross collateralized," a common industry practice in which Universal could recover, from the sale of other albums, the advance it paid the group for an album that did not do well.

"It lit me up," Barry Gibb recalled. "I had never agreed to it, and it was in the contract. That was when the trouble started."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/bu...ALK.html?8hpib

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Low-Cost Wireless RFID Networks
Jonathan Collins

One of the big challenges in creating large-scale RFID tracking systems across store shelves or warehouse racks is installing networks of readers. Wireless 802.11b access points offer one solution, but Ember Corp., a networking software company based in Boston, is working on another option.

Ember recently signed a partnership deal with Norway’s Chipcon AS, which specializes in making radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) and systems on a chip (SoCs). The two companies are working on new chips that take advantage of Ember's technology to create low-cost wireless networks for RFID readers, as well as systems for industrial monitoring and building automation.

According to Ember, adding its controllers to the radio chips can turn the chips into wireless routers capable of routing application-specific data across a wireless mesh network. The active chips, which are currently capable of transmitting 35 kilobits of data per second, are expected to cost less than $5 and have enough battery power to last for more than five years.

Mesh networks are a hot topic among technologists these days. They are ad hoc peer-to-peer networks in which devices organize themselves and assist each other in transmitting data. If one node goes down, data is just re-routed through another low-cost device.

Embers’ embedded networking software uses a mesh network routing algorithm to create these resilient networks. The new Chipcon RFICs could be used in a range of applications, such monitoring and reporting equipment status and environmental changes, or acting as a simple on/off control switch.

Robert Poor, co-founder and CTO of Ember, says that a low power mesh network could be used to connect RFID readers to back-office systems more cheaply than using CAT5 cable. Not only is the cost of deployment lower, he says, but the mesh network is far more flexible because readers could be moved without the need for ripping up floors, walls or ceilings to reroute cables.

"Wired networks are just not appropriate for networking unattended devices, such as RFID readers on retail shelves," says Poor. The technology can also be used to extend the reach of RFID by monitoring the tag and relaying the information over the mesh network when the tag is out of range of fixed RFID readers, he says.
http://216.121.131.129/article/articleprint/420/-1/1/

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Fizzer worm may be fizzling
But some say the problem hasn't peaked yet
Paul Roberts

Almost a week after it first appeared on the Internet, the Fizzer worm appears to be losing momentum, but experts disagree on whether or not the new computer virus has peaked.
Fizzer was first detected late last week and spread slowly at first, according to a statement by antivirus company Sophos.

However, Monday saw a surge of incidents of the virus on the Internet, with most antivirus companies upgrading their rating of the virus from a low profile threat to a moderate or high threat.

On Monday, for example, F-Secure of Helsinki raised the alert on Fizzer to its highest level, saying it was one of the most widespread viruses currently in circulation. Symantec's Security Response likewise upgraded its rating of Fizzer to a level 3 threat on a scale of one to five, citing 146 customer submissions of the virus including 26 from corporations, according to a statement from the Cupertino, Calif., company.

On Tuesday, most antivirus companies maintained their threat rating on Fizzer, but there is disagreement on whether the virus is continuing to rapidly proliferate, as it did on Monday.

"We saw in increase in the number of infections sharply over the course of (Monday) but (Fizzer) didn't spread widely and appears to have died out," said Chris Belthoff, senior product manager at Sophos.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/...NFizzle_1.html

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'Big music' set to declare war on its audience
Michael Geist

Many online music fans reflect on July 26, 2000, as the day the music almost died. On that day a U.S. court ruled that Napster, the file-sharing phenomenon that took the world by storm, was engaged in copyright infringement and should be shut down. While the service survived for nearly 18 months longer, that initial decision clearly marked the beginning of the end for Napster. Since the conclusion of the Napster battle, the recording industry has sought both business and legal solutions to the online music issue. On the business side, new fee-based subscription alternatives have been introduced, though none has proven to be particularly popular. On the legal front, the next generation of file sharing services, including Kazaa, Morpheus, and Grokster, have been hit with lawsuits premised on legal arguments similar to those used in the Napster litigation. The last week of April, 2003, is also likely to be well-remembered ? as the next stage in the evolution of online music. In one week's time, Apple Computer introduced a new, fee-based music service that instantly seemed to render the competition obsolete, while two U.S. court decisions foreshadowed a shift away from suing music services toward suing music swappers.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...l=969048863851

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Colleges disable network access for file swappers
Jefferson Graham

College administrators, under pressure from record labels, have dramatically stepped up efforts to wean students from downloading copyrighted music and movie files via high-speed university networks. "More schools are becoming more aware of the seriousness of the problem and trying to figure out ways to deal with it," says John Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities. "Administrators see this as a multidimensional problem -- bad press, bandwidth, educational and ethical responsibilities to teach." The Recording Industry Association of America has been working with universities since last fall to increase efforts at education, involving letters and e-mail to students about copyright theft, and to make punishments more severe (specifically, loss of Internet access) if students are caught using the system for uses other than homework.
http://www.detnews.com/2003/technolo...12/-161225.htm

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High-tech lawsuit could become modern version of David and Goliath
Buzzy Gordon

Two Israelis who invented a wireless game technology hope they’ll become a high-tech version of David battling a computing Goliath.

Michael Kagan and Ian Solomon immigrated to Israel from England in the 1970s, eventually becoming business partners in the early 1990s.

Their latest company, Peer-to-Peer Systems, is suing Palm Inc., the Silicon Valley personal digital assistant giant, and AOL-backed Cybiko Inc., which has developed an operating system for its own brand of mobile hand-held devices, for patent infringement.

Peer-to-Peer filed suit in U.S. District Court in Delaware this January alleging that Palm’s use of its PDAs and clone PDAs for multiple-player games, played wirelessly and interactively on two or more devices, directly infringes a 1995 technology that Kagan and Solomon patented in 1997.

Peer-to-Peer also claims that Palm’s promotion of multiplayer games in selling its PDAs and clone PDAs induces patent infringement.

“Unfortunately, the general feeling of many large corporations vis-a-vis individual inventors is that the latter do not have the resources to protect their patents,” Kagan says. “These companies often decide simply to infringe the patent — perhaps inadvertently at first, but later deliberately — in order to avoid paying anything at all to the rightful owners of the technology.”

Peer-to-Peer’s attorney, Stephen Sulzer, said the Israeli company took action against Palm after settlement talks between the companies broke down.
http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.a...ntcategoryid=1

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Apple looks to iTunes Europe
Owen Gibson

After years enjoying the pleasures of illegally downloaded songs, music fans are starting to enjoy an unexpected pleasure of going legal - and all because of their warm feelings towards the Apple computer brand.

Apple is negotiating with major European record labels to launch a version of its hugely successful iTunes online music download store before the end of the year.

The legal download service, launched in the US two weeks ago by Apple's chief executive, Steve Jobs, has got off to a hugely successful start with over 1m songs downloaded in its first week of operation.

And now Apple is hoping to prove it can solve the problems facing record companies in Europe too.

The secret of Mr Jobs' success is partly to do with Apple's cachet, its reputation for good design and for championing consumers rather than corporations.

But it is also to do with the simplicity of the transaction. Songs cost a flat fee of 99 cents to download, and the company has developed software that allowed users to "burn" an unlimited number of tracks to CD or transfer them to the Apple iPod portable music player.

At present the service is available only to owners of Apple computers, representing around 3% of the world's total, but the company is also planning a Windows version for PCs before the end of the year.

Apple, which pioneered the personal computer in the 1970s before Microsoft and IBM took over as the dominant force, has retained a certain prestige among its consumers, who tend to be loyal advocates of the brand.

Analysts have suggested this also has much to do with the success of the Apple service because the company is perceived as being on the side of the consumer, rather than trying to rip them off.

The success of the iTunes store is also expected to convince those major artists who have yet to licence their music for use on the web, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to look again at the idea.

Mr Jobs, a big fan of the Eagles, intervened personally in order to get the veteran Hotel California rockers to change their minds about the web.

Music industry insiders say Apple, buoyed by the overnight success of the US version, plans to launch a European service before the end of the year - as soon as it can agree rights deals with the record labels and artists involved.

Given record labels' growing enthusiasm for the concept of paid-for downloads, as evidenced by EMI's recent decision to make over 90% of its catalogue available on the web, the service could launch by the autumn.

"Hitting 1m songs in less than a week was totally unexpected," said the Warner Music chairman, Roger Ames. "Apple has shown music fans, artists and the music industry as a whole that there really is a successful and easy way of legally distributing music over the internet."
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia...954544,00.html

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Radio row erupts over accuracy of singles charts
Julia Day

A three-way battle to reflect teenagers' changing musical tastes has given way to a bitter war of words between the BBC and two commercial radio groups over the Top 40 pop charts.

The BBC has accused commercial broadcasters of creating listener confusion and building music charts that are open to manipulation by radio programmers.

It said Emap's launch of a second commercial radio chart had started a turf war among commercial stations over which chart to broadcast.

The commercial groups hit back, variously accusing the BBC's chart model of being "broken" and "past its sell-by date".

The row centres on the inexact science of measuring teenage listening habits

Before the arrival of the internet, BBC Radio 1's Top 40 countdown on Sunday afternoons - based solely on single sales - was the pre-eminent chart.

But now commercial companies believe it is vital to take airplay and internet listening into account because online music piracy is widespread and teenagers are often long bored of a single by the time it is released in the record shops.

The BBC still bases its Official Top 40 on singles sales even though sales have plummeted by one third in the past five years.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/radio/st...943780,00.html

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Student's file-sharing site has new tune
Robert Stern

A Princeton University student who owes the recording industry $15,000 as part of a legal settlement reached over his alleged online music piracy is using the Internet site that led to the showdown to help chip away at the bill.

"A lot of people wanted to know if there was a way for them to help out," Princeton sophomore Daniel Peng said.

"I decided to set up a Web site" for that purpose, he said. "That's basically it."

Peng, 18, arranged an account with the online transaction firm Paypal that briefly solicited donations on his Web site - wake.princeton.edu. - last week.

But because the site is hosted on a Princeton University server, the university forced Peng to remove the box that allowed visitors to make online donations.

Instead, he said, the university let him leave a link to an independent Internet address Peng subsequently set up to raise funds for his legal bill and lawsuit settlement.

Previously, Peng's Princeton address enabled visitors to share music files.

That prompted a lawsuit against him by the Recording Industry Association of America.

The RIAA alleged that wake.princeton.edu was one of numerous online music-piracy sites operated by students around the country to illegally distribute thousands of copyrighted songs.

Hoping to discourage online music piracy, the RIAA filed federal copyright-infringement lawsuits against Peng and three students from two other colleges, seeking up to $150,000 in damages per song from the students.

Earlier this month, the RIAA announced it had agreed to settle the litigation.

Although Peng and the other students denied wrongdoing, they agreed to pay the RIAA restitution ranging from $12,000 to $17,500 and stop distributing copyrighted music.

Peng's lawyer, Howard Ende, has said his client was the victim of the recording industry's inappropriate use of the legal system for public relations purposes.
http://www.nj.com/news/times/index.s...3106146990.xml

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Music industry turns against file sharing customers
Mike Ingram

The recording giants have turned their fire on music consumers after failing to halt online music swapping, despite shutting the file-sharing pioneer Napster.

Last month recording labels organised in the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued four university students who allegedly ran file-sharing networks on their school’s local networks.

The students, two from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the others from Princeton University and Michigan Technological University, were accused of operating “local area Napster networks” by the RIAA. The organisation claims the students operated Napster-like networks “designed to enable widespread music thievery”.

Under the terms of the settlement reached this week, Jesse Jordan and Aaron Sherman, students from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, agreed to pay $12,000 and $17,000 respectively, according to an RIAA announcement on May 2. Princeton University’s Daniel Peng and Michigan Technological University’s Joseph Nievelt will pay the RIAA $15,000 each.

The problems confronting the music industry are similar in character to those faced by proprietary software developers such as Microsoft in the face of developments in free Open Source software. What the recording giants, like their software counterparts, fail to grasp is that the attraction of online music is not only reduced cost but increased freedom. For many the main attraction of online music sites is not the ability to download songs free of charge but the ability to exchange opinions with fellow fans, to make their tastes known and encourage others to listen to music they think highly of. But this socialisation of music immediately comes into conflict with the interests of the multibillion-dollar corporations.

Because “intellectual property rights” translates into big money, the freedom of the consumer is curtailed in the interests of maintaining corporate profits. While the free exchange of music, as with other forms of information, grew organically out of the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium, it comes into direct conflict with the capitalist profit system and is subject to repeated attacks.

The arguments in relation to online music have been complicated by the support given to the RIAA by a number of artists in its initial campaign against Napster. This allowed the RIAA to pose as the defender of the interests of the struggling artist and individual copyright. But this is a red herring. The vast majority of copyrights are not held by the creator of the work, but by multinational labels. For many artists the Internet represents a welcome opportunity for mass distribution, independent of the recording labels. In attacking those downloading online music the recording giants are denying all artists the most important motivator for artistic creation, a wider and more attentive audience for their work.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/ma...shar-m10.shtml

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RIAA using guerilla tactics to stop piracy
Jon Healey

Unable to sue file-sharing networks into submission, the music industry is stepping up its campaign to instill fear and frustration among the people who use them to copy songs for free.

The multifaceted effort tries to paint the global networks as seedy realms rife with unseemly and dangerous material - places where computer viruses, kiddie porn and legal woes lurk amid the temptations of free tunes.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America on April 29 launched the latest element of the campaign, sending intimidating electronic warnings to users of the Kazaa and Grokster file-sharing networks.

The notes, which declare that unauthorized file-sharers "risk legal penalties," are sent via the two networks' instant message systems to anyone offering certain songs for others to copy. They aim to show users with fake names such as "bigfishmouth" and "calebsgirl" that they can be tracked as easily as a surveillance camera records shoplifters.

The not-so-subtle threat is that those who continue flouting the law will be hauled into court. Indeed, some in the music industry say it's time to start suing heavy users of the networks en masse.

As one high-ranking record executive put it, if parents got subpoenas or high school kids confronted the prospect of being viewed as pirates by college admissions personnel, "that begins to affect behavior."

The instant messages are just one of many efforts the entertainment industry has launched in the last few months to make file-sharing networks seem risky and unappealing to users and, in many cases, their parents. But the combination of electronic guerrilla tactics, threats and collaborative crackdowns faces long odds, given that tens of millions of consumers routinely use the networks to download whatever they want for free.

RIAA President Cary Sherman said the latest tactic had been in the works for months but gained urgency after a judge ruled on April 25 that Grokster's technology didn't violate copyright law.

U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson held that although network users committed piracy when they made unauthorized copies, the networks themselves weren't liable.

The major record companies and music publishers have been suing the companies that distribute file-sharing software since 1999, and they've won some important legal victories. But they haven't stopped the proliferation of file-sharing networks, the increase in their popularity or the prolonged slide in CD sales that they blame on Internet piracy.
http://newsobserver.com/24hour/techn...-6174579c.html

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Can Your ISP Stop File Swapping?
Cisco helps cable providers crack down on the use of peer-to-peer services.
Stephen Lawson

Cisco Systems Monday launched a major push to equip cable operators for new services such as voice and video, announcing a flurry of products designed to help them deploy the new offerings easily and at low cost.

Also among the benefits of what Cisco introduced Monday, cable operators will be able to crack down on heavy use of upstream bandwidth for peer-to-peer file-sharing or charge broadband customers extra for using it, Cisco executives said Monday.

As cable operators evolve from traditional one-way, analog TV service to broadband data network access, Cisco already is providing data- over-cable equipment and software. Now the San Jose, California, networking giant is moving aggressively to provide the infrastructure for voice and video services that can bring cable operators additional revenue, said Paul Bosco, vice president of broadband and cable industry development at Cisco.

To help support the new services, Cisco rolled out a version of its Broadband Processing Engine (BPE) for the UBR7246VXR, a CMTS (cable modem termination system) that now can support 12,000 cable modems per chassis. A higher capacity version of the BPE was introduced in December for the UBR10012, a larger CMTS that can support 80,000 modems per chassis for densely populated urban areas.

The BPEs can be used to upgrade thousands of Cisco CMTSes already in use, according to Cisco.

The BPE can offload processing tasks from the central processor of a CMTS to the interface cards, boosting the platform's performance. It also can perform advanced functions such as deep packet inspection, subscriber management, and application recognition.

Peer-to-Peer Problem

These advanced features can help operators solve the problem of peer-to-peer file-sharing applications taking up too much upstream bandwidth. It's common for a few peer-to-peer users to take up most of the upstream bandwidth, which is typically used mostly for Web- page requests, according to Enzo Signore, senior director of marketing for the cable and midrange routing group at Cisco.

Used along with new software features being introduced in Cisco's IOS (Internetwork Operating System), the BPE will let cable operators identify which of 85 types of applications are being used by a customer and how much bandwidth that application is consuming. If it found a bandwidth hog, the operator could warn the customer, bump the customer up to a higher level of service that costs more, or cut back on the amount of bandwidth available to the application, Bosco said. In addition to the 85 predefined application types, operators will be able to code their own application descriptions.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,110710,00.asp

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Trio face the music over internet site
Daily Telegraph

THREE students charged over an alleged Napster-style file-swapping website appeared in Downing Centre Local Court yesterday.

Tommy Le, 19, Peter Trau, 20, and Charles Kok Hau Ng are charged with breaching copyright by making hundreds of digital music files available for downloading at an internet site known as "MP3 WMA Land".

Australian Federal Police alleged the operation of the site resulted in potential music industry losses of over $60million, making the matter one of Australia's largest copyright infringement cases.

AFP alleged digital files available on the site included several hundred commercially available music albums and individual recordings, album covers and music videos belonging to Universal Music, Sony, Warner, BMG, EMI and Festival Mushroom Records.

Le, Ng and Trau were all arrested last month following AFP raids on four houses in Sydney's west and southwest.

Each of the three is charged with breaching copyright, under the Copyright Act 1968, which carries a maximum penalty of five years' jail and a $60,500 fine.

The case was adjourned to Downing Centre Local Court on July 8.

It estimates that 2.6 billion music files are downloaded every month using peer-to-peer file- sharing programs such as Gnutella, Morpheus and Kazaa, which is said to sit on more than 100 million PCs.

The Australian Record Industry Association has reported an 8.2 per cent decline in sales since 2002, as revenue tumbled from $623 million to $573 million.

The Australasian Performing Rights Association and Screenrights have a proposal before the Federal Government to put a levy on blank CDs and DVDs.
http://www.dailytelegraph.news.com.a...E21302,00.html

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Record industry faces its doom
Edna Gundersen

Evolve or die.

The digital revolution's ultimatum, delivered by an epidemic of online piracy, has the $12 billion recording industry facing the real possibility of extinction.

The sky is falling, say pessimistic observers who liken the five major labels to lumbering dinosaurs flattened by meteorites from cyberspace. Computer users download an estimated 2.6 billion music files every month. Purchases or freebies from legitimate sites constitute a fraction; most are illegal.

Aggressive legal action, drastic security measures and sophisticated counterattacks may not be enough to slow, much less halt or reverse, the flood of illegal downloading that is taking a significant bite out of record sales. In its third year of slumping revenues, the recording industry has little reason to expect a turnaround. Recordable CDs are outselling prerecorded music CDs by more than two to one. Monster file-sharing service KaZaA has 218 million registered users. Sluggish dial-up connections, long an impediment to easy downloading, are on the wane as broadband spreads rapidly outside the corporate and university sectors to the residential realm, inviting countless additional users into the free-for-all.

A recent federal court ruling that peer-to-peer systems such as Morpheus and Grokster are not acting illegally further hampers industry efforts to protect intellectual property and profits. Labels have little recourse except to sue individual file-sharers, hardly a cost-effective remedy.

Once dismissed as fringe alarmists, doomsayers who predicted the demise of the music biz are penetrating the walls of denial at music corporations, where alarming statistics are forcing a reassessment of old-school leadership and obsolete business models.

"The record companies are history," says James Hetfield of Metallica, the band that stood up to file-swapping juggernaut Napster. "They won't be around much longer unless they get with it and morph into something new that's going to help get music directly to the masses. The Internet is about as direct as it gets. Putting a CD in a store is like putting a rotary dial phone in front of a kid: 'What's that? There's no antenna.' Downloading is a sobering change."
http://www.floridatoday.com/!NEWSROOM/peoplestoryA52301A.htm

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Yeah sure, blame it on the “intern”…
RIAA apologizes for threatening letter
Declan McCullagh

Recording Industry Association of America apologized Monday to Penn State University for sending an incorrect legal notice of alleged Internet copyright violations.

The notice and subsequent apology appears to mark the first time that a faulty notification has been made public. The incident also shows just how easily automated programs that search for copyrighted material can be fooled, as well as how disruptive such notices can be on college campuses.

Last Thursday, the RIAA sent a stiff copyright warning to Penn State's department of astronomy and astrophysics. Department officials at first were puzzled, because the notification invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and alleged that one of its FTP sites was unlawfully distributing songs by the musician Usher. The letter demanded that the department "remove the site" and delete the infringing sound files.

But no such files existed on the server, which is used by faculty and graduate students to publish research and grant proposals. Matt Soccio, the department's system administrator, said that he searched the FTP server "for files ending in mp3, wma, ogg, wav, mov, mpg, etc., and found nothing that would precipitate this complaint."

Except, that is, when Soccio realized two things. The department has on its faculty a professor emeritus named Peter Usher whose work on radio-selected quasars the FTP site hosted. The site also had a copy of an a capella song performed by astronomers about the Swift gamma ray satellite, which Penn State helped to design.

The combination of the word "Usher" and the suffix ".mp3" had triggered the RIAA's automated copyright crawlers.

In an e-mail sent after a query from CNET News.com, the RIAA said a temporary employee had caused the notice to be sent. "We have withdrawn, and apologize for, the DMCA notice that had been sent to Penn State University in error. In order to safeguard against errors like this one, we have individuals look at each and every notice we send out. In this particular instance, a temp employee made a mistake and did not follow RIAA's established protocol, and we regret any inconvenience this may have caused. We are currently reviewing any other notices this temp may have sent."

The RIAA confirmed that its policy does not require its Internet copyright enforcers to listen to the complete song that is allegedly infringing.

Soccio, the department's network and information systems manager, said he had been worried that the server would be yanked from the network during the middle of Penn State's final exams last week. "If our site was shut down as this was being investigated, I wouldn't even be able to have a conversation with you because (there would) be so many people in my office wanting to know when it would be back up," he said.

The RIAA's notice went to the university's central computing office, which told the department to delete the material or "we will need to disable access to the machine hosting the infringing song." The central office then notified the department. Soccio said: "The swiftness of the activity the university wanted to take just around finals time scared the living daylights out of me. I'm just glad the university took my word for it that we weren't violating copyright law."

Now, Soccio said, he's writing a letter to his members of Congress opposing the DMCA and will post it in the department for signatures. "I'm loath to think that our educational resources and years of valuable resources can be jeopardized just because some kid in a dorm room is downloading copyrighted material," he said. "That's not a price that society should have to pay."
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-1001095.html

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The Evelyn Wood of Digitized Book Scanners
John Markoff

Putting the world's most advanced scholarly and scientific knowledge on the Internet has been a long-held ambition for Michael Keller, head librarian at Stanford University. But achieving this goal means digitizing the texts of millions of books, journals and magazines — a slow process that involves turning each page, flattening it and scanning the words into a computer database.

Mr. Keller, however, has recently added a tool to his crusade. On a recent afternoon, he unlocked an unmarked door in the basement of the Stanford library to demonstrate the newest agent in the march toward digitization. Inside the room a Swiss-designed robot about the size of a sport utility vehicle was rapidly turning the pages of an old book and scanning the text. The machine can turn the pages of both small and large books as well as bound newspaper volumes and scan at speeds of more than 1,000 pages an hour.

Occasionally the robot will stumble, turning more than a single page. When that happens, the machine will pause briefly and send out a puff of compressed air to separate the sticking pages.

For Mr. Keller, the robot, made by 4DigitalBooks, one of two companies now introducing the first automated digitization systems, is a boon.

"Think about the power of bringing our library to little schools in the middle of Africa," Mr. Keller said. "Would it make a difference for those who now have their minds closed to the idea of democracy?"

The first book-scanning robots were introduced this spring by 4DigitalBooks of St. Aubin, Switzerland, and Kirtas Technologies of Victor, N.Y. The machines have already begun to generate interest from libraries and private and nonprofit groups now working to digitize books.

Until now, the job has been done mostly by students or armies of low-cost workers in countries like India and the Philippines. But manual digitization presents significant logistical problems. Book collections may have to be moved long distances to digitization centers.

Mr. Lesk said that currently in India or the Philippines it is possible to scan and digitize a book for $1 to $4. But he acknowledged that there were significant costs in quality control.

For Mr. Keller the most vexing challenges are neither labor costs nor technology. Librarians, he said, must find a way to address the copyright restrictions that appear to be tightening as a result of new federal laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

Stanford is struggling to comply with copyright restrictions while making works that have recently lost their copyright protection available digitally. Mr. Keller said the library increased the circulation of its collection by 50 percent when it computerized its card catalog. Digitizing out-of-print books could likewise make them available to a much wider audience, he said. The payoff for building such a digital collection, he added, is vastly improved availability of a huge store of knowledge and information for teaching, learning and research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/12/te...gy/12TURN.html

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'New Media': Ready for the Dustbin of History?
Steve Lohr

Last year, Barry Diller, once an old-fashioned movie mogul, sold off his company's television and film properties and invested in Internet operations that specialize in searching and selling. Today, his company, USA Interactive, owns a major online travel service, a lodging site, a ticket booking agency and a dating site. Last week, Mr. Diller agreed to pay $734 million for Lending Tree, a Web site for finding and arranging home loans.

Mr. Diller and others have come to realize that two things succeed commercially on the World Wide Web: searching (like Google and Yahoo) and shopping (like Amazon.com and eBay).

Is that what the digital revolution has come to? Back in the mid-1990's, it was going to cause a media revolution. The shift to bits, the 1's and 0's of computer code, would change everything, wrote Nicholas Negroponte, director of the M. I. T. Media Laboratory, in his 1995 best seller, "Being Digital." Book publishers, newspapers, magazines, television networks and movie studios — all would be digitized, some would disappear, but vast new opportunities would arise.

The shift to bits promised more than just faster and cheaper distribution of the same old information and entertainment. The digital age held out the potential for a genuinely "new media." Pundits and media executives spoke about the prospect of everything from interactive television and shopping — click the zapper to suggest a new story line or buy the sweater Jennifer Aniston was wearing on that "Friends" episode — to donning goggles and suits to enter virtual worlds offering simulated sports, travel and sex.

But it hasn't happened. The companies that spent hugely on the "digital convergence" of media and Internet-era computing, AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal, which bought Mr. Diller's media properties, are in turmoil. And their visionary architects, Stephen M. Case at AOL Time Warner and Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi Universal, have been ousted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/we...ew/11LOHR.html

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Ferreting Out the Fittest in Cable
Geraldine Fabrikant

SHARES of cable companies have generally performed well this year, but when Verizon Communications, the telecommunications company, announced this month that it was cutting the rates that consumers pay for high-speed Internet access, shares of a broad range of the companies fell.

High-speed Internet access has been the fastest-growing sector for most cable companies. The Verizon announcement, on May 2, suggested a possible price war between cable and telecommunications companies, a prospect that troubles many investors. From that day until last Tuesday, most major cable stocks, including those of the Comcast Corporation, Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems and Mediacom Communications, dropped by about 5 percent or more; most have recovered partially since then.

Many analysts remain optimistic about the ability of at least two companies, Comcast and Cox, to prosper despite competition from telephone companies and satellite television, which has made inroads in the cable industry's core video business. Both Comcast and Cox have relatively strong balance sheets, and they can offer a broad array of services to attract customers, several analysts said.

Aryeh B. Bourkoff, who follows cable companies for UBS Warburg, said he believed that most of them would find a way to avoid brutal price competition. "The cable industry still has the legacy of its days as a monopoly," he said. "Even as it has faced competition from satellite TV, cable operators have been willing to sacrifice market share rather than engage in a price war."

Loss of market share could have severe consequences for companies with high debt levels, like Cablevision and Charter Communications, which could find their ability to pay off debt impaired by a drop in cash flow, Mr. Bourkoff said.

Comcast, however, has demonstrated its ability to acquire an increasing share of the high-speed data pie, several analysts said. On Thursday, when the company reported earnings for the first quarter, executives said it had added 417,000 high-speed Internet customers, up 52 percent from the period last year. Comcast has also begun to stem subscriber losses at the AT&T cable systems it acquired last year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/bu...ss/11CABL.html

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It’s a cozy planet.
Secretary of State’s Son Prepares to Loosen Rules on Media Ownership
Will lead to massive consolidation.
Stephen Labaton

The government proposed the most significant overhaul of its media ownership rules in a generation today, including a change that would allow television networks to own enough local stations to reach 90 percent of the nation's viewers.

That change — a result of increasing the cap on ownership and simultaneously preserving a 1980's formula that discounts the reach of UHF stations — is part of the package of proposals that officials said appeared to have the support of the Republican majority of the Federal Communications Commission.

The commission staff sent the detailed plan early this evening to the five commissioners ahead of a final vote in three weeks. The commission has not formally made the plan public, though major portions were disclosed today and in previous days by officials and industry experts.

The proposed changes represent the most important rewriting of the ownership rules in decades, permitting the largest media conglomerates to expand into new markets and own more properties in a single city. Analysts expect companies, including Viacom and the News Corporation, to seek to expand their media holdings substantially.

But the agency's two Democrats have expressed concerns about many aspects of the proposal. In interviews today before receiving the detailed plan, the two commissioners, Michael J. Copps and Jonathan S. Adelstein, said that they were troubled by reports that the commission's staff, after extensive consultations with Mr. Powell, would recommend raising the ownership cap while retaining the formula that discounts the audience size of UHF stations.

"I'm afraid we may be moving in a more dramatic fashion that could permanently alter the media for generations to come," Mr. Adelstein said.

Mr. Copps said that the changes, including the sharp increase in the television ownership cap, "would be a green light to considerable and significant consolidation in the future."

"It's hard to imagine how the proposals foster the goals of the rules, which are diversity of voices, localism and competition," he said.

Local affiliates and small broadcasting stations fear that any further growth in the networks would be detrimental to viewers in a variety of ways. They say it would homogenize entertainment, discourage local news coverage in favor of national broadcasts and reduce the commercial leverage of the local stations to offer independent programming.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/bu...dia/13FCC.html

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Warner Music and BMG rumoured to be hopeful of merger
David Minto

Record labels Warner Music and BMG are reported to be in preliminary merger talks in a move that appears to snub the British independent music label EMI.

The last few months have seen EMI and Warner Music, music arm of media giant AOL Time Warner, repeatedly attempt to engage each other in merger talks, though the pair had not succeed in pushing the process into any significant stage of action. New talks between Warner and BMG, the music division of the family-controlled German media group, have now been revealed to be at a preliminary but serious stage.

The news, broken by yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, is unlikely to be welcomed by EMI, which is said to be watching how things proceed carefully. The UK music group, and the only independent label among the top five industry majors, has long stated its belief that consolidation is needed in order to cut costs. Missing out on the chance to be one of the merged parties would likely see EMI increasingly sidelined in an industry dominated by big – and growing – players bolstered up by larger media organisations.

Both AOL Time Warner and Bertelsmann reported significant losses in the first quarter of this year, with their respective music divisions believed to played a major part in their fortunes. Though the two record labels would be expected to keep their music publishing operations separate, if recorded music divisions of Warner Music and BMG were to merge, the new entity would be large enough to pose a challenge to industry monolith, Universal Music.

Both AOL Time Warner and Bertelsmann have so far declined to offer official comment on the reports.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16301

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Record Companies Now Earn Living Suing
Ryan Naraine

Struggling media giant Bertelsmann's legal woes over its association with Napster escalated this week with Universal Music joining a group of songwriters and music publishers to sue the German company for supporting a rogue P2P service.

Universal Music Group, a division of French media company Vivendi, filed suit in a Manhattan court accusing Bertelsmann of contributing to digital music piracy by funding the operations of Napster at the height of its existence.

The complaint is the second major lawsuit filed against Bertelsmann with basically the same allegations. Back in February, a group of songwriters and two independent music publishers -- Frank Music and Peer International -- filed a $17 billion suit against Bertelsmann, accusing the company of contributing to copyright infringement by financially supporting Napster.

Bertelsmann, itself a former foe of Napster, pumped more than $90 million worth of investments into the peer-to-peer firm as part of the media company's ambitious plans to create a legitimate, membership-based music download service. That partnership is now at the center of the latest legal wrangle.

The latest suit from Universal is seeking damages of up to $150,000 per copyrighted file. It is unclear how many works are being claimed by the music label.

The lawsuit accused Bertelsmann of firmly controlling Napster when it was used by file- traders to pirate copyrighted works. "By the time the Napster system was shut down, Bertelsmann had materially contributed to, aided and facilitated millions upon millions of separate acts of infringement by millions of Napster users," according to the suit, filed late on Monday in New York.

The suit also comes on the heels of anoter legal tussle in Los Angeles where Universal teamed up with EMI Recorded Music to sue VC firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

That suit, which was also slapped on the firm's partners John Hummer and Hank Barry, accused the legendary dot-com VC of encouraging illegal sharing of copyrighted materials by injecting $13 million into Napster.
www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/2205801

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Hold technology creators liable?
Declan McCullagh

Should the people who invent technology be legally responsible for what other people do with it?

The Recording Industry Association of America thinks so. It recently sued four college students for running programs that create a searchable index of files on a local area network. Their offense: The utilities, which go by names like Phynd and FlatLan, are general-purpose tools that indiscriminately compile lists of copyrighted and noncopyrighted files that can be transferred from one machine to another.

The results of the RIAA's action were predictable. Faced with the unpalatable prospect of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys' fees defending themselves, the students quickly chose the lesser of two evils, handing over $12,000 and $17,000 each to the RIAA to settle the case.

The RIAA didn't do nearly as well in another lawsuit that, by contrast, benefited from an aggressive team of defense attorneys. U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson recently ruled that peer-to-peer services Grokster and Streamcast Networks, which distributes Morpheus, were not liable for what their users did. "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 a 34-page opinion.

"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," Wilson wrote. Even if the companies vanished overnight, the peer-to-peer networks would continue to operate, he noted.

That's exactly right, and it's heartening to see that at least one federal judge is tech-savvy enough to get it. Wilson rejected the arguments from the RIAA and its fellow Hollywood plaintiffs that wanted to establish the legal principle that creators of general-purpose technology can be sued if it can also be used for illicit purposes.

This isn't the first time the entertainment industry has tried to make inventors responsible for what people do with their creations. The most obvious example is the 1984 case of Sony versus Universal City Studios, in which the Supreme Court rejected an attempt to restrict the then-novel VCR after concluding it was quite "capable of substantial noninfringing uses." (In a bit of historical irony, Sony Music Entertainment is one of the plaintiffs in the current lawsuit against the P2P services. And John Ashcroft, then-attorney general of Missouri, filed a brief siding with Hollywood against those nettlesome VCRs.)

If technology inventors are held liable, it's difficult to imagine where to draw the line. The Google search engine arguably helps pirates find copies of software, and Usenet newsreaders--from Forte FreeAgent to the venerable tin and trn--surely aid and abet file-swapping on the alt.binaries hierarchy. FTP (file transfer protocol) is often used to swap illicit files, the argument might go, and the ready availability of free Perl interpreters and C compilers accelerates the development process.

I'm exaggerating to make a point, but perhaps not by much. Eight movie studios handily won a lawsuit against the DeCSS DVD- decryption utility, even though it had substantial noninfringing uses -- something the Supreme Court said was acceptable in the Sony case. The reason for the 2nd Circuit's decision: The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which, by declaring circumvention tools to be verboten, nixed part of the Sony decision's effect.

Similarly, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., introduced a bill during the last session of Congress that would make it illegal to distribute software that could be used to spam. His "Anti-Spamming Act" bans code that "has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to conceal such source or routing information" used in e-mail addresses. That would cover some spamware, true, but it could ban legitimate utilities as well. (And this is from the person who is co-chairman of the Congressional Internet Caucus.)

Then there were the encryption wars that took place through much of the 1990s, when the U.S. government tried to restrict data- scrambling software like Pretty Good Privacy just because criminals might use it to cloak their communications. The sentiment is still strong among hawks in Congress. In a floor speech two days after Sept. 11, 2001, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., called for a global prohibition on encryption products without backdoors for government surveillance.

All of these legal tactics have something in common: They seek to punish people who write code instead of the people who do mischief with it. After all, software creators and distributors are more visible and easy to target through the court system than people who stealthily use SSH or DeCSS at home and choose not to inform law enforcement about it. Instead of punishing only miscreants and spammers, the rule covers everyone.

While the RIAA's legal arguments are dangerous, I do think the group makes a reasonable economic point. Today's apparent slump in CD sales may not be due to P2P networks in the short term, but in the long term, piracy will become a more attractive option. As bandwidth becomes more plentiful, song quality improves and storage space becomes cheaper, the music industry faces a critical problem. And this means that if the record labels lose in court, they won't give up.
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-1000673.html

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A TiVo Player for the Radio
Elisa Batista

Several electronics makers are releasing new products that promise to do for radio what the TiVo digital video recorder has done for television.

These digital radio recorders, which can be preset to record a program at a certain time, enable customers to record any radio program they want and have it converted into a digital format. They then can listen to the program or upload it onto a PC in a transferable file.

Like TiVo, the audio recorders will let customers fast-forward over commercials -- although this isn't a feature the industry is actively promoting.

"What you do with it is your own doing and there's nothing we can do to stop you," said Bob Fullerton, director of marketing for one of the manufacturers, PoGo Products. "But the main use is not to skip commercials, but to record your favorite talk-radio show or the ball game you're going to miss because you are at work."

Fullerton's company has been taking orders for the Radio YourWay AM/FM recorder, which costs $150. It's a palm-sized device that weighs 2.8 ounces and will arrive in computer stores later this month. The device is primarily a radio and program recorder that converts files into a digital format, Fullerton said. Secondly, it's an MP3 player, he said.

Digital Innovations, another manufacturer, plans to release an updated version of its Neuros MP3 digital audio recorder in September.

While the current version of Neuros can record music on FM stations in real time, the upgrade will include a timer to record programs at any time.

As companies prepare to release more of these digital radio recorders, the potential conflicts the devices raise over copyright issues remain unresolved. While it is legal to record material off the radio, swapping certain digital files as was the case with copyright music on Napster is not, said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,58769,00.html

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Microsoft pay-radio increases MSN premium content
David Minto

Industry commentators have reacted to Microsoft’s launch on Monday of a premium Radio Plus service on MSN by
saying the move is indicative of Microsoft’s increasing adoption of a paid content strategy.

Lisa Gurry, Microsoft’s group product manager for MSN, told CNET news that "We look at it as a first step in a much broader strategy that we hope to deliver in time. I can't go into details,” Gurry said, “but this is the first of an array of offerings that we hope to deliver in the subscription space – not just in entertainment, but across the board there will be more subscription services. This is an example of how we're going to deliver on that vision."

Microsoft’s launch of MSN Radio Plus means that, for a fee of around E26 a year (USD29.99), subscribers will be able to hear the service without interstitial adverts, whereas at the moment an audio commercial is placed after every sixth song and a banner ad is displayed for each track. Paying listeners will also have increased search facilities based on criteria such as genre and artist, and will be saved irritating ‘buffer delays’ by the deployment of new technology.

Analysts speaking to CNET news said that Microsoft was making its foray into pay-radio at a time when the elasticity of what user are willing to pay for digital music is still unclear. Microsoft is competing in an increasingly tight sector, with pay-services from RealNetworks and Yahoo already popular (though also expensive), and Apple finally making a success of legitimate digital music downloads.

Microsoft also faces competition from one of the most hungry, revered, and feared participants in the computer industry – itself. The Microsoft Windows Media Player comes complete with a radio able to tune selected ad- supported, third-party stations.

More paid subscription services are expected to be launched on MSN before the year’s end.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16302

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Apple's online music coup ignites a budding industry

Allen Evans of Middlesex, Vermont, is no stranger to digital music. About two-thirds of his music collection was downloaded for free from Internet file-swapping networks. The rest comes from CDs he and his family already owned.

Recently, Evans downloaded four songs -- and gladly paid for them.

The 19-year-old's purchases, along with 1 million other tracks sold in the first week of business for Apple Computer Inc.'s online music store, mark a refreshing turn of events for the ailing music industry.

Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, has succeeded in a major coup, forcing tectonic change in an industry notorious for its dinosaur pace and dragon tactics.

Since the late 1990s, the music industry has battled Internet sites that allowed anyone to download and copy virtually any song for free. Entertainment companies sued to shut down such file-sharing services as Napster, but failed to stem the traffic as other sites and technologies replaced it.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/05/11/a....ap/index.html

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Invention International

Q&A: Bruce Lehman, the former head of the U.S. Patent Office, says intellectual property protection is essential for nurturing a knowledge economy in the developing world.

The knowledge economy has yet to penetrate many areas of the world. Taking up this cause is Bruce Lehman, who served from 1993 through 1998 as the commissioner of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, under President Clinton. After stepping down, he founded the non-profit International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI) to work with governments, companies and entrepreneurs in developing nations who were failing to use patent, trademark, and copyright laws for their own economic advancement. Lehman visited Technology Review last month and sat down to talk with editor-in-chief Robert Buderi and contributing writer Evan I. Schwartz about patents, intellectual property development projects, and their role in fostering economic growth.

TR: Why did you set up the institute?

LEHMAN: If you’re going to develop knowledge-based economies in other countries, and if they’re going to get rich, they have to have effective intellectual property systems. When I left government, I wanted to set up an institution which would help people in developing countries understand how to use these new tools which they’ve been forced to accept as a result of trade negotiations. Doing so would be a win-win situation because it would create constituencies in these countries that would begin to see things our way. So instead of having the tension of us against them all the time, we would move forward together into a more harmonious world.

TR: How is it funded?

LEHMAN: I started out by getting a couple of people in the private sector to give us some seed money.

TR: I saw the logos on your Web site and noticed that sponsors include Ford, IBM, Microsoft, Merck, Time Warner, and Bacardi.

LEHMAN: Those are the companies that have contributed. But the idea always was that this should be publicly funded and indeed, that’s also happened. This is a development organization, so it should come from the U.S. Agency for International Development (US AID), global development banks, things like that. We also got money from WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization).

TR: How does your mission relate to that of WIPO?

LEHMAN: WIPO is a specialized U.N. agency that deals with the world’s intellectual property system. They’re unique among UN agencies. They don’t get funded from member states, but generate about $200 million in fee revenue by administering the Patent Cooperation Treaty and the Madrid Union [for international trademark cooperation]. WIPO financed some of our first projects, in Egypt and in Jamaica.

TR: What are those projects?

LEHMAN: There’s a technology consortium in Cairo that had made digital images of all of the artifacts in the collection of the Egyptian Museum. They called up WIPO and said, “Look, we might want to put these out on the Web. What should we do about it?” And the response was: call the IIPI. And we talked to them and told them, “No, don’t do that just quite yet.” We sent a copyright lawyer to help them understand that when you create a visual image of something, even though it might be in the public domain, that you can copyright it and that you should license these things.
http://www.technologyreview.com/arti...hman050903.asp

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P2P Whipping Boy: Know the Risks
Katie Dean

While his buddies celebrate the end of final exams this weekend, Joseph Nievelt has one more deadline to meet: He's got to pony up $5,000 to the Recording Industry Association of America by June 1.

In April, the Michigan Technological University junior was sued by the RIAA for running a so-called "Napster-like" network on campus that enabled his fellow students to share music files.

The RIAA sought to recover $150,000 for each file that was downloaded, but settled with Nievelt earlier this month for a total of $15,000. After the initial payment in June, Nievelt will pay an additional $3,333 each year for the next three years to pay off the settlement.

Aaron Sherman and Jesse Jordan of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Daniel Peng of Princeton University also were sued, and have since settled with the RIAA for similar amounts.

Nievelt wouldn't say why he set up the site in the first place and admitted no wrongdoing for his actions. In fact, deciding to settle was not an easy choice, according to his lawyer.

"Joe's a student and these kinds of cases drag on for years. It would have been a major distraction for him," said his lawyer, Tom Lewry of Brooks & Kushman. Plus, the terms of the settlement "are pretty easy compared to what the RIAA wanted in the lawsuit."

"He went back and forth for a couple of weeks before he decided to settle," Lewry said.

The computer science and math double major seems to have a bright future and said he wanted to put the case behind him.

"It's nice having it done with," Nievelt said.

"I can understand that they hold the copyrights to a lot of materials that people are sharing freely, and they have a right to be upset about that," he said of the RIAA. "But I think the way they are trying to solve the problem is not good at all."

"I don't imagine people holding a higher opinion of the RIAA," he added.

Before the lawsuit, Nievelt was better-known for his sensational coding abilities. He placed fourth last year in the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge, and was the first Michigan Tech student to advance to the finals in the competition. He won $5,000 in that particular contest and ranked 13th among 11,000 TopCoders in the nation at the time. He also has competed in programming competitions sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery.

Nievelt -- as DJ QuackQuack -- also co-hosted a morning show this year, called Holla if you love tofu, on the school's radio station, WMTU. He serenaded his classmates with bands like Saves the Day and New Found Glory.

Nievelt said his website was visible from outside the school network -- so outsiders could see what files were shared -- but the files themselves could not be retrieved.

His lawyer, Lewry, called the site "virtually identical to Google," and said, "I thought it was a very strong case. It was an issue that's new and hasn't been decided before, but it's certainly one that Joe should have won if it had gone to trial."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,58783,00.html

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Destroy the media
Crispin Sartwell

These are fearful times for the megalithic media corporations who produce and sell movies, music, television shows, books and magazines. With each passing moment -- each advance in chip and network technologies, each increase in connection speed, each additional user signed on to the Internet computer networks are more capable of absorbing and distributing copyrighted materials for free. And so with each passing moment, folks are becoming a little less enthusiastic about paying.

A week ago, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled against the entertainment industry and in favor of the online file-sharing services Grokster and Morpheus, which are used to swap music and movies. The ruling was based on the rather narrow grounds that the services were incapable of distinguishing between exchanges of copyrighted and noncopyrighted materials, and hence were not responsible for illegal uses of their software. But it was also a practical victory for those of us who are enthusiastic about the free exchange of information.

The music industry, in particular, is facing the prospect of an amazingly rapid disintegration because virtually everything it tries to sell is widely available for free. And as the saying goes, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy. In a decades-long celebration of puerility and mediocrity, large record companies have become continuously more consolidated into fewer hands, less tolerant of diversity and more obsessed with a star system in which they themselves and a few artists reap huge rewards while most musicians struggle to be heard at all.

Indeed, the major labels are famous for doing things like signing original or idiosyncratic artists to exclusive contracts and then refusing to release their records, while engaging in production and publicity involving artists they manufacture from the ground up such as Britney Spears or the Back Street Boys. Indeed, the major-label versions of such central areas of artistic expression and subcultural formation as hip-hop, country music and punk are diluted, safe and boring.

Destroying that industry is a very, very good idea. And roughly the same might be said of the slavishly starstruck movie world with its bloated blockbusters, or of book publishing with its twin obsessions on authorial prestige and print run. All these industries operate by trying to enforce on us a hierarchy of artists and ideas of their own devising for their own benefit. But it is already easily possible to publish your book yourself and distribute it free to anyone who wants to read it without using paper at all or make your own music and send it out over the telephone wires. Surely that can't be something bad.

The only reasonable concern here is that it is going to become harder for people who want to work in the arts to make a living. It is of course worth keeping in mind that most such people are already excluded from making a living by the industry itself. But it is true that in a universe of free information, no one is going to be able to get rich making records, though certainly people will still pay to see live performances.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...4/IN164833.DTL

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No. 1 With a Bullet:
Madonna Opens Big, and She'd Better
Rob Tannenbaum

Two weeks ago, Madonna was so ubiquitous, it almost felt like 1985 again.

With her interview on "Dateline," a special on MTV, a feature role on the sitcom "Will and Grace" and an appearance on "Live With Regis and Kelly," the 44-year-old singer was suddenly on more channels than Donald H. Rumsfeld. She hadn't developed an affection for television (which she says she doesn't watch); her appearances were planned to promote a new album, "American Life," released that week.

The strategy succeeded. "American Life" sold 241,000 copies in its first week, the third-largest weekly total Madonna has tallied in the 12-year history of the Nielsen SoundScan charts, and she grabbed the top chart position, a remarkable achievement for a singer twice as old as most of her rivals. Still, not everyone called the record a success. "Madonna Album Is Flopping," read one headline.

The discrepancy between objectively impressive numbers and the subjective evaluation of a "flop" reveals more than just another episode of Madonna- bashing. More than ever, first-week sales have become a focus in the music business, a cause for speculating, handicapping and second-guessing.

"The music business has become like the film business," said Ron Baldwin, a manager and producer. "If a record doesn't do well the opening week, people say it's dead."

In the race for first-week supremacy, labels coordinate an attack on four fronts: radio airplay, video exposure, media coverage and placement at retail stores. But radio and MTV often wait to evaluate first-week sales before committing to airplay. Yet, strong opening sales are difficult to build without radio and video exposure.

So labels increasingly emphasize retail placement, which is more pliable. They often offer initial discounts to stores, which draw higher profits in Week 1.

The first-week strategy has been a rare area of success in a depressed business. After 18 years of growth, overall CD sales dropped in 2001, and are down 7.3 percent this year; by contrast, sales for weekly chart-toppers are up more than 40 percent this year, compared with those in the same period last year. "The labels are doing a better job of getting records to debut large," concludes Geoff Mayfield, director of charts at Billboard magazine.

To create big first weeks, labels use "smoke and mirrors," says a manager who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"It's a well-known dirty secret," he said. "Some labels buy their own records. It's part of the marketing plan, to buy CD's wholesale at $6 a pop, and Sound- Scan them."

Two years ago, a Los Angeles Times article reported that record companies hired "independent consultants" to generate falsely high sales, and although all five record groups denied engaging in such duplicitous behavior, SoundScan eliminated some stores from its tallies because of what it called anomalies in the reporting system.
http://nytimes.com/2003/05/11/weekinreview/11TANN.html

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Digital rights: What MS could learn from Apple
David Coursey,

I received a letter from Steve Ballmer last week, the same digital rights management (DRM) message the Microsoft CEO sent to a half-million other registered customers. Maybe I expected too much, but I was hoping Steve would tell me something I didn't already know, rather than just tout the wonders of the DRM package he wants to sell my company.

FOR MONTHS, maybe even years, I've asked Microsoft to tell me what they think people should be able to do with the content they "own." I use the quotes because, while you may own the physical manifestation of the content (a CD or book, for example), you never own the content itself.

Microsoft has, however, been silent on the issue. The closest the company has come to making a statement on the subject is the way it handled the DVD recording debacle involving its Media Center PCs. After initially locking down video content--typically TV programs-- recorded on the machine, Microsoft eventually chose to let content owners decide whether a particular program could be recorded onto a DVD that could be viewed on a consumer DVD player.

Beyond that concession, Microsoft has been silent on the issue of content rights for consumers. What they're doing in the business arena (building rights management into the enterprise versions of Office 2003) makes a lot of sense. But those efforts just make the company's silence on fair-use rights even more apparent.

TO MAKE THAT SILENCE even more embarrassing, Apple's Music Store and its Fairplay rights policy put that company way ahead of Microsoft on the issue and could set a standard for what consumers may do with the content they purchase.

Fairplay allows you to purchase and download any song or album for personal use. That use is defined as playback on up to three computers, unlimited syncing on iPods, unlimited burning of individual songs, and the right to burn custom playlists onto a CD up to 10 times each.

Two weeks ago, at the Music Store introduction, Steve Jobs predicted that most customers would never run into these limitations: Computers can be easily deauthorized (meaning that, while you're limited to playback on three computers, you can change which three machines those are), and any change you make to a playlist resets its "burn count" to zero, allowing you to create another 10 CDs.
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stor...913625,00.html

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Magnatune Manifesto

We are an Internet record label which sells and licenses music by encouraging MP3 file trading and Internet Radio.

When you find an artist you like, pay what you can afford to show your support, starting at $5 for an entire online album. Companies can sublicense our music for commercial use using our no haggling, easy online forms.


All money from your purchases is split 50/50 with our artists.

No major label connections.

We are not evil.

http://www.magnatune.com/

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Comcast to test DVRs that use cable lines
David Lieberman

Comcast will shake up the digital video recorder business Monday by unveiling a system to go on field trial in Philadelphia midyear that records TV shows and uses cable lines to distribute them through the home.

Samsung will make decoders with built-in DVRs — which record TV shows to a hard drive, making them far easier to use than VCRs. Set-top units for other TVs will access that hard drive. Ucentric Systems will provide the software to sort through TV schedules and help users select shows to record.

What makes the Comcast system different from DVRs such as those from TiVo and ReplayTV is its ability to piggyback on the cable system to create a home network. That eliminates the need for extra connections or equipment.

For example, if the kids are watching a show recorded on the DVR in the living room and adults want to entertain there, they can send the program to the den.

The system also can be configured to take music stored on a PC and play it on a home stereo or show digital photos on the TV.

"The consumer doesn't have to worry about where things are happening," Ucentric CEO Michael Collette says. "This is a big move into the networked home economy."

Pricing and a date for broad consumer rollout haven't been set.

The announcement could have far-reaching implications. It appears to be a setback for TiVo and ReplayTV, which have been trying to license their DVR scheduling services to cable operators.

Ucentric's system "is full featured," Collette says. "It's essentially the same" as TiVo and ReplayTV.

It also could give Comcast leverage in its negotiations with programmers to let the cable company offer their shows on its video-on-demand system.

Comcast wants to "explore options for consumers that take advantage of devices that are networked in the home," says Mark Coblitz, senior vice president for strategic planning.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/20...-comcast_x.htm

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Appeals Court Revives Parks/Outkast Suit
Reuters

A federal appeals court in Detroit today (May 12) revived a lawsuit by civil rights icon Rosa Parks against the rap group Outkast over a song that uses her name for its title. A federal judge in Detroit had dismissed Parks' lawsuit in 1999 over the song "Rosa Parks," saying Outkast's use of her name was protected by free speech, and the group did not need to compensate her.

But a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that while Outkast's free speech defense was valid, so was Parks' claim that using her name could suggest the song was about her or that she was connected to the group.

The panel said Outkast needed to show some artistic reason for calling the song "Rosa Parks," and ordered the district court to conduct a hearing and rule on the issue.

"The fact that Defendants cry 'artist' and 'symbol' as reasons for appropriating Rosa Parks' name for a song title does not absolve them from potential liability for, in the words of Shakespeare, filching Rosa Parks' good name," the ruling said.
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=1886002

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Four Young Albums Make Jump To CD
Jonathan Cohen

The four remaining Neil Young studio albums that have never been issued on CD will finally be unveiled in that format next month. "On the Beach," "American Stars 'N Bars," "Hawks & Doves," and "Re.ac.tor" will be released June 24 via Reprise. The albums, which have been out of print in any form for years and heavily bootlegged, have been digitally remastered but do not include any bonus tracks.
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=1886578

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Hendrix Bassist Noel Redding Dead At 57
Troy Carpenter & Barry A. Jeckell

Rock musician Noel Redding, best known for his stint as the bassist of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, was found dead yesterday (May 11) at his home in Ireland of unknown causes, his manager Ian Grant has confirmed to Billboard.com. He was 57. Redding, an accomplished guitarist based in the U.K., joined Hendrix's band in 1966 and played on the three Jimi Hendrix Experience albums -- writing two songs as well as playing bass -- before parting ways with the legendary guitarist in 1969.

Redding also made numerous recordings with his bands Fat Mattress, Road, and the Noel Redding Band. The artist's most recent release was a live album, "Live From Bunkr. Prague," which came out last year on Grant's Track Records label and included Hendrix songs. His mother reportedly died last week.

"I am very shocked to learn of my partner's death," reads a statement from Redding's companion Deborah McNaughton, posted by Grant on the Track Records Web site. "Noel was extremely gentle and gracious soul. He had a kind of chivalry and nobility about him and he was kind to everyone bar none, people and animals alike."

In a statement from Experience Hendrix, which oversees the guitar legend's catalog, Hendrix's family said, "We at Experience Hendrix mourn the loss of Noel Redding. His contributions to the Jimi Hendrix Experience shall never be forgotten. Our prayers go out to his family and friends during this difficult time."

In an interview last year with Billboard.com, Redding recounted his trials and tribulations in attempting to recover unpaid royalties for his work with Hendrix. "I should have been a plumber. That's a joke. But the thing is, plumbers get paid," he said. "But there again, I'm still playing, thank God. That's the main thing."

The fight for those royalties has been ongoing, according to Grant. "We were about to be in court over it, and we were on top," he says. "And now he will never know how it turns out. I don't know what will happen with it now. I've only been working with him for about two years. I was on a mission to right the wrongs that had been done to him.

"In working with him, I know him as a very kind, considerate man, especially given what happened to him with royalties and such," Grant adds. "He struggled at various times to reap the benefits of that part of his career ... He's now with Jimi, I guess, and they'll be comparing notes."

http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=1886017

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Jackson Sues Universal Over Motown Royalties
Erik Gruenwedel

Michael Jackson has filed suit against Motown Records and parent Universal Music Group (UMG) in an attempt to obtain rights to all masters of material he recorded for the label from 1969-76, Billboard Bulletin reports.

The 10-count suit, filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims that under a 1980 agreement, Motown agreed to pay royalties to Jackson on the distribution of select pre- 1976 material, including solo and Jackson 5 recordings, as well as any "best-ofs" or compilations of unreleased tracks.

Jackson says UMG has since released such albums and licensed songs commercially without his consent. He claims the label failed to provide him "with a single accounting" and has not paid him "a single dollar in royalties."

The artist is seeking to terminate the 1980 contract and all other recording agreements with Motown, and seeks to reclaim "his right, title and interest in" all of his master recordings and compositions with the label. A UMG spokesperson declined comment.

The new suit comes almost a year after Jackson attacked his current label, Sony, and its then-CEO, Tommy Mottola, for what he described as racist business practices. Jackson has been in and out of court in the past few months, having been sued by a promoter for backing out of a millennium concert as well as by auction house Sotheby's for failure to pay for two paintings.
http://www.billboard.com/bb/daily/ar...ent_id=1885834

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AU Internet group denies copyright negotiation failure
James Pearce

The Internet Industry Association has denied that negotiations between itself and various copyright holders groups over mechanisms for taking down infringing content have fallen through.

Michael Speck, the managing director of Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), one of the companies involved in the negotiations, told ZDNet Australia the organisations representing copyright holders were pulling out of the negotiations because they "didn’t think the takedown protocol will do anything other than advantage the Internet industry".

"We want to understand the true levels of profits made by ISPs from illegal content," said Speck. "Any takedown protocol will protect them from taking any legal responsibility for [piracy] and prevent them from assisting copyright owners from identifying infringers."

Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association (IIA) denied the negotiations had been derailed. "I read a media report that said they were threatening to, but they haven't informed us and as far as we're concerned the negotiations are still on," he told ZDNet Australia .

Coroneos said the copyright owners were probably expressing frustration at the pace of the negotiations, which he admitted had been "slow". "What we want to do is try and find protocols which preserve the balance of interests between those people who run networks and those people who feel their rights are being infringed by people on the networks," he said.

"There's no point in developing an industry code quickly and finding that no-one in the industry is willing to support it," said Coroneos. He pointed out that no country in the world had sorted out the problem posed by the Internet to copyright owners, and the US method of litigation led to "very unpredictable results".
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebu...0274417,00.htm

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File swappers fight back
BBC

Music fans swapping songs online are fighting industry efforts to watch and police what they do.

In recent weeks, the US music industry has stepped up attempts to stop piracy on peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa and Grokster.

The industry's trade body has started suing individual file swappers, has sent warning messages to millions of peer-to-peer users and is thought to be developing programs that hijack the computers of suspected pirates.

But users are fighting back by creating tools that help people avoid the attention of anti-pirate groups and block attempts to limit what they can do online.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3013065.stm