Guarding Privacy vs. Enforcing Copyrights
John Schwartz
Sometimes, it seems, the sanctity of data is in the eye, and ideology, of the beholder. The libertarian stripe found in many meets some seeming contradictions when the discussion turns from swapping songs to sharing personal information.
Many of the people who argue that they should not have to pay for one kind of file (say, the latest song from J. Lo) can become outraged at the thought of sharing another kind of file -- say, the one that contains their personal financial data or a map of their Web wanderings.
The issues came into sharp focus recently in two data firestorms. In one, Internet denizens expressed outrage over the lawsuits the recording industry filed against 261 people accused of being large-scale swappers of pirated music. At the same time, equally fierce outrage met news that JetBlue Airways had handed over customer records to a military contractor for a test program to blend the data with personal financial information from another company to spot likely terrorists.
Some Internet activists have said that privacy should be treated like a property right -- and a wave of companies arose in the 1990's to create a marketplace in which people could retain control of their personal information and even be paid when someone wants access to it. (They call themselves ''infomediaries,'' and the concept has proved as ungainly as the word.)
Taken as a whole, these events have set up a potential ideological conflict between protecting privacy rights and protesting the enforcement of copyrights. The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, which has sponsored a ''Take Back Your Data'' campaign to promote online privacy, is also filing a lawsuit to protect the rights of file traders against the entertainment industry. ''This is relatively new and treacherous ground,'' said Alan Davidson, associate director for the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington. The group, which has focused on issues of privacy and civil liberties online, found itself without a place in the copyright wars about a year ago and decided that it needed to go on active duty, Mr. Davidson said. ''We realized that so many of the things that C.D.T. has stood for -- the open, decentralized vision of the Internet -- are threatened by some of the ideas on how to protect copyright online.''
But establishing a position has been difficult for the group, which takes a pragmatic view of policy issues. The copyright issue ''cuts through all these different coalitions we had built up over time'' among high-tech groups, he said. ''There is no real negotiating going on.''
The center had a coming out of sorts at recent Congressional hearings over the recording industry lawsuits against file traders. Mr. Davidson delivered careful testimony that called for changes in the law governing subpoenas that copyright holders can obtain -- currently with scant judicial oversight -- as they try to find file traders and other copyright infringers.
Those subpoenas, which are allowed under the Millennium Digital Copyright Act of 1998, have become a point of contention for the high-tech civil liberties groups, which see them as heavy-handed tactics -- a crusade against data piracy that can quickly become an invasion of data privacy.
Mr. Davidson said his group saw the testimony as a cautious first step. ''We're not going to be bomb throwers,'' he said. Instead, the group is hoping ''to find the places where there might be middle-ground solutions.''
But another digital advocacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sees little contradiction between the privacy and piracy campaigns. The group has taken a highly vocal stance in favor of protecting music file traders, but has also been at the forefront of the online privacy fight. Cindy Cohn, the foundation's legal director, said that privacy rights and copyrights were not really comparable. ''I think artists should be paid,'' Ms. Cohn said, explaining that her group is fighting industry tactics, not artists' rights. ''We want people to keep creating.'' But problems arise, she said, if the industry's subpoena power violates file traders' privacy without the court protections that are available to people in criminal investigations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/te...ne r=USERLAND
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Statement of Jonathan D. Moreno PhD
Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs
"Privacy & Piracy: The Paradox of Illegal File Sharing on Peer-to-Peer Networks and the Impact of Technology on the Entertainment Industry"
Mr. Chairman, honorable members of this subcommittee:
On previous occasions I have testified before congress as a bioethicist; today I appear before you in my more general role as a social ethicist. Social ethics calls on diverse fields for guidance: the law, philosophy, religious traditions, history, and the social sciences.
In one sense the question before us is straightforward. To intentionally take that which does not belong to you is to violate the social contract. Intellectual property is a form of property, and intellectual theft is a form of theft. Under such circumstances the justifiable legal response is clear: Those who commit theft are liable to punishment.
Yet if our goal is not merely to be punitive, but to craft an effective public policy, the law is a notoriously blunt instrument. There are many social behaviors in which the rigid application of the law is not only ineffective in solving the essential problem, but may actually aggravate the problem by encouraging offenders to find ingenious new ways to evade authorities. Prosecution may also be disproportionate to the value lost, seemingly arbitrary in its selection of targets, and erroneous.
Further, if powerful and distant entities that control a highly valued item institute legal measures that are widely perceived as draconian, they may encourage disrespect for law, especially among the young. Still more complex are situations like this one, in which the culture itself is evolving in tandem with technological change.
The underlying problem is this: Many people with otherwise healthy moral intuitions fail to see internet file-sharing as theft, or if they do, they do not perceive it as wrong, or at least not very wrong. Of course the pricing structure of compact discs is widely resented because the blank CD is so inexpensive and downloading can be accomplished with ease. But these facts do not explain the largely guilt-free social psychology of so many file sharers. A more nuanced explanation is required.
First, those who are victimized are “moral strangers,” are distant and unknown to us as individuals. Harms to moral strangers do not easily excite our guilt.
Second, consumers have become accustomed to the portability and transferability of music, partly because of successful marketing by the industry.
Third, unlike familiar forms of copying a recording, as in the case of “bootleg” audio tapes, the copy never needs to be a physical object but can remain in electronic form. Physical associations with theft may be absent.
Fourth, the very term file-sharing connotes altruism and community. In particular, many adolescents find a sense of community more easily in the World Wide Web than in the rest of their lives. In this case what seems to be an impersonal, wealthy and imperious industry places itself in opposition to this otherwise positive value.
These factors do not justify theft, but file-sharing is not simply an attack on the concept of private property. It is a demand for access to a highly valued social commodity, a demand triggered and facilitated by technology. A new interpretation of the social contract is emerging, and industry and the law must take note.
If file-sharing is the wave of the future, as many believe it is, then adversarial approaches should not be the first, and certainly not the only response. Though aggressive prosecution may result in a short-term deterrent, in the long run it cannot stem the cultural tide.
In the short run, the industry should expand its effort to acquaint us with its moral strangers, the hard working men and women behind the scenes. Taking a longer view, the music industry must adapt its business model to the new culture. It must explore measures to renew consumers’ sense that they are being dealt with fairly. Devising alternative pricing structures through the Web, developing technologies that allow for appropriate personal use, and building more value into the product are among the constructive approaches that should be at least as aggressively pursued as legal remedies.
In their wisdom, the framers of the constitution specified that inventors should have rights over their products “for limited times.” They were concerned to balance the right to property with the need for civil society to flourish through the vibrant exchange of ideas. Artistic media are especially important for social flourishing because they create the common coin of human experience. In this field, civil society itself is changing, and the music industry must change with it. Measures to protect the legitimate interests of artists and the industry should be as creatively and sensitively crafted as the artistry itself.
Thank you.
http://govt-aff.senate.gov/index.cfm...itnes sID=422
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Can Porn Kill File-Sharing?
Record labels trying a new tack to shut down P2P networks
The music industry is hoping that the availability of child pornography on peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa will help put file sharing out of business. Record executives have been frustrated that Congress hasn't acted to curb piracy on these services, but some are now optimistic that lawmakers will intervene. "This is like Al Capone and taxes, which is how the government got him," says Jimmy Iovine, chairman of Interscope Records. "This shows peer-to-peers for what they really are."
At a September 9th Senate hearing on the connection between porn and peer-to- peer, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, warned about the "great risk of inadvertent exposure to these materials by young P2P users." Two congressmen have introduced a bill to mandate parental consent before children can access such networks. A government report last March found that more than half the searches for files named "Britney Spears," "Pokemon" and "Olsen twins" retrieved pornography, including eight percent that contained images of children.
In July, authorities in Suffolk County, New York made one of the first-ever child-porn busts of peer-to-peer offenders, arresting twelve people between ages sixteen and thirty-eight. Investigators found the suspects by searching hard drives for secret file terms that child pornographers use, much in the same manner that the music industry is hunting for illegally shared music files. "There's no easier way to get child pornography than peer-to-peer right now," says Randy Saaf, president of MediaDefender, a technology firm that assisted the police investigation.
File-sharing defenders decried the suggestion that Kazaa is to blame, saying that the software is no different from e- mail or Web browsers, both of which can also be used to access child porn. Alan Morris, an executive at Sharman Networks, which distributes the Kazaa software, told the Senate panel that "certain Hollywood interests . . . have embarked on a deliberate campaign to try to smear P2P technology itself." Kazaa, in particular, says it already offers a filter to exclude keywords associated with pornography from appearing in search results. But that's not enough to stop the music industry's campaign. "They are hiding behind the fact that they don't control their users," says Iovine. "But what is really going on is pornography is delivered to unsuspecting kids."
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/pri...=18764&cf=6720
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In depth: Kazaa Legal Team, AU Music Industry Talk Copyright
Following Sharman Networks' announcement that it filed papers with the United States Supreme Court in support of file sharing companies Grokster and StreamCast, ZDNet Australia spoke to the peer-to-peer software company's California based legal team and Australia's own piracy investigations chief about copyright infringement, technology and the law.
In the red corner is Rod Dorman of California based Hennigan, Bennett & Dorman, co-counsel for Sharman Networks, the makers of the Kazaa peer to peer tools. In the blue corner is Australia's Music Industry Piracy Investigations' manager Michael Speck.
Not surprisingly the two men don't exactly agree with each other on, well, more or less anything. Speck set the tone of the interview fairly quickly by comparing peer to peer companies' legal defences in the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) case against them to those of infamous Colombian cocaine lord Pablo Escobar.
"It's the last hurrah of copyright infringers before the court," he said. "And it can be likened to the Pablo Escobar defence -- 'I make available every aspect of the activity, I make a handsome profit from it but my fingerprints aren't on it' -- I don't think it's an approach that will be ultimately successful in the courts."
Continuing with the guns and hard crime analogy, Speck moved on to comparing Kazaa's role on the Internet to that of a gun dealer in an armed robbery -- as far as he's concerned peer to peer software is about as legitimate as a sawn-off. "A gun has a legitimate use until it's used for a bank robbery," he said.
Kazaa's argument is that because it never actually swapped copyrighted files it hasn't done anything wrong. "There is no allegation that Sharman is a direct [copyright] infringer," Dorman told ZDNet Australia from California by phone. "The argument has been that Sharman is guilty of contributory and vicarious infringement."
"Contributory infringement is if you knowingly assist someone in committing an act of deliberate infringement... vicarious infringement is knowingly allowing someone to it when you have the ability to stop it," he continued.
Speck argues that defence shouldn't apply because Kazaa is simply a tool that is first and foremost used to illegally copy works. "Legitimate use is entirely incidental to the actual use, and blind Freddy would know that," he said.
However Dorman says that from the very beginning Kazaa was set up as a means of distributing licensed content. "From the time that Sharman was created the intention was to [create] the largest means of distributing digitally rights licensed material on the Internet."
Anyway, he says, a decision made in April this year by a U.S. Judge Stephen Wilson basically gives technology companies cart-blanche to do whatever the hell they want, as long as they don't actually trade in copyrighted materials. "There is no statute that talks about secondary liability," he said. "You cannot be guilty of contributory infringement."
It's impossible to stop people trading copyrighted works by filtering content shared over peer to peer networks, Dorman says. He points out that big-time copyright holder Time Warner has a whole raft of its technologies that can be used to "steal" copyrighted material -- like AOL instant messaging and even e-mail. Dorman says the whole thing is about protecting market share and the means of distribution.
"They are trying to criminalise p2p because they want to control the means of distribution they had in the bricks and mortar world. What ended up happening was you had the large five companies in the music industry controlling 85 percent of that market," Dorman said. "So when they decide to put out CDs and distribute CDs they control effectively the distribution of the product. That's why it costs US$20 a CD in the U.S."
Speck holds a different view -- he says AOL's technologies were set up for "legitimate" purposes and Kazaa is clearly a tool which was designed for the purpose of stealing copyrighted works.
"It's an entirely inappropriate comparison. AOL and the like are legitimate systems in the first place are legitimate systems that are misused," he said. "[and] we would seriously dispute the notion that they (p2p companies) can't control traffic."
When asked if he was questioning the legitimacy of Sharman's core business, Speck only had this to say: "They're gaining great profit from trading in somebody else's property and in the real world there's a word for that."
However Dorman says the music industry's got it all wrong -- Kazaa has very little to do with copyright infringement, he explains. His logic runs along the same sorts of lines as that of gun zealots -- you know, guns don't kill people, people kill people. "You had the head of the RIAA saying falsely that Sharman promotes infringing conduct. That's a false fact. You're not permitted to do that if you follow the rules of the end user license agreement," he said.
It's all pretty black and white if you ask Speck -- peer to peer software companies can't get revenues up without resorting to thievery. "Their main concern is that the owners of copyright aren't embracing their model... the model is only successful as a commercial enterprise if you take the music from the owners without their permission and without paying them for it," he explained.
Contrary to Sharman's very public belief that if the appeal goes the RIAA's way technological innovation will be stunted, Speck says stamping out "illegitimate" online music trading will give birth to a new market. "A decision against these people will provide tremendous impetus for developers and establishers of legitimate models," he said.
That's not the way Dorman sees it. If the RIAA's appeal against Judge Wilson's ruling gets up the repercussions could be dire, he thinks. The legal history goes as far back as a ruling in 1984 relating to Sony Betamax video recorders, where the court found Sony could not be held liable for the misuse of its product. "I think the Sony Betamax decision provides a clear bright-line rule that tells tech developers and users not to stop -- you should keep innovating even if some people misuse it... we as a society are not going to penalise you for it."
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebu...0279224,00.htm
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RIAA Still Suing, Will Warn File Traders
Jay Lyman
In addition to indicating its intention to file more lawsuits against individual file traders accused of substantial copyright infringement, the RIAA called on peer-to-peer (P2P) network operators to implement reforms voluntarily.
Despite criticism of its technical and legal tactics, the Recording Industry Association of America is continuing its campaign of lawsuits against individual Internet file traders accused of copyright infringement.
Opponents of the strategy, which so far has consisted of nearly 1,500 subpoenas and 261 lawsuits, claimed a victory when the RIAA agreed it would inform potential targets that they might be sued. But the recording industry's tracking of alleged music thieves on file-sharing networks -- such as Kazaa and Gnutella -- was criticized for its likelihood of producing false positives.
RIAA spokesperson Jonathan Lamy told TechNewsWorld that the organization has "a thorough and comprehensive process" for ensuring the information it gathers on accused file swappers is accurate. He also indicated the RIAA is continuing to acquire evidence and is planning more litigation.
"There will be more lawsuits, and they'll happen in October sometime," Lamy said. "As we are working on current cases, we are gathering more evidence for the purpose of filing more lawsuits."
Committee hearings in the U.S. Senate have resulted in the RIAA's agreement to send a letter encouraging settlement discussions to computer users who may be the subject of lawsuits. Lamy, who reported that 52 of the RIAA's 261 lawsuits have been settled, said that "it seemed appropriate to give advance notification to someone being sued."
A spokesperson for Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota) -- who called for this week's hearings -- said the senator was pleased by discussion between the two sides on the Internet music-trading issue. However, Coleman is still seeking a solution other than litigation.
"He doesn't feel that that's the answer," Coleman spokesperson Andy Brehm told TechNewsWorld. "He wants to find a way to avoid these massive, wide-sweeping lawsuits."
In addition to indicating its intention to file more lawsuits against individual file traders accused of substantial copyright infringement, the RIAA called on peer- to-peer (P2P) network operators to implement reforms voluntarily.
Among the top requests was for P2P networks to change default settings so that the uploading of music from users' hard drives is not automatic. Other suggestions involved implementing filters to block uploading of copyrighted material and notifying users that trading copyrighted material without permission is illegal.
GartnerG2 research director Mike McGuire told TechNewsWorld that although changing the default settings may be a bargaining chip and a way to buy time for the P2P purveyors, leaving them as they are now could prove to be more useful when the files involved are not illegal.
"As a legal matter, it will be up to a judge to determine whether there is substantial, noninfringing use," McGuire said, referring to appellate cases between the RIAA and P2P operators.
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31730.html
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Former McAfee CEO Takes on P2P
Michael Stroud
Can a music company build a profitable business around peer-to-peer song swapping?
In November, a startup called Mercora plans to launch a service that will attempt to answer that question. Challenging popular wisdom, Mercora Chief Executive Srivats Sampath, former CEO of McAfee.com, is betting that users will jump at the opportunity to trade news, song clips and information about each other's buying and listening habits -- while paying for copyright material.
"We want to build eBay for music," said Sampath in an interview at the Digital Hollywood entertainment technology show in Los Angeles. "We want to build a trusted infrastructure where labels, artists and users come together."
Mercora, a derivation of a Latin word meaning "to trade," is designing a site that will allow users to voluntarily open up their hard drives to millions of users. If members give permission, other users can find out what they just bought and what they're listening to at a given moment. Members can send each other clips from songs the labels want to promote, or even entire albums from up-and- coming bands that want their names known.
Sampath said he plans to price songs from big labels at 99 cents initially, on par with Apple Computer's new iTunes store and BuyMusic.com's recently launched service. But labels can opt to price the songs any way they want or even give them away for free.
Mercora will make money by taking an undisclosed piece of the revenue from music sold on its service. It also plans to sell market research to studios about users' listening habits.
Ted Cohen, EMI's senior vice president for digital development and distribution, said in a Digital Hollywood panel with Sampath that he has no problem with Mercora's business model. But he questioned whether it's a true peer- to-peer service, since customers buy music from Mercora's central server, not music they're swapping with each other.
Sampath said he's in final-stage talks with EMI about contributing music to the service.
Given Sampath's background -- he also was an executive at both Intel and Netscape -- you'd think he might think twice about jumping into the music business. But Sampath said he doesn't see Mercora as really that different from McAfee.com, which rose to become the No. 1 consumer antivirus company by also selling downloadable software over the Internet.
After all, music is a much bigger market. "We got 4.4 million people who paid $50 a year" for the McAfee.com service, he said. "If you can do that for antivirus software, you can do it for music."
The initial version of Mercora, Sampath said, will incorporate Microsoft's Windows Media Audio, or WMA, software, which file traders will use to encode any songs downloaded or exchanged over the Internet. With Mercora, no one gets a song without paying for it, unless a label or the artist gives it away as a promotion.
Other secure formats, such as RealNetworks' Helix software and formats being developed by Philips and Sony, probably will be available on the service down the road, Sampath said.
Sampath sees the irony in inviting Microsoft to the party. About a year ago, Sampath sold McAfee.com to Network Associates, just as Microsoft was gearing up to enter the antivirus software market itself. Now, Sampath -- who readily admits he used to be paranoid about Microsoft -- could help cement the dominance of Microsoft in secure music transactions.
"The reality of the market is that Windows XP is on 40 million boxes," he said. "If you know a PC has WMA built into it, why wouldn't you piggyback on that?"
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60660,00.html
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Power To The People
Chuck D and LL Cool J locked horns on Capitol Hill on Tuesday (September 30) over the issue of Internet music file-sharing. The two veteran rappers were speaking before a Senate hearing on the issue blamed for the ongoing decline of record industry profits. Whilst LL Cool J followed the industry line, Chuck D played devil's advocate pointing out the positive role that peer-to-peer services, which he refers to as 'new accessible radio', play in getting music heard.
"P2P to me means power to the people. I trust the consumer more than I trust the people at the helm of these companies," Chuck D said. "As far as rock'n'roll, blues licks were taken from the Mississippi Delta without authorisation, so people can spend $180 to check out the Rolling Stones do it all over again. So the record industry is hypocritical."
http://www.dotmusic.com/news/October2003/news31028.asp
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RIAA: P2P Vendors Must Filter Content
Grant Gross
The U.S. recording industry Tuesday during a Senate hearing on file trading called on peer-to-peer software vendors to filter out copyright content and a U.S. senator pressed the distributor of the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer software to cut off users who violate its end user license agreement.
Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) asked Alan Morris, executive vice president of Kazaa owner Sharman Networks Ltd., in Sydney, why his company couldn't shut down users who violate the Kazaa license agreement not to share copyright files.
Morris, testifying at a hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said it was technically impossible to cut off users of the software who trade copyright files or to filter content to ban copyright works from being traded by Kazaa users, as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) called for.
The hearing on file trading featured two popular rap music artists, LL Cool J and Chuck D, debating on the opposite side of the issue, and a college student who told how she had to raise money on the Internet to pay a settlement after the RIAA brought a file-trading lawsuit against her. Levin and the RIAA called for the peer-to-peer vendors to make reforms while two Republican senators questioned the RIAA's tactics of suing hundreds of peer-to-peer users.
http://www.nwfusion.com/cgi-bin/mailto/x.cgi
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Korean Online Music Providers Agree To Stop Pending Approval
Michael Geist, ILN
Several Korean online music providers have agreed to stop their services effective October 1st pending approval from the Korean Association of Phonogram Producers. Bug Music, the largest music provider, has thus far refused to stop its services.
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/site/da...0309220015.asp
Thai Copyright Reforms Would End Settlements
Thailand is considering new copyright reforms that would stop the use of out-of-court settlements in copyright infringment cases. The move is designed to deter counterfeiting, as police say that the copyright infringement rarely results in a stiff penalty and most cases are settled by way of fine.
http://search.bangkokpost.co.th/bkkp...usiness/24sep2
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The Digital Piracy Debate
Jonathan Whitehead
Vice President and Senior Counsel, Recording Industry Assn. of America
Wednesday, October 1, 2003; 12:00 PM
The chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) yesterday told a Senate panel that the music industry would alter its campaign to sue people who illegally trade copyrighted music files on the Internet. Unlike before, the RIAA plans to contact would-be defendants before they are sued and give them a chance to settle or dispute the accusations.
Jonathan Whitehead, a senior RIAA attorney and head of the association's Online Copyright Protection Department, discussed the ongoing debate on Internet music trading. An edited transcript is below.
Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
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washingtonpost.com: Hi Jonathan, thanks for joining us. The RIAA's legal campaign against song swappers has been your organization's most effective -- and most controversial -- weapon against online copyright infringement. Would you describe your efforts? How is that campaign going? Is the crime-fighting reward of the subpoenas worth the public relations cost?
Jonathan Whitehead: Thanks for inviting me to be on today's chat. It's important to keep in mind the extraordinary level of online piracy - on FastTrack alone there are over 3 million users offering over 600 million files - most of them infringing. It's been estimated that there are over 2.5 billion copyrighted files (mostly music) illegally downloaded each month.
And it's effecting sales - the record industry has experienced a 31% drop in sales in the past three years. While we've undertaken massive education efforts to stem the tide of illegal music, litigation against egregious users gets an important message out - uploading and downloading music without permission is illegal and there are consequences. And that message is being heard loud and clear.
The ultimate objective is to create an environment for the legal distribution of music. There are legitimate services available right now - there's no reason to get music illegally from a P2P network. A list of legitimate sites can be found at --
http://www.musicunited.org/6_legalsites.html . These sites benefit from our education and enforcement efforts. In fact, there are already signs that these services are experiencing increased traffic. That's the reason we're undertaking these enforcement actions - we're starting to see results.
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Columbia, Mo.: What kind of effect is your deterrent campaign having on downloads? Have you seen a drop in peer to peer exchanges with all the stories being run about the illegality of downloading free music?
Jonathan Whitehead: We're most interested in how the legitimate sites fare in the face of P2P systems that are offering millions of illegal files. There's been a migration to these services, we believe that this trend will continue. There's also been a dramatic increase in people's awareness that stealing music is illegal. Parents are talking to their kids, university students are hearing about this from administrators - and that shows the deterrence message is getting out.
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Washington, D.C.: Right or wrong, it's hard to be sympathetic when wealthy, market-saturating bands complain that downloaders hurt their sales. But I'm curious how something like Kazaa affects less famous artists, who don't sell millions of albums, or fill big venues. Do you have a sense of how they're affected? Are the economic issues the same?
Jonathan Whitehead: Remember that not all artists are commercially successful. In fact, only 10% of CDs released each year will be commercially successful. That 10% supports the other 90% of albums that don't return the investment. The record companies rely on the albums that are the hits to invest and take a chance on the unknown bands. Of course, the popular albums are the ones that are the ones most downloaded on P2P. So in effect, it's the band that you've never heard of that may be hurt because the labels don't have as much money to invest in the artists of tomorrow.
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Herndon, Va.: Has the RIAA seriously considered the fact the consumers feel ripped off? The price of CD players has plummeted since their introduction; CD's prices have not. People are expected to pay $18 for a disc that has maybe 3 good songs with the other 15 being filler. Also what's going on with the rebates to consumers due to the recording industry being sued for price fixing? Or has the industry been so busy playing the injured party that they've forgotten they crossed the consumers first?
Jonathan Whitehead: In comparison to free, it's understandable that any price feels too much. Many people are under the misconception that CDs are just the cost of the plastic. In reality, creating an album involves recording costs, session musicians, studio time, and marketing and promoting the album the album. When you go to Kazaa, you know which artist you.re looking for b/c a label has invested a lot of money to get that music out to the public. The top 200 search requests on Kazaa mirror the Billboard top 200. Even touring is part of promoting the album - many tours lose money. In addition, just b/c someone thinks something is too expensive isn't a justification for stealing it.
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Westford, Mass.: What should the average consumer understand about copyright law when it comes to file-swapping, and how does "fair use" come into play? For example, lots of people copy music from CDs they already own onto multiple digital media readers -- are there any legal limitations to this practice? What advice would you give users who aren't well versed in the specifics of copyright law about what they can and can't do when it comes to copying and sharing files?
Jonathan Whitehead: Very simply, uploading and downloading songs without the permission of the copyright owner is against the law. Offering unlicensed songs for others to download is not a fair use. In fact, many of the P2P users we're seeing are offering hundreds, if not thousands of unlicensed songs on FastTrack for millions of other people to download.
You can get more information about copyright law and its application to the Internet and P2P at
http://www.musicunited.org/2_thelaw.html
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New York: I certainly understand your concerns and issues you are working towards for the people you represent. It makes complete sense that a consumer should pay for music for which they choose to enjoy. But isn't there a different route the RIAA can take that doesn't make your organization look so brutish and out of touch?
Jonathan Whitehead: Keep in mind, these enforcement efforts are a last resort. We've undertaken our recent enforcement efforts after years of public education. For example, we helped launch the musicunited campaign, with the participation of artists and other music industry leaders. We aired PSAs on tv, radio and print. The message was clear - downloading music without the permission of the copyright owners is not only illegal, but it hurts everyone in the music industry from artists to studio engineers, to record store clerks. In addition we've sent millions of instant messages to Kazaa and Grokster users informing them of the illegality of distributing copyrighted music. Part of this educational campaign is to let people know that legitimate music is available now. In fact, a recent consumer survey shows that 52% of the public is supportive of efforts, as opposed to 21% unsupportive.
No one likes playing the heavy - but if we don't something in light of the rampant online piracy - the long-term health of the music industry is threatened. In addition, the legitimate online marketplace will not have an opportunity to thrive.
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Vienna, Va.: How and with what authority is the RIAA gaining access to peoples computers to know that they have these files?
Jonathan Whitehead: The RIAA searches for P2P users offering copyright music files to millions of other users. When you offer files for upload on a P2P system, you are opening up your computer to millions of people. The RIAA only searches for people offering infringing music files - we search the P2P systems just like any other user can. Instructions on how to disable the upload function on P2P applications can be found at
http://www.musicunited.org/5_takeoff.html
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Great Falls, Va.: Can you give some examples of good and legal Web sites for downloading music? I'd like to use iTunes but I don't have a Mac. When will iTunes start selling to PC users?
Jonathan Whitehead: There are plenty of options in getting legal music online for PC users. You can find a list of legitimate services at
http://www.musicunited.org/ 6_legalsites.html
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Sterling, Va.: Surely the 31% drop in CD sales can't all be attributed to the proliferation of file-sharing. Isn't part of the problem that most of the music heard on the radio or played on MTV or VH1 is simply not interesting or memorable? I think the more critical issue is one of creativity rather than legal issues. What can the RIAA do to get the radio stations and MTV/VH1 to feature more adventurous, creative and interesting music?
Jonathan Whitehead: There's a lot of great music out there. Music is still very popular - evidenced by the massive number of music downloaded every day. Unfortunately, many are people aren't paying for it. Legitimate online services have features that suggest new and otherwise unknown artists. I think you'll find there's plenty of interesting and creative music. We agree that there's sometimes is a lack of diversity in radio airplay - we share your sentiment that there should be more on-air opportunities for newer artists to be heard.
Thanks again for the opportunity to take part in this chat. I hope it was a useful and informative exchange. Let's try this again soon.
Jonathan
_______________________
washingtonpost.com: Unfortunately we're past our time. I'd like to thank Jonathan Whitehead for joining us and our guests for submitting so many thoughtful questions.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Sep30.html
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A Stroll Through Patent History
Teresa Riordan
CAN a theoretical stroll through the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851 in London — at which thousands of inventions from countries around the world were on display — tell us something about the nature of innovation today?
Petra Moser, now an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, took exactly such a stroll — in the form of a Ph.D. thesis — and has come up with some surprising conclusions that are attracting the attention of fellow scholars. This month the Economic History Association awarded her a dissertation prize at its annual meeting.
On Friday she will be giving a seminar on her research at the University of Maryland in College Park.
One of Professor Moser's conclusions is that developing countries like India, which is scheduled to come into full compliance with an international patent treaty in 2005, may be better off without strong patent laws.
The conventional wisdom among economists has been that a robust patent system helped transform the United States into an economic powerhouse. And this may be true. But, Professor Moser concludes, what was good for America and Britain in the 19th century is not necessarily good for emerging, largely rural economies in countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
"In economics, we are taught that patent laws are what create incentives for innovation," she said. "But many of the best innovators in what was the high technology of the day came from some of the smallest countries in Europe, and these nations did not have patent laws."
Professor Moser found, for example, that Swiss inventors tended to concentrate their efforts in watch making and specialized steel making for scientific and optical instruments. Their innovations were exceedingly difficult to reverse-engineer and thus were successfully guarded as trade secrets.
"There were competitions in England to reproduce some Swiss innovations in steel," Professor Moser said. "But the English just couldn't figure out how to do it. The Swiss would have been silly to patent these innovations."
That is because the purpose of patents is twofold: to protect the inventor and to speed technological progress. Thus, patent laws require that an inventor, in a quid pro quo exchange for the limited monopoly that a patent provides, disclose his methods to others. "Countries without patent laws have much larger shares of their innovations where patenting would have been a bad idea," Professor Moser said.
Meanwhile, inventors from countries not governed by patent laws were free to appropriate ideas patented by innovators in other countries.
The French inventor Hippolyte Mège-Mouriez, who invented margarine in 1870, blithely showed his invention to two Dutch entrepreneurs. Mr. Mège-Mouriez, having received a patent, felt confident that his idea was protected. The Dutch entrepreneurs took the Frenchman's ideas, improved on them (keeping their improvements secret) and established a thriving margarine business that in the 20th century merged into the multinational conglomerate Unilever. Mr. Mège-Mouriez died a pauper.
Professor Moser's work builds on work of Jacob Schmookler and Kenneth Sokoloff, both of whom have used 19th-century patent records to correlate rates of invention with market demand.
But her source material was not patents, since many of the inventions she studied were not patented. Rather, she combed through exhibition catalogs from the Crystal Palace exhibition and the 1876 Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia.
"The idea of using the exhibition data to empirically examine this idea was exceptionally creative, and the analysis was well executed," said Professor Sokoloff, a professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Petra deserves enormous credit."
For about two hours every day during the four years she pursued her doctorate in economics at the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Moser entered data from 33,000 19th-century exhibition inventions into a spreadsheet.
The Crystal Palace exhibition was the first in a series of world fairs at which countries showed off their newest technologies. More than 6 million people visited the Crystal Palace, and almost 10 million people attended the Centennial Exhibition.
"Exhibition data are particularly useful for studying the effects of patent laws on innovation because they measure economically useful innovation in a way that is independent of changes in patent laws," Professor Moser said. "Countries without patent laws were really doing quite well."
So what is the lesson for Brazil, China, India and other countries that are being pressed by industrialized nations to create strong patent systems?
"We try to force patent laws on developing countries and say, This is best for you," she said. "Then we are surprised when they say they don't want patent laws. But they have a point. Such laws could actually hinder innovation in those countries."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/te...gy/29PATE.html
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A.C.L.U. Challenges Music Industry in Court
John Schwartz
Stepping up its involvement in the legal conflict over file sharing, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a motion to stop attempts by the music industry to get the name of a Boston College student who is accused of being a large-scale file trader.
In court papers that were filed on Friday and will be announced today, the group said that Boston College should not be forced to reveal the identity of the student.
The civil liberties group argues that the constitutional rights of its client, referred to as Jane Doe, would be violated if her college, which is also her Internet service provider, were forced to reveal her name. The industry subpoena "seeks to strip Jane Doe of her fundamental right to anonymity," according to the group's court filings.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/bu...ia/29aclu.html
Top 10 D/Ls - Singles
BigChampagne
New Group To Fight RIAA, Microsoft
Christina Temes
In an effort to gain campus-wide exposure and to inform students of threats to computing freedom, the new student-run group Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons held a rally and information session on Tuesday night in the science center.
The group, founded by Nelson Pavlovsky ’06 and Luke Smith ’06, is dedicated to a multitude of issues pertaining to the prevention of the limiting of open culture. This translates into resisting the efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America to sue those who share music files, opposing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and similar expansion of intellectual property law, spreading the use of Linux and other freeware programs and fighting the plan of Microsoft and the “Trusted Computing Platform Alliance” to put monitoring chips in personal computers.
Linux, a free alternative to the Microsoft Windows operating system, lies at the heart of SCDC’s philosophy. The group’s short-term goals include getting more students to switch to Linux and get some Linux-based computers in public areas, to “show everyone how functional Linux is — that it’s not some impractical pipedream,” Pavlovsky said.
A major factor in SCDC’s championing of Linux is the advent of the Microsoft’s new “Trusted Computing” technology, also known as the Palladium chip. This technology, already present in some new IBM ThinkPads and set to be released in the upcoming version of Windows, would require Microsoft to verify if a user has permission to open a file on his or her computer.
Theoretically, this gives Microsoft the power to deny one access to a file or program that is saved on one’s own computer. Pavlovsky said that a massive switch to Linux could possibly cause Microsoft to step down its efforts to expand this technology. This is why SCDC wishes to recruit more colleges to boycott ‘Trusted Computing’ technology.”
One of the other major issues to which the SCDC is committed is resisting current copyright and intellectual property laws, such as the DMCA. “The current trend in intellectual property [law] is toward the absurd,” Smith said. He added that this “is not encouraging innovation, but inhibiting it.”
Under current law, one cannot reproduce a DVD or tell someone how to reproduce a DVD, even if one owns the data and is using it for personal use. The RIAA continues to crack down more harshly on those who share music files over the Internet.
SCDC organizers wish to demonstrate the benefits of free, open sharing of such files without advocating piracy and while promoting alternatives to current copyrights, such as those available through creativecommons.org, in which artists choose how their work can be used, shared, or altered in the future.
SCDC members attempted to address all of these issues at Tuesday night’s meeting. The night began with an explanation of the group by Smith and Pavlovsky, which was followed by questions by the audience.
A viewing of “Free Culture,” a recorded presentation given by Lawrence Lessig, a proponent of open culture and author of “The Future of Ideas,” followed. In it, Lessig described the beginning of free culture in 1774 and the progression of laws to limit it, saying that “never in our history have fewer people controlled the evolution of our culture.” The event ended with the distribution of free software and the opportunity for students to get Linux installed on their computers.
Upwards of 20 students attended the event, many of whom were informed of the event by SCDC’s chalking of the campus that took place on Sunday. The audience seemed to respond positively to the meeting.
“It’s good to think about [these issues], because people don’t often think about things like intellectual property law until they start to directly impact them,” Tara Levin ’07 said.
After the night’s success, the SCDC organizers began to look to the future with optimism. This semester they hope to continue proposing alternatives in software, to get a speaker to come to campus and to organize a faculty panel for the spring semester.
After that, the SCDC plans to continue to work hard for their goals. “If there’s one place to bridge the gap between technology and creativity, it’s Swarthmore,” Smith said.
http://phoenix.swarthmore.edu/2003-10-02/news/13240
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Accused Copyright Violator Hatch Warns Against Folly Of Stealing Music Off Internet
Christopher Smith
Illegally downloading a digital music file from the Internet is just as bad -- if not worse -- than shoplifting a music CD from Costco, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Orrin Hatch said Friday.
Announcing that he is working on new legislation to warn parents of the potential criminal and civil liabilities if their children download songs on their home computers, Hatch told the National Press Club that unless the practice is stopped, it will result in "endless mass-tort litigation" against not only owners of the computers, but the companies that make them.
"Why should Microsoft, Intel, Verizon or Cisco be responsible when using their products for their intended purpose costs people money, psychological harm, and perhaps even criminal convictions?" asked Hatch. "Well, I'm not saying they should be. As a veteran of the tobacco and asbestos litigation wars, however, I'm just saying that nothing surprises me anymore."
Hatch said technology industries that benefit from the so-called peer-to-peer file sharing programs that are used to swap digital music files must start warning consumers of the potential for legal action, identity theft, password disclosure and pornography peddling from downloading songs.
In June, Hatch created an uproar in cyberspace when he announced at a Senate hearing that he supported remotely destroying a person's home computer with copyright security software. Hatch said Friday the comment was made "tongue in cheek" and only to denounce the stealing of copyrighted materials and to "spark a policy discussion."
He acknowledged, however, that the amount of public backlash to his comments ranked among the highest in his political career.
But Hatch said he fears the recent wave of recording industry lawsuits against children and adults who downloaded songs using the KaZaa! peer-to-peer software is only the beginning of a tidal wave of litigation that could swamp the U.S. economy.
"First, consumers deserve to know about these risks," said Hatch, a songwriter and author who reported earning more than $40,000 last year in royalties on sales of his intellectual properties. "And second, unless the technology industries that benefit, directly or indirectly, from peer-to-peer file sharing start warning consumers about its dangers, creative lawyers may mire the technology industries in the sort of endless mass-tort litigation that has devastated other industries while conferring few benefits on consumers."
http://www.sltrib.com/2003/Oct/10042...s/business.asp
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Internet Evolves In Wake Of Music-Swapping Suits
Matthew Fordahl
Just as Prohibition drove drinkers underground in the roaring '20s, the music industry's crackdown is pushing many song swappers away from the open Internet and into what amount to cyberspace speakeasies.
These high-tech Cotton Clubs usually require users to be trusted or at least know someone inside. The files being traded, instead of out in the open, are encrypted - the 21st century equivalent of hiding bathtub gin under a fake floorboard.
Internet file-sharers are operating much like any society that falls under attack. And the very technologies they are using as shields have long been employed by legitimate businesses to protect their data from prying eyes and hackers.
"The software that users are moving toward, it has characteristics that businesses need - which is a high degree of privacy, a high degree of security and the ability to handle large files," said Clay Shirky, a professor of interactive telecommunications at New York University.
Three years after the Recording Industry Association of America's lawyers succeeded in shutting down the Napster file-trading service, the music industry's jihad against unauthorized digital music distribution is reaping an unintended consequence: better, easier-to-use software for exchanging data securely - and even anonymously - on the Internet.
"Thanks to the RIAA, ease of use surrounding encryption technologies, which was never a big deal before, is a big deal now," Shirky said.
The decentralized peer-to-peer technology that enables a computer user to share his or her music collection with strangers remains an unbottled genie - and is now likely to evolve so ever more traffic becomes invisible not just to the entertainment industry's copyright cops but also to repressive governments, inquisitive employers and snooping relatives.
On the file-swapping front, current favorites Kazaa, Morpheus and iMesh are more decentralized and harder to sue than Napster. They are breeding more sophisticated stepchildren just as the RIAA goes after the swappers themselves with lawsuits filed against 260 alleged file sharers.
An upcoming release of the file-sharing program Blubster, for instance, not only makes users more difficult to identify. It also seamlessly encrypts files before they are transferred and decrypts them for the end user.
Another program, called Waste, can be used to set up an encrypted instant-messaging and content-sharing network of up to 50 users. Unlike traditional instant- messaging programs, Waste messages don't pass through a central server.
Waste was pulled by America Online shortly after its release by the company's Nullsoft division, but is still circulating online. Neither AOL nor Nullsoft programmer Justin Frankel returned calls seeking comment. (Nullsoft also released Gnutella - on which many of Napster's successors are based. AOL quickly yanked that program, too, but the damage was done.)
Copyright crackdowns like those staged by the RIAA, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Business Software Alliance have succeeded on at least one front: Because higher security and anonymity tend to make software more difficult to use, fewer people are likely to be engaged in casual copying.
"To some degree, the effort has always been one of pushing down the piracy problem, forcing it down to the hardcore pirate," said Bob Kruger, the BSA's vice president for enforcement.
Matt Oppenheim, the RIAA's senior vice president for business and legal affairs, said it's still possible to undermine pirates - even those operating anonymously. In fact, four university students sued last April were using allegedly more-secure swapping software.
So the race is on to improve and simplify advanced security technologies. Beyond programs like Blubster and Waste, there are projects like Freenet, which has been around since 1999. Downloaded nearly 2 million times, it cannot only trade files but also exchange information and spread censored news to places like China.
Like other programs, it's difficult for the programmers to know exactly how it's being used, but there are clues.
"Our Web site is censored by Chinese government," said Freenet leader Ian Clarke. "I suspect we must have had some effect to justify that."
Though Clarke is well known for his information-needs-to-be-free philosophy, he's also trying to cash in on Freenet's architecture.
Last year, he founded Cematics LLC and the company has since released a prototype of Locutus, which allows users to search corporate networks for information distributed across a wide range of computers.
"Just as Napster or Kazaa allow 12-year-old kids to shares media files over the Internet, Locutus allows corporations to share documents within their organization," Clarke said. "It's kind of like Google for people's hard disks, but with added security. You can define who has permission to find what kind of files."
The shift toward integrating encryption and anonymity tools answer the prayers of privacy advocates who have been warning Internet users for years about the potential problems of using the open network without such protection.
"The recording industry lawsuits may in fact change the ecological pressures on the software developers to encourage more anonymity. I think that's a good outcome of this," said Cory Doctorow, outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "What it won't do is legalize what 60 million people are up to and it won't ... pay any artists."
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...ss/6933265.htm
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It’s flawed but hey, at least they gave it a shot.
THE DIGITAL MEDIA MANIFESTO
Executive summary
Today Digital Media has been enabled by remarkably sophisticated technologies with potential opportunities today for creativity, business, culture and enjoyment, as well as benefits for players all along the value chain.
However, the achievement of a full Digital Media Experience is stuck in a stalemate. There is too much at stake to simply bow to this stalemate as an inevitable presence to live with in the next few years to come, hoping wistfully that the mess will be sorted out some day soon.
The Digital Media Manifesto identifies the need for coordinated policy and technical actions needed to achieve this fuller realisation of Digital Media. The policy actions include reviewing the Digital Media standardisation process. The technical actions require, as explicit critical success factors, the development of specifications for interoperable Digital Rights Management (DRM) platforms technically open to value-chain players and for interoperable end-user devices, and the development of recommended practices for end-to-end conformance assessment.
Executing these actions is the mission of the Digital Media Project, a not-for-profit organisation whose establishment is proposed to create the policy and technical conditions for a sustainable Digital Media economy.
http://www.chiariglione.org/manifesto/dmm.htm
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[bb]The Incredible Shrinking Studio[/b]
Mark McClusky
Brian Transeau, better-known in the dance-music world as BT, is one of the top DJs and remixers in the world. And he gets some of his best work done on a plane.
Using a laptop computer and an audio-editing program, BT can work on songs anywhere, and often does. Transeau has worked with Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan and Peter Gabriel, among others, and released several of his own dance records. His production work on the song "Pop" from Nsync's last record is one of the projects he did while flying.
"I did a lot of the vocal edits on a plane," said BT. "I cut and pieced the vocal together. There's something like 2,000 or 3,000 edits in that three-minute song, and I did that sitting on a plane."
Working on the go has become standard operating procedure in the music industry. Times have changed: Twenty years ago, a studio was the only place where professional recordings could be made; even five years ago, desktop computers were just starting to get enough horsepower to make great records. Today, a laptop offers plenty of power to make a great-sounding track -- and that portability is changing the way music is made.
For instance, guitar hero Steve Vai recorded his Alive in an Ultra World live album on location using an Apple PowerBook and Logic, a multitrack recording program. "Technology changes, and you really have to stay on top of it," Vai said.
In another sign of the increased prominence of laptops in the recording process, as of this fall, new students at the Berklee College of Music have to buy a PowerBook, a MIDI keyboard controller and a copy of Reason, a popular software synthesis and sampling program.
For years, music students were expected to learn to play the piano as the main instrument for their education. But according to Professor Michael Bierylo of Berklee, those days are over. "People are turning to the computer as the way of learning music," said Bierylo. "That represents a very radical shift in music education."
Bierylo, who also composes scores for movies and television, knows that familiarizing Berklee students with laptops is a crucial part of their education as the technological landscape of the industry changes.
"You can take your laptop and work almost anywhere and use it to make incredible music on stage," he said. "That's pretty revolutionary. The whole idea of the studio as a single place where all the production is done has more or less flown out the window. High-end studios still have their place, of course, but more and more and more musicians are tracking in different locations."
Along with freeing musicians from the studio, the new power of laptops, and some of the software that has been written to use that power, has had a huge impact on the market for synthesizers.
Instead of spending $3,000 for a high-end hardware synthesizer, musicians can now buy software-based synths and load dozens of them on a laptop.
"There are plenty of artists who are using laptops live, instead of carrying racks of synths with them to shows," said Steve Oppenheimer, the editor in chief of Electronic Musician magazine. "It used to be that hardware synths sold like crazy, but those guys would kill to make decent sales on hardware synths today. The sales of hardware aren't what they used to be, and they're not going to come back. It adds up to big trouble for hardware manufacturers."
Manufacturers aren't the only ones feeling the pinch. Recording studio owners have seen their business drop as well. Sorcerer Sound in New York, where Norah Jones recorded her Grammy-winning album, recently closed and auctioned off its recording equipment.
Mike Caffrey owns Monster Island studio in New York City. He sees some tough times ahead. "For the short term, the number of studios will drop," he said. "Their main function will be to provide a proper acoustical environment."
But there's something else that a trip to the studio offers musicians -- the experience of the person running it. "My studio is not intended to be a commercial studio, which is essentially a specialized real estate business," Caffrey said. "People are paying for my skills and expertise, and get the studio as part of the package."
The full economic impact of the shrinking studio remains to be seen. But the physical freedom and power of these systems has changed the world for musicians. Ken Jordan, one part of the popular techno duo The Crystal Method, is a firm believer in the power of a laptop for his music.
"That's what took us so long to make our second album," he said. "We were on the road so much promoting our first album, and we didn't really know how to write or make music outside of our studio. Now with PowerBooks, soft synths and programs like Live and Reason, we can write anywhere. And we do."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60639,00.html
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New Monitor Displays 4,000 Lines Of Resolution
This monitor can provide an immersive experience
Sander Olson
BLURB
The controversial futurist Ray Kurzweil has argued in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines that immersive virtual reality machines will soon be commonplace. Kurzweil argues that:
By 2009, computers will disappear. Visual information will be written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact lenses. In addition to high resolution virtual monitors appearing to hover in space, these intimate displays will provide full-immersion visual virtual reality. We will have ubiquitous very high bandwidth wireless connection to the Internet at all times. "Going to a Website" will mean entering a virtual reality environment--at least for the visual and auditory senses-- where we will meet other real people. There will be simulated people as well, but these virtual personalities will not be up to human standards, at least not by 2009. The miniscule electronics powering these developments will be invisibly embedded in our glasses and clothing. Thus we won't be searching for our misplaced mobile phones, Palms, notebooks, and other gadgets. And we won't have to deal with the mess of wires that now entangle our lives. We will be plugged in all the time, and able to have any type of interaction with anyone regardless of physical proximity.
Although many are quick to discount Kurzweil's predictions for immersive VR, a technological advance has brought this vision one step closer to fruition. Researchers at the Japan Broadcasting Company have created an ultra-high definition video system with 16 times the resolution of High Definition Television (HDTV). The prototype system consists of 4,000 horizontal lines of resolution, which far exceeds the 1920x1080 resolution of HDTV. At that level of resolution, the "you are there" sensation can apparently be overwhelming. We shouldn't expect to see television or computer screens sporting any ultra-high definition video anytime soon--the first HDTV sets were built back in 1981, and HDTV is only now becoming common. Moreover, any video card capable of displaying that many pixels and lines of resolution would need to be far more powerful than current GPUs. Even a terabyte hard drive would be insufficient for storing more than a couple of minutes of video/ animation. Finally, the infrastructure for sending, receiving, and processing such images doesn't currently exist. Nevertheless, such displays could become commercially available within a decade or so.
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/20...0930021981.htm
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No Easy Way to Resolve P2P, Industry Conflict
Bill Holland
The Recording Industry Assn. of America appears to have weathered what first promised to be a congressional hurricane but has turned out to be an autumn sprinkle.
Observers described the Sept. 30 hearing to probe the subpoena process the RIAA uses to go after alleged copyright infringers as muted.
Despite initial rumblings, it appears that Congress may not revisit the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), observers say.
Some Capitol Hill veterans say that Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who called the hearing, is now part of a growing group of lawmakers that sees no easy way to solve the conflict between the record industry and peer-to-peer services.
"After studying the issue, I think Coleman now recognizes that the Kazaas are inherently conflicted," says lobbyist Manus Cooney, formerly chief of staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"So there's no real incentive for the recording industry to license them. At the same time, the Kazaas have no real incentive to develop the technology solution to identify illegal downloaders because they'd be liable."
Cooney and other Hill vets say that Mitch Bainwol, the RIAA's new chairman/CEO, came across as informed and positive at the hearing when he announced that going forward, the RIAA will give prior notice to alleged egregious P2P infringers.
By law, neither Internet service providers nor copyright holders are required to give notice to a user whose personal information has been turned over to a copyright holder.
The RIAA notification will alleviate some of the surprise or confusion the lawsuits have generated, allowing infringers to contact the RIAA to settle out of court and enabling those who feel they are innocent of wrongdoing to make their case.
"We are trying to be reasonable and fair and allow these cases the opportunity to be resolved without litigation," Bainwol told the panel.
He also said that lawsuits could be avoided if P2P network operators instituted meaningful disclosure notices stating that unauthorized uploading and downloading is illegal, used available technology to filter and block such activity and changed default settings for users so that they do not unknowingly upload material.
Hill veterans say that lawmakers have too much on their plate to reconstruct the DMCA.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml...toryID=3556769
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Senator Seeks Lower Downloading Penalties
Frederic J. Frommer
Sen. Norm Coleman said Thursday he will push legislation this year to reduce legal penalties for people who download copyrighted music off the
Internet.
Coleman, R-Minn., said current penalties, which range from $750 to $150,000 per downloaded song, are excessive and enough to scare innocent people into settling lawsuits filed by the recording industry.
"I can tell you that $150,000 per song is not reasonable, and that's technically what you can put in front of somebody," Coleman said in a conference call with reporters. "That forces people to settle when they may want to fight, but they're thinking, 'goodness, gracious, what am I going to face?' "
Coleman said he will also press for changes in federal law to reign in the recording industry's subpoena power.
The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows the industry to obtain subpoenas, without a judge's signature, to track and sue people who download songs. Coleman said he would like to allow for some judicial review.
Coleman's announcement came two days after he held a high-profile congressional hearing that featured the recording industry, the file sharing industry, and rappers LL Cool J and Chuck D.
The Washington-based Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major record labels, has filed civil lawsuits against 261 people it accuses of illegally distributing music online, and promises thousands more suits.
The RIAA, which blames piracy for flagging music sales, opposes changing the law.
"Given the scope of today's piracy epidemic, we must not weaken the hand of copyright holders to enforce their rights and deter illegal behavior," said spokesman Jonathan Lamy.
Not surprisingly, the file sharing industry welcomed Coleman's comments.
"Senator Coleman's willingness to act quickly to protect the public in these two critical areas is commendable," said Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a trade group which represents the file-sharing industry.
Coleman said he didn't have any specific numbers in mind yet for revised penalties.
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...ws/6918045.htm
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I say it’s a breath mint! I say it’s a candy mint!
Major Accusations Flying Around Earth Station Five
Jack Spratts
According to a
poster at the P2P site Zeropaid, which has never been a fan of the Middle Eastern file sharing application
Earth Station Five, malicious code was allegedly placed in the P2P program deliberately to facilitate the deletion of files from users computers at will. Forums were lit up over the allegation with sides being drawn depending mostly on how people felt about the two camps.
Despite repeated attempts officials at ES5 did not return calls seeking comment.
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Madonna Sued For Copying Images For Video
AP
The son of a fashion photographer has sued Madonna, saying his late father's images were copied by the singer in a set of videos for a song called "Hollywood."
Samuel Bourdin brought the lawsuit Friday, saying he holds the rights to the images created by his father, Guy Bourdin, who died in 1991.
The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan accused Madonna of copyright infringement for her imitation of poses and images in at least 11 works of Bourdin, whose images were published in French Vogue from the mid-1950s through the late 1980s.
According to the lawsuit, Bourdin is recognized as one of the most influential fashion photographers for his highly constructed compositions in unusual settings.
The lawsuit sought unspecified damages from Madonna and companies and individuals involved in production of the videos.
The lawsuit included comparisons of photographs by Bourdin with video images of Madonna. In one Bourdin picture, a scantily clad woman peers into a round mirror. Madonna does the same.
In another Bourdin picture, a woman squats on a floor with what appears to be a large television-size screen between her legs. Madonna does the same.
"This is more than inspiration," Bourdin's attorney John Koegel told The Daily News.
A message left with a publicist for Madonna was not immediately returned.
http://www.sunspot.net/entertainment...ment-headlines
Until next week,
-
js.
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Recent WIRs -
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17605 September 29th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17552 September 20th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17495 September 13th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17325 September 6th
Jack Spratts Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.