[JackSpratts]

"The FCC's decision to allow media monopolies (really, shared monopolies among the current major players – Disney, Time Warner, Fox, Viacom, maybe GE if it wants) didn't really happen today. It happened a long time ago." - Dana Blankenhorn.

Less Choice, More Illusion

By now you’ve probably heard that the Republican majority on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the U.S. agency in charge of allocating broadcast spectrum for radio and TV, has gutted ownership laws in a narrow 3-2 vote along party lines. These laws were put in place years ago to prevent the over concentration of news and media outlets into the hands of fewer and fewer companies. It’s more than a little strange actually when you think about it, because when you ask most people they think media companies are too big already.

The U.S. is quickly approaching a point where five companies will control film and television production, four companies will control music production and two companies will control most radio broadcasting. In addition, in any given area we’re now at a point where two, and often only one company controls access to the Internet. Here in Fairfield County where I live for instance I happen to have two choices for highspeed access, one choice for mid speed and one choice for dialup - but that’s one of the two companies that provides broadband, so I really have just three different outfits to choose from. A mile away from me however DSL is unavailable and out farther still so is cable. Friends in the country have just dial-up and the slightly faster satellite (faster for downloads only - they still have to use dial-up for uploads). Some progressive communities have as many as four access points through different providers (wow) but whether it’s one or whether it’s as many as five, it’s still not a whole hell of a lot of choices to get me or anyone else onto the Internet.

I mention this because the Republican appointed chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell (who happens to be the son of Colin Powell, the Republican Secretary of State), says he used the Internet as justification for the rules change. He seems to think we’re awash in media outlets now that we’re all a “nation of surfers” and he thinks it doesn’t matter if one company owns your TV stations, your radio stations and your newspapers - because he says you have all these new – and “independent” – channels. I guess he thinks a nation of navel gazing bloggers will make up for the mass consolidation of mass communications, but I doubt that will happen, and it’s no insult to boggers. I like them but bedroom essayists, no matter how much fun or interesting, can’t begin to marshal the resources needed to compete with major news organizations, and bloggers will be the first to admit it. Furthermore it doesn’t square a problem advertisers have to keep ad costs down when faced with no competition, especially since these same media giants also own the billboard companies in many communities.

Exploring the issues of Internet competition just a bit further brings us to another less than coincidental occurrence, and that’s Congress’ direct role in eliminating thousands of webcasters at the behest of the RIAA. It was just about this time last June the Librarian of Congress issued the payment fees webcasters would have to pay – as per a Congressional mandate – for the privilege of broadcasting music on the net. Fees so high that thousands of webcasters went silent that very day and have not come back since, in spite of frantic renegotiations that have continued for a year. The fact is regular radio doesn’t have to pay these fees and this makes Internet broadcasting more expensive, by law, and unable to compete on an even playing field with their established – and monopolized - over the air cousins, which was probably the intent all along. Don’t listen to those FCC members touting the increased competition the Internet brings. They looked the other way when thousands of broadcasters were silenced by Congress and the RIAA. They know as well as anyone that the same handful of giants monopolizing traditional media are doing the very same thing with the Internet. Using massive market power and the help of friends in Congress these giants and their allies are making sure their piece of the media pie just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You’re not getting more choice, you’re getting more illusions of choice. As a dissenting Democrat on the FCC succinctly put it, no matter how many electrical outlets you put in your house, your electricity still comes from the same company, and it’s no way to make public policy.

The one bright spot in all of this is peer-to-peer. Instead of a billion consumers getting information and entertainment force-fed to them by three of four giant media monoliths, they can choose to participate in hundreds of thousands of smaller news groups and connect to millions of individuals. The problem of limited Internet access remains but even here technology may offer a solution. On the horizon are systems that could soon allow huge groups of people to leave their ISP’s behind and move onto ad-hoc wi-fi SubNets, controlled by no one at all. This is real independence at last. But make no mistake; this is not what the FCC has in mind when they justify their duplicity with fables of “increased competition”. Decentralized P2P networks terrify them and they will do all they can to shut them down.

I couldn’t help smiling today when I read a memo from media giant Warner Music Group (WMG), a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner (last item). It seems there may be a small, ah, “problem”, with unauthorized file sharing among the company staff. WMG is one of the biggest of the old line, vertically integrated music monopolists. The business is so bloated they’re exploring a sale or a merger (there are only four others like them in the entire world and together the five conglomerates directly control 80% of the music business). In spite of the tough times their own staff is happily day trading copyrighted files! I’m not surprised. Why should the workers be any different from anyone else? But if Warners is unable to stop file sharing amongst their employees, what makes them think they can stop it anywhere else? Nothing really. But it’s just as well. They don’t know it yet but it’s the only thing that might save them, if they realize it in time.










Enjoy,

Jack.









Scrapping Copyright Law As We Know It
This is the last of a two-part interview with Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and Chair of the Creative Commons project. In Part 1, Professor Lessig talked about the Civil War between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

AlwaysOn: You were in front of the Supreme Court.

Lessig: Yes, the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, along with other groups, was challenging the Copyright Term Extension Act. For the 11th time in 40 years, Congress extended the term of existing copyrights. This time they extended the copyrights because two percent of the content covered still has commercial value. They wanted to extend the term for that two percent, but they extended it for everything, which means there is an extraordinary amount of content out there which can't be used or cultivated or copied, because you can't identify the copyright owner anymore.

One of the briefs in our case was from the guy who runs Hal Roach Studios, which has the Laurel and Hardy movies. In essence, he said, "We make millions of dollars from copyright term extension. It's the greatest thing in the world for us. But if you don't strike this law down, a whole generation of American films will disappear because nobody can clear the copyrights for this old film. It is not one copyright owner; it is a pile of copyright owners."

There is no registry. Companies dissolve, and often there is no way to find the owner. If we don't remove the copyright, nobody is going to restore this old nitrate-based film, and in 20 years it will literally be gone. He said there is a whole generation of American film that will have turned to dust by the time the copyrights expire.

AlwaysOn: What specifically did you argue before the Court?

Lessig: Simply that when the Constitution says "limited times," that means you shouldn't be allowed to extend the term of the existing copyrights. So you get whatever your term is: life plus 70, life plus 50, or whatever. But that's it. It doesn’t make sense to extend copyrights for everything just to protect the two percent that still has commercial value.

AlwaysOn: You’ve proposed a solution.

Lessig: Yes, a copyright maintenance fee. It’s a very simple procedure: 50 years after you published something, you’d have to file a copyright maintenance fee, say a dollar a year. If you didn’t pay the fee then the work would pass to the public domain, but if you did pay the fee then the copyright would continue. We know from past registration systems that 98 percent of copyright owners would not bother to renew, even for a dollar, because they don't care. So Disney would pay for Mickey Mouse for as long as they wanted, but 98 percent of the stuff would pass to the public domain.

AlwaysOn: The Court case is just one copyright project you’ve been involved in. You recently launched a new organization, Creative Commons. How did that come about?

Lessig: It came about because we live in a world that is divided between two types of extremists. One type thinks that all content has to be perfectly controlled, and the other doesn’t respect any type of rights at all. When the Internet was first born, the architecture supported the no-rights people because basically nothing could be protected. The counter reaction to that is to build an Internet in which all rights get protected all the time. The reality is that most creators live in between, not in the no-rights reserve or the all-rights reserve, but in the some-rights reserve.

AlwaysOn: That fits with what you’ve said before: we have a technology that supports the cut-and-paste culture, but a legal system that rejects the cut-and-paste culture.

Lessig: Exactly. So what Creative Commons is doing is enabling creative people to voluntarily liberate some of the rights associated with their content. Take musicians, for example. Right now there’s no easy way for one musician to say to another: "Yes, you can take content out of my music. You can sample it and even release it for commercial purposes, that's fine, just don't copy my whole song and release it for commercial purposes."

So we came up with a voluntary copyright system. There are now about 400,000 web pages, mine included, with these little Creative Commons tags. A Creative Commons tag has three layers. One is a machine-readable RDF expression of a license that outlines how the content can be used: for non-commercial purposes, or with attribution, or as long as you share and share alike, or with no derivative use, etc. The creator decides.

The second layer of the tag is a human-readable version of the license, which uses icons to very simply express what the permissions are. Finally, there is a legal license that would cost about $50,000 in legal time to construct from scratch—it provides a bulletproof way to license the content. So we’ve put those three layers together into this tag to create a copyright that people can build on and use to liberate more content while still receiving reasonable protection.
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comm...?id=P477_0_3_0

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Verizon Turns Over Names in Piracy Case
Brian Bergstein

Verizon Communications Inc. reluctantly surrendered to the music industry on Thursday the names of four Internet subscribers suspected of illegally offering free song downloads, but vowed to keep fighting the law that forced its hand.

Verizon was compelled to give up the names Wednesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., which rejected the telecom giant's request for a stay while it appeals a lower court decision won by the Recording Industry Association of America.

The RIAA has not decided what action to take against the four Verizon customers, said Matt Oppenheim, the group's senior vice president for business and legal affairs.

Though it released the names, New York-based Verizon, the nation's biggest phone company, plans to continue the appeal.

The provision in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that the recording industry invoked in seeking the names is unconstitutional and greatly exceeds traditional copyright and privacy laws, said Sarah Deutsch, Verizon's associate general counsel.

"We are committing to pursuing the case if necessary to the Supreme Court," she said Thursday. "The real harm here is to the consumer."

The recording industry has been unrelenting in fighting people and services who facilitate online song-sharing, calling the practice larceny.

In the Verizon case, the recording association relied on the DMCA law, which permits copyright holders to compel Internet providers to hand over the names of suspected pirates. All they need is a subpoena from a federal court clerk's office. A judge's signature is not even required.

Internet privacy and civil liberties advocates say that system is open to abuse.

"The RIAA's position would make it trivially easy to learn the name, address, and phone number of anyone who sends e-mail or visits a Web site," said Peter Swire, chief privacy counsel in the Clinton White House and now an Ohio State law professor.

Swire, who filed briefs supporting Verizon with the Washington court, believes copyright holders should be forced to rely on "John Doe" lawsuits in which a copyright holder has to persuade a judge that an Internet user's identity ought to be revealed.

The federal district court judge who originally heard the case, John D. Bates, wrote that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has adequate safeguards that in some ways are more protective of Internet users' rights than "John Doe" cases.

Verizon's Deutsch said the recording industry seems to be using the case "to teach Verizon and all the service providers in the future that we shouldn't dare challenge one of these subpoenas."
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/sto...MPLATE=DEFAULT

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Net Radio Debate Simmers Amidst Ongoing Deals
David McGuire

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is hoping a deal it announced Tuesday will end a lengthy battle over Internet radio royalty rates, but many online "webcasters" say they still are facing royalty payments that will put them out of business.

The RIAA's deal allows college, nonprofit and religious broadcasters to pay up to $500 a year for the songs they play online. The agreement comes on the heels of similar deals the RIAA reached with commercial Web radio operators earlier this year.

"We know for a fact that the majority of webcasters out there are not comfortable in choosing from any of the deals that the RIAA say are on the table," said Ann Gabriel, president of the Las Vegas-based Webcaster Alliance, which represents 300 Internet radio operators, including several nonprofits. "It's our contention that the RIAA has selectively chosen parties to negotiate with to make it appear as though they’ve made an effort to address the royalty rates on the Internet, and we just don’t believe that's so."

Under the college deal, nonprofit webcasters with less than 200 listeners an hour on average will pay $250 to $500 as a flat annual fee. Stations exceeding that limit would pay .02 cents per song for each listener above 200.

But Deborah Proctor, the general manager of WCBE, a nonprofit classical music station based in Raleigh, N.C., said the rate is deceptive. With a growing international listener base that now tops 1,400 listeners an hour, WCBE is well over the caps set forth in the deal and could be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars a year, dating back to 1998, Proctor said. Even if she could afford to pay them, Proctor said the rates are too high for a nonprofit station that doesn't advertise.

"I think it would be immoral and an improper use of the contributions that were entrusted to us if I were to pay this very unethical rate," she said.

Proctor said she's had a hard time conveying her warning to other nonprofit stations that they could easily exceed the listener limits set forth in the deal and be on the hook for more money than they can afford to pay.

John Simson, the executive director of SoundExchange, which collects royalties for the record industry, said rates cannot be tailored to individual webcasters.

Simson also said that the record industry has tried to accommodate webcasters of different sizes and business models. "If people want very specialized deals, they've got to negotiate with the publishers themselves," he said.

Small commercial webcasters also are facing hard economic times under the royalty rates. Unlike nonprofits, they have to pay either a percentage of their revenues or expenses instead of the per-song rate established by the government. That system was developed as part of a congressionally brokered compromise between the webcasters and the recording industry, and was designed to keep small for-profit Web radio stations in business. The operators say those prices still are too high.

The Webcaster Alliance hopes that the U.S. Copyright Office will take notice of its members' plights. The Copyright office determines whether the royalty rates are fair, or whether to launch a round of federal arbitration to set new royalty rates. The last arbitration, which ended in 2002, took several years, cost participants millions of dollars and produced a royalty rate that nobody liked.

The RIAA hopes that the specialized deals it made with small and large Webcasters remove the need for arbitration, but Copyright Office General Counsel David Carson said the possibility remains on the table.

Not everyone is happy with the arbitration panel, however. The Webcaster Alliance has complained in the past that it costs too much money to afford a seat at the table. The U.S. House of Representatives is considering a bill that would put the arbitration process in the hands of the courts.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?nav=hptoc_tn

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Negroponte Fetes Italian Inventor, Eyes Telecom Future
Philip Willan

Internet guru Nicholas Negroponte Wednesday outlined his view of the future of telecommunications -- light in infrastruucture but heavy in intelligence -- at a meeting in Rome to celebrate the Italian inventor of the telephone, Antonio Meucci.

Tomorrow's telecommunications will be influenced by the ability to put intelligence into increasingly small devices and by an ever more efficient use of radio spectrum, Negroponte said.

The chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Media Lab was addressing a ceremony at the Communications Ministry in Rome to honor the Florentine-born Meucci, who died in the U.S. in 1889, an unsung pauper. The "Meucci Day" celebration was hosted by Communications Minister Maurizio Gasparri and attended by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and leading figures from Italy's telecom industry. It came just a year after the U.S. House of Representatives officially recognized Meucci as the inventor of the telephone, righting the judicial and historical injustices that had handed credit for the discovery to his rival Alexander Graham Bell.

Negroponte pointed out that two Italian inventions, Guglielmo Marconi's wireless and Meucci's telephone, had come together to produce the cellphones in everybody's pocket. Last year the number of wireless handsets had overtaken the number of fixed-line telephones for the first time, he said.

Radio spectrum is currently inefficiently used, Negroponte said, with at most 5 percent being exploited at any one moment. "The reason for this is that we designed our laws assuming the devices were very stupid. In future they will be much more intelligent and will collaborate with one another. As a result we will be able to use spectrum with lower power and greater efficiency," he said. "Radio and telephones will become more peer-to-peer."

A new economic model will emerge to harness the new technological possibilities, Negroponte predicted. "Today's telephony, even wireless telephony, is like a heavy industry. You need a big company to pay for the towers for the infrastructure. That model will continue, but a new one will emerge. Radios and computers will become microcommunication entities."

Negroponte likened the emergence of Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) hotspots to waterlilies on a pond, with frogs hopping from lily to lily to carry messages. If every cellphone assumes the task of carrying messages for other people, he said, it could reduce the need for large, fixed infrastructures. "The more telephones the better in that system," he said.

"People object that there is no economic model for it, but there is: the economic model of flower-boxes," he said. "I put out flower- boxes to raise my self-esteem and make my house look more attractive. If almost everyone does it then the whole town becomes more beautiful. The same thing can happen with communications."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/nind...1&fp=16&fpid=0

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Music Execs Threaten Fansites - Again

Executives from the music world are again hunting down fan sites that may infringe copyright. This time, a number of Radiohead fan sites have been asked to remove their popular lyrics and tabs archives.

At least two high-traffic fansites devoted to the band, ateaseweb and GreenPlastic, have received emails from Warner/Chappell Music asking their owners to remove lyrics.

Its emails claimed the websites constituted “an infringement of our rights under US Copyright Law” and had a “direct impact on our ability to market and sell our musical arrangements and songbooks, and that adversely affects the royalities that we are able to generate and pay to the band. May we count on your cooperation?”

Adriaan Pels, webmaster of ateaseweb, told Internet Magazine that most of his visitors have expressed concerns in postings on his message board.

“There’s even a petition online,” he said of his site, which receives 20,000 unique visitors daily. “Most of them are shocked and angry. Just like me, they don’t understand what Warner Chappell is doing at the moment.”

Although Pels may have to remove his lyrics page, he hopes adding a disclaimer to individual song pages would suffice as a "compromise".

“Radiohead or their record company [EMI] have nothing to do with all of this,” Pels said. “I know that people are trying to contact the band about this. I’m sure they don’t approve of Warner Chappell’s actions. Only last week, bassist Colin Greenwood recommended ateaseweb.com on UK radio.”

Radiohead's album artist Stanley Donwood has also been in touch with Pels, saying in an email that he thought "fan sites do far more for both the band, the record label, and the publishing company than is generally recognised".

Meanwhile Jonathan Percy’s popular Greenplastic site – which came second in the Dotmusic Interactive Music Awards for most popular site last year - received a similar letter. “It’s understandable that Warner Chappell would be concerned that the hosting of lyrics and tabs would hurt the sales of Radiohead songbooks," Percy wrote on his site. "My feeling is that we, the fansites, are helping Radiohead by marketing and promoting the band for free.”
http://www.internet-magazine.com/news/view.asp?id=3462

UPDATE: Radiohead Sites Ok To Print Lyrics
Mark Brennae

The latest battle in the ongoing war between the music industry and Web sites carrying songs, lyrics and stories about bands appears to have been settled: it looks like the fans have won.

Warner/Chappell Music, which owns the publishing rights to the British rock group Radiohead, had asked two of the group's fan sites to remove concert set lists and lyrics, including those on its new album Hail to the Thief, due in stores next Tuesday.

But after what appears to have been direct intervention by the band or its record company, EMI, webmasters said Warner/ Chappell had indicated it was considering relenting and allowing lyrics to be published online.

"I can tell you that it appears that Warner/ Chappell has decided to step off due to Radiohead's interest in keeping the lyrics on the site," Jonathan Percy, webmaster for fan site www.greenplastic.com, said in an e-mail to The Canadian Press.

"I've just found out that they are going to grant me and the other fan sites a free licence to have the lyrics and tabs up."

GreenPlastic and Ateaseweb had each received e-mails from Warner/Chappell asking webmasters to remove lyrics because their publication may infringe copyright laws.

In e-mails published on both sites, Warner/ Chappell said the Web sites had a "direct impact on our ability to market and sell our musical arrangements and songbooks, and that adversely affects the royalties that we are able to generate and pay to the band."

The directive was another example of the music industry's inability to find common ground with fan sites and music-sharing Web sites, better known as peer-to-peer networks which labels say pose a threat to the sale and distribution of music and related materials from signed artists.

Percy wrote on his Web site "my feeling is that we, the fan sites, are helping Radiohead by marketing and promoting the band for free."

Adriaan Pels, webmaster of Ateaseweb, told Internet Magazine that many visitors -- he said his site receives 20,000 hits a day -- were upset and had posted expressions of concern on his message board.

Pels said he hadn't heard anything official from Warner/Chappell but believed that Radiohead intervened to ensure fans' access to their lyrics.

"I can safely say that the band has had some influence," he said in an e-mail to CP.

Both sites had posted a petition imploring Warner/Chappell to allow them to continue publishing lyrics, particularly since Radiohead is a band that rarely offers lyrics inside its CDs, and when it does they're often cryptic and incomplete. Hail to the Thief does come with lyrics.

As of Wednesday afternoon, 6,193 people had signed the petition.

The controversy came as EMI went on a full- court sales press, drumming up support for Hail to the Thief, the group's sixth album.

Unfinished recordings of the release's 14 new tracks were leaked months ago and made available on peer-to-peer sites, weeks before the album's first single, There There, was released last week.

Radiohead is to perform in New York City on Thursday -- a concert to be shown on the giant screen in Times Square and broadcast live in select movie theatres across North America.
http://www.canoe.ca/JamMusic/jun4_radiohead-cp.html

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PNC Has No Qualms About Copying Movies
Daniel Przybyla

Heather Howard doesn’t have any qualms about peer-to-peer file-sharing software that allows her to download movies for free.

Though downloading movies from software systems like Kazaa and Morpheus is considered by many to be copyright infringement, the 21-year-old Purdue North Central student does it anyway.

“It’s just out there. So many people use Kazaa,” she said.

Howard justifies not paying anything for the movies with her financial situation.

“I don’t have a lot of money. They’re not losing money. I go to PNC. I’m obviously not rich.”

Howard, an organizational leadership and supervision major, lives at home in Chesterton with her parents. She returned to Porter County from the main Purdue campus last semester after her savings ran out and she was unable to find work despite an arduous search.

Unable to find anyone to sublease her apartment to in West Lafayette, she’s still shelling out $400 a month in rent.

Other expenses have made it difficult for the stocker and waitress to pay bills on time.

She uses the lack of funds as rationale for the simple comfort of no-cost movies.

Besides, Howard says, the film industry is making profits from another outlet.

“I’m still seeing the product placement. I still see the guy holding the Coke can,” Howard said. “If anything, they should charge more for advertising in the film.”

Howard says she’ll still buy her favorite movies on DVD, but she has downloaded 30 to 40 movies through file sharing and views them on her computer.
http://www.heraldargus.com/content/s...p?storyid=2947

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It Doesn't Pay to be Popular
Glenn Fleishman

It rarely pays to be popular, unless you're a film star or an amusement park. On the Internet, popularity and cost often go hand in hand. The more traffic you get (unless it's tightly bound to sales), the more money it costs you. This is because most bandwidth usage is centralized: one server and one network feeds all of the hungry mouths, and you pay the piper for spikes and sustained use.

In mid-March, I narrowly averted a $15,000 bandwidth bill that arose when I offered Real World Adobe GoLive 6 as a free PDF. The site at which I hosted the download is a Level 3 Communications co-location customer, and Level 3 charges on sustained bandwidth.

The book had 10,000 downloads, representing nearly 250 gigabytes, in just 36 hours. I averted any cost because Level 3 drops the top five percent of the most busiest hours each month, which is just over 36 hours in an average month. My 36th hour was a few megabits per second, it turned out; my 37th or so, below 500Kbps.

If I were living in the future, the scenario might have been less harrowing. Systems that involve peer-to-peer file sharing -- which distribute parts or entire files across a whole system to reduce strain on any one part -- and edge server-to-edge server networks, like Akamai's system of pushing files topologically closer to downloaders, would make the effective cost of bandwidth lower by never straining single locations.

I learned a lot in the process of coping with the stress of a high-ticket bill and then the aftermath about managing expectations, dealing with high- bandwidth needs, and the true current cost of bandwidth. I also had a chance to reflect on how current distributed file sharing requires either too much work or involves too many unrelated political and legal issues.

(For more on the social costs and the follow-up on what happened, you can read the New York Times article I wrote that appeared in April 2003. The Times requires registration and is now charging for access to the archives after about seven days.)

Hosting and Co-Location: Where Things Stand Now

When I started buying in-house bandwidth at the T-1 level (1.544Mbps dedicated digital service) back in 1994, it cost about $2,000 per month. And that didn't include unlimited bandwidth: after a small number of gigabytes, I was charged $50 for each additional Gb. I, in turn, passed this on to the Web hosting clients.

In the near decade since, bandwidth costs have dropped but not plummeted; you still have to shop around. If you want in-house bandwidth with more than just a few static IP addresses, you'll wind up spending several hundred dollars a month on the low end for 512Kbps DSL to T-1 service in places, like Seattle, with lots of competition. In other parts of the country, with older infrastructure or less competition, a T-1 could still top $2,000 per month.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/p2p/...e_sharing.html

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Earth Station 5 – Burning Down the House Or Smoke and Mirrors?
Jack Spratts

After more than a year and a million plus in development, the file sharing and messaging system known as Earth Station 5 (ES 5) is said to be ready for its first public users. In beta for months and officially released just days ago this new product may or may not rewrite the rules of filesharing, but no argument can be made about the scope of its founders’ ambitions - they want it all. According to ES 5 spokesman Steve Taylor, six international owners with deep pockets and stakes in ventures ranging from software to satellites preside over some 70 full time developers responsible for creating and maintaining an operation that incorporates a complex decentralized peer-to-peer system, centralized chat, personal web-server and the ability to allow users to stream their own content over a new and proprietary network.

“They looked at Gnutella initially” says Taylor, referring to the open source file sharing system, “but weren’t satisfied. The developers felt they had to create their own network from scratch if they were going to have any hope of achieving the goals they’d set for themselves.” In what is certainly a bold and attention grabbing maneuver they’ve already “used it to stream the Matrix Reloaded over their high speed lines” to the amazement of over 11,000 viewers so far, and have plans for doing much more. “This network will include a world of features unheard of in present P2P’s”, continues Taylor, “as a matter of fact calling it a P2P may actually be too limiting, there’s so much more to it.” Upcoming versions are slated to include an Internet portal, a worldwide eBay type auction service, a sports gambling site and versions in twenty six different languages.


Welcome to the Neighborhood - Earth Station 5 HQ as seen from space.

The main office is in the Palestinian refugee camp Jenin, chosen as much for defensive purposes as for practicality (several founders are Palestinians). Legally they’re operating out of what’s essentially a no man’s land of chaos, where according to Taylor enforcement resources aren’t usually extended to cover intellectual policy disputes and even if they are, copyrights don’t extend to non-Palestinian owned content. The owners are confident the physical location alone protects them from distracting and expensive legal assaults but they claim they’ve incorporated robust defenses in the software as well. Features are said to include encryption, resistance to line sniffing, random ports and even proxy serving to block Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from sharing partners.

Many of the features announced for ES5 have aroused if not hostility at least a fair amount of skepticism in the P2P community, with outright rejection reserved for any claims of proxying. That feature is said to be critical for the future of peer-to-peer systems if users are to be insulated from subpoenas, court challenges and nuisance suits from rights claimants, legitimate or otherwise. To date the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has had its only real success attacking individual users through their open IP’s but huge bandwidth costs have prevented the widespread use of IP masking in other P2P’s so far. Interestingly it’s here that the confident bluster of official statements and Taylor’s own boosterism part ways. He’s unwilling to commit to the heady guarantee of “complete anonymity” promised in a recent press release, allowing only that the client has powerful protection, but it’s “not infallible.”

While accurate counts are hard to come by Taylor says the network is already “seeing worldwide user numbers in the 190,000 range.” An extraordinary claim that if true would make ES 5 one of the fastest growing file sharing systems in history.

As for business plans, nobody’s talking just yet. All anyone will allow is that money is not a priority at the moment. “These guys are all very well off,” says Taylor, “and they’ve got plenty of cash to carry them through the initial phases of the start-up - and then some.” Since the developers insist the application is adware and spyware free, there doesn’t seem to be a way for an income stream to start flowing anyway, but that’s not a problem with Taylor. “They’re looking way down the road", he says, "way down. They expect to be here when the others have left the stage. You’ve got to remember, not having to pay $1,000,000 a month in legal fees is a huge advantage in this business.”

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Metallica Changes File-Sharing Tune
Jam

Three years after suing Napster, Metallica is offering songs from its new album exclusively on the Internet.

The heavy metal band, whose first album in six years is scheduled for release Thursday, is making some tracks available online as well through a partnership with Speakeasy, the Seattle-based high-speed Internet access provider said.

Customers who buy Metallica's new compact disc, "St. Anger," will find a code inside the packaging allowing them to view, listen to and download exclusive, unreleased music tracks from a Metallica Web site.

Speakeasy will host and manage the Web site and music offerings. The company didn't disclose terms of the deal in its announcement Tuesday.

The arrangement is a show of confidence from Metallica, which in 2000 sued Napster, the now-defunct music file swapping service, alleging copyright infringement and racketeering.

"We've always wanted our fans to experience our music online," drummer Lars Ulrich said. "But up until now, the existing distribution methods have not passed the kind of 'quality' standards our fans have come to expect from us."
http://www.canoe.ca/JamMusic/jun3_metallica-ap.html

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Copy-Protection Technology: An Article Of Faith
Sam Varghese

Copy-control technology used on music discs demands one thing from users - absolute faith in the motives of the enforcer. That's the only conclusion one can draw after a fairly detailed Q and A with Roger Kuah, the new media projects manager of EMI.

EMI's copy-protected music discs have given people plenty to complain about ever since they were introduced in Australia in November last year.

The copy protection has irked music buffs, served to turn people off EMI products for life, prevented radio stations from giving artists play-time, raised questions about whether they are fish or fowl, resulted in EMI pulling its copy-control forum off the web, made one consumer go to the ACCC with a complaint, and sometimes had exactly the opposite effect to that it was intended to have.

Recently Philips, one of the creators of the CD specs, expressed concern over the side effects of the technology, though it tiptoed diplomatically through some of the more troublesome questions raised.

Not surprisingly, EMI has a different spin on the whole thing. Kuah provided the following answers to queries sent to him by email.

Given that you can't call your music releases CDs anymore, what do you call them?

The issue over what they are called is unresolved. They are still commonly referred to as copy protected CDs.

To the extent possible, give us a brief outline of the model followed by the copy protection technology which EMI employs. Why was this model selected? Were other
models considered?

There are a number of different companies working in this area and we are talking to several of them, but to date we have used the technology provided by only one (specifics are confidential).
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...406220122.html

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Altnet To Pay Kazaa Users For Swapping
John Borland

A year after launching its sometimes-controversial alliance with Kazaa, Brilliant Digital Entertainment subsidiary Altnet is kicking off a new, ambitious stage of its peer-to-peer marketing campaign.

Later this week, Kazaa parent Sharman Networks and Altnet will jointly release a new bundle of file-swapping software that will include components of a new high-security peer-to-peer network and a program that will pay users to be a part of it.

The idea, says Altnet CEO Kevin Bermeister, is to harness the computing resources of the tens of millions of Kazaa users to distribute authorized files such as games, songs and movies. Giving people an incentive to host and trade paid files could create a powerful medium for distributing authorized content and could diminish file-trading networks' role as hubs of online piracy, he said.

"The minute you begin shifting unauthorized files out of people's shared folders, the peer-to-peer networks (as sources of copyright infringement) begin to disappear," Bermeister said. "Lawsuits are the stick approach. This is the carrot."

The release of the new service is a landmark moment for both Altnet and Kazaa, which is far and away the most popular file-swapping software program online. Bermeister's plans for marketing authorized files using Kazaa have been an instrumental part in the strategy of Sharman since its inception in early 2002.

It also could serve as a first large-scale test of the idea that the current generation of file-swapping networks can be hosts for legitimate business as easily as for copyright infringement. This has long been a contention of peer-to-peer advocates, but the idea has been tested only in limited and small-scale ways to date.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025-1011827.html

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Free for All
From downloading free music to movies and games, user-pays is a concept rapidly becoming a memory for the online generation.
Greg Thom

IF YOU believe the howls of the recording industry, online piracy is driving it to its knees. Profits and CD sales are tumbling and the viability of the music industry as we know it is on borrowed time. Major record labels are trying everything -- from intimidation in court to techno-based security solutions and heartfelt pleas to do the right thing -- to stem the music free-for-all.

Despite this, consumers don't appear to care. The one place the music industry can't seem to reach is inside people's heads. Most people downloading illegal MP3s and burning blank CDs believe they are doing nothing wrong or, at worst, are involved in a victimless crime.

Online music provider Napster may have been closed down, but replacement file-swapping services like KaZaA, which has more than 200 million registered users worldwide and is being pursued through the courts, have proved just as popular and elusive.

It seems the biggest battle faced by the entertainment industry in the war against piracy is human nature.

RMIT psychology lecturer Dr Kerry Hempenstall says it's a fight the industry is unlikely to win. He says most people, no matter what they are told to the contrary, have convinced themselves their actions are justified.

"Most people who fit into the honest category have bits of their life where they are dishonest," he says.

"It's the ability to live with such a contradiction within ourselves, a selective dishonesty if you like, that forms part of our ability to survive."

These are people who would never dream of shoplifting a CD, but will happily plunder music online.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/com...E11869,00.html

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Stop, Thief! (This Means You)
Christopher J. Cosenza

You're thieves, every last one of you.

Shocking? Sorry, but if you agree with the ongoing accusations made by the executives and artists of the music industry, then it's true. Here's why:

Their lawyers are fighting to stop computer peer-to-peer sharing of music because they believe copyright laws are being infringed. (Peer-to-peer sharing, for the uninitiated, is the process by which individuals share their music libraries and files with each other through computer software without necessarily paying for the acquired files. Remember Napster? Plenty of other programs have arisen to take its place: Morpheus, Grokster, the Gnutella Network, Kazaa.)

And not to be left out of this computer software conflict, Hollywood and the Motion Picture Association of America want to keep you from using DVD-copying software because they believe that also violates the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Are all of these people right? Be careful before answering "yes" because you may convict yourself. Okay, so you've read this far and thought, "I don't share music. I certainly don't copy DVDs. You're wrong Mr. Cosenza, I'm not a thief." Well, then let's take a different approach.

Suppose you visited the doctor last week and, while you were waiting, you picked up the office copy of the St. Petersburg Times. You thumbed through the pages and came across an article your family would really like. You asked the receptionists for permission to tear it out, but you were refused. So instead, you asked to make a dozen or so photocopies and they let you use their copier.

Gotcha! You're a thief.

Seem harsh? You're not using those copies for educational purposes, so you're not exactly protected under the "fair use" copyright provisions. Is it more justifiable to copy a newspaper that only costs 35 cents than it is to copy a record that costs $12.99? Your intention wasn't to sell the article; you just wanted your family to read it, right? Same goes for those who share music; they just want to hear the song, they don't want to sell it.

"Once you photocopy something like say, March Madness brackets, from a magazine or newspaper 25 or 50 times, and distribute them around to your office mates, you're walking a fine line and you're potentially infringing on copyrights," said Kembrew McLeod, a professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa and author of Owning Culture.

Raise your hand if you've ever recorded your favorite song off the radio. Did you sell it? Of course not. You only listened to it. That's what blank cassette tapes are for - and don't say you use them for recording your innermost thoughts. You must be the same people who actually use fireworks to scare pesky birds from your crops.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/06/01/Pe...his_mean.shtml

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File-Sharing Program Slips Out of AOL Offices
Amy Harmon

AOL Time Warner is trying to stop the spread of new software released by its Nullsoft division, whose founder and lead programmer, Justin Frankel, is known for leaking his work onto the Internet and causing headaches for his employer.

The new program makes it easy for groups of about 50 people to set up file-sharing networks that are secure and private. In addition to letting users search for and download files, it includes an instant messaging feature that could be seen as competition for AOL Instant Messenger, which provides AOL with a crucial presence on millions of computer screens.

"Whatever Justin releases tends to be of some import," said Shawn Yeager, a technology consultant in Toronto, who is making Waste available from his site. "Given his history and the personal respect I have for the work he does it seems to me to be important enough to preserve."

Still, Eben Moglen, a lawyer for the Free Software Foundation, said that if the release was unauthorized it would not matter if it had his group's "open source" designation. If AOL were to take one of the distributors to court, a judge would need to decide how much authority Mr. Frankel had, Mr. Moglen said.

"It doesn't matter what the license says if the distributor didn't intend to distribute it," Mr. Moglen said. But he noted the "open source" license, as a practical matter, makes it hard to recapture software once it has been released.http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/te...rtne r=GOOGLE

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Department Of Prior Restraints Department, Or If It’s Digital, Free Speech Does Not Apply
Internet Battle Raises Questions About the First Amendment
Adam Liptak

The beauty queen and the cad both have Web sites.

Katy Johnson, who was Miss Vermont in 1999 and again in 2001, uses her site to promote what she calls her "platform of character education." "She is founder of Say Nay Today and the Sobriety Society," the site says, "and her article `ABC's of Abstinence' was featured in Teen magazine."

Tucker Max's site promotes something like the opposite of character education. It contains a form through which women can apply for a date with him, pictures of his former girlfriends and reports on what Mr. Max calls his "belligerence and debauchery."

Until a Florida judge issued an unusual order last month, Mr. Max's site also contained a long account of his relationship with Ms. Johnson, whom he portrayed, according to court papers, as vapid, promiscuous and an unlikely candidate for membership in the Sobriety Society.

The order, entered by Judge Diana Lewis of Circuit Court in West Palm Beach, forbids Mr. Max to write about Ms. Johnson. It has alarmed experts in First Amendment law, who say that such orders prohibiting future publication, prior restraints, are essentially unknown in American law. Moreover, they say, claims like Ms. Johnson's, for invasion of privacy, have almost never been considered enough to justify prior restraints.

Ms. Johnson's lawsuit also highlights some shifting legal distinctions in the Internet era, between private matters and public ones and between speech and property.

Judge Lewis ruled on May 6, before Mr. Max was notified of the suit and without holding a hearing. She told Mr. Max that he could not use "Katy" on his site. Nor could he use Ms. Johnson's last name, full name or the words "Miss Vermont."

The judge also prohibited Mr. Max from "disclosing any stories, facts or information, notwithstanding its truth, about any intimate or sexual acts engaged in by" Ms. Johnson. That prohibition is not limited to his Web site. Finally, Judge Lewis ordered Mr. Max to sever the virtual remains of his relationship with Ms. Johnson. He is no longer allowed to link to her Web site.

The page of Mr. Max's site that used to contain his rambling memoir now has only a reference to the court order.

Ms. Johnson did not respond to telephone and e-mail messages seeking comment. In her lawsuit, Ms. Johnson maintained that Mr. Max had invaded her privacy by publishing accurate information about her and had used her name and picture for commercial purposes.

Her lawyer, Michael I. Santucci of Fort Lauderdale, declined to be interviewed. He has asked Judge Lewis to seal the court file in the case, a request on which she has not yet ruled, and to prohibit Mr. Max from talking about the suit, a request she has rejected.

Mr. Santucci did provide a copy of a news release he issued after the order was issued.

"This victory should send a clear message to all parasitic smut peddlers who live off the good names of others," he said in the release, which also noted that Ms. Johnson "emphatically denies the story contained on Tucker Max's Web site."

Mr. Santucci did not respond to an e-mail message asking whether his issuing a news release was at odds with his request to seal the court file on privacy grounds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/national/02INTE.html

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File Swappers Learn New Tricks
BBC

The popularity of file peer-to-peer networks is driving the development of novel technologies that capitalise on the huge numbers of people sharing music and movies. Unlike earlier systems the performance of the latest file-swapping software does not degrade as more people try to get hold of popular files. The newer software also makes it easier for people to find the files they are looking for. The programs make it easier to get hold of and download larger files which could spell problems for film studios keen to stamp out movie piracy.

Last week file-swapping software Kazaa became the most downloaded program ever. According to figures from Download.com, the Kazaa file-swapping system has been downloaded more than 229 million times, more than the previous record holder ICQ. But the technology behind Kazaa is being superseded by newer programs such as eDonkey and BitTorrent that use new techniques to get files to people.

By contrast to earlier peer-to-peer systems, eDonkey spreads the index of files people are willing to share across several machines. Instead of going to a master list to find a particular file, users would interrogate the machine holding the list of those types of file. Downloaded files are split into small pieces and shared out across the network. This means that other people looking for the same file can start downloading more quickly.

BitTorrent works in a similar fashion with those downloading a file becoming a proxy server for anyone else wanting the same track, program or film. The program started out as a tool for downloading large files such as CD images.

While these technologies have been in use for a while, now large numbers of people are starting to use them as their preferred downloading system. Making it easier to find and download large files might mean more problems for music and movie makers keen to stamp out piracy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2950850.stm

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Interview With BitTorrent's Bram Cohen
Roblimo/Slashdot

Here we go... direct questions and direct answers about BitTorrent, the latest big-time P2P file distribution system to hit the Internet. Bram Cohen made BitTorrent and maintains it, and perhaps, one day, just maybe, he'll even make a living from it...

1) Bit-Torrent browsing... by CashCarSTAR

Has any effort/thought been put towards bit torrent page distribution?

Specifically, a way that one can use BT to mirror webpages. A way to get around the /. effect, and as well would work wonders the next emergency that comes out (see 9/11).

Bram:

Images in web pages are very small and require very low latency. BitTorrent is designed for much larger files, which download on the order of minutes or hours rather than seconds. BitTorrent uses the significant amount of time those downloads take to try out and compare different connections. This process has inherent latencies which make it unsuitable for images on web pages.

Certainly it would beis possible on paper to dramatically reduce the cost of hosting an ordinary web site using peer transfers, but the logistical problems of handling many small files at low latency have yet to be solved, and will probably require a protocol which looks significantly different from BitTorrent.

The Interview: http://interviews.slashdot.org/inter...tid=185&tid=95

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Right Or Wrong, Lots Of Teens Download Music For Free
Selena Ricks

Music fans like Ryan Brown make the recording industry shudder.

Brown, 18, of Portland owns more burned CDs than pre- recorded CDs, and has about 700 songs downloaded onto his computer from the file-swapping program Kazaa Media Desktop.

"I'm going to have to really like an artist to buy the CD," said Brown, who graduates from Cheverus High School today. He said he downloads free music every day, and he doesn't feel sorry for the record companies or artists.

"They're fine, they still have money to fall back on," he said. "Back in the day it wasn't even about the money. It was about the fans."

Kazaa and other peer-to-peer file-sharing systems like Gnutella, Morpheus and FreeNet have radically changed the way teens learn about and get music.

Teens have always been major consumers of music, and with their generally limited disposable income, they have flooded sites like Kazaa, where they can learn about and download music for free. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 53 percent of American teens ages 12 to 17 download music files while online.

Last week, Sharman Networks Ltd. announced that its file-swapping program Kazaa Media Desktop has become the most downloaded software, beating the previous record-holder, ICQ, by reaching 230 million downloads worldwide. By comparison, Napster had an estimated 20 million registered users in 2000.

Kazaa is available for free at www.kazaa.com, and allows its users to download more licensed content than any other application. In a matter of minutes, users can easily find songs, music videos, television shows, movies, games and software.

The debate over the illegal sharing of copyrighted music and media on the Internet is well-known. Critics say Kazaa encourages people to take recordings for free instead of buying CDs, costing the record industry millions in lost sales. Supporters of Kazaa say they are merely taking advantage of a widely used technology that can't be stopped.

The major film and music companies are suing Sharman Networks Ltd. and other companies involved with the Kazaa software, accusing them of aiding copyright infringement on a massive scale. Sharman argues that its software has legitimate uses, adding that the company is not liable for what consumers do on the network.

While programs like Kazaa can hurt mainstream artists, many teens say the availability of free songs is helping bring underground music to the masses.

"The kinds of bands I listen to, you can't buy their CDs anywhere," said Ben Anderson, a 16-year-old sophomore at Portland High School. Anderson said he downloads about 20 songs each day from Kazaa and has about 300 stored on his computer, mostly hard-core punk and reggae.

"You can find out about bands, check 'em out, see if you like them," he said. "It's a trade-off. More people know who you are but you get fewer sales."

Anderson, who plays guitar in a band, wants to study recording at Berklee College of Music in Boston after he graduates from high school. He said mainstream artists shouldn't complain about losing money to Internet file traders when "they're ripping off other artists too."

It's too soon to tell what impact Kazaa and other file-sharing programs will have on the future of the music industry, but many teens say they are optimistic that recording artists will continue to thrive.
http://www.pressherald.com/mondaymag...602kazaa.shtml

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MacNN: Acquisition 0.92: file sharing client updated

David Watanabe has released version 0.92 of Acquisition, a popular Mac file sharing program. Acquisition is a gnutella client supporting modern gnutella features such as Ultrapeers, swarm (multi-source) downloads, download resumption, and distributed network discovery. Acquisition is built using code from the LimeWire gnutella client, and consequently supports the same rich set of protocol features. The new release has important protocol changes including support for compressed message streams. It also features various aesthetic and stability fixes as well. The $15 shareware runs on Mac OS X. Download - 1.6MB
http://macnn.com/news/19607

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Supreme Court Rules Against 20th Century Fox In Hollywood Copying Case
AP

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a video company cannot be sued under a trademark law for reusing old war documentary footage without giving credit to 20th Century Fox.

The 8-0 decision gives some freedom to people who want to reproduce works that no longer have copyright protection.

Justice Antonin Scalia said that the trademark law, which is intended to protect consumers from confusion, does not allow creators to claim plagiarism when their uncopyrighted works and inventions are used.

The original documentary was "Crusade in Europe." Dastar Corp. deleted one hour, added a half hour of new material, then sold tape sets for about $25 as "Campaigns in Europe."

Scalia said that Dastar could have been sued if it bought videotapes of "Crusade in Europe," repackaged them and put them on the market under the Dastar name.

Instead, he said, the company made some changes and cannot be held liable for misleading the public about the origin of the work.

"The consumer who buys a branded product does not automatically assume that the brand-name company is the same entity that came up with the idea for the product -- and typically does not care whether it is," Scalia wrote in the opinion.

The court had been asked to decide if the video distributor should turn over its profits, and pay damages over the use of the documentary, based on Dwight Eisenhower's memoirs. A judge had ordered the company to pay $1.5 million.

The documentary, which was made by Time Inc. for Fox, did not have copyright protection when Dastar used it for its own video in 1995 -- the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Dastar sold more than 35,000 copies of "Campaigns in Europe," court records show.

Scalia said that if creative producers were required under the trademark law to attribute the origin of any uncopyrighted materials they used, it would be difficult.

"We do not think the Lanham Act requires this search for the source of the Nile and all its tributaries," he wrote.

The Bush administration and other groups including the American Library Association had supported Dastar.

Justice Stephen Breyer did not take part in the case because his brother, a judge in California, was involved in the case in lower courts.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/02/scotus.copyright.ap/

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Judge Backs Labels' MP3 Search
Chris Jenkins

THE Federal Court appears to have opened the door for record companies to examine university data for pirated music.

Record companies Sony, EMI and Universal were seeking court approval to conduct a search of data held by the Universities of Tasmania, Sydney and Melbourne as part of the discovery process in an action against alleged student music pirates.

The universities had proposed searching by file type, where the record companies believed that a search of file headers was necessary to find any material that infringed copyright.

Computer forensic expert John Thackray had testified that the search method proposed by the universities was "very limited" and could potentially overlook pertinent files.

The universities argued that the type of search proposed by the record labels could compromise private information held on their systems, including information on third parties uninvolved in the case.

Justice Tamberlin preferred the search method proposed by Mr Thackray, which included using specialist forensic software known as EnCase, to the method proposed by the universities, which he said would prove too limited.

Nevertheless, he said the method proposed by Mr Thackray would "reveal a great deal of extraneous information , some of which may be privileged or subject to confidentiality obligations".

"It must be remembered that none of the parties in this application, it seems, are aware as to the full content of the material contained in the very extensive records," he said

Still, he argued it was unlikely the record companies and their lawyers would not " 'rummage' or 'trawl' through a miscellany of irrelevant material".
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...E15306,00.html

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Oz Police In Music Piracy Raid At Top University
Students watch out!
James Pearce

The Australian Federal Police raided the University of Technology, Sydney on Wednesday this
week in connection with a AU$60m music piracy case before the courts.

"We have executed a search warrant [on the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)] which is connected to the investigation into the alleged AU$60 million piracy matter," a spokesperson for the AFP told silicon.com sister site ZDNet Australia.

The spokesperson declined to comment on whether anything of note was discovered at the university or any further action that will be taken.

Last month three tertiary students, Charles Ng, Tommy Le and Peter Tran, were charged with copyright infringement following an AFP investigation assisted by Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI). They were charged over an Australian-based website, MP3 WMA land, which allegedly offered illegal downloads of copyright-protected music.

The case was deferred until 8 July. If the accused are found guilty they face maximum penalties of up to five years jail and/or a AU$60,500 fine.

The music industry has stepped up its battle against online pirates in recent months. Justice Brian Tamberlin is due to hand down his verdict in the Federal Court case pitching music industry giants against three Australian universities this afternoon, which is poised to go to appeal whatever the decision.

MIPI has written to the State Ombudsmen of NSW, Victoria and Tasmania asking for an independent investigation into the behaviour of the universities during the case.

The effect of illegal online trading in music files on the music industry is also controversial, with some reports finding the practice increases the overall amount of money filesharers spend on music.
http://silicon.com/news/500022/1/4413.html

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Court Confirms DMCA 'Good Faith' Web Site Shut Down Rights
Ashlee Vance

A U.S. court has extended the power of the DMCA even further with
a ruling this week that backs up copyright holders' ability to shut down a Web site on "good faith."

InternetMovies.com had asked the District Court for the District of Hawaii to require that copyright holders investigate infringing Web sites before shutting them down. This rational request was rejected by the court, as its granted the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and any other DMCA zealot the right to put the clamp on Web sites at will.

"This decision rules that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) does not require a copyright holder to conduct an investigation to establish actual infringement prior to sending notice to an Internet Service Provider (ISP) requiring them to shut-down an allegedly infringing web site, or stopping service all together to an alleged violator," InternetMovies.com said in a statement.

In the land of the DMCA, a "good faith belief" of infringement makes it possible to hijack a Web site without investigation.

This decision seems to have thrown a large chunk of the Internet into a virtual Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. military describes its Cuban compound as the least worst place, which is an apt take on where Internet users appear to be.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30943.html

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Artists call for CD tax cut
BBC

Hundreds of music artists from across Europe are calling on the European Union to cut VAT on CDs. More than 1,200 international stars including Sir Elton John, Chris de Burgh and Andrea Bocelli have signed a petition being presented to the EU in Brussels on Tuesday. They want recorded music to be classed in line with other cultural products such as books, newspapers and theatre tickets - which attract reduced VAT rates.

Belgian pop star Alex Callier and German singer Rolf Zuckowski presented the petition, which has been sent to the 20 European Commissioners. Callier, from the band Hooverphonic, said: " When someone buys a biography of Jacques Brel in Belgium he pays a VAT rate of 6%, but if he buys a CD of his music he has to pay 21%. This makes no sense and does not recognise the cultural role of musical artists."

Other European artists involved in the campaign include Johnny Hallyday and Françoise Hardy from France, Zucchero of Italy, Greece's Nana Mouskouri and Spanish singer Julio Iglesias. The European Commission is currently considering changes to the EU's system of reduced rates as part of a review of VAT directives. VAT on CDs is set at between 15% and 25%. Rates range from Sweden and Denmark (25%) to Luxembourg (15%), with the UK on 17.5%.

A recent survey for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) found that 60% of people over the age of 16 would buy more CDs if they were made cheaper. It suggested that increased sales would compensate governments for any loss of revenue from a VAT cut within one or two years. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has reported a 4% slump in UK music sales, the biggest downturn since the launch of CDs in the early 1980s. It blames piracy, including illegal duplication and distribution by international criminals, for the decrease. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...ic/2959096.stm

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The Abandonware Dilemma
When is the beagle legal?
Jack Russell

After the article we ran on classic adventure gaming earlier this week one reader wrote in suggesting that we or you our readers check into abandonware websites if you've got a hankering to do some classic gaming. Since the legal status of abandonware sites isn't always clear, and because there are a lot of great classic games out there, it seemed prudent to address the issue.

Abandonware is a term used to refer to software that's supposedly been "abandoned" by the manufacturer and is no longer being sold or produced on the market. The length of time before a website will declare a piece of software abandoned varies from as short as four years in one case to as long as fifteen in another. Abandonware sites are typically easy to find and even the oldest / most obscure games can often be located within minutes on a simple http server. Compared to the tremendous gap between the amount of advertised "warez" software online and the ability to find or download it, there's a notable difference.

The crucial question swirling around abandonware is whether or not it's legal to possess or download. The justification for such activity usually hinges on the fact that the product is no longer in the market, cannot be purchased (or in some cases may not even run on modern hardware), and is generating no royalty for the company, which may even have gone completely out of business in the meantime. Unlike the pirating of modern games, in which every stolen copy is a copy not sold, there is no financial loss to the company in question, according to this point of view, and hence, no violation of the law.

Companies inclined to fight the abandonware battle, unsurprisingly, see the situation differently and in much more black and white terms. If Company X owns the rights to "Dungeon Crawl" published in 1981, it doesn't matter if Company X has no intention of ever making a sequel or re-releasing the game - downloading Dungeon Crawl and playing it without purchasing the product is a copyright violation and hence illegal.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) the issue isn't quite this simple. Is it illegal, for instance, to download a copy of a game you once legitimately purchased but now, through no fault of your own, can no longer install? Anyone who gamed in the pre-CD ROM period will remember the disk failure rates that all gamers suffered and the hassle of procuring replacements even then. If a game shipped on ten 3.5" floppies it wasn’t at all uncommon to find a bad disk every third or fourth game, and now, over ten years later, there are precious few disk sets that are still going to reliably hold their data. Obviously most companies aren't going to be able to provide replacements, even if offered full original market value for the game. Can the legitimate owner of a game legally download a functional copy?
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9753

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End Of Browser Battle May Boost Digital Content
Mary Anne Ostrom

The decision by Microsoft and AOL Time Warner to patch up their legal differences and join forces to promote digital content could speed the delivery of music, magazines and movies to online consumers.

But, warned industry analysts, only concrete initiatives from the once-feuding companies in the months to come will prove the deal's significance.

Microsoft's decision to pay $750 million to AOL to settle a 2002 antitrust lawsuit over Internet browsers paves the way for the two companies to work more closely at a time when technology and entertainment companies are in a high-stakes battle to emerge as the premier players in bringing digital entertainment to the Internet.

Technology companies are banking on widespread adoption of broadband content to energize the sales of software, hardware and online services, while Hollywood and other content creators remain fiercely protective of their ownership rights to the material.

``There's been an interest in having a media company and a technology company really take some bold steps in this area,'' Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said in a conference call. The key, he added, is to ``not make it so cumbersome that it's unattractive for people to use things that have rights protection. And so this is the kickoff; we're hoping to draw others into these activities.''

Few details, however, were released on how Microsoft and AOL would cooperate, beyond promising that their products and services would work better with each other.

``The aftermath will be the most interesting part. They haven't necessarily committed to deploying any of the stuff. Going forward, the proof will be in the execution,'' said Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/5977149.htm

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California Supremes Hear DeCSS Case
Kevin Poulsen

California's Supreme Court on Thursday heard oral arguments in a case that pits the motion picture industry against a man who distributed a DVD descrambling program through his website, until he was forced by a court order to remove it.

Andrew Bunner, now 26, was one of hundreds of people who mirrored a copy of the open-source DeCSS program on the Web in 1999, after learning about the controversy surrounding the program on the "news for nerds" community site Slashdot. Shortly thereafter he was named in an injunction ordering him to take down the program, as part of broadly targeted lawsuit filed by the DVD Copy Control Association -- a motion picture industry group -- under a 1979 state law designed to protect trade secrets.

DeCSS was written by Norwegian teenager Jon Johansen, in part based on information Johansen reverse-engineered from a commercial DVD- playing program that included a click-wrap license agreement that barred reverse engineering.

Bunner, with the support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Project, appealed, and an appeals court overturned the injunction in 2000, ruling that the order violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The DVD-CCA then appealed to the state Supreme Court.

In a packed courtroom Thursday, the argument focused mostly on whether a computer program should be considered "pure speech" afforded the full protection of the First Amendment, or a mixture of expression and functionality protected by a lower standard.

Robert Sugarman, a lawyer for DVD-CCA, argued the latter view. He said the appellate court erred by treating DeCSS as pure speech, because code is designed to be functional -- to be executed on a computer -- and "not to communicate ideas [or] to comment on something of public concern."

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, appearing as a friend of the court, also sided with the industry, describing DeCSS as a "burglary tool" built for "entering and stealing the property" of the movie studios. Lockyer warned the court in stark terms that California's motion picture, music and technology industries would all suffer grave financial losses if trial courts had to treat computer code as speech when considering legal bids to suppress a program.

Bunner: A Matter of Principle
David Greene, from the non-profit First Amendment Project, represented Bunner. He argued that a computer program is no different from music lyrics or a novel -- it's just written in a different language, designed to be interpretable by machine. "This is pure speech because... it is purely the transmission of information via a language," said Greene.
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/5239

State official testifies against DVD copying
Bob Egelko

Saying California's economy is threatened by computer-aided piracy, Attorney General Bill Lockyer joined the movie industry Thursday in urging the state Supreme Court to forbid the Internet posting of a program that lets users copy DVDs.

Making his second appearance ever before the high court, Lockyer asked the justices to reject a state appellate court's ruling that a San Francisco man was exercising free speech when he posted the program in 1999.

Lockyer said the unscrambling program, devised by a Norwegian teenager, was simply "a burglary tool" designed for "breaking, entering and stealing" a trade secret -- the industry-owned code designed to prevent unauthorized playback of movies recorded on digital versatile discs, or DVDs.

The state is taking sides in the private dispute in order to "prevent and combat piracy . . . encourage investment (and) promote the creative arts," Lockyer said. He said the motion picture industry estimates that as many as 350,000 movies are copied illegally every day, and recording companies are losing billions of dollars from unauthorized copying.

A lawyer for Andrew Bunner, the young software engineer whose use of his Web site landed him in the middle of a heavyweight fight, countered that a court injunction obtained by an industry group was intended to "stop the flow of information." Bunner did nothing wrong, and the program he posted is so readily available now that it can't be described as a trade secret, added attorney David Greene.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...&type=business

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Creative Commons And Negativland Begin Work On Free Sampling And Collage License

Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a layer of reasonable copyright, announced today that it would begin development of the Sampling License, a copyright tool designed to let artists encourage the creative transformation of their work, for profit or otherwise. Leading the public discussion and development of the license is Negativland, practitioners of "found sound" music as well as other forms of media manipulation.

Glenn Otis Brown, Creative Commons Executive Director, commented: "The Sampling License is among the most exciting projects we've taken on so far. The technology and culture of the Net already facilitate the remixing of culture. The law does not, so we're helping it catch up by remixing copyright itself."

When completed, the Sampling License will allow people to create collage art and "mash-ups" - as well as other art forms based on re-used materials - from licensed works. Like all of Creative Commons copyright tools, the Sampling License will be made available for free to the public from the organization's website.
http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=52513

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Sony Unit To Trial Content With A 'Consume By' Date
"This film will self-destruct in five seconds..."

A subsidiary of the electronics maker Sony is to sell downloadable movie files that self-destruct after a given time.

According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei Business Daily, the So-net ISP will soon trial the service in Japan.

Many digital content providers currently use encrypted streaming to prevent users saving and copying movie files. But the downside is that the quality of the video suffers, as it is reduced in size for web transmission. In addition, users must stay online to view the feed.

However, allowing downloads of movie files opens the door to illegal copying.

To sidestep these issues, So-net's new service allows users to download the content from its website to their hard drives - but those hoping to add the file to a permanent collection or to copy it will have their attempts frustrated.

The firm has incorporated a DRM (digital rights management) technology from software maker Japan Wave which makes copying impossible, the report said.

Instead of saving the video to a single file and location, Japan Wave's technology splits the data into numerous directories on the hard disk. Users will need to download special software to play back the various pieces as a continuous movie.

There's a second layer of protection: Those who manage to join up the files won't be able to use them for very long. Software embedded in the file will cause it to self-destruct after a given time, said the report.

So-net's approach to DRM is part of a growing effort by providers to find robust copy protection without restricting the user's rights to enjoy the content.

Earlier this month, Disney announced plans for a trial in the US. The film-maker said it will start renting self-destructing DVDs which automatically become unplayable after a two-day period.

Major movie studios in Hollywood are also turning up the heat, joining forces in a slew of lawsuits against US-based DVD copying software makers like DVDBackupbuddy.com and DVDSqueeze.com.
http://silicon.com/news/500019-500016/1/4412.html

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Taking a page from China

Top Technology Used To Stop Us Movie Pirates
BBC
Cinemas in the US are using top technology to try and stop people from illegally recording the latest films.

Disney are desperate to stop their latest animated film Finding Nemo being recorded and put onto the internet. So they've asked a security firm to use metal detectors and special night-vision glasses that can see in the dark to help them. Should someone get a recording device past the metal detectors, then guards wearing the goggles would be able to spot them using it inside.

Film bosses are getting more and more annoyed because people are downloading films from the internet rather than paying to see them in the cinema.

A spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America said the US film industry estimates it loses between £1.8bn and £2.4bn to online piracy every year.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/tv...00/2952716.stm

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Chatter

- “Here's how to download stuff from yourself Super fast, it is so cool. Type http://localhost:1214/ , in your address bar with your kazaa/kazaalite open, there will be a list of your sharing files, just click it, and bingo~~~~~~~~~”

- “And the point of this is? This was useful when we actually had to worry about participation level.”

- “I learned it from somewhere else, it doesn't download the files on kazaa, i don't know why.”

- “it's so people can get there participation levels up”

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/rema...ping~mode=flat

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Online Music Business May Soon Have 'Desi' Touch
Anand Parthasarathy

A flurry of activity this week, may give the whole business of online music sharing a new — and more legitimate — lease of life, even as a major Indian player looks poised to enter the arena.

A U.S.-based player in the electronic cash arena, E-C Logix, has launched what it calls "the world's first legitimate online music file- sharing service based on the popular peer-to-peer (P2P) delivery method". Called File-Cash (www.file-cash.com) the service claims to have signed up over 100 independent music publishers and in an innovative plan those who download the music at a small price are encouraged to open their files to others and earn a percentage of the author's asking price every time a fresh buyer is found. The company claims to be unique in one respect: micro-payments as small as one tenth of a U.S. cent (5 paise) will be made without a transaction fee.

By enabling affordable downloads, the creators of File-Cash hope to remove the incentive to make illegal downloads. "Our answer is not to fight P2P but to embrace it," they say.

The move comes exactly one month after Apple Computers, makers of the "other" PC platform, launched a phenomenally successful online music sale service called the "iTunes Music Store" where owners of Apple's Mac PCs and iPod portable MP3 music players could download music pieces from a 2 lakh-strong repertoire at 99 cents a track — and then use the Mac's CD cutting software to make their own customised disks.

Within weeks of the April 28 launch over three million tracks were downloaded — and paid for, making the major music publishers such as Sony, Universal/Vivendi, BMG and Warners looking rather foolish: for months they have been ranting about the rampant piracy involved in online music swapping services but could not come up with a compelling counter-service of their own.
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/s...0302031300.htm

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New peer-to-peer management technology saving service providers millions via improved bandwidth utilization, but P2P-agnostic approach doesn't diminish subscribers' online experience, satisfaction
Press Release

Just-released customer metrics from Sandvine Incorporated show that Peer-To-Peer (P2P) Policy Management is dramatically reducing the amount of expensive bandwidth consumed by file-sharing applications. P2P programs like KaZaA and Morpheus consume as much as 70% of available bandwidth on broadband networks. Yet service providers who have deployed Sandvine technology report that they are improving bandwidth utilization to such an extent, file sharing has almost ceased to be a significant drag on network costs.

For example, one large MSO estimates that Sandvine's approach will save it in excess of $5 million dollars this year. P2P upload traffic was consuming approximately 150 out of 160 MB of the MSO's provisioned upload bandwidth - a full 94% of available upstream capacity. Once Sandvine Peer-To-Peer Policy Management was enabled, bandwidth utilization by P2P traffic fell abruptly - and sharply - without impacting peer-to-peer networking by subscribers.

"This effect was achieved without invoking the CAPEX, legal or QoS issues that node splitting, content caching and traffic shaping solutions, respectively, impose on service providers," said Tom Donnelly, co-founder and VP, marketing and sales of Sandvine Incorporated. "Sandvine was able to deliver these impressive cost benefits and efficiencies without degrading the online experience for the MSO's subscribers."

To learn more about this deployment, download Sandvine's just-released "P2P Case Study" at http://www.sandvine.com/solutions/download_center.asp.

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Announcing The NetEnforcer AC-1000 Series.
Press Release

Carriers, enterprises and universities can implement QoS device in the network core to control P2P and other traffic down to the application level --

Allot Communications, a premier provider of policy-based networking solutions, today announced the general availability of its next generation Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth and Service Level Agreement (SLA) management appliances - the NetEnforcer(R) AC-1000 Series. The new devices allow, for the first time, QoS deployment at Gigabit wire speed with layer seven protocol classification and monitoring supporting nearly 100,000 policies. Powered by a new high-performance and scalable hardware and software architecture for network computing tasks, the NetEnforcer AC-1000 Series sets a new performance benchmark by more than tripling the previous limits.

"Allot has reshaped the traffic management landscape with this incredibly powerful new series of NetEnforcers", said Eran Ziv, President, Allot Communications "Aside from shattering previous performance levels, we are enabling large-scale Peer-to-Peer (P2P) control and traffic management for the world's largest IP networks and empowering service providers with exciting new service capabilities for their customers. Until now, there simply hasn't been a solution with the power and reliability to support the largest enterprise, service provider and university networks."

The new AC-1000 Series allows customers to monitor, classify and shape IP traffic, enforce QoS policies, throttle P2P traffic and enforce SLAs. The support for Gigabit throughput provides carriers and service providers with a competitive edge and rapid ROI by allowing deployment in central hub locations and enabling an array of new revenue-generating services such as tiered services, class of service and usage-based billing. Supporting tens of thousands of users from a single location translates into a dramatically reduced cost per user for Fortune 500 networks, major universities and service providers.

"Carriers and service providers are facing major changes in usage patterns of their services in the recent two years," stated Claudia Bacco, President of TeleChoice, the strategic catalyst for the telecom industry. "With its service control features, the NetEnforcer AC-1000 can provide an essential building block for the carrier's service network by allowing its operator to control the traffic and costs and offer new revenue-generating services to its subscribers."
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/...m&footer_file=

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Row Over Gas Masked Queen
BBC

Pictures of the Queen wearing a gas mask which are on display in an art gallery in Brighton have caused a row with the Royal Mail. Three images representing first, second and third class stamps are on display at artrepublic in the North Lanes. They were created by former pop star James Cauty, who was in the group KLF, and are supposed to reflect his stance on the war with Iraq. But now the Royal Mail has said using the Queen's head is a breach of its copyright. We have had one or two objections and thousands of compliments Lawrence Alkin, gallery owner Gallery owner Lawrence Alkin said:

"Artrepublic has always been about demystifying art and bringing it to a mass audience. Nothing is original, it is through thousands of years of evolution of ideas - artistic and scientific - that has brought our culture to where it is today. So I am quite amazed. It has had a fantastic reception. We have had one or two objections and thousands of compliments. We have never sold a limited edition as fast as this one."



The images, which have been created through the Giclée printing technique, have been on display at the gallery since May. A spokesman for the Royal Mail said: "We do take any breach of copyright very seriously especially in relation to the Queen's image. We produce over three billion of these stamps every year and the images belong to the Royal Mail. It is still too early to say what action we will take. We hope this will be sorted out amicably."

The Royal Mail has given the artrepublic until Friday to take the images down. But Mr Alkin has said he is seeking legal advice on the issue.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/e...on/2963414.stm

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Security Standards Could Bolster File-Sharing Networks
Will Knight

Plans to build security features into personal computers to make unauthorised digital copying more difficult could backfire by strengthening controversial peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, say US researchers.

Peer-to-peer programs such as Kazaa and Morpheus let users scour each other's hard drives for music and other files though a decentralised network. The entertainment industry has targeted the companies behind these programs because many shared files are protected by copyright. But so far, it has proven difficult to eradicate the networks.

Security measures proposed by the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), a consortium of software and hardware companies, would help tackle the problem by making copying more difficult. The proposed measures include cryptographic signatures embedded in hardware and software which many observers believe will be used to create new audio and video formats and players that will restrict copying. The plans are controversial because some believe it will take control of a computer away from its user.

But Michael Smith and colleagues from Harvard University in the US say the same TCPA technology could, ironically, be used to make file sharing networks more robust. Cryptographic signatures could be used to verify that clients on the network are trusted thereby preventing an outsider from creating a client designed to disrupt network traffic or to spy on users' sharing activities.

The researchers say it will always be possible for a small number of people to copy content straight from a
computer's output, using a high-quality microphone, for example. They say this makes controlling the distribution of content through peer-to-peer file networks crucial.

"The bar can never be made high enough such that content can't eventually be broken out of the locked box and placed in a free format that can be distributed around," Smith told New Scientist.

Microsoft plans to release a version of the Windows operating system that will co-operate with this system but has promised to make this an open standard - one that anyone can use to write TCPA-compliant software.

Smith says, using open TCPA standards, software engineers could write peer-to-peer software that verifies that everyone on a network is trustworthy. "It would avoid scalable attacks where a little bit of work will let you pull down the network," he says.

The entertainment industry has already discussed using such measures, along with legal threats to disrupt peer-to-peer networks. Some companies have taken to uploading corrupted or incorrectly named files to these networks to make it harder for people to find music.

Chris Lightfoot, of the UK computer user lobby group Campaign for Digital Rights, says that providing the security standards are open, they could potentially be used in this way. He says: "Peer-to-peer technology has lots of legitimate applications and building robust networks to enable those applications is welcome."

But Lightfoot adds that TCPA technology could have serious implications for users' ability to use their computers as they wish. He says it could "stifle innovation, suppress open standards and create a serious invasion of privacy".
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993793

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Rogue AOL Subsidiary Leader to Resign
Matthew Fordahl

A young programmer whose software startup, Nullsoft, was gobbled up by America Online — and then caused numerous headaches for its corporate parent — plans to resign after his latest piece of rebel code was pulled from the Internet.

Justin Frankel, 24, announced his intentions late Monday, less than a week after a file-sharing program called Waste was posted and then pulled from the Nullsoft Web site.

"The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have," he said in his Web log. "This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leav (sic). I don't know when it will be, but I'm not going to last much longer."

Attempts to reach Frankel by telephone were not successful. An AOL spokeswoman declined to comment.

AOL paid $86 million for Nullsoft in 1999. At the time, the San Francisco company was best known for creating a popular music player called Winamp.

Despite the new corporate ownership, Nullsoft's team of programmers managed to maintain a freestyle hacker culture.

In March 2000, Nullsoft briefly posted a decentralized file-sharing program called Gnutella (news - web sites) before it was axed by AOL. But the genie had been set free, and other developers refined the code to create post-Napster (news - web sites) file-sharing programs.

Nullsoft's latest creation was a file-sharing program that allowed users to set up secure networks of no more than 50 people.

Within hours of its posting, Waste was deleted. In its place was a notice that said the program had been posted without Nullsoft's permission.

"If you downloaded or otherwise obtained a copy of the software, you acquired no lawful rights to the software and must destroy any and all copies of the software, including by deleting it from your computer," the statement said. "Any license that you may believe you acquired with the software is void, revoked and terminated."

Frankel, who is called "Our Benevolent Dictator" on the Nullsoft site, founded the company in 1998 after dropping out of the University of Utah.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...e/aol_nullsoft

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MusicNet Gets New Round Of Funding
Reuters

Online music service MusicNet said on Thursday it got about $10 million in new funding from its shareholders, including three of the world's biggest record labels and RealNetworks Inc. RNWK.O .

MusicNet is co-owned by AOL Time Warner's AOL.N Warner Music, Bertelsmann AG's BERT.UL BMG and EMI Group Plc EMI.L , as well as RealNetworks, a digital media software maker.

MusicNet is one of two online services launched by the recording industry in late 2001 to compete against popular unauthorized song-swapping services like Kazaa and Morpheus, which the industry blames largely for a decline in CD sales.

But both MusicNet and Pressplay have met with only limited success since their launch. This week Pressplay said it was purchased by digital media company Roxio ROXI.O , leading analysts to speculation whether MusicNet may next be acquired.

A source close to the company said the new round of funding should squash the rumors the service is for sale, showing that its partners remained committed to it.

"While we are a lean, strategically focused company, we will continue to set the bar because of our unique business approach as the digital music space grows and matures," MusicNet Chief Executive Alan McGlade said in a statement.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=2796099

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Envoy Debuts; Download Manager For HTTP, FTP, Gnutella
Peter Cohen

Bains Software on Tuesday released Envoy, a new download manager for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. The software is designed to simplify HTTP, FTP and Gnutella-based downloads.

Envoy features the ability to resume transfers, even those started from other applications. It sports an integrated Gnutella client. Gnutella is a peer-to-peer file sharing network.

Envoy also has the ability to disconnect automatically, put the computer to sleep or shut down after the download queue is finished. You can schedule Envoy to start and stop its download queues; configure multiple download folders; play media files like songs or movies while downloading; and keep a download log to keep track of partial transfers and complete files.

Envoy costs US$18 to register. A downloadable version is available that expires after 30 days.

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/06/03/envoy/

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E-Books Catch On, but Only for Hardcore Fans So Far
Elinor Mills Abreu

Within 12 hours of Cory Doctorow's posting his new novel on his Web site, more than 10,000 free digital copies were snatched up by online readers.

Nearly five months later, the site (http://www.craphound.com/down/download.php) has passed along more than 110,000 copies of the science fiction book, titled "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom."

But while Doctorow's story illustrates the potential for e-books, it is not an accurate reflection of the market.

E-books, hailed in hi-tech precincts as the electronic alternative to traditional publishing, have failed to live up to their early billing as a replacement for the printed page, despite their popularity with gadget-obsessed pioneers.

"The (e-book) vendors will tell you that mass adoption is just around the corner," said Rich Levin, editor-in-chief of BookTech, a trade magazine for the publishing industry.

"When I talk to readers and publishers, they tell me the technology is just not ready for prime time," he said.

Publishers remain wary of releasing books on the Internet until there is a proven method of preventing people from copying and distributing them indiscriminately, Levin said. As a result, only a limited selection of current titles exist online.

Another problem is that competing technology standards restrict the type of digital files readers can use, he said. "Paper is going to remain the dominant medium for major titles for the foreseeable future."

Fewer than 5 percent of computer users say they have read an e-book over the last year, said Richard Doherty, research director at consumer technology assessment firm Envisioneering Group. That's up from 1 percent five years ago, he said.

"They (e-books) are not exactly taking off, but it is a groundswell movement that is growing," Doherty said.

Still, companies are trying to address the problem -- by coming up with new forms of temporary electronic "ink," that disappears, or is unreadable, after a few weeks or months, for instance. One company, Overdrive.com, has a copyright security technology and offers a service that enables libraries to "loan" e-books and stores like Barnes & Noble to sell them.

Meanwhile, the Open eBook Forum is working on standards to make electronic book publishing easier for publishers, said Nicholas Bogaty, executive director of the group.

But the biggest problem for electronic book readers remains that the reading experience still doesn't compare to curling up on the sofa with a riveting novel.
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle....toryID=2855493

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Free Trade With Us No Big Deal
Rod Oram

US president George W Bush, like many politicians, tries to rule by reward and punishment. But the tactic only works if he has something valuable to give or deny.

Sadly for him, a US-NZ free trade agreement carries no such allure. The odds on getting one were always long. Even if we eventually succeed, its value would be marginal and the US would extract from us a stiff economic price for agreeing to it.

Yet the US administration recently killed hopes of an FTA to punish the Prime Minister Helen Clark for her Gore and war comments and New Zealand's position on Iraq. The tactic backfired. As with the emperor's new clothes, the lack of substance was embarrassing.

Certainly, trade agreements are a tool of US diplomacy. Witness the unseemly speed with which Bush dangled trade in front of Middle East countries after he declared victory over Saddam Hussein.

But while the president initiates trade deals, the gift is from congress. The law requires congress to vote for or against an FTA. It cannot amend it. Therefore, the president has to craft a complex deal that carefully balances anti and pro-deal domestic lobbies to stand any chance of winning approval.

For us, the biggest anti-FTA lobby is the US dairy industry. Unfortunately that's the industry in which we face the largest trade barriers. Similarly, Australian hopes for its FTA face stiff opposition from the US sugar lobby.

It is highly unlikely Bush would expend considerable political capital to placate the dairy or sugar lobbies, even after next year's presidential election. His domestic political instincts are too strong. Witness his pledge of protection to US steel workers before the 2000 election. When he won, he paid them off by introducing new tariffs.

The Australians are beginning to wake up to the fact that FTAs are not all they're cracked up to be. Reports are beginning to circulate across the Tasman that even a US FTA including agriculture might eventually lift GDP by only 0.3% a year. And this analysis excludes the negatives the US would extract, such as a rewrite of Australia's copyright laws to suit US producers.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,...7a1865,00.html

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Friendster: Six Degrees of Sexual Frustration
William O'Shea

Just as Napster exploded in popularity a few years ago, Friendster is now making its own climb to Internet stardom. By May, just three months after its beta release, the site had grown to over 300,000 users.

In practice, Friendster is far different from its file-sharing cousin. It is completely Web- based, with no peer-to-peer application to download, and the "sharing" is purely metaphorical. But it is expanding for the same reason Napster did—members have an interest in making it more popular, because that means there's more to trade. While similar new services like Ryze.org and LinkedIn.com help people swap business contacts, Friendster is one of the few places that help you swap your friends.

Friendster works on the same principle as the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, where you find connections between movie stars. People who join post profiles of themselves including photos, interests, favorite books, TV shows, and movies. Browse someone's profile—anyone within three degrees of separation is fair game—and you also see thumbnail pictures of their friends. If one looks interesting, you can click it for a full profile. With another click you can send a message, though the site safeguards your e-mail address to thwart unwanted come-ons.

Not strictly a dating service, Friendster has built its success on its casual feel. There are no cupids or hearts on the site, nothing to indicate it's anything but a tool for connecting with friends. But although you could use it to meet a fellow Scrabble aficionado or an ultimate Frisbee partner, the site ends up being largely about dating. "For every one user of online dating services, there are probably 10 people who would use Friendster because they're more comfortable with the approach," says company founder Jonathan Abrams. "Friendster is less creepy. It's a little more like real life."

Harris Danow, a development assistant at Miramax, has used online personals services but prefers Friendster. "It isn't threatening, like dating sites. It's called Friendster, not 'Fuckster' or 'Makeoutster,' " he says. "It's like the kiddie pool of online dating." Harris has been contacted by several women through his online profile and went out with one. "I didn't think of it as a place for making dates, but women started contacting me. On Friendster people can check out your credentials, meaning that someone can ask your friend, 'What's the deal with this person?' It keeps you on your best behavior. You couldn't get away with meeting someone on Friendster, sleeping with her, and never calling her back. There's a net behind you."

Friendster is beginning to impact real-life socializing in intriguing ways. "It's interesting that now, when I go out to social gatherings, it seems as if just about everyone is on Friendster," says James Meetze, a publisher from Oakland, California. "The other night I was at an art opening when a girl approached me and said, 'I've seen you on the Internet.' I made the connection that she had recently sent me a message on Friendster about liking to eat kittens. I said, 'Oh, right, you're the kitten eater, please stay away from my kittens.' "

The site is emerging as a means to check out would-be mates. Lauryn Siegel, an unemployed production office manager in New York, spends much of her newfound free time browsing the service. "Friendster is the new Googling. It lets you find out more about a person, to put them in context."

This narrowing of social groups has created its share of awkward online moments. Lauryn found an old flame in her circle of friends, one she didn't want to rekindle. "I didn't think I would ever lay eyes on this person again. Maybe it's not so surprising. We're both from Northern California, both into music. . . . Everyone accepts that it's a small world, but Friendster makes it a lot more apparent."
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0323/oshea.php