Volume III, Issue No. 1
Quote Of The Week
"This is the almost-worst-possible bill." - Art Brodsky
"It's just plain wrong to make the Department of Justice Hollywood's law firm." - Stacie Rumenap
"This is like Big Brother. This is completely whacked." - Michael Francis
"When you take away that stuff and say, 'No, we own this. You can't have it unless you're ready to pay for it,' . . . it basically cuts the whole culture off at the knees." - David Byrne
"P2P-Zone.com is the home of the Napsterites forum. Although not a news site, it is a large forum full of intelligent discussion." - Thomas Mennecke
"A piece of art is not a loaf of bread." – Jeff Tweedy
Avast, Ye Pirates
Get Yourself -- And Congress -- Ready For The Next Wave Of Absurd Anti-File-Sharing Tactics
Dan Strachota
Let's say that for the past year you've diligently bought MP3s legitimately from sites like iTunes and the relaunched Napster. "I'm getting cool music and paying the artists," you think. "Everything's perfectly legal. John Ashcroft and Lars Ulrich would be proud." Then you buy your thousandth song -- say, the Black Eyed Peas' "Let's Get Retarded" -- and moments later the feds burst into your room and cart you away. To jail. For three years.
Couldn't happen, right? Well then, neither could this: It's Friday night. You've had a long week at work, and all you want to do is settle into your favorite chair and watch that Desperate Housewives episode you taped earlier. You press play and happily fast-forward through all the commercials. Suddenly, five FBI agents barrel through your front windows, yelling "Drop the remote, scum!"
A final, completely impossible possibility: For the holiday gift-giving season, you want to buy an Internet phone, a laptop with wi-fi capabilities, Jane magazine, a 3- D scanner, and a subscription to The New York Times. You soon discover, however, that you're screwed, since all these items have been sued out of existence thanks to ludicrously vague copyright law.
All three scenes sound ridiculous, even by George Orwell's standards. And yet, if certain members of Congress and their deep-pocketed allies in Big Media have their way, all of them could soon become reality.
In fact, the Senate is currently haggling over a bill, HR 4077 Substitute, that would make at least the first two scenarios eminently possible. Sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), this legislation is actually a bunch of stitched-together copyright-issue acts, some of which have already passed either or both of the houses of Congress. A few of the articles are harmless -- one would designate the oak our national tree -- while others are horrifying. Chief in the latter category is the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act (aka PDEA, the original HR 4077).
"This is the almost-worst-possible bill," says Art Brodsky, communications director for Washington, DC, digital rights organization Public Knowledge. (Worst possible, Brodsky believes, is the INDUCE Act, which we'll get to later.)
The PDEA aims to switch the onus of prosecuting file-swapping peer-to-peer users from Big Music and Hollywood to the US government. So instead of suing file-swappers themselves, these huge media companies would let the government -- and your tax dollars -- take over.
"The recording industry has this problem," says Jason Schultz, attorney for SF technology liberties watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The people who are their biggest fans are also the people who they are the most mad at, because they're the ones downloading stuff. They've never figured out what to do with this problem, because they want to crack down and sue, but they also don't want to alienate them. ... So the solution they came up with was, 'Jeez, if we can find some way for the Justice Department to do our dirty work for us, we can crack down on Americans, and they'll blame the government more than they'll blame us.'"
Not one to do anything half-assed, the recording industry also suggested the government crack down like a sledgehammer, offering fines of up to $250,000 and jail stays of up to three years. And here's the kicker: The PDEA's language is incredibly vague, suggesting that "making available" or "offering for distribution" MP3s would constitute such an offense.
"'For distribution.' What does that mean? 'Making available.' What does that mean?" Brodsky asks. "These standards are very vague, and could just as well include material on networks, on hard drives, whatever." And that's a thousand legally downloaded songs, like the ones that artists offer for free on their Web sites, or even those you buy from iTunes, if you were to either burn songs for friends or use the site's sharing feature to stream songs over a network. Not to mention all the people -- you know who you are -- who are still illegally downloading materials, like, oh, the leaked new U2 album.
"If that's the standard, then you're criminalizing half the teenagers in America," Schultz says. "Do we really want to start filling our jails with teenagers who simply downloaded music?"
What do government goons get for assuming the task of prosecuting twelve-year-old boys, 25-year-old indie rockers, and 84-year-old grandmothers? Well, for one thing, they get money. If the House follows the Senate in passing the Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act (S. 2237, aka PIRATE), the Department of Justice will get a puny $2 million to take civil action against copyright infringers. But the PDEA recommends that the department should get $15 million more for education and prosecuting purposes -- except that the money would have to come out of its existing budget, which means it would be diverted from such unnecessary activities as, say, fighting terrorism.
The PDEA's original language also demanded that ISPs share information about any infringing subscribers with the Justice Department, although that action has now been made only "voluntary," which is like having a cop politely ask you to take a DUI test. Schultz points to this expansion of powers as a reason the feds are happy to go along with the act: "In addition to PDEA and the PIRATE Act, the DoJ just released a Task Force Report on Intellectual Property, which outlined all the things they want to do besides PDEA. It includes expanding wiretap authorizations for crimes of intellectual property. So that if they suspect that you're an intellectual-property thief, they will move to get a wiretap order to tap your phone and your e-mail, log what Web sites you go to, and your Web traffic, all this stuff."
Bizarrely enough, none of these Orwellian aspects of the bill has gotten the attention of the Senate. What has held up the omnibus package is something far simpler: John McCain's distaste for commercials. The maverick Republican senator from Arizona has placed a hold on the act until language in the Family Movie Act, making it illegal to speed through ads on videotaped TV programs, is taken out. That's right: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) wants to make it a crime for you not to watch that annoying formerly fat guy shill for Subway.
During the legislative break, it is hoped that McCain and other senators will take a closer look at the PDEA's ramifications, including its possible quashing of technological innovation. Regarding that thousand- songs rule: Schultz says that if you're streaming iTunes throughout your house via wi-fi, then you could be caught sharing your songs with your neighbors and anyone driving by. And if that's illegal, then couldn't the definition of sharing be extended to playing your car stereo with the windows down? Furthermore, it's highly likely your cell phone, laptop, TiVo, and iPod already hold that many songs, if not several thousand more. Does sharing or publicly enjoying those constitute an offense?
"Even though these bills are trying to target peer-to-peer, the language that they use will trample not only other technologies, but ones we haven't invented yet," Schultz says. "The fear is that Congress will be so overzealous in their pursuit of criminalizing peer-to-peer users that they will outlaw or ban all kinds of amazing future technologies that we will mostly all use legitimately."
These issues are even more prevalent in the case of the aforementioned worst-case scenario: the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (S. 2560, formerly known as INDUCE, now IICA), which dropped off the Senate calendar in early October but is expected to be retooled for next year. Introduced by the ubiquitous Senator Hatch (who, according to Congressional newspaper The Hill, has sponsored more unconstitutional laws than any of his peers), IICA would've made any company that induced -- or promoted the inducing of -- copyright infringement liable for that transgression. Therefore, not only would VCR, TiVo, and CD-burner manufacturers be running scared, but future innovators would think twice before stepping into this legal minefield. Plus, anyone who wrote about such companies favorably, or wrote positive articles about users of their products, or recommended that people do such activities, would be liable.
Under such vague language, magazines, newspapers, Web sites, artists, or labels that were seen as endorsing file-swapping could be sued. "It's a really dangerous thing in its current form," says Kevin Arnold, founder of SF's Independent Online Distribution Alliance (a digital music distributor for indie artists and labels) and the Noise Pop Festival.
Thankfully, the opposition to IICA was overwhelming, including such large companies as Yahoo, Verizon, Texas Instruments, Google, Intel, Sun Microsystems, and MCI, as well as constitutional watchdogs like EFF and the American Library Association. It didn't hurt that Hatch decided to also use the bill to harp against the evils of downloadable pornography, always the last tactic of a desperate politician. Then again, perhaps it was a ruse. "There's also a theory that INDUCE was a red herring put out there to distract attention away from PDEA, while they push that thing through," Arnold says.
In any event, downloading -- legal or otherwise -- isn't going away, even with such heavy-handed attempts to terrorize the participants. But one of the most bizarre things about these bills is that they're completely unnecessary from a policy standpoint. As Schultz points out, "The RIAA lawsuits are actually making money for the record companies. They're actually bringing in more money than it costs them to file the lawsuits. So there's no reason they can't simply file more and step up their own enforcement. There's no need for the Justice Department to intervene at all."
What we have instead is a terrible PR move that could send thousands of innocent people to jail, do irreparable harm to the economy, stunt future technological growth, and divert the Justice Department's attention from far more important matters. "Everyone waves their hands in the air and says, 'Piracy bad, piracy bad!' and expects to pass anything they want," Schultz says. "We have to try to hold Congress to a standard that they need to pass the laws that they want to pass."
And that means leaving you, your fast-forward button, and your legit "Let's Get Retarded" download alone.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues...sic/music.html
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U.S. Senate May Ram Through Copyright Bill
Michael Grebb
Several lobbying camps from different industries and ideologies are joining forces to fight an overhaul of copyright law, which they say would radically shift in favor of Hollywood and the record companies and which Congress might try to push through during a lame-duck session that begins this week.
The Senate might vote on HR2391 (
.pdf), the Intellectual Property Protection Act, a comprehensive bill that opponents charge could make many users of peer-to-peer networks, digital-music players and other products criminally liable for copyright infringement. The bill would also undo centuries of "fair use" -- the principle that gives Americans the right to use small samples of the works of others without having to ask permission or pay.
The bill lumps together several pending copyright bills including HR4077, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, which would criminally punish a person who "infringes a copyright by ... offering for distribution to the public by electronic means, with reckless disregard of the risk of further infringement." Critics charge the vague language could apply to a person who uses the popular Apple iTunes music-sharing application.
The bill would also permit people to use technology to skip objectionable content -- like a gory or sexually explicit scene -- in films, a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed language, viewers would not be allowed to use software or devices to skip commericals or promotional announcements "that would otherwise be performed or displayed before, during or after the performance of the motion picture," like the previews on a DVD. The proposed law also includes language from the Pirate Act (S2237), which would permit the Justice Department to file civil lawsuits against alleged copyright infringers.
Also under the proposed law, people who bring a video camera into a movie theater to make a copy of the film for distribution would be imprisoned for three years, fined or both.
The Recording Industry Association of America vigorously defended the bill, saying it would provide a "common sense set of tools that will help law enforcement better deter and prosecute theft."
"This legislation enjoys overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. Many pieces of it already have unanimously passed one house of Congress," RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy wrote in an e-mail. "The intellectual property industries are one of our leading national exports, and it's appropriate for the federal government to have a role in protecting those sectors from rampant piracy."
The groups that lined up against the bill include the Consumer Electronics Association, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, the American Conservative Union and public-interest advocacy group Public Knowledge, which hosted a press briefing on Friday as the opening salvo of its campaign to stop passage.
The groups are calling for the Senate to postpone consideration of the bill until at least next year, when there would be more time for hearings and debate.
In addition, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) will expire next year, with Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) in line to take over the committee. Bill opponents hope Specter would take a different approach to copyright law than Hatch, who has been an advocate of several bills that have rankled public-interest, technology and consumer-electronics camps.
The entertainment industry has been lobbying hard for quick Senate passage during the lame-duck session, with opponents gearing up for a tough fight.
Hollywood's involvement has even irked the American Conservative Union, which holds considerable sway with conservative Republicans in Congress. The ACU plans a major print ad campaign this week to oppose the bill, mainly because some provisions would require the Justice Department to file civil copyright lawsuits on behalf of the entertainment industry.
"It's just plain wrong to make the Department of Justice Hollywood's law firm," said Stacie Rumenap, ACU's deputy director.
The Motion Picture Association of America also defended the bill.
"There are components there that we think are critical for the health of a vibrant film industry and intellectual property as a whole," said Rich Taylor, a spokesman for the MPAA. Specifically, the camcording provision and allowing the Justice Department to prosecute copyright infringers are important to the movie trade group, he said.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65704,00.html
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MPAA Files First Suits Against Movie File-Swappers
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has announced that it has begun filing lawsuits against people who use peer-to-peer (P2P) software to trade movie files without permission over the internet.
The MPAA filed an unspecified number of lawsuits in courts across the US, seeking damages and injunctions against the P2P users.
Under the US Copyright Act, people can be liable for as much as $30,000 (£16,200) for each movie traded over the internet, and as much as $150,000 per movie if the infringement is proven to be willful. The trade group announced earlier this month it would begin to sue file traders.
The MPAA also announced it will soon offer to computer users a free program that identifies movie and music titles stored on a computer, along with any installed P2P software. The information collected by this program would be available only to the computer's user, according to the MPAA.
Users can ask the program to remove infringing movies or music files and any P2P software, the MPAA said.
"Our ultimate goal is to help consumers locate the resources and information they need to make appropriate decisions about using and trading illegal files," Dan Glickman, MPAA president and chief executive said.
"Many parents are concerned about what their children have downloaded and where they have downloaded it from."
The MPAA also announced a new P2P ad campaign, to be distributed to about 10,000 US video stores. The Rated I: Inappropriate for All Ages video-store campaign is similar to an ad campaign that appeared in cinemas, newspapers, magazines and on the internet.
"Litigation alone is not the solution, but it is part of a broader MPAA effort that includes education and new technological tools among other components," Glickman said.
http://www.computerweekly.com/articl...arch=&nPage=1#
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RIAA Files 761 New File-Trading Lawsuits
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed new lawsuits against 761 people who allegedly use peer-to- peer (P2P) software to trade music files without permission.
The lawsuits included users of the eDonkey, Limewire and Kazaa services, as well as 25 people using university internet connections to distribute music files. American University, Boston College, Iowa State University and the University of Massachusetts were among the college networks used by those sued.
The RIAA believes that partnerships between universities and pay-for-music download services have in part come about because of the trade group's legal strategy, said RIAA president Cary Sherman.
At least 20 US universities signed agreements with pay-for-music services as of August, and more signed agreements since then, according to the RIAA.
"The lawsuits are an essential educational tool," Sherman said in a statement. "They remind music fans about the law and provide incentives to university administrators to offer legal alternatives."
Since September 2003, the RIAA has filed more than 7,000 lawsuits, including more than 2,200 lawsuits announced since 1 October, against alleged file traders.
The new RIAA lawsuits come on the heels of another group of lawsuits announced this week by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The undisclosed number of MPAA lawsuits were aimed at P2P users who allegedly distributed movies without permission.
http://www.computerweekly.com/articl...earch=&nPage=1
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Internet Archive’s Web Page Snapshots Held Admissible as Evidence
The Internet Archive (IA) is a non-profit effort to preserve Internet sites and other digital media and make them available online. IA’s spiders regularly crawl the World Wide Web, making copies of web pages and storing them permanently in an enormous digital archive. Using the “Wayback Machine”, one of the Archive’s popular services, users can input the address of a web page and call up a series of dated copies, allowing them to see what the page contained at the times it was accessed by the IA spider.
Polska is the American provider of TV Polonia, a Polish-language television channel. According
to its pleadings in the case, it had reached a deal with EchoStar, which operates the Dish Network satellite TV service, to provide TV Polonia to Dish Network. The contract included marketing rights, giving EchoStar the right to use Polska’s trademarks to sell subscriptions to its television service. The deal was scheduled to expire in stages: absent a renewal, EchoStar’s marketing rights would expire in April of 2001, and programming would stop a year afterwards. The deal was not renewed, and Polska alleges that EchoStar continued to use the “TV Polonia” name to market its satellite service after its rights to exploit that trademark had expired. EchoStar pointed out that Polska seemed to have no problem with advertisements stating that TV Polonia could be found on the Dish Network, since Polska had one on its own website after the expiration of marketing rights. EchoStar offered IA snapshots dated to various times in 2001 as proof of the past content of Polska’s website. As part of a series of motions in limine, Polska attempted to suppress the snapshots on the grounds of hearsay and unauthenticated source.
Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Polska’s assertion of hearsay, holding that the archived copies were not themselves statements susceptible to hearsay exclusion, since they merely showed what Polska had previously posted on its site. He also noted that, since Polska was seeking to suppress evidence of its own previous statements, the snapshots would not be barred even if they were hearsay. Over Polska’s objection, Judge Keys accepted an affidavit from an Internet Archive employee as sufficient to authenticate the snapshots for admissibility.
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets...3/002728.shtml
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Poland Withdraws Support For EU Patent Plan
Graeme Wearden
The Polish government has said it will not support a controversial European directive, delivering a potential blow to attempts to make software patentable in Europe.
The Polish government said Tuesday that it could not support the proposed Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions that was agreed on by the EU Council earlier this year.
"Because of numerous ambiguity and contradictions respecting the current directive project, Poland cannot support the text which was accepted in the vote of the Council on May 18, 2004," the Polish government said in a statement.
It added that it would be prepared to back a directive that made it clear that "computer-implemented inventions" would be patentable, but that computer programs would not be.
Without the backing of the Polish government, it is likely that the directive no longer has enough support to be sent back from the Council to the EU Parliament. Crucially, the EU has just revised the number of votes that each member state can wield, and this move has given Poland enough influence to tip the balance.
In May, Poland decided to abstain as it did not have enough votes to make a difference. By keeping quiet then, Poland was judged to have supported the directive.
Florian Mueller, a German software developer and campaigner against software patents, believes that the move will force the EU to rethink its position on software patenting.
"I was derided by some when I said on the first of this month that the new voting weights would, because of Poland's position, prevent the EU Council from formally ratifying its May 18 proposal," Mueller said.
"Now that's a reality, and a great opportunity for the Council to properly define the scope of patentability and exclude software," Mueller added.
The Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive has caused a storm of protest. Opponents claim that it will allow software to be patented in Europe, and that this will threaten developers and small businesses.
Those in favor of the directive, such as the European Information and Communication Technology Association (EICTA), insist that it would actually maintain the status quo, and help European companies to compete.
Sources at EICTA confirmed Wednesday that the decision of the Polish government to withdraw its support for the directive would be a major setback to its adoption.
"It's not been confirmed to us yet, so we can't say for certain. But we hope it's not the case," said one EICTA employee.
It's possible that another EU country which had previously opposed the directive, or abstained, could still change its position and back it, bringing in enough votes, but the EICTA said that's unlikely.
http://news.com.com/Poland+withdraws...3-5456995.html
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Copyrights and anti-competitive behavior
EU Takes On Those Who Call The Tune
Paul Meller
BRUSSELS The organizations that collect royalties for songwriters in Europe were to defend themselves at a hearing on Tuesday against accusations by the European Commission that they are restricting competition in the field of music distribution over the Internet.
The commission asserts that the 16 so-called collecting societies are illegally forcing online music retailers to buy rights to songs only from the collecting society in their own country.
Companies that sell music online, including the French retailer Fnac and the British record store chain Virgin, complain that this prevents them from shopping around for cheaper access to music from other collecting societies in other countries.
Failure to establish clear, fair rules for online music licensing has "been the main obstacle in Europe" to faster development of online music services, said Lucy Cronin, executive director of the European Digital Media Association.
The 16 collecting societies agreed in 2001 to grant one another licensing rights to their musical repertoires so that online music retailers could buy rights to the works of a range of artists from all over Europe through a single licensing agreement, but they could deal only with the society in their own country.
This accord, known as the Santiago agreement, was sent to the European Commission for antitrust approval. In May, the commission said in a statement of objections that the deal could lead to an effective carve-up of the European market.
By extending national boundaries into the online world, the collecting societies are preventing retailers from taking advantage of the single European market, said Cronin, whose association's members include Yahoo, Amazon, Fnac, Virgin and Apple Computer.
"We are concerned because the Santiago agreement doesn't comply with our members' right to operate in the single market," Cronin said.
The association was to take part in the hearing on Tuesday in Brussels.
Record companies have separate collecting societies. These groups have also signed an accord, called the simulcasting agreement, which permits retailers to buy music rights from any collecting society in Europe.
"Adapting the Santiago agreement to make it like the simulcasting agreement would be a workable solution for us," Cronin said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/11/...ney/music.html
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Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War
Tim Weiner
The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future.
The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle.
This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."
The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG. Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the new war net and its components.
Skeptics say the costs are staggering and the technological hurdles huge.
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant on the war net, said he wondered if the military's dream was realistic. "I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination," Mr. Cerf said.
"This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy was, 'Let's go out and build this system,' and technology lagged far behind,'' he said. "There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need to temper them with physics and reality."
Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a global network - what they call net-centric warfare - will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and culture.
"Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, "will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections."
The American military, built to fight nations and armies, now faces stateless enemies without jets, tanks, ships or central headquarters. Sending secret intelligence and stratagems instantly to soldiers in battle would, in theory, make the military a faster, fiercer force against a faceless foe.
Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation's biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a "highly secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are fused," shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons shaped the cold war.
Every member of the military would have "a picture of the battle space, a God's-eye view," he said. "And that's real power."
Pentagon traditionalists, however, ask if net-centric warfare is nothing more than an expensive fad. They point to the street fighting in Falluja and Baghdad, saying firepower and armor still mean more than fiber optic cables and wireless connections.
But the biggest challenge in building a war net may be the military bureaucracy. For decades, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built their own weapons and traditions. A network, advocates say, would cut through those old ways.
The ideals of this new warfare are driving many of the Pentagon's spending plans for the next 10 to 15 years. Some costs are secret, but billions have already been spent.
Providing the connections to run the war net will cost at least $24 billion over the next five years - more than the cost, in today's dollars, of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Beyond that, encrypting data will be a $5 billion project.
Hundreds of thousands of new radios are likely to cost $25 billion. Satellite systems for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and communications will be tens of billions more. The Army's program for a war net alone has a $120 billion price tag.
Over all, Pentagon documents suggest, $200 billion or more may go for the war net's hardware and software in the next decade or so. "The question is one of cost and technology," said John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense, now president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"We want to know all things at all times everywhere in the world? Fine," Mr. Hamre said. "Do we know what this staring, all-seeing eye is that we're going to put in space is? Hell, no."
The military wants to know "everything of interest to us, all the time," in the words of Steven A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence. He has told Congress that military intelligence - including secret satellite surveillance covering most of the earth - will be posted on the war net and shared with troops.
John Garing, strategic planning director at the Defense Information Security Agency, now starting to build the war net, said: "The essence of net-centric warfare is our ability to deploy a war-fighting force anywhere, anytime. Information technology is the key to that."
Military contractors - and information-technology creators not usually associated with weapons systems - formed a consortium to develop the war net on Sept. 28. The group includes an A-list of military contractors and technology powerhouses: Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters; General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems. They are working to weave weapons, intelligence and communications into a seamless web.
The Pentagon has tried this twice before.
Its Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built in the 1960's, often failed in crises. A $25 billion successor, Milstar, was completed in 2003 after two decades of work. Pentagon officials say it is already outdated: more switchboard than server, more dial-up than broadband, it cannot support 21st-century technology.
The Pentagon's scientists and engineers, starting four decades ago, invented the systems that became the Internet. Throughout the cold war, their computer power ran far ahead of the rest of the world.
Then the world eclipsed them. The nation's military and intelligence services started falling behind when the Internet exploded onto the commercial scene a decade ago. The war net is "an attempt to catch up," Mr. Cerf said.
It has been slowly evolving for at least six years. In 1999, Pentagon officials told Congress that "this monumental task will span a quarter-century or more." This year, the vision gained focus, and Pentagon officials started explaining it in some detail to Congress.
Its scope was described in July by the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog agency for Congress.
Many new multibillion-dollar weapons and satellites are "critically dependent on the future network," the agency reported. "Despite enormous challenges and risks - many of which have not been successfully overcome in smaller-scale efforts" like missile defense, "the Pentagon is depending on the GIG to enable a fundamental transformation in the way military operations are conducted."
According to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, "What we are really talking about is a new theory of war."
Linton Wells II, the chief information officer at the Defense Department, said net-centric principles were becoming "the center of gravity" for war planners.
"The tenets are broadly accepted throughout the Defense Department," said Mr. Wells, who directs the Office of Networks and Information Integration. "Senior leadership can articulate them. We still have a way to go in terms of why we should spend X billion dollars on a certain program. In the fight between widgets and digits, widgets tend to win."
He said $24 billion would be spent in the next five years to build new war net connections. "No doubt these are expensive," Mr. Wells said. "Technology developments always are."
Advocates acknowledge that weaving American military and intelligence services into a unified system is a huge challenge.
The military is filled with "tribal representatives behind tribal workstations interpreting tribal hieroglyphics," in the words of Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff. "What if the machines talked to each other?" he asked.
That is the vision of the new web: war machines with a common language for all military forces, instantly emitting encyclopedias of lethal information against all enemies.
To realize this vision, the military must solve a persistent problem. It all boils down to bandwidth.
Bandwidth measures how much data can flow between electronic devices. Too little for civilians means a Web page takes forever to load. Too little for soldiers means the war net will not work.
The bandwidth requirements seem bottomless. The military will need 40 or 50 times what it used at the height of the Iraq war last year, a Rand Corporation study estimates - enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second.
The Congressional Research Service said the Army, despite plans to spend $20 billion on the problem, may wind up with a tenth of the bandwidth it needs. The Army, in its "lessons learned" report from Iraq, published in May, said "there will probably never be enough resources to establish a complete and functioning network of communications, sensors, and systems everywhere in the world."
The bottleneck is already great. In Iraq, front-line commanders and troops fight frequent software freezes. "To make net-centric warfare a reality," said Tony Montemarano, the Defense Information Security Agency's bandwidth expansion chief, "we will have to precipitously enhance bandwidth."
The military must also change its own culture.
For decades, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built separate weapons, radios, frequencies and traditions. They guard their "rice bowls" - their turf - from rival services.
But Mr. Rumsfeld's vision depends on interoperability: warfare using all four services in joint operations.
In a net-centric world, "you would not have a Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines," but a unified force, said William Owens, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For the Pentagon's visionaries, Mr. Montemarano said, "the single biggest obstacle is a cultural one.''
"Breaking these rice bowls - that's a huge job."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/te...rtner=homepage
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Gates vs. Jobs: The Rematch
Saul Hansell
THE history of Apple Computer can be told through its advertisements as well as its products. There was, of course, the commercial that introduced the Macintosh. It was broadcast exactly once, during the 1984 Super Bowl, and signaled the company's bid to reclaim leadership in personal computers from I.B.M. and its tiny, little- known software partner, Microsoft.
Late last month, Steven P. Jobs, Apple's chairman, rented an ornate theater here to promote Apple's latest advertisement for its iPod music player - a crisp psychedelic montage of the Irish pop band U2 playing "Vertigo," a song from its next album. Unlike the 1984 commercial, this one is intended to help Apple preserve a big, and growing, lead in the marketplace.
Speaking just after the event, Bono, U2's lead singer, said the band was not charging Apple a penny to be in the ad. (The band says it had turned down as much as $23 million to use its music in other commercials.) In its three-year life, the iPod has achieved such "iconic value," Bono said, that U2 gets as much value as Apple does from the commercial, by promoting its music and the new Red and Black U2 edition of the iPod, for which the band gets royalties.
The iPod, Mr. Jobs boasted at the event, has become the "Walkman of the 21st century." It dominates its market in a way that no Apple product has done in a generation, raising the possibility that the company is becoming more than just a purveyor of computers with high design and low market share. If Apple continues to ride the wave of digital consumer electronics products, it may become the Sony of the 21st century.
For that to happen, however, Mr. Jobs must do what he failed to do last time: prevail over his old nemesis, Bill Gates, who sees entertainment as Microsoft's next great frontier. Microsoft is working hard to make sure that the iPod is less like the Walkman and more like the Betamax, Sony's videocassette format that was defeated in the marketplace by VHS.
A few days after Apple's U2 extravaganza, Mr. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, paced around his office overlooking the rolling hills of suburban Seattle and recalled another advertisement that Apple made 25 years ago. "When I.B.M. came out with their PC, Apple ran an ad saying, "Welcome,' " said Mr. Gates. "They haven't yet run the ad welcoming us into the music business.
"Apple should," he added.
But he isn't holding his breath. Instead, Microsoft is turning up the volume in the portable music business. And Mr. Gates makes no secret that he expects to beat Mr. Jobs in that market as convincingly as he did in personal computers.
In many ways, the story sounds eerily familiar. As was the case in computers, Apple has sprinted ahead in the music market with an innovative product, elegant design and tight links between its hardware and software. Plodding along after it is a vast army, organized by Microsoft, of rivals that may be less skillful than Apple but offer a broader array of options and cheaper prices.
IN music, Microsoft has rallied nearly every other manufacturer - like Dell, Samsung and Rio - to support a new version of Windows Media. That audio standard allows their gadgets to play songs bought from most music service companies, including America Online, Napster and RealNetworks, as well as its own new MSN Music store. Microsoft's campaign slogan for the services and players is "plays for sure."
The iPod cannot play songs from most other stores, and Apple's iTunes store won't sell songs for other players. Mr. Gates argues that consumers ultimately will want more choices. "There's nothing unique about music in terms of, do people want variety of fashion, do people want low price, do they want many distribution channels?" he said. "This story has played out on the PC and worked very well for the choice approach there."
Mr. Jobs rejects the comparison between the music players and computers. The Macintosh had an uphill battle, Apple says, because so many corporate customers already had applications based on Microsoft's operating system that they didn't want to abandon. By contrast, Apple's iTunes Music Store sells pretty much the same songs that the others do, but they cannot be moved onto non-Apple portable devices.
Most important, he points out, Apple's market share has actually increased over the last year, despite increasing competition. "We offer customers choice," he said during a news conference after the U2 event, answering a question about Microsoft's strategy. "They don't like the choices our customers are making."
Indeed, in the third quarter, some two million iPods were sold - more than all of its competitors combined, and more than double the pace of the second quarter. Market analysts and even rivals expect that Apple will sell more of them this Christmas season and continue to dominate the market into next year.
What happens next Christmas and beyond, however, is a matter of considerable debate. Microsoft fans say that other music players will begin to match Apple's features and styling, and with lower prices. They suggest that consumers, meanwhile, will want to buy music from stores other than iTunes.
"Over time, proprietary standards always lose because industry standards always win because you get more for less," said Michael A. George, the general manager of Dell's consumer business. Dell has just introduced a 5-gigabyte music player, using the Windows standard, for $199, some $50 less than Apple's iPod Mini, which has 4 gigabytes.
Microsoft is also betting that a new crop of subscription services, like Napster to Go, which let users fill up a music player with thousands of songs for a flat fee of $10 to $20 a month, will prove attractive to consumers. Mr. Jobs, by contrast, spent months convincing the record labels to allow Apple to sell songs one at a time for 99 cents each, and he argues that consumers prefer owning music to renting it.
"If you sit down next to me and say you have 1,000 songs and you pay $10 a month, how cool will I feel to say I paid $1,000 for 1,000 songs," asked Jonathan Sasse, the president of iRiver America, a subsidiary of ReignCom, a Korean maker of portable players that has endorsed Microsoft's format for subscription services.
Still, dethroning the iPod won't be easy. One reason is that none of the rival electronics companies have made a player that is nearly as attractive and easy to use. "It is not an MP3 player; it is just an iPod, and it's only made by Apple," said Frank Sadowski, the head of Amazon.com's consumer electronics department. The proportion of Amazon.com customers who buy iPods continues to increase, he added.
Again, Apple is bucking the trend. The classic Silicon Valley playbook calls for the company to try to turn its hit product into a broader "platform." And many people argue that Apple should open up both the iPod and iTunes to rivals, so as to establish itself in the center of the digital music world.
BUT Geoff Moore, who articulated the platform strategy in his 1999 book "Crossing the Chasm," argues that Apple is the rare company that should not follow his advice. Mr. Jobs, he said, has built the company around idiosyncratic, premium-priced products that gain appeal in part from their splendid isolation.
It's a risky strategy, Mr. Moore contends. "You are only as good as your latest hit," he said. "You know at some point you will miss a step."
But he says Apple is better off rolling the dice than trying to try to emulate Microsoft. "It is hard to change the DNA of a company, even if you have a great hand," he said. "There are some times that you say, 'there is a great opportunity here, but it is not for us.' "
There is no question that Apple has played the music business like a virtuoso, after ignoring the first several years of the online music boom. When Apple became interested in music players in 2001, it rejected the most common technology in the market, flash memory chips, which can make inexpensive players that can hold a few dozen songs. Rather, it latched onto an emerging design based on a hard drive that could hold thousands of songs.
A few hard-drive players already existed, but they were bulky. For the iPod's introduction, Apple bought the entire inventory of a new generation of smaller drives from Toshiba, making the iPod the sleekest hard-drive player in the market. This prevented rivals from offering the smaller players for months.
Since then, Apple has been quick to add new features. In the spring, it introduced the iPod Mini, based on 1-inch drives, and last month it introduced iPod Photo, with the ability to bore your friends with thousands of snapshots of your latest vacation on its small color screen. Each innovation was matched quickly by rivals, but Apple was able to cement its position in the minds of its consumers as the leader in online music.
It was helped even more by competitors' missteps. Sony, in theory, would have been the strongest rival, but it tripped over its own conflicting agendas. Sony's biggest bet in digital music was the MiniDisc, a popular format in Japan that never took off in the United States. And because it owned a major record label, Sony manufactured players that made it difficult to play MP3 files, the sort that were traded freely on file-sharing services.
The pioneers in the market were Rio (born as Diamond Multimedia) and Creative Technology, both makers of add-on sound cards for PC's. Neither had Apple's marketing savvy or budget. Samsung, for its part, chose to focus on the more lucrative cellphone and flat-panel television businesses, letting its MP3 business flounder.
Indeed, Apple has been able to keep its leading share even though its products are priced above similar models from rivals. Judging by its latest crop of products, Apple seems to believe that its profit margins can grow. The U2 iPod, for example, is priced at $349, or $50 more than an identical model with a white case. Adding the photo features to an iPod costs less than $20, competitors say, but Apple has been able to charge $100 extra for iPod Photo, over the $399 price of the comparable, music- only player.
"The iPod is an affordable luxury," said Michael Gartenberg, the research director of Jupiter Research. "It's not the cheapest player on the market, but you don't spend thousands of dollars extra to own one."
While Apple has not opened the iPod to other music stores, it did make an important decision to go after the broader market by building a version for Windows computers. And it reached an agreement with Hewlett-Packard for H-P to resell iPods and install iTunes software on its computers.
Microsoft has been developing the Windows Audio formats for nearly a decade as part of the media player built into Windows. It has long licensed these formats for use in portable players, and it recently added features for so-called digital rights management, which allow music labels to control who plays a song and under what circumstances. (Apple developed its own digital rights plan, called FairPlay, that also is intended to thwart digital piracy.)
As the underdog in audio technology, Microsoft has marshaled its formidable resources to get others behind its standard. For example, the fee that electronics companies pay to license the Windows Media format is about half of what the owners of MP3 charge. And Microsoft has offered all sorts of engineering help and marketing muscle to electronics companies and music service purveyors in return for their adopting the Windows formats.
"Microsoft made it worth our while to get them into our box," said Hugh Cooney, the president of Rio, a unit of D&M Holdings of Japan. Rio had been using software from RealNetworks. "They bring a whole suite of service to us, marketing, help with testing and engineering support," he said.
Not surprisingly, RealNetworks was not thrilled. Last year, it filed a $1 billion antitrust suit against Microsoft, accusing it of anticompetitive practices in the player software market. In the meantime, RealNetworks has largely abandoned that business to focus on selling subscription music and video services.
Microsoft also raised hackles recently when it started its MSN Music Store to compete with companies like Napster that it had been courting for years. That isn't so unusual for Microsoft, its executives say. The company often finds itself both competing and cooperating, they say, with companies in the software business.
For the most part, though, the music world, from the electronics companies to the music labels, has embraced Microsoft. "I never would have believed I would say this, but Microsoft has been easy to work with," said Ted Cohen, a senior vice president at EMI Recorded Music.
One reason that Microsoft can be so accommodating is that it does not need to make money on media software, as RealNetworks does. It does sell operating systems for telephones, personal digital assistants and television set-top boxes. But all of these are meant first and foremost to encourage people to buy more and more powerful PC's, each with Windows.
"The key to all this is that in the end, the consumer gets a great experience with digital entertainment that the PC makes better," said Will Poole, the senior vice president of Microsoft's Windows client division.
Many other PC makers, like H-P, Dell and Gateway, see their futures in consumer electronics and have started making devices like cameras, flat-screen televisions and music players. They also hope to sell more computers, based on Microsoft's Media Center software, to power home entertainment systems.
Apple's leading position with the iPod, marketing experts say, could give it a leg up in these other markets. That is why some analysts are puzzled that Apple's sleek new iMac, a computer built into a flat-panel display, does not record and play television shows the way a Media Center PC does.
Mr. Jobs declines to discuss his product plans. He has been openly contemptuous of attempts to add video playback to hard-drive music players, as Microsoft has with its new design called Portable Media Center. And other Apple executives pointed out that the Media Center PC had not been a success in the market until recently, and that Apple tried to sell computers with TV tuners in them a few years ago, with disappointing results.
Longtime Apple watchers say they recognize a pattern. In the past, they say, Mr. Jobs has often dismissed a market as irrelevant before introducing just such a product, with a great flourish. He then explains that he has solved the problems his lesser competitors couldn't. It worked stunningly well with music. And many expect that he will try again, with some products related to television.
MICROSOFT, however, cares far less about music than it does about television, a much bigger market. It has attacked it from many sides - not only with the Media Center PC and Portable Media Center, but with software for cable boxes, WebTV and the Xbox video game system. None of these have left Microsoft with a position in television that is even slightly similar to its chokehold on computers. (And it's not clear that Hollywood and the cable companies would like that to happen.) But the company has patience that is almost as deep as its pocketbooks.
So it is easy to imagine, a few years from now, that an elegant, hip Apple digital television product will be battling for the home entertainment market against a much larger army of rivals using various forms of Microsoft software. "It's a classic one," Mr. Gates said. "Apple has always been a hardware company. I think Apple will do things the Apple way, and Microsoft will do things the Microsoft way. I'd say the long-term factors all favor our approach."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/bu...y/14music.html
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They sell it and they give it away
Xandros Desktop OS
Downloads of all editions of Xandros Desktop OS are available for purchase and each product provides a different level of functionality and technical support. For a quick comparison of the differences between products, see the product comparison matrix.
The Open Circulation Edition of Xandros Desktop OS can be downloaded for no charge from Xandros using BitTorrent. You can also download through our Web site using the HTTP protocol for a nominal fee.
Downloads:
Business Edition US$129
Deluxe Edition US$89
Standard Edition US$39
Open Circulation (HTTP download) US$10
Open Circulation (BitTorrent download) No Charge
http://www.xandros.com/about/downloads.html
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Unused PC Power to Run Grid for Unraveling Disease
Steve Lohr
I.B.M. plans today to announce a project to harness untapped computing power from millions of personal computers to help unlock the genetic mysteries of illnesses like AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, malaria and cancer.
The project, called the World Community Grid, was developed in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, the United Nations and other organizations, and represents a significant step in the use of the Internet to foster collaborative scientific research. The goal is to combine computer resources and the shared knowledge of researchers to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
Dr. Eric Jakobsson, who heads the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative at the National Institutes of Health, said, "This program is both a sizable commitment of computing resources and an encouraging sign of progress in moving toward a community model for biomedical computing."
To succeed, the community grid project will require a willingness by millions of volunteers to contribute the unused computing capacity of their personal computers.
Its ambitions and its backing by I.B.M. and others are unusual, but the approach is not new. The spread of the Internet and steady advances in processing power and software have made it possible to assemble networks of far-flung machines that can take on daunting scientific problems.
A comparatively simple but well-known distributed computing effort is the SETI@home program, begun in 1999, which uses the spare power of personal computers to scan radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Grid computing technology could be useful for all kinds of scientific problems that require vast computing and can be broken up into small chunks for processing. But biology and medicine are ideal areas, the project participants say, given the increasing use of computers in the search for genetic markers for disease and in seeking clues to the basic processes of life.
The new network's resources will be devoted to a series of problems chosen by a 17-member advisory board. Its first mission will be the Human Proteome Folding Project, directed by the Institute for Systems Biology, a nonprofit research organization in Seattle. The proteome project seeks to identify all the proteins in the human body and their functions.
At the Institute for Systems Biology, the community grid will be used to compute how new genes fold into proteins and then match those shapes against a three- dimensional protein database, looking for similarities. That could provide important clues about what a specific gene actually does in the body - and those clues could, in turn, help scientists understand disease, move toward the discovery of drugs or solve biological puzzles.
"This is a perfect problem for this kind of computing," said Dr. Leroy Hood, president of the Institute for Systems Biology, "and it could have a big impact on biology."
Researchers wishing to take advantage of the grid must agree to keep their research and software tools in the public domain.
Several other projects have sought to harness the power of personal computers to explore areas like the evolution of disease-causing bacteria and to identify chemical compounds that show promise against smallpox. I.B.M. was a sponsor of the smallpox project last year, along with the Defense Department.
"The hope is that the World Community Grid project can expand the impact of this kind of computing to a much broader set of applications," said Ian Foster, a computer scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.
Those wishing to join the grid project and donate computer time will be able to download software from a Web site,
www.worldcommunitygrid.org. When the machine is turned on but not in use, the program will use it as part of the computing grid.
I.B.M. is financing the grid project as a permanent charitable program that will cost it several million dollars a year, a spokesman said. The results will be gathered at an I.B.M. data center in Boulder, Colo. Software for assembling the computing power from the PC's is to be supplied by United Devices of Austin, Tex.
The advisory board includes Dr. Jakobsson of the National Institutes of Health, Mr. Foster of the Argonne laboratory and representatives from the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Mayo Clinic, Oxford University, the California Institute of Technology and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Our hope is that the problems to be addressed will be determined by the world's community of scientists," said Carol Kovac, general manager of the health care and life sciences business at I.B.M.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/16/te...gy/16grid.html
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Music Rebels Seek To Tame P2P
John Borland
After years of bitter battles between copyright holders and file-swapping services, the outlines of a partial truce are emerging that may soon see major record labels partner with peer-to-peer networks to create legal online music stores.
At the center of the detente is Napster creator Shawn Fanning, whose new company, Snocap, has spent the last year building technology designed to identify music on file-swapping networks and turn free song trades into purchases. The company plans to emerge from stealth mode by the end of the year and has already secured licenses to the song catalog of the Universal Music Group.
Fanning's technology is designed to work behind the scenes of other companies' services, rather than directly replacing either file-swapping networks like Kazaa or today's download stores such as Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store. But several companies are already planning to use the technology, which could allow peer-to-peer networks to become online stores that sell music legally, much like iTunes.
In order to get there, though, peer-to-peer companies would have to agree to keep unauthorized music out--something large networks that support millions of users might be loathe to do.
"There's nothing we'd like better than to see peer-to-peer (services) selling our music," said one top label executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They just can't be allowing people to steal it at the same time."
Three years after the courts forced Napster to close its doors at the peak of its popularity, the company's founder is poised to rejoin the online music revolution on the side of the record labels.
Fanning's apparent conversion offers more than a hint of historical irony. As a young renegade, he was ordered by courts in 2000 to begin blocking trades of copyrighted songs on the original Napster service, which ultimately shut down a year later, after the company's filters proved unwieldy.
The Snocap system, which identifies songs in order to extract payment, carries at least the mark of that original court order--and might arguably be seen as its fruition.
Fanning's technology is just one element in a series of pieces that are rapidly falling into place to allow new kinds of peer-to-peer music distribution. Another change, possibly more significant, has come in the form of growing flexibility on the part of record label executives, who increasingly see how using peer-to-peer technology as a legitimate distribution system could offset its use for piracy.
Labels have flirted with peer-to-peer services before--most notably when BMG Music parent Bertelsmann provided a financial lifeline to the original Napster in the last months of its operation. Labels have also had discussions with Altnet, a company that has tried to sell music, movies and games through Kazaa and other file-swapping services. But so far nothing tangible has come of those talks.
But a generation of peer-to-peer companies and executives, weary of intractable legal fights, now appear to be willing to accede to record labels' primary demand: They can distribute major-label music, but not alongside free, pirated content.
"Presented with an opportunity to get licensed, as we have all been screaming for for the last year, it would be disingenuous not to do it," said former Grokster President Wayne Rosso, whose Mashboxx music distribution network, slated to be released early next year, may be one of the first services to use Snocap's technology.
They'll have a steep hill to climb, competing against the established download services, such as iTunes, as well as free file-swapping services. Optimists point to tapping the community aspects of peer to peer, in which drawing from other users' unique playlists would still be an attractive notion, even if the songs were no longer free.
"It's going to be a tricky thing, but ultimately you could make it viable, in the same way that eBay offers an alternative to Amazon in purchasing goods," said Vance Ikezoye, chief executive officer of Audible Magic, a company that provides technology for identifying and blocking songs on peer-to-peer networks. "You might say that P2P could similarly be an alternative way of purchasing content to iTunes and Napster."
Snocap details emerge
Fanning and other Snocap executives, through a spokeswoman, declined requests for an interview. But new details of their technological system are emerging as it nears completion.
The company has been working for more than a year with the close support of many in the record industry. Top executives in the business have come to see one-time pariah Fanning as a genuine convert to the idea of selling music legally online.
The overall technology is designed to plug into other software or services and identify songs that are being swapped on a network, sources familiar with the company say. In a peer-to-peer network, a piece of software using Fanning's technology would have to get authorization from Snocap before downloading a song, for example.
Sources said Snocap itself is not a filter, although some in the record industry see it as proof that existing file-trading networks can have copyright-friendly filters applied to them, blocking unauthorized transmissions. Services that use Snocap's technology will not be allowed to have pirated material swapped alongside the authorized versions of songs.
Snocap itself will offer a range of different services to record companies and other customers, including the creation of a "warehouse" of authorized music that can help "seed" peer-to-peer networks with content.
Record executives say they are also interested in a feature that will track peer-to-peer requests for songs that aren't yet licensed for digital distribution. That will help them go into their archives and find songs that are out of print that people may want online, one executive said.
The identification and transaction system won't be limited to traditional peer-to-peer networks, sources said. Ordinary Web retailers could use the technology to sell a song online, and let their own customers forward the song to other people. If those people downstream wanted to keep the song, they would also pay for it, with the funds forwarded to the original retailer by Snocap.
The seeds of competition
None of this is likely to eliminate traditional peer-to-peer networks anytime soon, of course. The siren call of free music and movies, even with the associated risk of prosecution from the Recording Industry Association of America or the Motion Picture Association of America, will keep many people coming back to unregulated networks like Kazaa and eDonkey.
But a few services will likely pop up early next year. Rosso has been widely reported to be in talks with SonyBMG, although sources say no deal has been finalized. Sources familiar with the project say Mashboxx is likely to provide low-quality versions of music to sample, along with Snocap-backed links to purchase high-quality songs, in part tapping into existing file-trading networks for content.
Rosso himself declined to comment on the specifics of his project, or on whether he had already inked any deals with labels. But "it's going to be file-sharing on steroids," he said.
Wayne Chang, the creator of the college-focused peer-to-peer service I2Hub, which now operates in part on the super-high-speed Internet2 network, said he is interested in turning it into an authorized service with the help of Snocap or other similar technology.
The Israel-based iMesh service, which settled a lawsuit with the recording industry earlier this year, has also said it will turn itself into an authorized distribution channel, while retaining its peer-to-peer aspect. But sources familiar with the company said it is likely to use Audible Magic technology rather than Snocap.
http://news.com.com/Music+rebels+see...3-5453788.html
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Grokster Sails into Net Radio
Elizabeth Millard
File-sharing company Grokster has introduced a streaming-audio online radio service. Grokster Radio is a co-branded version of Mercora P2P Radio. Its catalog includes more than 10 million tracks and features some artists, like the Beatles, not available through other music services, such as iTunes.
File-sharing company Grokster will distribute and market a co-branded version of Mercora P2P Radio, a peer- to-peer music search and discovery service.
The service, called Grokster Radio, will not allow people to download music. Instead, users can search for specific artists through Mecora's technology and listen to songs via streaming audio.
Grokster also will host several radio stations for independent artists and bands whose music will be showcased through a special tab within the application, according to the company. Grokster Radio is available now, and can be downloaded from the company's site.
Search and Discover
The ability to do music search and discovery in a way that is useful and legal is of great interest to Grokster, making the agreement with Mercora a natural fit, the company noted.
"We think this innovative technology and solution is a sign of the important changes taking place in both the technology and music industries," says Grokster president and founder Dan Rung in a statement.
Mercora has noted that Grokster's support will bring the firm more momentum in the marketplace.
Main Feature
Mercora P2P Radio and the Mercora Network encompass a range of technology beyond peer-to-peer, bringing together grid computing , social networking and Internet streaming.
A notable advantage for users of the service will be access to a large music catalog. Mercora said it currently has over 10 million user-contributed tracks on the network. Also, it features some artists, like the Beatles, not available through other music services like iTunes.
Grokster Radio and Mercora are also touting the service's social networking aspect, which matches users with people who have listened to similar music.
Legal Tender
One of the features of the Mercora partnership that Grokster is especially eager to highlight is that the companies will be committed to abiding by "the spirit and letter of copyright law," according to Grokster's release.
Considering the legal tussles that Grokster has experienced with the Recording Industry Association of America , which has sued the company for copyright infringement, it is not surprising that Grokster would emphasize the legalities of its radio play.
As the lawsuits continue, it is likely that Grokster will focus on its legal offerings, intellectual property attorney Jeff Norman of Chicago-based firm Kirkland & Ellis told NewsFactor.
"Courts are taking a look at what peer-to-peer companies are doing in a way they haven't in the past," he said. "That's going to change how some people do business."
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtm...story_id=28443
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Sony Talks To Grokster
John Oates
The chairman of Sony BMG Rolf Schmidt-Holtz has admitted the music giant is in early talks with file sharing network Grokster.
Schmidt-Holtz said the technology was too popular to ignore and needed to be brought into a legal framework. He said: "I'm not negotiating myself, as Sony BMG chairman, but I know some staff members are at the very beginning of talks with Grokster."
The comments were made during a panel discussion at a T-Online event in Germany, according to Reuters. He said: "We are noticing that there is huge demand for services like that, and our intention is to transfer this demand into legal channels. Only then it would make sense for us."
Bertelsmann, before the Sony takeover, did a deal with Napster, then king of the peer-to-peer networks, much to the horror of the rest of the music industry.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11...er_sony_talks/
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A Visit to ShareDirect
Michael Ingram
ShareDirect has been developed to be the easiest way to build a private file sharing network. The software is designed and priced primarily for business, but may also be of interest to individual users.
NATs (Network Address Translation) and firewalls are the biggest headache for individuals wanting to connect to each other. Two users, both behind NATs, are not able to make a direct connection.
This is particularly true for business users, who are most likely behind a NAT, and who are likely trying to send to a client or business colleague, also behind a NAT.
Businesses can set up file servers to overcome the problem of NATs and share information, but this is costly, time consuming and requires the right knowledge.
In steps ShareDirect.
ShareDirect began life as a dream for businesses to have the ability to quickly and securely transfer information. With Napster in the news and Bearshare making waves, P2P was the unmistakeable answer.
Emir Aboulhosn, founder and project manager, explained to Slyck the purpose of ShareDirect:
“To provide the ability for anyone to create an instant secure and private network with anyone they choose. The tool that will allow them to do this has to be as easy as possible, requiring almost no set up time. Our mission statement is to connect people instantly who are not connected through a LAN.”
The idea was snapped up by LapLink, a small, but famous company which has specialised in information sharing since 1986.
“With [Laplink’s] past history of instant networking of PCs, we have taken a further step to create easy and secure data networks to reduce IT costs and time while creating new business agility,” Aboulhosn continued.
LapLink is helmed by ex-Microsoft strategy manager, Thomas Koll. Koll is fascinated with the ease of connecting to the internet, and now he wants people to be able to connect to each other with that same ease.
“People can connect to the internet, but connecting to each other is a different matter,” he says.
In order to circumvent NAT and firewall problems, the ShareDirect software has the facility to proxy data via ShareDirect central servers.
Unsurprisingly then, ShareDirect costs money. Prices start shy of $40 per year, and go up to $249. The cheapest package allows for 50MB of data to be transferred via LapLink servers every month. The top end package has a 3GB monthly limit.
In tests performed by Slyck, the software successfully penetrated a university firewall, where all other P2P software is blocked.
Direct file transfers are unlimited. There are no free packages without any server bandwidth allowance.
Prices are not suited to individual file sharers, who are used to free and much larger bandwidth usage. However, for businesses this software is time saving, allowing for instant collaboration.
That is the theory, here is the practice.
Installation of the software is effortless. Users are then required to register an e-mail address and password. A valid e-mail address is required. Users log on every session.
Since all users verify themselves with a central server, everyone can have confidence with who they are sharing with. This is further supported by 256 bit encryption. ShareDirect is therefore suitable for sharing sensitive business and personal documents.
Furthermore, to combat any virus concerns, all files are automatically checked by LaoLink anti-virus.
With the plan of making the program as user-friendly as possible, Laplink decided to build ShareDirect into Windows Explorer.
The idea was great as everyone is familiar with Explorer, and on many levels it has worked.
To get started, users must know the e-mail address of the person they want to share files with, and which folders to share with them.
When a folder is shared with another user, ShareDirect splits the Windows Explorer view into two panes. The top pane shows the domestic files, the bottom half shows the files being shared in return by the second user. Selecting a file from the bottom pane transfers it to the local folder.
Files can not be uploaded by the serving computer; files must be requested by the downloader.
Users have to share each folder and each subfolder separately. For a user to accept each shared folder, they must share a folder in return.
This system works perfectly if only a few folders are shared with no subfolders, otherwise the situation quickly become messy.
It did not take Slyck long to have albums being shared with unrelated albums and, even worse, films shared with “My Received Files.” Downloads quickly become unmanageable. The more users who joined, the worse the situation became.
Emir Aboulhosn defends the system, arguing that the program is primarily for business users sharing project folders. A business environment makes the decision of which folders to share with which folders considerably easier, as project folders are symmetrical on each computer.
A conscious decision was made to not share subfolders. Aboulhosn argues that it would be a logistical nightmare. However, this just pushes the problem onto the end user.
It would be better for ShareDirect to find a solution, rather than each end-user having to, but Emir also argues there is a security risk to sub-folders being accidentally shared.
A simple opt-in to share system would avoid these security fears. Perhaps a feature we can look forward to in a future release.
In the name of user-friendliness, users can not view upload or download speeds, or throttle bandwidth usage. Aboulhosn believes that such information and functionality is too confusing and of no value to business users, as files being transferred are relatively small. Bandwidth usage is more comparable with e-mail than P2P.
Aboulhosn told Slyck that businesses have been praising ShareDirect for the efficiency improvements that the program has provided them.
“[ShareDirect] is exactly what [businesses] have been looking for.
ShareDirect is being used by a Medical Patient Aircraft Transport Company in USA to share patient records. With the level of security ShareDirect offers, it meets HIPAA standards, meaning that the medical community can use to transport medical files/ records over the internet.
In Austria a customer of ours wrote to us after installing ShareDirect at his businesses telling us that he intends to connect all his stores to retrieve daily sales data, exchange new product information and access various ad-hoc data without creating expensive networks.”
Even so, the use of Windows Explorer is a mistake. This program stands out for business users as it is comparatively not bad, rather than good.
Sensible organization of shared folders would instantly solve 90% of the problems with ShareDirect, bringing implementation of the dream close to reality.
Businesses can look forward to compatible Mac and Linux versions of the software.
Active Role
ShareDirect is going to be active in the P2P community, proving file sharing has legitimate uses.
The company would like to join P2P United, to help the front line in demonstrating to organisations like the RIAA, and people such as Senator Orrin Hatch, that sharing is not a dirty word, and P2P is a positive force on the Internet.
In talks with Slyck, Aboulhosn described file sharing of copyright material between friends as harmless. He also had some choice words for Orrin Hatch. However, the official statement is somewhat more conservative:
“We do not support or encourage people to use ShareDirect to share copyrighted material. As a software company, we are also victims of software piracy and understand certain industries’ position on the issue. With ShareDirect people may use it to share their music files or any other copyrighted material as we cannot enforce the law. What makes us different from others is that ShareDirect was not designed nor build to allow for anonymous distribution of copyrighted material over the internet. ShareDirect is built to help people communicate and exchange data for business and personal use. Today many systems are used to violate copyright, including email, and the fault does not lie with the technology, but with the intent to break the law.”
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=606