[JackSpratts]

Why Punish The Technology?
Charles Cooper

"Grokster and StreamCast are simply digital-age versions of the record sellers or dance-hall operators that, when facing liability for failing to supervise or control the infringement from which they directly profit, seek to evade that liability by leaving the dirty work to others."
Hard words, but entertainment lawyers are paid to be nasty. So it was that a brief they filed with the Supreme Court this week predictably portrayed the file-swapping companies as the antithesis of all that is holy and right. The legal paperwork was submitted in advance of a critical March court date when they will again try to get the court to shut down digital file swapping.

But in its zeal to put the likes of Grokster and StreamCast Networks out of business, the entertainment industry's challenge might lead to a change in the law that renders potentially important technologies stillborn. More about that in a moment.

Ever since Napster first popularized Internet file swapping in the late 1990s, Hollywood and the music studios have viewed peer-to-peer technology as a license to steal. The content industry won its famous battle against Napster (which closed its doors in 2001). Victory was declared, but digital file swappers easily found other peer-to-peer sites.

If a ban on P2P technology had existed in the late 1990s, the MP3 player industry would never have come into being.The industry pressed its legal attack, but a decision by California's 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last August unexpectedly upheld the validity of P2P file-sharing services. The court found that providers of online file-swapping technology could not be held liable for aiding copyright infringement, in a decision that contained shades of the Sony-Betamax decision two decades earlier.

The entertainment industry was livid. How could the law allow companies that damned well knew they were facilitating illegal file swapping to stay in business? That's where the Betamax precedent comes into play.

In 1984, the Supreme Court determined that Sony was not liable for copyright infringement just because its Betamax video tape recorder might be used by people engaged in infringing activities. The content industry has been itching to knock down this decision ever since. Now it has another chance.

Here's the problem: The law can be a blunt instrument. What's to avert an overly broad ruling that inadvertently prevents a future technology from ever coming into being? Most of the songs that ran on the early crop of MP3 players came from illegal music downloads. If technology that flourished because of customers' illegal activity had been banned in the late 1990s, the MP3 player industry would not exist today.

Truth be told, I've had a tough time trying to decide who to support in this cat fight. I roll my eyes whenever senior executives at Grokster and StreamCast claim they don't know how their technology gets used. They'd have a better chance convincing me there are huge stockpiles of WMD hiding in Laura Bush's armoire than to insist on pleading ignorance.

I still can't bring myself to root for the control freaks in Hollywood. The power brokers who run the show are so focused on the piracy rate part of the story they keep missing the bigger revenue growth rate takeaway.

So they make up a cock-and-bull story that Grokster and StreamCast exert the same kind of centralized control as a Napster. In fact, Napster got shut down because it owned and operated servers that facilitated illegal file swapping.

Truth be told, I've had a tough time trying to decide who to support in this cat fight.Why punish the technology because some people use it for unlawful means? Speaking as a consumer (and occasional file downloader--legally, of course!), it should be as easy to use content legally as it is illegally. Case in point: the flourishing business that grew up around online music stores.

The entertainment studios took forever to bless the concept. That opened the door for Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs, who moved on his hunch about how the future was being reshaped. Apple developed an easy-to-use online music site, and that's why it boasts millions of music customers today. (Heads should be rolling at places like Sony, EMI and Universal.)

Ever since Napster got closed down, the content industry's strategy for dealing with the peer-to-peer challenge can be summed up in three words: Sue the bastards. Everyone of sane mind can agree there's a need to address digital piracy. But how about trying something more nuanced than a sledgehammer approach?
http://news.com.com/Why+punish+the+t...3-5553805.html


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Strangling P2P

Cambridge Firm Raises $5.6m For R&D
David Manners

CacheLogic, the two year-old Cambridge start-up, has raised another $5.6m to expand its R&D and marketing operations in the peer-to-peer Internet datacomms industry.

"Peer-to-peer traffic [data traffic which goes from one Internet user to another where the data is not stored on a central server] is taking between 60 and 80 per cent of total Internet traffic by volume, causing major bandwidth problems for ISPs," Nick Farka, marketing manager for CacheLogic, told EW.

The main problems caused for Internet service providers are the very large files commonly transferred - typically music and video - and the symmetrical nature of peer-to-peer traffic with both parties uploading and downloading large files. This does not sit well with the asymmetric nature of much of the broadband network based on ADSL and cable.

Peer-to-peer transactions are substantially adding to the bandwidth requirements and costs of ISPs without adding to their revenues. CacheLogic has a product called Cacheswitch which identifies peer-to-peer transactions, and a product called Cachepliance which reduces the transit bandwidth 50 per cent and the upstream bandwidth up to 80 per cent.

CacheLogic used its first investment of $2m from Pentech Ventures and Cambridge Gateway to get initial products manufactured and into trials, and to find its first customers. The products are manufactured in Cambridge.

CacheLogic's funding, which comes in a round led by 3i, but including Pentech and Cambridge Gateway, will allow the firm to expand its R&D personnel and its sales and marketing team.

The big opportunity for peer-to-peer will come from its move to big corporate usage.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/art...earch=&nPage=1


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Legal P2P Radio Gets Cash Boost
Steve Malone

The P2P internet radio company Mercora has landed $5 million worth of venture capital funding. The company says it plans to use the money to expand its team and range of services.

Using the Mercora software, anyone can be a radio station. All music, legally gathered, is available for broadcast using the company's servers and peer-to-peer technologies. Broadcast restrictions are fairly limited and include things like not being allowed to broadcast a 'programme guide' in advance, play requests within one hour of receiving it or interfere with the digital recording (Mercora uses data on the file to assess royalty payments) and generally stay within the law.

The company is allowed to facilitate the broadcasting of copyright music in accordance with the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and pays the appropriate royalties to the RIAA through its collection arm SoundExchange.

Since its launch in 2003, Mercora IM Radio, the company says it has amassed 300,000 registered users and over 15 million user contributed tracks. It intends to create revenue streams through advertising and paid-for services, although the core radio function will remain free.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/68736/le...ash-boost.html


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Fake Commercial Spots Spread Quickly on the Internet
Nat Ives

EVEN as the British unit of Volkswagen prepared yesterday to confront the creators of a fake Volkswagen commercial circulating online, executives there said they were worried that the incident would not be the last. Rather, they said, it may set the table for more hoaxes and brand confusion.

"The difficulty is, of course, that the general public may not know who is behind what they see on the Internet," said Paul Buckett, the head of press and public relations at Volkswagen Group U.K. in London. "And in the future it may not be easy to take legal action to defend ourselves. That's not just for Volkswagen, of course, but for any company or individual."

Viral marketing, in which low-profile ads spread quickly online as people share them, has become an intriguing strategy for many marketers trying to look beyond traditional 30-second television commercials.

But marketers are not the only ones taking the viral approach. Because the Web and cheap video technology keep making it easier for anyone with some knowledge and equipment to produce spots that look almost like real commercials, brand managers may find their carefully calibrated marketing messages increasingly being tweaked, teased, spoiled or entirely undermined.

Consumers, on the other hand, can now wonder whether each supposed hoax is an authorized, but deniable, below-the-radar marketing ploy.

The hoax at hand has set off a particularly sharp bout of distress since its appearance last week, because it looks almost exactly like a real commercial for the Volkswagen Polo, a model sold outside the United States, except that it portrays the Polo driver as a suicide bomber.

In the commercial, the driver pulls up to a busy outdoor cafe, exposes explosives strapped to his chest and pushes a detonator. His car, however, contains the explosion without cracking a window. The spot ends with the Volkswagen logo and the actual Polo ad theme: "Small but tough."

The spot was sent to the London office of DDB Worldwide, a Volkswagen roster agency, by two people known as Lee and Dan. "We had no part in disseminating it," said Annouchka Behrmann, public relations director at DDB London, part of the DDB Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group. "We think it's absolutely disgusting."

Mr. Buckett said yesterday that his company was about to deliver Lee and Dan a letter demanding the source material, an admission that they created the ad without authorization, a public apology in language to be worked out with the automaker and a public promise to neither infringe on Volkswagen's trademarks nor create or distribute any more Volkswagen work.

The letter then warns that Volkswagen will sue if it does not receive a response by tomorrow.

Harry Cymbler at Hot Cherry P.R. in London, which represents Lee and Dan, said they would not comment, declining to elaborate or provide their last names. In a quotation published in The New York Post last week, Dan apologized and exonerated Volkswagen.

Lee and Dan, whose motives in creating the spot remain unclear, are among a growing number of people who are creating unsolicited, often unwelcome advertising for companies that have their own agencies and plans. Volkswagen executives said that they thought Lee and Dan sent the mock Polo commercial to DDB on a speculative basis, seeking work on the account.

Then there are volunteer advertisers motivated by product evangelism, like George Masters, a Web design and graphics instructor in Irvine, Calif., who created an unauthorized 60-second animated spot for the iPod Mini music player partly for the challenge and partly out of enthusiasm for the product.

Mr. Masters said that Apple had not asked him to remove his ad, which has circulated online, from his Web site at www.gomotron.com. "I'll still continue to make Apple ads as I find time," he said.

Given that others, from enthusiasts to self-promoters to corporate critics, are likely to keep making unsolicited ads as well, Mr. Masters said, some of the work will hurt brands and some will help them. "Companies just need to find smart ways of dealing with this new word-of-mouth, homegrown advertising," he said.

Other commercials on the Internet have already gained occasional notoriety in Europe, most notably a spot that appeared last year, apparently promoting the Ford Sportka.

Using special effects, the spot shows a housecat as it lazily approaches a Sportka parked in a driveway, hops on the roof to investigate and peeks inside when the sunroof spontaneously opens. The cat is killed when the sunroof closes.

The British operation of Ford Motor and its agency, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, denied any involvement, but failed to totally squelch speculation that the spot was deliberately leaked.

"Some advertisers see this as a way of deliberately making their brands a little more edgy," said Richard Leishman, managing director at Bore Me in London, which operates a Web site (www.boreme.com) where visitors can watch viral videos, including the Polo and Sportka spots. "A lot of brands benefit and do it deliberately. There are others who probably don't want that."

At the same time, many others are using the viral approach for a wide range of reasons, Mr. Leishman said. "You may get rogue agencies who are keen to get some public relations who produce something that purports to be something that it is not," he said. And when the Internet is the medium, he added, the spread of such material is nearly impossible to control.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/bu...ia/27adco.html


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They're Off to See the Wizards
Katie Hafner

IT was just past noon on a recent weekday at the Apple Store here, and the Genius Bar was buzzing.

At one end of the 40-foot maple counter, a cherub-faced Genius in a black T-shirt spoke soothingly to a middle-aged customer whose iPod kept erasing songs. After a few minutes of probing, the Genius announced his diagnosis: the firmware needed updating. Then he showed the man how to do it.

At the other end of the bar, another amiable Genius - Apple's term for its in-store technical support staff - greeted a couple who had arrived with an ailing PowerBook. "Hey, what's going on?" he said, and got down to work.

In an age when human help of any kind is hard to come by, the eight or nine Geniuses on duty at any given time here are a welcome anomaly.

In fact, go to any of the 102 Apple-owned retail stores in the world and - if you are willing to wait - you will be treated to what is an increasingly rare service: free face-to-face technical support.

The walk-up assistance has existed since the first Apple Store opened in 2001, in Washington. Over the years, as the concept gained momentum, the bars have become what Ron Johnson, Apple's senior vice president for retailing, calls the soul of the stores.

"It's the part of the store that people connect to emotionally more than any other," Mr. Johnson said.

For the first few years, there was general mayhem around the Genius Bars. Customers would stand four or five deep, broken gadgets in hand, waiting to speak to an expert. Now there is an online system for scheduling free, same-day appointments. And for $100 a year, customers can schedule appointments up to a week in advance with the expert of their choice.

But there can still be long waits. Just after Christmas, for instance, at the Apple Store in SoHo in New York, by 10 a.m. the earliest appointment that could be had was at 4 p.m. People left and came back, or sat for hours, reading, talking on their cellphones or milling about the store.

The San Francisco store, like all the others, has instituted a pager system for those who show up when all the experts are busy, like the man on this day who lugged his iMac to the bar, hoisted over his shoulder like a recalcitrant child. He took a pager and joined a dozen or so others waiting for help.

The concept of a bar came to Mr. Johnson one night when he was thinking about the kind of environment Apple wanted to create in its stores. He said he was inspired by Four Seasons, the Ritz-Carlton and other hotels where service is paramount.

"We believed you had to bring the people dimension back into retail," said Mr. Johnson, who joined Apple five years ago after 15 years at Target. "We thought, What about giving tech support that's as welcoming as the bar at the Ritz?"

Tim Bajarin, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, a high-tech consulting firm in Campbell, Calif., said Apple's strategy was sound. "It's all part of a sales process," he said. "They have these guys who are extremely articulate answering customers' questions, which is key not only to the sales process, but the support afterwards."

Other computer retail stores have technical support counters, too. A few, like CompUSA and Best Buy, even have traveling teams of tech support staff who make house calls. But those services are not free.

Further, Mr. Bajarin said, the wider spectrum of problems encountered at other stores dilutes the quality of service.

"A Best Buy could be handling not just H-P, but Gateway and Epson and whatever else they have in the store," he said. "These guys running the Genius Bars are extremely well trained around a single platform."

Hiring those Geniuses - the label was Mr. Johnson's idea, too - is not difficult. He said that when the company advertises for an opening, an average of 50 people apply within 24 hours. For the most part, the applicants already have extensive technical knowledge. Apple provides eight weeks of training, four weeks at the company's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and another four weeks at the store.

Mr. Johnson said an initial concern was that the people hired would be geeky, lacking the social skills for a job that calls for continuous interaction with strangers. But he soon found that more often than not, the employees were well-socialized young people who happened to know a lot about computers.

Each employee has an area of expertise - digital photography, say, or the Windows operating system. And they aren't too proud to call on colleagues for help.

"I borrow others' brain cells all the time," said Diana Souverbielle, an employee in the San Francisco store, who confessed to knowing "just enough about Windows to get in trouble."

David Marcantonio, 25, who diagnosed the firmware problem, is the resident iPod expert at the San Francisco store. Mr. Marcantonio, who studied criminology in college and has been fluent in most things Apple since age 14, stands out from his co-workers because his T-shirt reads iPod Genius.

"It's a bull's-eye," Mr. Marcantonio said of the shirt. Half of the customers at the Genius Bar these days have iPod-related problems.

Sometimes the public misunderstands the purpose of the Genius Bar, mistaking it for a think tank or an intellectual sounding board. David Isom, 29, who decided to defer a legal career in favor of a stint at the bar, said a man came in recently to discuss an idea he had for a solar-powered subway system. "He had technical questions, and he wanted to pitch it to us," Mr. Isom said. "I know nothing about solar power."

Indeed, they are humble experts. When confronted by a thorny problem on the fringe of their expertise, they might conduct a Google search to consult sources that are "not necessarily endorsed by Apple," Mr. Isom said.

And the experience of one customer whose keyboard had a sticky "e," which was cured by Ms. Souverbielle's mere touch, suggests that the experts might even have healing powers. Ms. Souverbielle declared that it was merely a coincidence.

Invariably in their 20's and 30's, and predominantly male, Apple's experts do keep lofty company. Behind each bar is a screen with a rotating display of quotations from half a dozen better-known intellectual luminaries, like Leonardo da Vinci ("The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding") and Michelangelo ("If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn't seem wonderful at all").

But could Michelangelo have executed a clean startup from an external drive on a PowerBook G4?

Could Leonardo have restored the video on Joe Montana's iBook?

That task was performed by Chris Tichenor, a 24-year-old Genius in San Francisco. No matter that the concierge mistakenly entered Mr. Montana, the famous quarterback, into the appointment queue as Steve Young, Mr. Montana's successor on the San Francisco 49ers. "He didn't seem to mind," Mr. Tichenor said.

By Mr. Johnson's estimate, each of the company's 500 experts handles some 200 customers a week, taking as long as is needed to solve each problem.

The stores in general and the Genius Bars in particular have been credited with creating a halo effect for Apple. The iPod owners who own PC's and go to the unrelentingly chic stores for an expert's help are often seduced by Apple's self-conscious hipness.

Paula Mauro, who lives in New York and recently spent several hours at the Genius Bar in the SoHo store, got that message when getting help with iPod-to-PC communication. As she sat at the bar with her 10-year-old son, William, who aspires to Macintosh ownership, it became evident to her that synching an iPod to a Macintosh computer is relatively seamless, while her three-year-old PC posed no end of technical challenges.

"The next computer I buy is going to be a Mac," she said.

The Geniuses are patient even when people show up with problems that only a technophobe could create. Mr. Isom said people have come to him with an iPod that they insisted was dead - until Mr. Isom showed them that they had pushed the Hold switch, which inactivates the iPod's buttons, mainly so that it cannot be turned on or off inadvertently.

If a problem can be solved on the spot, the Genius may disappear into the back and re-emerge with a piece of equipment restored to health. Broken iPods are often replaced at no cost, Mr. Marcantonio said, because if the warranty applies, the easiest thing to do is to hand the customer a new one.

In some ways, this has little to do with keen technical knowledge and a lot to do with astute customer service.

The experience of Cecilia Joyce, a marathon runner who claims to be unable to live without her iPod, is a recent case in point. Ms. Joyce's iPod is packed with music like Boy George's rendition of "The Girl From Ipanema," which inspires her to run longer, sometimes even faster.

When her iPod's battery stopped holding a charge, Ms. Joyce went straight to the Genius Bar in San Francisco. She apologized to Mr. Marcantonio for having bought the device at a different Apple Store. Unfazed by this mundane detail, and without further ado, he gave Ms. Joyce a new iPod.

Were it not for the Genius Bar, Ms. Joyce might have gone an untenable two weeks without a device, the amount of time it could have taken to send it to be repaired or replaced.

Soon after the elated Ms. Joyce left, Mr. Marcantonio glanced down at his computer to see what troubled device was coming next. "Oh, it's an iPod Shuffle - this is going to be interesting," he said, delighted by his first encounter with the tiny new flash-based iPod.

Mr. Marcantonio picked up the white plastic stick and gave its miniature controls a quick poke.

Unlike the clerk in the Monty Python dead parrot skit, who refuses to concede that the bird he sold to a customer was in fact deceased, Mr. Marcantonio knows a dead iPod Shuffle when he sees one. The solution: give the customer a new one.

Genius.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/te...ts/27appl.html


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iPods Act as D.J.'s at Clubs Where Patrons Call the Tunes
Ashlee Vance

WHOSE iPod is this?" yelled the manager. "Is this the Pogues?"

Bar managers do not typically ask their clientele about the songs pumping out of the bar's music system. They tend to have intimate knowledge of the jukebox, or leave music questions to the D.J. But that is changing in some bars, where customers who bring their own iPods have started to take control of the tunes.

Nic Nepo, the manager inquiring about the folk-punk band the Pogues, oversees an iPod night every Tuesday at his bar, the Tonic Room, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. On a typical night, about 10 people bring their iPods loaded with a special playlist for the occasion. They sign up, wait for their turn and then plug into the Tonic Room's sound system. They have 15 minutes to wow other customers or simply soothe their own souls.

"I've been having a bad week," said Julianna Holowka, an iPod night regular. "I'm feeling entirely self-indulgent, so I'm just playing what I want to hear."

The New York club APT, in the West Village, lays claim to having held the first iPod night almost three years ago when DJ Andrew Andrew kicked off what it calls an iParty. (DJ Andrew Andrew is two men named Andrew who decline to reveal their last names.) In Chicago, the Tonic Room is one of at least four bars that hold the events. The 21st Amendment in San Francisco has the Bay Area's best-known iPod night.

DJ Andrew Andrew places relatively tight controls on APT's iPod night, held every Tuesday and attended by 50 to 75 people. Customers take a number, just as they would at a delicatessen, and look to a Now Serving sign for their moment. They then pick seven minutes' worth of music from two iPods provided by DJ Andrew Andrew, each holding 1,000 songs. Only APT regulars who have proven good taste can play songs from their own iPods.

"Once a month or so, someone will be taken aback that you have to use our iPods," said one of the Andrews in a telephone interview. "But APT has a really strong musical identity, and we want to make sure there is a certain type of music playing."

A more relaxed atmosphere permeates the Get Me High Lounge in Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood. Two regulars, Rob Tarpey and Edmund Gomez, arrive every Wednesday night and play songs off their iPods until the bartender or another customer asks to have a turn. The iPods are passed across the bar and placed in a standard dock.

"This gives a couple of iPod dorks like us a chance to listen to the music you jam to at home in a really comfortable setting," Mr. Gomez said. "I look forward to this every week."

The bartender, Joshua Tilden, appreciates the night as well. "It's my favorite night to work," he said. "I like hearing other peoples' taste in music."

The recording industry hasn't reacted negatively to the iPod nights, even though the format sidesteps traditional methods of playing music at bars and clubs.

Mr. Nepo said that the license from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers that establishments use to cover the music played by D.J.'s should also cover iPod owners acting as D.J.'s for a night.

Becoming a temporary D.J. can be as nerve-racking as it is gratifying. Customers huddled in the Tonic Room's dark red confines agonized over which songs to play. The music departed from typical jukebox fare, with one customer showing off his collection of recorded Phish concerts and another playing TV theme songs. One iPod user accidentally cut off Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine" midsong to an outpouring of jeers, while another participant had patrons gyrating to the Doors' "Peace Frog."

"It's a rush to have people dancing to your music," said Amanda MacDonald, a law school student at Northwestern. "They should have this everywhere."

Most of the iPod fanatics interviewed seemed certain that iPod nights were a trend that would catch on in a big way, enabling a customer to rise, for a moment, to the status of star D.J., or use music as a way to strike up a conversation or a flirtation.

One customer at the Tonic Room asked if the bar would ever charge for the evening. "We don't want to have people pay to play their own music," Mr. Nepo said. "That would be terrible."
http://news.com.com/At+these+clubs%2...l?tag=nefd.top


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Ted Turner Calls Fox a 'Propaganda Voice'
Ken Ritter

CNN founder Ted Turner has called the Fox television network a "propaganda voice" of the Bush administration and compared Fox News Channel's popularity to Adolf Hitler's rise in Germany before World War II.

Turner, in a speech Tuesday to the National Association of Television Programming Executives, also targeted "gigantic companies whose agenda goes beyond broadcasting" for timidity in challenging the Bush White House.

"There's one network, Fox, that's a propaganda voice for them," the cable news pioneer said. "It's certainly legal. But it does pose problems for our democracy when the news is 'dumbed-down.'"

Fox News in New York issued a statement saying, "Ted is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network and now his mind - we wish him well."

Turner, 66, stepped down as vice chairman of AOL Time Warner in May 2003.

During a question-and-answer session moderated by former CNN anchorman Bernard Shaw, Turner called it "not necessarily a bad thing" that Fox ratings top CNN and other cable news networks.

"Adolf Hitler was more popular in Germany in the early '30s than ... people that were running against him," Turner said in remarks videotaped by conference administrators. "So just because you're bigger doesn't mean you're right."

Convention spokeswoman Michelle Mikoljak said the association had no comment about Turner's comments.

Turner heads an Atlanta-based philanthropic and business empire.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...=ENTERTAINMENT


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Microsoft Plans Restrictions on Fixes
Allison Linn

Microsoft Corp. plans to severely curtail the ways in which people running pirated copies of its dominant Windows operating system can receive software updates, including security fixes.

The new authentication system, announced Tuesday and due to arrive by midyear, will still allow people with pirated copies of Windows to obtain security fixes, but their options will be limited. The move allows Microsoft to use one of its sharpest weapons - access to security patches that can prevent viruses, worms and other crippling attacks - to thwart a costly and meddlesome piracy problem.

But some security experts said the crackdown also could increase Internet security problems in general, if there is a spike in unsecured computers open to attack, which then could be used to attack others.

David Lazar, a director of the effort, said Microsoft would monitor that potential problem closely. But the company actually considers its authentication requirement one possible way to boost Internet security - countering the idea it may increase threats. That's because pirated copies of Windows could contain viruses or other security threats, he said.

Over the next few months, the software behemoth will begin to more broadly adopt the program, called Windows Genuine Advantage, that urges users to provide proof their Windows copy is authentic before receiving some software updates.

By mid-2005, the program will become mandatory for Windows users to get virtually all updates, including security fixes available through the company's Windows Update Web site. But users who have pirated copies of Windows will be able to continue to get security fixes if they sign up to automatically receive security updates.

Russ Cooper, a senior scientist with Cybertrust Inc., said completely cutting off access to security fixes for pirated machines could cause a spike in malicious, Internet-based attacks. He lauded Microsoft for mitigating that problem by continuing to allow all users to get the automatic updates, regardless of whether they're running pirated versions.

Still, Cooper said he expected Microsoft to eventually cut off that security update avenue for pirated copies. He said the company may feel it has few other options as it tries to stop the millions of users who are running pirated copes of Windows.

The operating system is one of the company's major cash cows, and the move comes as Microsoft is moving aggressively into emerging markets where piracy is thought to be more common.

"The reality is that shareholders of Microsoft would like to see them get all the money they are owed," Cooper said.

Microsoft said the company has no current plans to require users running automatic updates to provide proof that their copies of Windows are genuine.

Lazar said piracy has cost the Redmond-based company "billions of dollars over the past 10 years," but he would not be more specific.

"Our desire is to enhance the value of genuine Windows, to create a differentiation (and) to add more value in the form of greater security and reliability," Lazar said.

Customers who visit the manual Windows Update site will be asked to prove that their copies of Windows are legitimate by allowing Microsoft's system to automatically run a check, or by providing a product identification number. Users who have lost that number will be asked three basic questions, and if they are deemed to be acting in good faith they will be given a free replacement key.

The company also said it will begin providing discounted versions of Windows to users in China, Norway and the Czech Republic who discover they have a counterfeit version of Windows XP.

Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, is expecting the more stringent authentication system to be successful, as Internet attacks become ever more sophisticated and users with pirated copies of Windows become helpless to stop them.

"It will create an environment where the pirated machines, if they're connected to the Internet, won't really work," he said.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS


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Is Piracy Pushing Linux Sales?

More PCs run the alternative OS, but many will end up with a pirated version of Windows, report says.
Robert McMillan,

Linux may be shipping on a growing number of PCs sold in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. But about 80 percent of PCs shipped with the open source operating system this year will eventually run pirated versions of Windows, industry research firm Gartner estimates.

The high price of Windows may be driving vendors in countries like China and Russia to ship Linux on as many as 40 percent of their PCs, but many of these systems will not ultimately run the free operating system, Gartner says in a recent report.

In fact, this high percentage of Linux sales is being driven by the availability of cheap pirated copies of Windows rather than a desire to run Linux.

Cutting Costs

"The widespread availability of pirated versions of Windows at a fraction of the cost of a legal copy stimulates the growth of Linux on PCs in emerging markets," writes Gartner Analyst Annette Jump in a report titled "Linux Has a Fight on Its Hands in Emerging PC Markets."

With the cost of the Windows operating system remaining "relatively constant," even as PC hardware components costs have dropped over the last 10 years, PC vendors in the emerging markets are increasingly being driven to Linux in order to maintain their profit margins, Jump reports.

The cost of Windows in the Asia-Pacific region, for example, has increased from 6 percent of the total price of a professional desktop PC in 1996 to 15 percent in 2004, the report says.

Linux will ship on 5 percent of the 185 million PCs that are expected to be sold this year, but it will be particularly popular in the Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Latin American regions, Gartner predicts. The open source operating system will be included with 9.8 percent of PCs shipped in Asia/Pacific, 11.2 percent in Eastern Europe, and 12.1 percent in Latin America.

In the U.S., Linux will ship on 0.8 percent of PCs this year, the research firm predicts.

Windows Light

Despite the fact that Windows will ultimately be run on the majority of emerging market desktops, even in those that ship with Linux, Microsoft's recent decision to begin pilot tests of a slimmed-down version of Windows XP, called Windows XP Starter Edition, is a sign that the company wants to cut down Linux's growth, according to Jump.

"Microsoft's plan to release a Windows XP Starter Edition in several countries in Asia/Pacific is a sign that the company has recognized the issue and is planning to fight for OS share in new PCs," Jump writes.

"It is likely that Microsoft would prefer the initial OS on a new PC to be Windows rather than Linux, even if piracy were to continue," she writes.

Microsoft's pilot program will see XP Starter Edition shipping in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand next month. Early next year, the product will start shipping in Russia and India.

Microsoft has promoted the software as a low-cost option for first-time PC users, but analysts have criticized the software for not meeting the most basic needs of users. XP Starter Edition does not include support for home networking, sharing printers, or multiuser accounts.
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/...RSS,RSS,00.asp


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Ex-Microsoft Worker Pleads Guilty to Software Theft

A former Microsoft Corp. employee pleaded guilty on Wednesday to selling the world's largest software maker's products for more than $7 million for personal profit, federal prosecutors said.

Finn Contini, 36, admitted to ordering software through Microsoft's internal systems under the pretense it was for internal use and using the money to buy real estate, cars and jewelry, the U.S. Attorney's office said.

After similar incidents involving employees selling Microsoft's high-end software for personal gain, the company cracked down on criminal theft in late 2003.

The Redmond, Washington, company hired investigators and made changes to its internal ordering system in order to prevent future incidents.

Contini, an assistant at Microsoft, resigned in February.

Two other individuals who worked with Contini are scheduled for plea hearings later this month.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7441955


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EU Raises Possibility of New Fines for Microsoft

The European Commission held out the possibility on Friday that Microsoft Corp. may face fines up to 5 percent of its average daily turnover unless it complies soon with an EU antitrust decision.

Last month Microsoft lost a months-long bid to suspend sanctions for breaking the law and said it would offer a stripped-down version of Windows and share some protocols with rival makers of servers by early February.

"We obviously expect the remedies to be complied with within a matter of weeks -- measured from last December -- rather than months," spokesman Jonathan Todd said on Friday.

Asked what the Commission can do if the software giant fails to comply, Todd said:

"The ... regulation allows the Commission to decide to impose penalty payments up to 5 percent of Microsoft's average daily turnover."

He also said Microsoft must refrain from contractual terms that would make the unbundled version less attractive.

The Commission decided 10 months ago that Microsoft abused its virtual monopoly of the Windows operating system and has already fined it 497 million euros ($647.9 million).

Microsoft has paid the 497 million euros fine.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=7468505


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UN Body Promotes Open Source In Education
Ingrid Marson

An official UN report has praised the high quality and reliability of free and open source software

A UN-funded body has produced a guide that encourages the use of Linux in educational institutions.

The International Open Source Network (IOSN), which is part of the UN's development programme, published the guide to free and open source software in education last week. The FOSS Education Primer explains the advantages of using open source software and gives information on server and desktop software that can be used in education.

The guide says the advantages of open source software include lower costs; the opportunity for students to learn about programming by examining and modifying the source code; and better reliability than proprietary software.

"The development methodology of FOSS [free / open source software] tends to assure high quality of the software," says the guide. "Bugs are removed with the help of large numbers of developers, and the resulting software is more reliable. This is especially true of the more mature FOSS for servers."

The guide -- which can be seen here -- has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows other organisations to copy and distribute the work. Last year the IOSN released a guide to using Linux on the desktop for novice PC users.

The UK government is also encouraging the use of open source software in education. At last week's BETT trade show Ruth Kelly, the secretary of state for education and skills, said in her keynote speech that open source software can be useful in education. "We believe that high quality and well supported open source solutions have a valuable role to play in education," said Kelly.

At the same show SchoolLINUX.com, a company which develops Linux tools for schools, was inundated with requests for its open source desktop operating system for schools.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/050121/152/farq5.html


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Music's Future on Show at Industry Confab
Jamey Keaten

It's a bit disorienting: slip on a set of headphones, turn up the volume and, while you move about the room, the music stays put - as if coming out of five speakers stuck on a wall.

Software engineers in Germany who developed the widely used MP3 audio file format have taken the technology to a higher level with a next-generation format that delivers cinema-like multichannel audio.

The headsets dazzled attendees at the Midem music conference in this French Riviera town, where goateed singers, sharply dressed executives and software designers in tennis shoes have been meeting this week to map out how music reaches ears in the future.

Tech gizmos are but a small part of the conference, now in its 39th year and typically devoted to the tough negotiations that go into record deals.

But technology is an increasing part of the business, especially as consumers show an unquenchable appetite for on-demand and on-the- go music.

The cutting-edge, but disorienting, Surround- sound headphones won't be commercially available for some time. But music fans can hear the new MP3 Surround technology, developed by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, on personal computers provided they have special 5.1-channel sound cards and multiple speakers.

A free test version of the software, which encodes and plays audio in the new multi-channel format, is available for download.

The MP3 Surround Evaluation Software 1.0 is backwards compatible, so it will also play the regular stereo MP3 files already sitting on tens of millions of computers worldwide.

"We simulate a virtual room so that you get the impression of listening to Surround sound even if you have only stereo headphones," said Fraunhofer's Oliver Baum.

Among other high-tech offerings, China's Zhejiang Huahong Optronics Group showed off a flash-memory portable video player tentatively called the MTV Player, which is to go on sale in China in March - though no export date has been set. The palm-sized gadget has 2 gigabytes of storage space and could be just the thing for consumers willing to see dazzling dancers on a 2-inch screen.

Music videos are just the start.

"The plan is for people to download movies from their computers or from the Web," said company president Wang Yuan Long.

China was making its first big splash at the conference this year, hoping to strike deals for Western music that young Chinese crave and assuage concerns that Beijing has not done enough against the black market in pirated CDs.

The undercurrent of the six-day show, which kicked off with a concert featuring big- name stars including Anastacia and Jennifer Lopez, has been the rebounding fortunes of recording companies.

After a four-year slump, global sales of recorded music increased last year largely through the success of fee-charging online services and the expansion of portable music devices like Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod.

Now, music industry honchos hope gadget makers, software powerhouses like Microsoft and cell phone companies will help deliver tunes to a fee-paying public.

Perhaps the biggest debate is how listeners will receive their music. With digitized music increasingly delivered through the Internet or mobile phone, the CD could one day go the way of the 8-track.

Apple's a-la-carte offering through its popular iTunes portal lets users pay to download songs to their iPods - but only iPods, not competing MP3 players.

Microsoft Corp. is fighting back with its PlaysForSure certification program, which helps consumers quickly recognize that a particular portable player supports files encoded in its Windows Media format.

When it comes to on-the-go music gadgetry, mobile phone companies like Vodafone Group PLC, Orange PLC, T-Mobile Ltd. in Europe or Verizon Communications Inc., Cingular Wireless and Sprint Corp. in the United States could also become serious players.

Mobile operators offer downloads of songs directly into handsets, though the fees have typically been higher than the per-track prices for portable music players such as the iPod.

Motorola Inc. will soon let people play on its cell phones the songs they buy through Apple's iTunes Music Store. Music fans in Japan already enjoy an over-the-cellular- network service offered by KDDI.

Online music distributor Napster, meantime, is pushing a new subscription service that will offer music lovers unlimited access to a catalog of 1 million songs transferrable to portable players - until their subscriptions lapse, that is. The songs are "rented", encoded with Microsoft copy-protection software.

Whatever strategy ultimately becomes dominant, the competition to deliver show tunes, jazz riffs, operatic arias or hip-hip rhymes to the music lover continues to inject hope into the embattled music business.

As Napster president Brad Duea said, "We have to encourage people to listen more."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...CTION=BUSINESS


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Wireless Headphones Possible with Aura’s NFC LibertyLink LL888
Christian Harris

Aura Communications has announced the first samples of its LibertyLink LL888 system-on-chip, for enabling high-quality wireless voice and stereo audio. The chip provides wireless stereo headphone capability for MP3 players, portable DVD players and audio-capable mobile phones - or indeed virtually any portable product where digital audio performance must be coupled with long battery life and low cost. The technology was previewed in ‘real life’ earlier his year by Creative Technology, whose wireless-enabled Zen Micro MP3 player is based on the LibertyLink LL888 chip.

The most interesting feature of the LibertyLink LL888 is that it uses a patented form of Near Field Communication (NFC) rather than conventional radio frequency technology (such as Bluetooth) to enable digital audio wireless performance. NFC is a short-range wireless connectivity standard that uses magnetic field induction to enable communication between devices when they’re touched together, or brought within a few centimetres of each other.

Jointly developed by Philips and Sony, the standard specifies a way for the devices to establish a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to exchange data. After the P2P network has been configured, another wireless communication technology, such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, can be used for longer range communication or for transferring larger amounts of data.

Unlike Bluetooth, which radiates in the crowded frequency band at 2.4GHz, Aura’s technology is more private and secure as it operates at 13.5MHz - it completely avoids the interference of the 2.4GHz band. Aura Communications claims that the chip’s magnetic signals creates a ‘secure communication bubble that surrounds the user and is uniquely owned by each user for reliable and private communications.

The chip is currently scheduled for production quantity availability by the second quarter of 2005, with pricing set on an individual customer basis, but expected to be under $5 (US) in OEM quantities.
http://digital-lifestyles.info/displ...tforms&id=1887


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Videotape to DVD, Made Easy
David Pogue

WHOEVER said "technology marches on" must have been kidding. Technology doesn't march; it sprints, dashes and zooms.

That relentless pace renders our storage media obsolete with appalling speed:5¼-inch floppies, Zip disks or whatever. And with the debut of each new storage format, millions of important files, photos, music and video have to be rescued from the last one.

At the moment, the most urgent conversion concerns videotape, whose signal begins to deteriorate in as little as 15 years. Rescuing tapes by copying them to fresh ones isn't an option, because you lose half the picture quality with each generation. You could play them into a computer for editing and DVD burning, but that's a months-long project. You could pay a company to transfer them to DVD, if you can stomach the cost and the possibility that something might happen to your precious tapes in the mail.

There is, fortunately, a safe, automated and relatively inexpensive solution to this problem: the combo VHS-DVD recorder. It looks like a VCR, but it can play or record both VHS tapes and blank DVD discs, and copy from one to the other, in either direction. Pressing a couple of buttons begins the process of copying a VHS tape to a DVD, with very little quality loss. (You can't duplicate copy-protected tapes or DVD's, of course; only tapes and discs you've recorded yourself.)

And if your movies are on some other format, like 8-millimeter cassettes, you can plug the old camcorder into the back of this machine, hit Play, and walk away as the video is transferred to a DVD.

(Of course, now you have to worry about the longevity of recordable DVD's. Fortunately, a DVD's movie files are stored as digital signals, not analog, so you won't lose any quality when you copy them onto whatever video format is popular in 2025. Video contact lenses, perhaps?)

As a bonus, a combo VCR-DVD player-recorder can eliminate one machine stacked under the TV, one remote control and, in most cases, one set of cables to your TV. (None of this makes it simple, however. All of these machines are far more complex than, say, a stand-alone DVD player.)

I sampled four of these combo boxes: the Panasonic DMR-E75V, the RCA DRC8300N, GoVideo's VR2940, and the JVC DR-MV1S. (Who makes up these model names, anyway - drunken Scrabble players?) All are available online for $285 to $350. As it turns out, shopping for a combo recorder is an exercise in compromise. Here are some of the trade-offs you have to look forward to.

JACKS Each recorder has a dazzling array of jacks on the front and back panels, for ease in connecting to your other home-entertainment gear. For example, each has so-called component video outputs for a superior picture on recent TV sets. JVC and GoVideo even included a front-panel FireWire input, which lets you dump footage from a digital camcorder directly onto a DVD.

Unfortunately, the GoVideo deck lacks an S-video input, a high-quality connection to many camcorder models. And a note to videophiles: The RCA, JVC and GoVideo decks can play both VCR and DVD signals through the same set of component video cables, so you don't have to switch TV inputs to get the best quality. DISC FORMAT Thanks to a foolhardy war between electronics companies, there are two incompatible formats for blank DVD's, confusingly called DVD-R and DVD+R. Recorded discs of either type will play in most recent DVD players, but you have to be careful to buy the right kind of blanks for your recorder, and many stores carry only one type.

The RCA and GoVideo decks require DVD+R (and their more expensive, erase-and-reuse variant, DVD+RW). The Panasonic and JVC players take DVD-R discs (and the erasable DVD-RW). A disc of either format must be "finalized" (a 2- to 15-minute electronic shrink-wrapping) before it will play in other DVD players.

As a bonus, the Panasonic and JVC models also accept a third format called DVD-RAM, which doesn't play in most everyday DVD players. But if you just leave it in your recorder, you can use it pretty much like a hard drive, adding and deleting recordings at will, slicing out commercials, watching the beginning of a show whose ending is still being recorded, and so on.

Frankly, understanding the differences between all of these formats makes most people's brains hurt. At the outset, you might want to consider just buying straight-ahead, ordinary blanks (either DVD-R or DVD+R) and treating them as burn-once-and-forget-it DVD's.

COPY QUALITY The quality of the copy depends on the speed setting you choose. The one- and two-hour DVD settings, for example, are nearly indistinguishable from the original VHS tape. Remember, of course, that VHS quality isn't so great to begin with. The four- to eight-hour modes look pretty terrible. The JVC and Panasonic decks also offer in-between settings that maximize quality based on the length of the recording, as long as you know the length ahead of time.

VCR FEATURES Only the JVC and Panasonic models offer VCR Plus+, the shortcut system that programs your recorder to record a show when you copy its code out of the newspaper TV listings. This feature applies to recordings made on either a tape or a disc, so a better name might be VCR Plus+ Plus DVD Plus+.

REMOTE CONTROL None of the remotes are fully illuminated, although the JVC's primary playback controls glow. Most require you to press a DVD or a VCR button before pressing Play, Pause or whatever; only the RCA is smart enough to play whatever is in the machine (a disc or a tape) - or, if one of each is inside, to ask which you want. The buttons on GoVideo's remote are especially poorly designed; they're all alike, all tiny, all the time.

DVD FEATURES All four of these decks work fine as DVD players, but the GoVideo's AutoPlay feature can skip all the ads, movie trailers, FBI warnings and so on at the beginning of a DVD movie, and just start playing the movie itself. DVDelicious!

Speaking of smart, the JVC, Panasonic and RCA decks offer a 30-second skip button that works on both discs and tapes; the JVC and RCA also offer a 7-second replay button that's great for catching mumbled dialogue.

CHAPTER MARKERS Each deck creates a new "chapter" of your DVD for each new recording you copy to it. But within a long recording, the Panasonic, RCA and JVC models just put a chapter marker every few minutes.

The GoVideo offers two more sophisticated features. One, an option called YesVideo, produces a handsome main menu featuring thumbnail images of the chapter breaks - an infinite improvement over the invisible markers of its rivals. (GoVideo's ads imply that these breaks are intelligently placed at scene breaks, but usually they're just spaced at regular intervals.) Better yet, if you pop the finished disc into a Windows PC, you can print out a DVD jewel-case insert depicting those thumbnail images, so you can see what's on the disc without having to put it into a player. Very cool.

YesVideo is available only if there's just one recording on a disc. Even without this feature, though, GoVideo still lets you place chapter markers manually during playback, complete with thumbnail images.

SUPPORT GoVideo should take pride in the fact that it prominently displays its toll-free tech-support number right on the box, part of what it calls its "widely heralded White Glove Customer Care."

It should be ashamed, however, of the fact that White Glove Customer Care turns out to be keeping you on hold for an hour, waiting for an agent - until a recording tells you that everyone's busy and hangs up on you. I never did get through.

Panasonic's player has a jaw-dropping list of features, including an amazing one-minute full-tape rewind speed, picture-in-picture, and so on - but its manual reads like a bad translation of the Japanese income-tax form. (Writing sample: "The title is irretrievably erased when you use this procedure and cannot be retrieved.")

On the other hand, RCA's manual offers standard high-school English-class writing - which means that, among electronics manuals, it's practically Shakespeare.

MAKING A CHOICE The GoVideo is the least expensive deck ($285 at shopping.com), its DVD preview-skipping feature is almost irresistible, and that YesVideo chapter thumbnail thing is a worthy exclusive. Its reliability is worrisome, though. My review unit froze several times during testing, and after a few days refused to burn any more DVD's. A replacement unit occasionally stopped burning discs until it was unplugged and plugged in again, earning it the household nickname Don'tGoVideo.(GoVideo's buyer reviews online are similarly discouraging.) The RCA ($346) and Panasonic ($342) are fine machines, but they can't touch the JVC ($312) for good looks, price or genuinely useful features. For example, only the JVC has two tuners, so that it can record two things at once (one on tape, one on DVD). And only JVC offers an infrared blaster (when you send in your registration card), which changes the channel on your cable or satellite box for a scheduled recording. VCR Plus+, a full complement of jacks and the glowing remote only sweeten the deal.

In any case, the arrival of the combo VCR-DVD recorder is a welcome moment in format-turnover history. Now all we need is an equally automated machine that rescues our vinyl records, Apple II floppies and 8-track tapes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/te...ts/27stat.html


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Napster Eyes Movie Downloads
Jo Best

Digital-music service Napster is considering remaking itself to offer movie downloads too.

Speaking at the Midem music conference in Cannes this week, Napster CEO Chris Gorog said the company is considering offering movies alongside its current catalog of some 1 million music tracks.

"We are currently considering moving into video, particularly to tap the younger video game generation," the Financial Times quoted him as saying. "I do think that while there are huge players in the delivery of movies like Sky, there could be a role for Napster."

Online movie distribution has already taken off to a small degree in the United States, with Movielink and CinemaNow selling films via the Web from $2.99 upwards.

Movielink is backed by major cinemas, including MGM Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner Bros., while CinemaNow has big-name partners including Disney and Microsoft.

However, use of legal movie download sites has paled in comparison to illegal film distribution--and the movie industry has ratcheted up its antipiracy efforts accordingly. The Motion Picture Association of America has filed lawsuits against pirates and is cracking down on distribution networks such as eDonkey and BitTorrent.

Nevertheless, analysts are predicting legal film downloads could be a winner. Since the advent of broadband, film downloads have surged considerably; one in four people online have now downloaded a film, according to the MPAA. Such statistics have encouraged Napster and others to eye the market.

In other news, Napster has announced it will be opening a German song shop within the year.
http://news.com.com/Napster+eyes+mov...3-5548022.html


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No-Cost Skype Strikes Chord With Businesses
Marguerite Reardon

The Internet telephony software Skype has found its way into the business world, as corporate road warriors and remote workers use it to reduce long-distance and cell phone costs.

Over the past year and a half, Skype's popularity has exploded. Currently, there are about 23 million users signed up for the service, which allows no-cost phone calls over the Internet, according to the company. By 2008 that number is expected to jump to between 140 million and 245 million, says market research firm Evalueserve.

Most of today's Skype adherents use it for personal calls, but a growing number of them are also using it to make calls for work. As more business customers start using the software, Skype's subscriber numbers could grow even higher.

"I realized while I was traveling overseas how difficult it is for my remote staff and traveling sales people to communicate with each other," said Don LeBeau, CEO of Aruba Wireless Networks, a maker of Wi-Fi networking gear. "Skype has been a great tool for helping us increase communication. Not to mention it saves us money."

In October, LeBeau sent a memo to his top executives at Aruba urging them and the people who report to them to start using Skype. Today, many of Aruba's 170 employees use it to communicate with colleagues on the road or in any of the dozen or so offices in the United States, Europe and Japan. Aruba has even placed a button on its home page to allow prospective customers to contact the company via Skype.

Aruba isn't the only company that has discovered Skype. Employees at Ruhrpumpen, an industrial pump manufacturer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, started using Skype last summer to communicate with co-workers and business partners in Asia, Central America and Europe. The company has even put a directory with Skype contacts on its Intranet Web site. About 70 people out of the 1,000 that work for the company are registered Skype users.

"One of our business partners introduced it to us," said Tom Wallbank, an IT manager at Ruhrpumpen. "Now, I use it a few times a week to talk to our guys in Mexico and Germany. And I'm not even one of the heavy users."

Skype executives have already recognized there is opportunity in the business market. As a result, they plan to introduce a new set of business offerings later this year. The idea is to create a package similar to the free Skype, but with extra features, such as videoconferencing, user groupings and company directories, that business customers would be willing to pay for.

"The Skype for Business offering will address ways to better serve the business community and targeted toward individuals and workgroups, not CIOs for enterprise wide deployments," said Niklas Zennstrom, CEO and co-founder of Skype during a keynote address at the Internet Telephony Expo in October 2004.

Skype's newfound business users say they're very interested to see what the company has to offer. But selling a service to these companies for a fee won't be a slam dunk.

"We will definitely check out their new offering when it comes out," Wallbank said. "Of course, we'll have to compare it to what others offer. Nothing really beats free."
http://news.com.com/No-cost+Skype+st...3-5553053.html


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No chat for you!

NTC Orders Cable Operators To Close Chat Rooms
Clarissa Batino

THE NATIONAL Telecommunications Commission (NTC) has ordered cable operators to shut down all chat rooms in reaction to complaints that some of these had become sex channels.

The NTC order, dated Jan. 20, immediately called for the suspension of all chat rooms until a new set of guidelines is approved.

Recently, police detained a businessman for allegedly operating a cybersex facility in Las Pi¤as City.

NTC chair Ronald Solis said he would meet this week with operators such as the Philippine Cable Television Association and the Federation of International Cable TV Associations of the Philippines to draft guidelines aimed at preventing abuses on cable chat channels.

Cable operators turn idle channels into chat rooms or community billboards.

Solis said some chat room operators were not regulating the use of profane language or explicit messages in their facilities. Some messages openly solicit sex, he added.

Police Monday also said it discovered what could be indications of money laundering based on confiscated evidence from the office of Aloysious M. Galvez, owner of Orgasmic Studios in Pilar Village, Las Pi¤as City, which was raided Friday.

Supt. Michel Filar, of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group- National Capital Region (CIDG-NCR), said transaction records between Orgasmic Studios Inc. and several local and foreign banks were discovered after the raid by the CIDG-NCR and local police.

Filart, however, refused to give details.

"We are now coordinating with members of the Anti-Money Laundering Act Council (AMLAC) in connection with our investigation of Galvez's activities," he said.

The Amlac also promised to help if violations of the electronic commerce law are included in the "predicate offenses," Filart added.

Police also said Galvez's outfit reportedly maintained links with several web page networks based in the United States.

"The internal protocol address was found to be linked to several US web pages featuring internet photography," Filart said.

He added that a big telecommunications company gave the police full support by providing them information needed in carrying out the raid at Orgasmic Studios located at Daisy and Lead Streets, Pilar Village. The outfit allegedly had 14 studios providing Internet sex.

Galvez, now detained at the Las Pi¤as City jail, is facing charges of violating Republic Act No. 9028, also known as the Anti-Trafficking of Persons Act.

Filart said that Galvez's lucrative business had been operating for more than a year.

The women, allegedly hired for cybersex, earned as high as P200,000 a month, police said.
http://news.inq7.net/metro/index.php...story_id=25364


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Orphaned Copyrights Suit Appealed

The good folks at Stanford Center for Internet and Society has helped file the appeal of Kahle v. Ashcroft.

This suit is about "orphan works", or works that are so out of print that often the publisher can not be found, but under the new copyright laws, these works are still under copyright.

This suit seeks to affirm that libraries in the digital world can have out-of-print works on their shelves, just as we had on the shelves of the libraries we grew up with.

Lets hope sanity prevails and we protect our libraries.
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=27356


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Hollywood: P2P is Not About Technology
Roy Mark

The entertainment industry urged the U.S. Supreme Court Monday afternoon not to give the companies developing peer-to-peer (P2P) music file swapping software a "perpetual free pass" to engage in "mind-boggling" copyright infringement.

In a 67-page brief filed in advance of the March 29 Supreme Court oral arguments in MGM vs. Grokster, attorneys for the music and movie studios claim Grokster exploits "this massive infringement for profit, and petitioners are suffering extreme harms as a consequence."

Hollywood wants the high court to reverse a district court ruling and a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco decision that say file- swapping companies such as Grokster, Morpheus and Kazaa are not liable for the infringement of their users.

The Supreme Court in December agreed to hear the case that challenges the court's landmark 1984 Sony Betamax decision. In the two lower court decisions, judges exonerated Grokster and its parent company, StreamCast, of secondary copyright liability based on the Betamax decision.

The judges used the Betamax standard established by the Supreme Court, which states that the use of new technology to infringe copyrights did not justify an outright ban on that technology as long as the technology had other, legal uses.

"Although the [P2P] technology can be used for lawful exchanges of digital files, that is not how Grokster and StreamCast use it," the entertainment industry's brief states. "They run businesses that abuse the technology. At least 90 percent of the material on their services is infringing, and that infringement occurs millions of times each day.

"The services are breeding grounds for copyright infringement of unprecedented magnitude -- infringement that would not occur if Grokster and StreamCast did not make it possible," the brief continues.

The U.S. Solicitor General, the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), the Business Software Alliance and the Christian Coalition of America supported the music and movie industries by filing friends of the court briefs. Grokster has until Feb. 28 to file its brief in the case.

At Tuesday's press conference in Washington, Hollywood representatives repeatedly stressed that case does not pit technology against the entertainment industry.

"These people are not engaging in technological innovation," Dan Glickman, president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, stated.

Donald B. Verrilli, the lead attorney for the MPAA, added, "They are abusing the technology. When you set out to run a business built on copyright violations, you're on the hook."

In its brief to the court, the PFF wrote, "The Ninth Circuit focused totally on the need to avoid any inhibition on technology, and in so doing it lost sight of the equally important consumer interest in promoting content."

James V. DeLong, the PFF counsel of record in the brief, wrote that consumers have two basic interests in the case: avoiding technological inhibitions and providing incentives to the creative community to foster the production of content.

"These are complementary, not conflicting, because each is necessary to the other," DeLong wrote. "Technological devices are useless without content, and content is pointless without means of delivery. But they must be reconciled, because each, taken to the limit of its logic, can do serious harm to the other."

DeLong contends in his brief that the Ninth Circuit was mistaken in application of the Betamax case.

"No one in this case argues that P2P as a technology should be banned. The issue, rather, is the business practices which the file-sharing companies are wrapping around this technology," he wrote. "This can and should be the subject of judicial inquiry, and condemned when they create business models that can fairly be classified as deliberately dependent on infringement."

MGM vs. Grokster began more than two years ago in Los Angeles. U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson ruled in favor of Grokster, saying the file sharing companies cannot control how people use their software if the product has legitimate applications.

"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," Judge Wilson wrote in his decision.

Wilson also made a distinction between the original Napster and its successors. In Napster's case, an index of material available for file-swapping was maintained on a central server. Grokster does not use central servers. In that situation, the court said, Grokster had no control over the actions of its customers.

Hollywood appealed the decision but got the same results from the Ninth Circuit.

"The technology has numerous other uses, significantly reducing the distribution costs of public domain and permissively shared art and speech, as well as reducing the centralized control of that distribution," Judge Sidney R. Thomas wrote in his opinion.

The three-judge panel acknowledged that copyright violations do occur on the decentralized P2P networks, but the companies owning and distributing the enabling software cannot be held liable for the infringements.
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3464081


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She’ll do it if she can

Judge Demands Trial Web Blackout
Kevin Meade and Cath Hart

A SUPREME Court judge has called for the internet to be purged of any material likely to prejudice a trial, to prevent jurors conducting their own investigations into cases they are sitting on.

Justice Virginia Bell, of the NSW Supreme Court, told a conference in Darwin of Supreme and Federal court judges from across the country yesterday that the ready availability of archived press reports on the internet could jeopardise the trial of an accused person.

But her call was branded "silly and unworkable" by the media union, while the internet industry said it would be impossible to police offshore sites.

Justice Bell recommended that to prevent jurors from researching cases online, Crown prosecutors in any pending case should "carry out searches on the internet and, in the event that prejudicial material is identified . . . request any Australian-based website to remove it until the trial is completed".

She said prejudicial material relating to the trial of a prominent business identity had been removed from the website Crikey.com.au at the request of the NSW Supreme Court's public information officer.

Justice Bell said publication of material that had a real and definite tendency to prejudice a trial amounted to contempt of court. "The difficulty arises with material published on the internet by individuals and interest groups who may be difficult to trace or, in widely publicised cases, by the publication of prejudicial material on the internet by persons outside the jurisdiction."

A NSW study which examined 41 trials held between 1997 and 2000 found that in three cases jurors admitted to having carried out internet searches despite being instructed not to by judges.

Queensland and NSW have introduced legislation making it an offence for jurors to conduct investigations on the internet, punishable by a maximum of two years' jail.

Justice Bell said the potential for the internet to threaten the integrity of jury trials was highlighted by the promotion of CrimeNet, a national police site which published criminal histories.

After concerns were raised about CrimeNet, the site was modified so anyone searching its criminal records database must now open an account and furnish credit card details.

A subscriber must agree "not to search for details of any person whilst I am a juror in a trial of that person, in a jurisdiction that prohibits such information".

Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance federal secretary Christopher Warren said it was an attempt at censorship which highlighted a "disturbing trend" in judges' decisions.

"It's silly and it's unworkable, we've already seen in the Gutnick case how dangerous that can be for Australia," Mr Warren said. The 2002 Gutnick v Dow Jones case in the High Court established that, in law, internet articles are published where they are read.

Courts could already compel Australian ISPs to remove material from websites in Australia, Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association said. "The problem is much more difficult if someone puts up a website in Argentina," Mr Coroneos said.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...5E2702,00.html


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'Betamax Principle' Central to Supreme Court P2P Case
Jay Lyman

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) staff attorney Fred von Lohmann noted that the primary issue is the longstanding court stance that technology, even if it is assisting in illegal copying, is not itself a source of liability.

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As the controversy over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks goes before the U.S. Supreme Court, the recording and film industries are enlisting celebrities to help make the case that network operators should be held liable for the illegal file sharing that occurs over their networks. The tech industry, meanwhile, fears that an adverse ruling might stifle innovation.

The latest court briefs filed on behalf of those fighting P2P networks Grokster and Morpheus include support from singers Don Henley, Sheryl Crow and Avril Lavigne, as well as entertainment giants such as the National Football League. The recording and movie industries -- which brought suit against the popular file-sharing services -- are joined by 40 state attorneys general and the U.S. government in calling for the P2Ps to be held liable for unlicensed downloads.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) staff attorney Fred von Lohmann noted that the primary issue is the longstanding court stance that technology, even if it is assisting in illegal copying or pirating, is not itself a source of liability. That stance derives from the 1984 Betamax case. While more recent court rulings have found that users of technology can be held liable for copyright infringement, the providers of that technology have not been.

Supreme P2P

The Supreme Court is now considering the case that the entertainment industry has brought against two of the largest P2P operators.

While the court strategy against the original song-swapping service, Napster, was largely successful, the entertainment groups have had more difficulty holding modern file-sharing services accountable, largely because they rely on distributed server systems instead of a central server, as the original Napster did.

Lower court rulings have consistently upheld the Betamax rule, holding that there are legitimate uses for P2P file sharing and that even though the technology may be used to infringe copyrights or licenses, the creators of the technology may not be held responsible for infringement.

The Supreme Court is expected to take up the case in March, with a ruling expected in June.

Betamax Basis
EFF's von Lohmann said the most recent briefs filed on behalf of the entertainment groups are largely an attack on precedent.

"The briefs they've filed all frontally attack the Betamax principle," he said. "To win, they're going to have to convince the court to change the course of 20 years. The court said no 20 years ago."

Von Lohmann added that the same entertainment groups have historically tried to challenge VCRs, dual-cassette decks, digital video recorders and other technologies that threatened their business models.

"They want the ability to control technologies that impact their business," he said. "We can't afford to allow the entertainment industry to be in charge of our technology in our country."

Tech Fear
Despite a legal attack on individual users accused of unlicensed, illegal downloads and the entertainment groups' pursuit of P2P companies, the technology has enjoyed strong use and growth among Internet users, according to analysts.

As for the technology industry's view on the P2P fight, von Lohmann said there is apprehension that a change to the Betamax rule would be costly.

"There's a very real fear in the technology industry," he said. "Undermining Betamax is a huge threat to the nation's economy and our technology."
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40054.html#

















Until next week,

- js.














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