Quotes of the week: "We are told that copyright owners are entitled to this unprecedented subpoena power so they can effectively exploit their copyright monopolies, we are not told why that right -- or that monopoly -- is more valuable than the privacy and due process rights those subpoenas invade.
"That right is insufficient to justify, without prior judicial review, an invasion of our fundamental personal liberties." - Daniel Ballard
"You can't stop the kids sharing files." - James Chen
Hell It’s Me
Singer songwriter Todd Rundgren launched a blistering attack against the business of music. Like Janis Ian, he rightly concludes the RIAA’s strong-arming of ordinary citizens has little if anything to do with protecting artists and their livelihoods and everything to do with protecting their own narrow corporate interests. That the RIAA also claims to be protecting
songwriters from downloading - because songwriters can’t make up any alleged losses by performing - makes his arguments well worth listening to. Like John Perry Barlow, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a major proponent of file-sharing, Rundgren makes his living writing songs for others as well as performing and producing and has given the matter real consideration. That he comes down squarely against the RIAA speaks volumes about their lack of credibility on the issue of protecting artists. If musicians make most of their money performing live (and they do) it may be that in the future they’ll directly compensate the writers who provide their songs, much like they pay the rest of their touring organization, and it’s more than likely this will be an improvement over the present system for the songwriters.
If you’d like to a see what the Establishment considers a “reasonable and balanced” look at Peer-to-Peer and the legal and moral reasons why file sharing should be stopped, look no further than this month’s Fortune magazine.
In a particularly one sided article entitled
“From Betamax to Kazaa: The Real War Over Piracy” author Roger Parloff makes the money case for investors while overlooking the other issues, especially the important cultural ones. Naturally enough he thinks file sharing is fundamentally different from other copying technologies like the VCR – so different in fact that the Supreme Court’s ruling that copying is legal does not apply and he thinks therefore P2Ps can be banned.
That his conclusion seems preordained comes as no surprise. We are talking about Fortune magazine after all, the bible of capitalists and product of media giant TimeWarner, owner of some of the largest record companies and film studios –
and music, film and TV libraries - in the world. It's an old argument with many hidden holes and it’s aggravating just stumbling over them. All in all a frustrating read.
“Why did the studios ever think they might be entitled to compensation for consumers' personal use of their works within the home? Try looking at it this way. What entices people into stores to buy VCRs is, in part, the prospect of taping copyrighted shows. If so, why should equipment manufacturers hoard all the profits, rather than sharing them with the copyright holders?”
Well…In the case of Peer-to-Peer the “VCR” is free and profit is zero. Even the networks P2P users are now migrating to are ad-free, have no real income streams or any hope of seeing them and are run by volunteers. But the question ignores a more fundamental point. In America we don’t tax industries (people actually) because other industries play parts in purchase decisions. When I buy Michelin tires the company doesn’t send a check to Oldsmobile because that’s where the tires wind up. I pick up furniture that works well in my 100 year old house but that doesn’t mean the carpenter's descendents get a piece of the profits - the carpenter got paid when he built it. We all do work that benefits someone but to tax all of us
for that reason alone is counter productive and demonstrably unworkable - while to tax us simply for the benefit of a few is downright unfair. He’s right that things have changed since the Betamax case but there's some snow in the video obscuring his picture. P2P changes things so thoroughly that in time the funds media companies may stand to lose - or gain - may come to be seen as one of the least important aspects of file sharing.
Enjoy,
Jack.
It's Time To Let The Monolith Of Commoditized Music Collapse Like The Berlin Wall
Todd Rundgren
Music is a sacrament. This has been true for thousands of years of human history, save the last 100 or so. I'm sure it was not Edison's purpose to debase such an important aspect of our collective liturgy, but what would one expect when something that was once ephemeral and could only be experienced at the behest of other humans is reduced to a commodity on a shelf.
The mechanisms of music, how and why it affects us the way it does, are still mystical even to a cynical older record producer like myself. Anyone who denies the depth and power of this medium has simply forgotten, in the face of the relentless Philistine argument, that all things can be commoditized regardless of their sacred origins -- that all music is worth exactly what the RIAA says it is.
Most musicians who have enjoyed any success under this model are in an ethical bind: On one hand, you may believe that your survival depends on effective marketing of a commodity; on the other, you realize that your truest expressions are being trivialized to fit properly into a prealloted space. How many times have I heard the argument, "Love the record, but we don't hear a third single -- back to the studio"?
I must remind my fellow players that for the vast majority of history we have only been appreciated for the quality of human expression we could produce at the moment. Great performances were only memories in the minds of those who witnessed, each unique except perhaps for the calliope at the local merry-go-round which was, of course, a machine.
The plain reality is that, except for a few notable aberrations, musicians will always be more appreciated, certainly in a financial sense, by live audiences than by labels and the listeners they purport to represent. The seemingly quaint idea that recordings were promotion for great performers is no less true today. Ask Phish.
Ask also whether, as a musician, you ever believed the RIAA was actively protecting your interests until they got into a fight with their own customers and started using your name, your so-called well-being, as justification. And when the customers became skeptical they became the enemy. And to follow the RIAA's logic, customers are therefore the enemies of musicians. Let us ignore the fact that if you ever got compensated for your contribution, it would have been because your manager and lawyer (and many before) forced the labels to recognize your labor in financial terms.
The reason why the RIAA comes off as a gang of ignorant thugs is because, well, how do I put this -- they are. I came into this business in an age of entrepreneurial integrity. The legends of the golden age of recorded music were still at the helm of most labels -- the Ertegun's, the Ostins, the Alperts and Mosses by the dozens. Now we have four monolithic (in every sense of the word) entities and a front organization that crows about the fact that they have solved their problems by leaning on a 12-year-old. Thank God that mystical fascination with the world of music has been stubbed out -- hopefully everyone will get the message and get over the idea that the musician actually meant for you to hear this.
The RIAA protects musicians like the musicians union protects musicians: They reward hacks and penalize those outside the system. The labels are not making this stink out of principle. They are not interested in the rights of musicians who don't sell any records for them. That myth was exploded when Warners dropped Van Morrison for "lackluster sales."
This stink is about a bunch of dumb-asses blaming the public for doing what the labels could have -- and should have -- done 10 years ago. I know because I told them so, each and every one individually and relentlessly: Put the music on a server so you can deliver on-demand services to people's homes. Seems so stupidly simple now.
After nearly 40 years in this business I know who my friends are. I know it isn't the labels who lost interest in my "fringe audience" decades ago. It is that fringe audience who still await any recording or performance I may come up with despite the RIAA trying to drive some symbolic wedge between me and my listeners just because their ass is in a sling. Don't do me any favors.
Audiences and musicians are on the same side. Musicians come from the audience (unlike record execs who come from the ranks of failed musicians). We experience together the mystical sacrament that a musical performance can represent. Additionally, we will be comfortably if not handsomely compensated by that audience if we can deliver a suitably affecting performance with some regularity.
It's time to let the monolith of commoditized music collapse like the Berlin Wall. Musicians can make records if they feel like it, or not. Wide open pipes are ready to transport us, mainstream and fringe alike, into the ears of an eager audience who appreciates us and is more than willing to financially support us. Get out of the way if you can't lend a hand because ... you know the rest by heart.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...ent_id=2007230
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Paper Reveals Treaty Would Send P2P File-Sharers to Prison
Sponsors Petition to Delete Intellectual Property Chapter
- International civil liberties group IP Justice published a report today entitled "FTAA: A Threat to Freedom and Free Trade," that analyzes key sections of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) Treaty. The FTAA Treaty will govern the lives of 800 million Americans in the Western Hemisphere in 2005.
Similar to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the FTAA Treaty seeks to bind the 34 democracies in the Western Hemisphere (including the US) to a single trade agreement. It will require all countries to change their domestic laws on a wide range of topics, including intellectual property rights.
The draft intellectual property rights chapter in the FTAA Agreement vastly expands criminal procedures and penalties against intellectual property infringements throughout the Americas. One clause would require countries to send non-commercial infringers such as Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharers to prison. It is estimated that 60 million Americans use file-sharing software in the US alone.
According to the IP Justice report, "unless the second proposed clause to Article 4.1 is deleted from the FTAA Treaty, Internet music swapping will be a felony throughout the Western Hemisphere in 2005."
The proposed agreement forbids consumers from bypassing technical restrictions on their own CDs, DVDs and other property, similar to the controversial US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Even though bills are pending in the US Congress to repeal the DMCA, FTAA proposes to outlaw even more speech and legitimate conduct.
Mislabeled as a "free trade" agreement, the FTAA Agreement would actually make it illegal to bypass trade barriers such as DVD region code restrictions and it would enable price discrimination against consumers in the Americas.
The draft treaty also imposes new definitions for "fair use" and "personal use," curtailing traditional fair use and personal use rights to a single copy and only under limited circumstances. This prevents consumers from backing-up their media collections, using their media in new and innovative ways, and accessing media for educational and non-commercial purposes.
Another clause would require all countries to amend their copyright laws to extend copyright's term to at least 70 years after the life of the author, essentially forcing the new US standard on all other 33 countries in the hemisphere. Although forbidden by the US Constitution, FTAA's copyright section would allow companies to copyright facts and scientific data.
Another provision requires all domain name trademark disputes to be decided by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private and unaccountable organization that is ill equipped to determine the limits of freedom of expression rights or the scope of intellectual property rights. Americans would no longer have access to their local public courts to adjudicate rights over their Internet domain names.
"The FTAA Treaty's IP chapter reads like a 'wish list' for RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft lobbyists," said IP Justice Executive Director Robin Gross. "Rather than promote competition and creativity, it is bloated with provisions that create monopolies over information and media devices," stated the intellectual property attorney.
In conjunction with the White Paper, IP Justice published an online petition calling upon the FTAA Trade Ministers to delete the entire chapter on intellectual property rights from the trade agreement. Earlier this year Brazil called for scrapping the chapter on intellectual property rights also.
FTAA Treaty negotiators, including the Office of the US Trade Representative who negotiates on behalf of US government, will meet in Miami from November 16-21, 2003. Debate over the text of the FTAA Treaty will conclude by January 2005 and the treaty is due to take effect by December 2005.
IP Justice White Paper on FTAA IP Chapter:
http://www.ipjustice.org/ftaa/whitepaper.shtml
IP Justice FTAA Educational Campaign:
http://www.ipjustice.org/ftaa
IP Justice's Top 10 Reasons to Delete FTAA's IP Chapter:
http://www.ipjustice.org/ftaa/topten.shtml
IP Justice Petition to Delete FTAA's IP Chapter:
http://www.ipjustice.org/ftaa/petition.shtml
Official FTAA Website:
http://www.ftaa-alca.org
Draft chapter on intellectual property rights in FTAA Agreement:
http://www.ftaa-alca.org/ftaadraft02/eng/draft_e.asp
IP Justice is an international civil liberties organization that promotes balanced intellectual property law. IP Justice defends individual rights to use digital media worldwide and is a registered California non-profit organization. IP Justice was founded in 2002 by Robin D. Gross, who serves as its Executive Director. To learn more about IP Justice, visit the website at
http://www.ipjustice.org.
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/storie.../10/19/6269615
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Grokster President Sparks Discussion
K. George Pradhan
Project Dialogue lived up to its name on Monday, when Grokster President Wayne Rosso sparked a heated debate in Wilson Hall among the animated audience members present to discuss the legitimacy of peer-to-peer file sharing and its effects on the music industry.
"Who hates me already?" Rosso, the self-proclaimed "Sultan of Swap," said jokingly to begin his speech.
Out of the approximately 80 people present in the mosaic of students, faculty members and individuals from the greater Nashville community, among the handful of people to raise a hand was musician Harold Bradley, reportedly the most recorded guitarist in history.
"It was a very interesting speech and I appreciate that we can have such discussion in our free country, but it's very surprising that he would come into our own town - Music City, USA - and tell people that it's OK to download music for free when it clearly hurts the singers, songwriters and musicians that I represent," Bradley said.
Bradley is currently the president of the Nashville Association of Musicians and the vice-president of the American Federation of Musicians.
The speech, entitled "Take Back the Music," was the second event of the 2003-04 Project Dialogue series. This year's theme is "Ideas, Images, Internet: Who Owns What?" A television crew from the CBS show "60 Minutes," was present to record the occasion.
Rosso spoke at length about how the Internet is inevitably revolutionizing the ways in which our lives are becoming more convenient, and how industries must adapt in response. Each step in making music more widely available has ultimately helped music sales, Rosso said, citing the example of radio among other things.
He referred to the landmark Supreme Court case of Sony v. Universal, in which the Court ruled in favor of Sony being legally allowed to make VCRs that can tape television programs.
"Sure it can be used for infringing copyrights, but that doesn't mean it has no other uses," Rosso said. "Just because some people are misusing it, you can't hold Sony responsible.
"File sharing technology is no different from a Xerox machine or a VCR. The way to stop unauthorized content on a P2P network is simple: you authorize it, you license it," Rosso said.
However, record individuals refuse to consider licensing their songs to him, he said.
"Nobody is trying to rip you off," Rosso said to several upset musicians in the audience. The artists strongly disagreed, using the term 'stealing' often to refer to file sharing.
"This is nothing new, you guys!" Rosso said heatedly as raucous interjections and complaints from audience members continued, including attacks on his financial comfort and one tongue-in-cheek insult about his weight.
Nonetheless, several audience members shared Rosso's point of view.
"I was really glad that he made the point of how the technology isn't inherently wrong, it's only how each person uses that technology," said freshman Jonathon Rigsby. "I agree that a lot of musicians are probably getting screwed over because of (file sharing), but it's so far out there, so commonplace, that the only thing they can do about it is to try and legitimize it.
"In that respect, his idea of licensing music to major file sharers is probably a smart thing."
The public relations aspect of the music industry's campaign to end file sharing was also discussed.
"This whole scenario has done nothing but breed contempt for the record industry in its customers," Rosso said.
"I have a collection of about 6,000 CDs, and I despise the record industry," said Dr. Michael Harrington, professor of music business at Belmont University.
Rosso suggested that musicians could take advantage of the new technology for their own benefit and independence. "File sharing programs are a great distribution mechanism and have a great deal of power (to help musicians)."
After the event had formally ended due to time constraints, people stood and engaged in vibrant discussions in several groups around the lecture hall for up to an hour.
"I understand that things have changed," Bradley said in one such discussion. "But the thing that hasn't changed is that singers, songwriters and musicians need their money."
"All I'm saying is let's take advantage of this technology," Harrington said in response. "It sounds crazy but we can tap into it. Just like any technology, I think we'll all be better off for it in the end."
Other artists present also felt that Rosso focused too much on criticizing the record industry and dodged the fundamental issue of musicians being hurt financially.
"Rosso paints the record labels as the enemy, but he doesn't take into account that the ones losing their houses and their livelihoods are the musicians," said Bruce Bouton, a country music artist. "Speaking as a musician, I have had my fair share of disputes with the record industry, but in this case, I support the record industry over file sharing.
"Also, I think it's disturbing... that a lot of young people feel they deserve this music for free," Bouton said.
In response to the recent lawsuits, Rosso is in the process of forming a lobbying organization, P2P United, to represent the interests of file-sharing services in Washington. One of the organization's first efforts has been to raise money to reimburse those being sued for illegal downloading, including the mother of a 12-year- old girl who paid $2,000 to settle legal action taken against her daughter. Rosso maintains that file sharing is inevitable and that the music industry must adapt.
"The music industry wants to kill us; they want us dead," Rosso said. "They can't do it. Maybe Grokster will go out of business somehow.
"I don't know. But there will always be some kid in a basement in Romania who will find a way. Technology always wins. Always."
http://www.vanderbilthustler.com/vne.../3f8f7258773d6
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A New Tech Battle Brews In D.C.
Declan McCullagh
Even casual observers of the moral swamp called Washington, D.C., may remember the notorious Hollings bill, a mandatory copy protection proposal last year, which Hollywood's lobbyists loved and Silicon Valley hated.
Because Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, D-S.C. is retiring, the entertainment industry has been forced to locate new champions in the U.S. Congress. It has found them in three key members of the U.S. House of Representatives: Lamar Smith, R-Texas; Howard Berman, D-Calif.; and John Conyers, D-Mich.
The like-minded trio has quietly drafted a bill arguably as intrusive as Hollings' plan. They seem to be trying to target peer-to-peer clients, but you wouldn't know it from their proposal.
The fine print says huge categories of software--including Web browsers, instant messaging clients and e-mail utilities--that are offered for download must contain a warning that it "could create a security and privacy risk."
And the catch? If the companies or individuals who offer the software for download don't comply with the requirement, they will face criminal penalties such as fines or prison terms of up to six months. Even, that is, if the software is actually secure and poses no security risk.
Ouch.
Imagine what that means in practice. Any program that lets someone else send data to your computer--such as a remote Web site setting a cookie--or use your computer to search other computers' contents over the Internet would be covered.
Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo and anyone else that offers such software would have to put warnings up, or their executives would face prison time. The editors of the popular open-source sites SourceForge and CPAN would have to follow suit. So would Download.com, which News.com publisher CNET Networks owns.
This is not merely a theoretical concern. Because Smith is the chairman of the subcommittee that oversees copyright laws, he's in a unique position to shepherd this scheme into law, possibly even before Congress adjourns this year. A scheduled October 2 vote was postponed, because the subcommittee ran out of time, but Smith's aides say he's aiming to try again this week or next.
Legislative high jinks
Some background: The same mandatory download warnings existed in another bill, H.R. 2752, which Conyers and Berman drafted and then introduced in July.
Other sections of the July bill were especially prickly, such as the idea that music fans should serve jail time for downloading even one illegal MP3 file. It suffered an unlamented, ignominious demise- -the expected fate, after all, because all its sponsors were Democrats.
In response, Berman and Conyers tried to preserve parts of their radioactive bill by injecting them into an otherwise uncontroversial, bipartisan proposal, H.R. 2517, which was previously intended to nudge the FBI toward more copyright prosecutions and to create an "Internet Use Education Program"--basically a propaganda office the U.S. Department of Justice would run that would warn everyone not to violate copyright laws.
True, these ideas are hardly the best use of taxpayer dollars, but they're not likely to cause a firestorm of public outcry, either. (Another section that made it in: a sure-to-please-Hollywood penalty that says videotaping movies in theaters would be against the law.)
With the support of Smith, an influential House Republican, Berman and Conyers are hoping to replace that generally innoucous bill with their "amendment in the nature of a substitute." Jeff Lungren, a spokesman for Smith, told me on Friday: "We're still working on this legislation to reach a consensus--and one that will receive solid support from both parties. We are not commenting on what, if any, changes might be made." He added that he hopes to "move the bill later this month."
Lungren wouldn't say who's supporting the download notification penalties or who's involved in the negotiations.
For its part, the Recording Industry Association of America claims that it's not pushing the three politicos in this direction, and I believe them. Mitch Glazier, the RIAA's senior vice president and lobbyist, says "notice is a good idea, and quite frankly, P2P services ought to be doing it voluntarily...So, we support the chairman, we like the concept--but agree that it is overly broad in its current form."
The last remaining potential culprit is the Motion Picture Association of America and its member companies, which were behind the original Hollings bill last year and which other lobbyists tell me are behind this one, too. (Walt Disney lobbyist Preston Padden once told me that Hollings' Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act represented "an exceedingly moderate and reasonable approach.")
An MPAA spokesman declined to comment.
Unfortunately, this has become Congress' usual pattern: A knee-jerk response that overreacts to a perceived technological problem. Instead of taking a thoughtful, careful approach, clue-impaired Congress critters do things like enact the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which SunnComm Technologies used last week to threaten a Princeton University student. (Trivia: Did you know that on Sept. 11, 1997, a House committee voted to ban all encryption products without backdoors for the FBI?)
Now, apparently at the behest of the MPAA, Congress may criminalise the unrestricted distribution of broad categories of basic and popular software, regardless of whether the programs actually create security or privacy vulnerabilities.
Jonathan Potter, head of the Digital Media Association that represents companies such as AOL, Amazon.com, Apple Computer, RealNetworks and Yahoo, opposes the replacement bill.
"We have communicated to Chairman Smith and representatives Conyers and Berman, in writing and in person, our companies' strong concerns that the anti-P2P provision seems to penalise a much broader class of software applications than was intended," Potters said. "They have asked us to work together to bridge our differences, and we have agreed to try our best."
We'll see. Berman and Conyers are probably lost causes--after all, Berman is the fellow who introduced a bill last year that would give copyright holders the right to assail a peer-to-peer node they suspect may be distributing their intellectual property without permission. Conyers has already chosen which side he'll line up with on this issue.
On the other hand, perhaps there's still time for Smith to realise that he may not want to become known as the Fritz Hollings of 2003.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ent...0280029,00.htm
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Congressional Caucus to Examine Entertainment Piracy
The aggressive crackdown on movie, music and software piracy on the Internet has been a headline grabber during the past six months, but a new group of congressional lawmakers is focusing instead on trampling the rampant copyright infringement taking place in broad daylight overseas.
Brazil, China, Pakistan, Russia and Taiwan have willfully ignored the need to crack down on the sale of pirated goods, a practice that costs the world economy billions of dollars each year, said Rep. Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.) at a press conference today on Capitol Hill.
Goodlatte is one of the four co-chairmen of the newly formed International Anti-Piracy Caucus, a 50-member group that gathered on Capitol Hill with top executives from the entertainment industry to highlight what they said are weak copyright laws and enforcement in other countries.
The caucus will try to persuade the Bush administration to include strong anti-piracy provisions in any trade deals it negotiates with foreign countries, said Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), another co-chairman of the caucus along with Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
Schiff said that the administration should make anti-piracy efforts a prerequisite for countries seeking U.S. foreign aid.
"We want to make sure that a message is delivered to every ambassador [and] to every country that we expect fair treatment in this area," said Smith.
Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, said the caucus will be helpful because the electronic gaming industry has been able to make virtually no inroads into Asian and Eastern European markets because of software piracy.
The caucus debuts at a time when the recording and motion picture industries are trying to cut down on the illegal online trading of digital music and movie files via the Internet on so-called peer-to-peer networks. The Recording Industry Association of America is waging a legal campaign against people who use P2P services like Kazaa and Grokster to illegally trade music.
The motion picture industry also is facing a rise in online piracy as more people buy powerful computers and subscribe to high-speed Internet connections. The Motion Picture Association of America garnered significant attention this month for its controversial decision to try to cut down on piracy by banning DVD and videocassette "screener" copies for judges at film awards.
Despite the piracy problems on the Internet, Biden said offline bootlegs would be an easier target.
About $3 billion in pirated entertainment software is sold each year, according to the ESA. The recording industry estimated that it lost $1 billion to piracy in 2002. The BSA tallied its 2002 loss at $5.5 billion for the Asia-Pacific region alone.
Much of today's press conference dealt with the open-air markets in countries like Russia where bootlegged hard copies of popular music, movies and software are sold on the black market for pennies on the dollar.
Goodlatte said he saw copies of Windows XP on sale "across the street from the Kremlin" for less than $2 -- months before its official U.S. release.
He said that the caucus also will focus on file-sharing companies that run their businesses from small island nations like Vanuatu to avoid the United States's stronger copyright laws. It will not examine the recording industry's crackdown on U.S. file swappers, Goodlatte said.
Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a group representing file-sharing services, applauded the creation of the new caucus but criticized the entertainment industry for ignoring the needs of artists they claim to represent by not sharing earnings equitably.
"Counterfeiting and piracy is bad," Eisgrau said. "So is a marketplace in which millions and millions of Americans engage in an activity that doesn't reward individual artists."
In addition to naming the five countries to its piracy watch list, the caucus extolled Malaysia, Thailand and Mexico for trying to address U.S. concerns regarding piracy.
http://www.bizreport.com/article.php?art_id=5245
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Recording, film execs want colleges to charge for downloaded music - University administrators say they aren't interested in new student fee
Michael Gluskin
If the recording and film industries get their way, university students across the country will soon be paying for downloaded music - even if they don't use the Internet.
An independent group of film and music industry executives and national higher education leaders has been quietly crafting a pilot program that would make universities add a mandatory file-sharing fee to students' room and board payments.
The program, the brainchild of the recently formed independent Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities, is still in its infancy. Only a few universities have agreed to join the program, but its creators are giving stiff warnings to those who haven't complied, including students at this university.
"No one would be required to participate, but those who don't, their students run the risk of having lawsuits filed against them and getting put in prison ... Music thefts are in the billions of dollars, and Congress is taking it very seriously," said Steve MacCarthy, vice president of University Relations at Penn State University.
University officials here have shown little interest in the program. They have looked at several different programs, including the committee's pilot program, but have yet to settle on specifics, said Amy Ginther, coordinator of Project NEThics in the Office of Information Technology.
Penn State's President Graham Spanier, co-chair of the new committee, encouraged this university to participate in the spring pilot program last month in a letter sent to university President Dan Mote.
"As you no doubt know, the recording industry is stepping up its enforcement of copyright, and the legal liability of students engaged in unauthorized P2P [peer to peer] file sharing ... will increase significantly," Spanier wrote in the letter.
The pilot program, which includes Penn State and the University of Rochester, pairs universities with an online music service interested in developing file sharing technology that could be used on a college campus. In the letter to Mote, Spanier said the committee would act as a "marriage broker" between universities and interested music services.
If the pilot program is successful, a permanent system may be established on certain college campuses.
"One idea is a program to charge students a fee folded into their regular semester bills which would offset copyright royalties," Penn State spokesman Tysen Kendig said.
Any fees would be "nominal," MacCarthy said. He said the fee would be added to a student's room-and-board charge, and that Penn State is close to reaching an agreement with a music provider to start a pilot program.
The university should keep its priorities focused on the state budget crisis - not file sharing, said Student Government Association President Tim Daly.
"I wouldn't expect this university to be too excited about the program because the increases in mandatory fees and tuition are significant problems," he said.
http://www.inform.umd.edu/News/Diamo.../21/news5.html
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Peer-to-Peer Networking Grant
Crains
Researchers at Brooklyn's Polytechnic University and Columbia University have won a $2.8 million grant to study "peer-to-peer networking" as a way of ending computer networks' reliance on central servers.
Brooklyn Poly's Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications said the National Science Foundation gave the institutions the grant for research over the next five years. It is the lead university in the project; along with Columbia, the University of Massachusetts is also participating.
Peer-to-peer networks connect different computers with minimal or no reliance on central servers. Some expect it to eventually revolutionize the Internet and computing, creating a global network that allows huge numbers of computers to communicate directly. CATT says its research will focus on "developing guidelines, performance modeling and optimization tools" that can be used to create affordable peer-to-peer applications.
Dr. Keith Ross, the project's leader, said in a statement that the goal is to help create "a massive, global virtual computer which will be shared by users around the world."
http://www.crainsny.com/news.cms?newsId=6723
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Picasa Launches 'Hello' - The Easiest Way to Securely Share Digital Photos
Press Release
Hello Enables Friends to Instantly Share High Resolution Pictures, Chat About Them, and Print Them at Home or Online
Picasa, Inc., the leading developer of software which enables photographers to effortlessly organize, manage and share digital photos, announces the availability of Hello, a completely new way to share digital pictures. For consumers with an Internet connection, Hello opens a private peer-to-peer network link that enables friends to instantly share and chat about digital photographs.
Hello is offered as a free download at
www.hello.com and can be used with or without Picasa, the company's award-winning digital photo organizing software. For consumers who have Picasa, Hello is automatically integrated, allowing one-click photo sharing. To share photos using Hello, consumers simply select the pictures they would like to send in Picasa, click the "Send to Hello" button and specify the person to receive them. Immediately, those images appear on their contact's Hello window. Users can see which pictures their friend is viewing and can chat about them in real-time. Hello makes it simple to send single photos or hundreds without the need for attachments or uploading to websites. Consumers who do not have Picasa can use Windows Explorer to select pictures to share.
Any pictures received via Hello are automatically organized and stored in a Picasa album, organized by the sender's name. To print high quality prints at home, Hello automatically retrieves the high-resolution version of a picture from the sender, eliminating the need to send email requests back and forth.
"Hello recreates the experience of sitting down on your couch with a friend and showing them your photo album," says Lars Perkins, CEO of Picasa. "With Hello, you can watch your friends' reaction as they see your pictures, instead of waiting hours or days for a reply. Unlike e-mail, Hello lets you send 50 pictures just as quickly as sending 5, and your friends will always be able to choose and print the pictures they like best."
Highlights of Hello include:
* Instant sharing of pictures over a private peer-to-peer network - a
single click sends one or multiple images to one or many recipients.
* Chat upon receipt lets you narrate your pictures and provides immediate,
faster-than-email feedback
* Private network ensures only the people you want will see your pictures
* Allows users to send or request high-resolution images that can be
printed at home
* Request online prints with two clicks; days later, they arrive in the
mail
* Pre-paid printing option allows friends and family to order prints
without the hassle of entering shipping and credit card information
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031022/law075_1.html
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Austrailian ISP in 'World First' Music Industry Court Case
James Pearce
In what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the world, the Australian music industry has listed an Internet service provider (ISP) as a respondent in a court case involving alleged music piracy.
E-Talk Communications, trading as Comcen Internet Services found itself in Federal Court in front of Justice Brian Tamberlin in Sydney this afternoon charged with making money from the provision of copyright-infringing music files. This is the first time the music industry has accused an ISP of being directly involved in piracy by allowing its infrastructure to be used for file-trading activities, according to Michael Speck, the manager of Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), who led the industry's investigation.
However, lawyers representing E-Talk Communications claimed in court today that the music industry, in acting against its subsidiary, Comcen, were pursuing the wrong entity. They argued the industry should be pursuing another entity associated with E-Talk Communications. In response, lawyers for the music industry applicants -- which include Universal Music Australia, EMI Music Australia, Sony Music Entertainment (Australia), Warner Music Australia, BMG Australia and Festival Records -- claimed they had the right entity, and would simply add the other entity to the proceedings.
The tactic marks an escalation in the simmering battle between the music industry and the ISPs over how much responsibility the latter should take for any copyright infringing behaviour of their subscribers. Around the world the music industry is attempting to force ISPs to hand over the details of specific customers, and the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) pulled out of negotiations with the Internet Industry Association (IIA) over differences on this issue.
"This case proves what the music industry has been saying about the Internet industry for many years, that music piracy is an integral part of the ISP business model," Speck told ZDNet Australia . He added that the evidence uncovered in this case proves that ISPs know how much illegal file sharing is happening on their networks, and they embrace it for the revenue.
"If things don't change we'll be going after more ISPs," said Speck.
The charge is the result of an 11-month investigation into the Web site
http://www.mp3s4free.net, culminating in raids over Friday and Saturday last week. The registrant of the domain name, Australian Stephen Cooper, was also charged but failed to appear in court today, prompting an adjournment of proceedings until Tuesday 28 October.
"In my experience investigating the revenue structure of Web sites such as [mp3s4free.net] the ISP hosting the Web site, [Com-cen], stands to benefit economically from the increased consumption of bandwidth that would result from an increase in the flow of traffic to the Web site and an increase in the number of sound recordings downloaded by visitors to the Web site due to the large size of music files," Speck's affadavit.
"The Web site appears to me to be highly organised," said Speck. "It provides a whole user interface to encourage Internet users to find digital music files and to assist them in the download process."
Lawyers for the music industry claim the Web site received 7 million unique visitors from around the world over the past 12 months.
"In my experience investigating Internet piracy and other piracy, this Web site is one of the largest sites of its kind, providing thousands of infringing recordings and continuously providing very recent releases based on top local and international charts for free download, under a highly accessible domain name and using obvious metatags," read the affidavit.
Speck also noted the Web site had disguised some music files by relabelling them as jpg files, "so as to avoid detection by persons or organisations, such as MIPI, monitoring files stored or shared".
The maintainers of the Web site appear to be aware of the illegality of their practice, as in the "Frequently Asked Questions" section under the question "Are MP3s Legal?" it reads:
"MP3s are both legal and illegal. It is legal when the song's copyright holder has granted permission to download and play the song. It's still legal if you encode the MP3 for personal use, however it is illegal to distribute or trade MP3s without permission from the song's copyright holder."
However, this is incorrect. Under current Australian laws it is illegal to make a back-up copy of legally obtained copyrighted material for personal use without the permission of the copyright holder.
The site also includes a disclaimer stating: "All audio files can be downloaded for evaluation purposes only and must be deleted after 24 hours! If you like a song, please buy the original. If you don't agree with these rules, the webmaster of mp3s4free.net, our host and advertisers, are not responsible for anything. When you download a song, you take full responsibility for doing so. None of the files on this site are stored on our servers. We are just providing links to remote files."
The move comes amongst widespread opposition to the U.S. music industry's campaign to suing individual file-swappers. A week-long boycott of the record industry which started on Monday, 'Stop RIAA Lawsuits Coalition', has seen 122 Web sites join it.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebu...0279975,00.htm
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Pricey perhaps, but "not going to be the cataclysmic event that the music industry experienced."
Film Industry Pay Dearly For Piracy
Richard Wray
The impact of internet piracy could be losing the film industry $460m (£275m) annually within seven years unless the leading motion picture studios and distributors act now, warns a new report.
Informa Media Group believes revenues from legitimate sales of movies over the internet will be more than $870m by 2010. But sales over the internet would be worth $1.33bn if the industry clamped down completely on online piracy.
Adam Thomas, the author of the report, Film on the Internet, said the industry is unlikely to go the same way as the music labels, where online piracy has had a major effect on profits, but the studios should not be complacent.
"It is not going to be the cataclysmic event that the music industry experienced but there are warning signs and it could be a serious issue," he said.
In fact, the prognosis given in the Informa report is not as dire as one given earlier in the year by Deloitte & Touche. A report from the consultants warned that online piracy could cost the top studios up to $4bn annually within the next two years.
The Informa report estimates that 144,000 films are downloaded every day across the world or 6,000 an hour.
But internet piracy can have a detrimental effect on more than just corporate profits: an unfinished version of the action movie The Hulk was available on the internet two weeks before its cinema release. As more internet users watched the pirated copy, online chat rooms filled up with bad reviews of what was an unfinished version of the film.
Some in the industry have blamed this "bad press" for the poor takings and official reviews received by the film.
"It may have been a bad film anyway, but that [the pirate copy] did not help," said Mr Thomas.
So far the industry has been shielded from the full force of internet piracy by the huge quantity of data inherent in films, leading to lengthy download times.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/s...067446,00.html
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Hollywood 'Need Not Fear Piracy'
BBC
Hollywood has little to fear from internet piracy, according to a business research group.
File-sharing and CD/DVD piracy will only have a limited impact on digital film sales, said Informa Media.
Instead Hollywood will actually thrive on the internet through legitimate online sales, the group's report adds.
Although the study estimates losses to the film industry of $460m (£275m) in 2010, it predicts legitimate global film sales will soar.
Legal movie sales via the internet will outstrip the losses from piracy, raking in $3.49bn (£2.1bn) by 2010, said the group in its report Film on the Internet.
According to the group's research, about 1% of the current 1.5m broadband users connected to a pirate peer-to-peer network are actively downloading at least one film at any one time.
This will lose the film industry $92m (£55m) in 2003, said Informa Media, reaching the $460m figure in just seven years.
In other predictions for 2010, Informa Media said North America would still sell the most movies online, accounting for 41.9% of the global total.
DVD sales would be reduced from 97% to 75% of the digital film sales market by 2010.
Among the online formats, digital downloads are expected to be the most successful. Streaming is less attractive because users have to be online while watching, whereas downloading allows users to watch the film file at leisure.
The group predicts subscription services will be a success, particularly to sites which offer a wide range of independent films.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently launched an advertising campaign to fight piracy.
They have also issued a ban on "screeners", the DVDs of Oscar-nominated films issued to Oscar voters.
Hundreds of stars and filmmakers are protesting against the ban, saying it will curb the chances of independent films because the screeners are sometimes the only chance for their films to be seen.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertain...lm/3210486.stm
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Same Study, Completely Opposite Interpretations On Downloadable Movies
Contributed by Mike
This isn't the first time that I've seen the same study interpreted completely differently by two different reporters. However, I think it is the first time that I've seen the same study interpreted in completely opposite ways by the same news organization. We're not talking about opinion pieces, either, but two supposedly factual pieces written about the same study concerning movie downloads. Both are written for the Guardian in the UK, but make completely opposite points. The first one says that the movie industry is going to "pay dearly for piracy" online. Meanwhile, the other one says that "Hollywood has little to fear from internet piracy". Yes. They are both talking about the same exact study from Informa Media Group, and both of these articles appear on the same Guardian site. The study basically says that there's plenty of money to be made in online movie downloads, but that there will be some loss due to "piracy". No matter which interpretation of the study you prefer, I think the overall study is flawed. Beyond using the typical "extrapolate and project" method of figuring out where online movies are headed, the study does little to nothing to determine if someone downloading a free movie uses that experience to decide whether or not to go out and see the movie in the theater and/ or buy the full DVD themselves (to get the extra features and such). It assumes, again, that the static movie is what people are buying, rather than the actual social experience of "going out to the movies", in which case a download is a promotion for the movie, itself. The study also makes a number of random assumptions, saying that 50% of downloaded movies will result in a lost sale of $3.50. It doesn't say how they came up with either number, and both can easily be argued.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20031021/106214.shtml
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The Lowdown On Legal Music File Sharing
Sam McDonald
The music business wants to make an honest listener out of you.
While the Recording Industry Association of America threatens to drag illegal downloaders and uploaders into court, a number of services are fighting to meet the demand for lawfully distributed Internet music.
Leading the charge is iTunes, the Apple service that grabbed market share with the help of its popular iPod portable player. Apple recently unveiled a PC- compatible version of iTunes. If that takes off, it could be on the road to pay-per-song dominance.
It won't get there without a struggle, though. More competitors are set to emerge, including a re-tooled, legal version of Napster, the renegade Internet site that helped ignite the file-sharing furor.
Here's a quick look at how some of the legitimate download services stack up:
BuyMusic.com - One of the first digital music download services for Windows users, BuyMusic has worked out most of the kinks. Downloads are offered by the song or by the album. Prices range generally from 79 cents to $1.14 a song, $7.99 to $12.89 for an album. Most tunes are 99 cents, most albums $9.99.
There's no subscription plan, no monthly fee. You simply pay for what you download.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, the service offers a library of 300,000 songs. A spot check showed that it includes a broad but not necessarily deep selection of rock, blues, jazz and rap. Music is organized conveniently into genres and subgenres.
The service does allow previews of songs, but only with the Microsoft Windows Media Player.
iTunes.com - It's not just for Mac users anymore. A Windows version of the Apple music download service is easy to navigate. Browsing and sampling music is a breeze. Prices are generally 99 cents a song, $9.99 an album. Some full discs are as cheap as $6.93.
We noticed that a number of albums are not available in their entirety. And using iTunes isn't as simple as visiting the Web site. It requires downloading the system's player and search engine. Also, Rolling Stone pegged the number of songs at 200,000, making it one of the smaller collections of the competing services. It's likely to grow, however. And the database won points for offering albums by cult artists like The Shaggs, a late-'60s girl rock group, and Mutabaruka, a beloved reggae act.
Rhapsody - This subscription service, found at
www.listen.com, offers two primary online products. A $9.95-a-month top tier provides access to what Rhapsody describes, not so modestly, as the largest legal collection of digital music in the world. The collection contains more than 20,000 albums from more than 9,000 artists. Rolling Stone put the number of stockpiled songs at 350,000. Online listening is unlimited. The ability to burn CDs from the collection is available for an additional fee per track, typically 79 cents per burned song.
A $4.95 per month Radio Plus service allows customers to use computers like a jukebox. Music is streamed, not downloaded. CDs can't be burned from the Rhapsody library at this tier.
Napster.com - This legendary - or notorious - name in Internet music is set to return as a legal service Oct. 29. Details are sketchy as yet, but the Napster Web site promises a gigantic library of 500,000 tracks and prices of 99 cents per song, $9.95 per album. The company is now a division of software maker Roxio Inc. Whether music consumers will warm up to a legit version of the service is anyone's guess.
http://www.dailypress.com/news/local...ws-local-final
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Music To My Peers
Chris Marlowe
The recording industry's attempts to grapple with online piracy have included education and lawsuits, pitting it against consumers.
When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was first introduced in Congress six years ago, it was viewed by lawmakers as a means of bringing the United States' copyright laws into line with other countries that adhere to the standards set by World Intellectual Property Organization treaties.
But even before the DMCA was signed into law in 1998, the entertainment industry had staked one side of a battlefield that had consumer electronics manufacturers, providers of online services, First Amendment experts and other interests aligned against the other.
It was inevitable that the music biz would lead the charge, if only because music downloads are more feasible for the average American with a computer and a high-speed Internet connection than are full- length movies and TV series.
The RIAA, which stands alongside the MPAA as showbiz's most powerful lobbying group, has taken legal action around the world to shut down file- sharing services starting with Napster and Scour. It has battled technology developments that it deems to be aiding and abetting copyright crime. It has also targeted the Internet service providers and telephone companies that provide the two-way pipe that facilitate the download-on-demand marketplace.
But the RIAA took its campaign into uncharted legal waters in April when it began suing individuals that it suspected of engaging in unauthorized downloads of copyrighted materials. The trade organization used its DMCA authority to issue subpoenas -- which lack a judge's scrutiny, since they require only the signature of a federal court clerk -- and force ISPs, telephone companies and others to reveal the true identity of previously anonymous customers.
That amounts to a dangerous level of authority to grant to a private trade group and possibly a violation of the Constitution, legal experts say.
"We are told that copyright owners are entitled to this unprecedented subpoena power so they can effectively exploit their copyright monopolies," said attorney Daniel Ballard of McDonough Holland & Allen. "We are not told why that right -- or that monopoly -- is more valuable than the privacy and due process rights those subpoenas invade." McDonough Holland & Allen represents at least four of the individuals who have been sued and has consulted with about 20 more.
For all the wide-ranging strategies and tactics in play in recent and pending digital copyright cases, the arguments boil down to a tug of war over protecting the fair- use rights of consumers versus the ownership interests of copyright holders. The music industry is waging all-out war on this front at a time when CD sales continue to decline, falling another 9% domestically and 11% worldwide last year.
"There is no question that piracy is a huge component of the challenge," RIAA chairman and CEO Mitch Bainwol said. "Obviously you've got physical piracy and the online piracy. To suggest that piracy is not a major factor in the decline of sales is not supportable."
Consumers are fighting for the freedom to make the most of new technologies in the sanctity of their own homes and on their own digital devices. The latest cases have drawn on the precedent established in 1984 by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the so-called Betamax case that fair use encompassed home videotaping of a television broadcast despite strong opposition from the entertainment industry. The Betamax case also added the phrase "substantial noninfringing uses" to the copyright law lexicon. The court agreed that some people were using their VCRs to pirate movies but decided that the technology could not be blamed since its primary function was legitimate and met a consumer demand for time-shifting of programs.
In a document on its Web site, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation states its concerns for the future of fair use: "While stopping copyright infringement is an important policy objective, (the DMCA) throws out the baby of fair use with the bath water of digital piracy. ... Copyright owners can unilaterally eliminate fair use, rewriting the copyright bargain developed by Congress and the courts over more than a century." It goes on to cite the advent of copy-protected CDs as a prime example of "the collision between fair use and the DMCA" since they restrict how consumers can enjoy music they legitimately purchased.
Napster (which shares only a brand name with Roxio's new, completely legal service) used that logic as its defense when the RIAA successfully sued it in 1999. The music industry claimed that unlike the Betamax case, Napster participated in the infringing: It was created solely for copying CDs without permission, the downturn in music sales was caused by such copying, and the company could filter out copyrighted material if it wanted to. The court agreed.
Indeed, most of the judicial rulings to date have gone in the industry's favor. But showbiz was dealt a setback in April in a federal judge's ruling on a lawsuit filed by the RIAA and the MPAA against file-swapping services Grokster, Streamcast Networks' Morpheus, and Sharman Networks' Kazaa.
U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson decided that Grokster and Morpheus had no control over how they were used and therefore could not be held liable for its customers doing illegal things with the technology. (Kazaa was not affected by the ruling).
The entertainment industry's appeal against the Grokster ruling has not yet been heard but has already caused the RIAA to change its tack. The court had virtually said that the industry's only recourse was to sue individual users -- and on April 3, it did. The first to be sued in federal court for direct and contributory copyright infringement were for East Coast college students: Daniel Peng, a sophomore at Princeton University; Jesse Jordan, a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Aaron Sherman, a senior at RPI; and Joseph Nievelt, a junior at Michigan Technological University.
All four settled out of court within the month for amounts ranging from $12,000 and $17,500 each, but without admission of wrongdoing. Members of the public immediately began sending donations. On June 22, Jordan put a notice on his Web site asking people to stop, after the amount he received reached $12,005.67. As of last month, Peng had received donations totaling more than two-thirds of his settlement debt.
The RIAA maintains that it is taking the extraordinary step of suing college students and other individuals to send a message about the illegality of music downloading.
"It is critical that this industry do what it can to get the message out. If it requires legal action against individuals, then so be it," Bainwol said. The aggressive campaign hasn't been without PR risks for the lobbying group.
On Sept. 8, the RIAA cited an additional 261 individuals for copyright violations. On that list were Brianna LaHara, a 12-year-old honor student living in a New York government-assisted housing development, and Durwood Pickle, 71-year-old Texan who let his grandchildren use the computer when they visited. The legal action was dropped against Sarah Ward, a 65-year-old educator and sculptor, when it became known that only Mac computers were in her home -- Macs cannot use Kazaa, the peer-to-peer program the RIAA said Ward used to illegally download music.
More recently, software engineer Ross Plank became the second public assertion that the RIAA had targeted the wrong person. He said the RIAA has the wrong IP address (an online computer's unique identifier), he doesn't have file sharing software anywhere on his wireless network, and he had never even heard of most of the Spanish-language music artists the subpoena said he downloaded.
"There was an understanding that there were going to be cases that would provoke sympathy," Bainwol said. "But the critical bottom line is that when you aggregate millions and millions of people, who, however innocently, are downloading, you end up producing a marketplace environment that is devastating to the jobs of clerks, songwriters, artists and even people who work in record companies."
The Internet service providers have their own reasons to be concerned over these RIAA lawsuits, too. Verizon Communications refused to disclose the identities of its customers accused of piracy, as requested by the RIAA, until ordered to do so by a federal judge in January. SBC Communications and Pacific Bell Internet Services have also taken up the fight.
The telephone companies challenged Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a provision that created a streamlined subpoena procedure. Verizon said that it did not apply to ISPs that are not hosting potentially infringing material on their own servers. More than a dozen amicus briefs had been filed arguing that Section 512 of the DMCA is unconstitutional, saying that it gave copyright owners the ability to violate protected, anonymous speech.
The recording industry commenced its second round of legal action against individuals last week, when it sent a warning letter notifying more than 200 people that they could be sued for stealing music. Those letters fulfilled a promise Bainwol made to Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., during a Senate hearing examining the association's use of the lawsuits and the controversial DMCA subpoena process.
DMCA critics maintain that the right to be presumed innocent, the right to remain anonymous while engaging in lawful activities and the right to due process all are under threat.
"Though the copyright industries generate enormous wealth for our economy and clearly have the right to vigorously enforce their copyrights, that right is insufficient to justify, without prior judicial review, an invasion of our fundamental personal liberties," attorney Ballard says.
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Open-Source Audio in a Proprietary World
David Halperin
Whether or not open-source audio standards will threaten the dominance of MP3 and WMA remains to be seen. Open- source audio developers -- opposed by aggressive commercial giants, ideologically committed to nonprofit but needing development capital -- seem to face unbeatable odds.
Even before we could send recorded sound reliably over the Internet and a file-sharing revolution set the music industry in an uproar, the large size of digital audio files was causing headaches. A minute of raw stereo sound at CD quality -- or 16-bit, 44.1 KHz sampling -- occupies 10.5 MB on a hard drive. Obviously, files of song-length recordings at that size can quickly get unwieldy.
Compression proved to be the answer. In 1987, technicians at the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen in West Germany began working on a sophisticated compression algorithm, one that could achieve compression ratios of 10:1 and better while preserving high-quality sound.
The original test bed for this technology was a box of electronics the size of a refrigerator, but by 1992 the Fraunhofer team, working with Deutsche Thomson Brandt, had reduced it to software and it became part of the MPEG standard. Officially known as MPEG-1 Layer III -- also endorsed by the ISO -- the new kid on the block soon became known as MP3 , and the rest, as they say, is history.
Players, both software and hardware, were created to play MP3s. Combined with Napster's peer-to-peer file-sharing network, the compact new codec -- or compression-decompression algorithm -- helped overturn the traditional relationship between music publishers and consumers, a confrontation now being played out in the courts.
Fraunhofer and Thomson still own the copyrights to MP3 and charge developers to use it in their authoring packages and players. A refinement, MP3Pro, has recently hit the streets, and the new MPEG-4 standard incorporates Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) developed by Dolby and used by Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) for its iTunes pay-per-track online music store.
Meanwhile, other developers have not been idle. Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) incorporated a proprietary audio codec into its Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, and RealNetworks (Nasdaq: RNWK) used its own codec in its RealPlayer systems. Like MP3, these formats must be paid for by developers wishing to use them. Both the authoring applications used to create music in these formats and the players themselves are usually charged fees.
Those fees typically vary with the number of units to be produced and, in some cases, the nature of the use. The numbers are serious: 100 million MP3 players, for example, are expected to be in use worldwide by the end of this year, and a billion music tracks are said to be downloaded every month.
Open-source developers have been busy, too. As Christopher Montgomery, founder and lead programmer at Xiph.org, an open-source development project, puts it, "Open source is not a fad any more than the Internet is; it is a necessary force driving innovation and the Internet forward while protecting the interests of individuals, artists, developers and consumers."
Several open-source audio encoding-decoding formats have been created, and they are supported by many authoring and player packages. There's LAME. There's Monkey's Audio and a voice-oriented codec called Speex.
There's also Exact Audio Copy, software written by a student at the University of Dortmund in Germany. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, there's the oddly named Ogg Vorbis, which could be the strongest challenger yet to the proprietary music formats.
"We are seeing Ogg Vorbis adopted by MP3 player manufacturers and chip manufacturers who, as the market grows and as the lower end becomes increasingly commoditized, are looking for ways to boost their feature sets," IDC senior analyst Susan Kevorkian told TechNewsWorld.
"One way for them to do that is to support a greater number of codecs," said Kevorkian. "The crux of the matter is how many people are using it and how much music is available encoded in that format."
You might think the choice of compression format would be easy: Run some tests and see which sounds best. But it's not so simple. First, modern compressors are based on psychoacoustic effects - - that is, tests that rely on human hearing. Comparison tests -- and there have been many -- are therefore largely subjective. Almost everyone comes up with a different set of bests and worsts.
In addition to psychoacoustic issues, there are Internet-specific issues: To be practical, a codec must support streaming. There's also the choice between lossy and lossless algorithms. The former eliminates supposedly nonessential data to achieve a greater compression ratio, but at a cost in quality and in the time required to encode and (more critically) decode.
Data transfer rate plays a role, too: The holy grail of audio compression is the best quality combined with the lowest bit-rate. Codecs can succeed or fail on that factor alone. Backward compatibility is important, too, as well as support from third-party manufacturers. Even content matters: Classical music demands more from a codec than rock. Finally, there's the question of digital rights management (DRM) to prevent unauthorized copying of audio content.
DRM might be the critical issue. "The question is, are the music labels actively supporting [Ogg]?" Kevorkian said. "Because if digital rights management isn't a part of it, then it's certainly not the direction that the music industry's going. In fact, [open-source developers] are proponents of unprotected codecs."
However, said Kevorkian, the major record labels are experimenting more actively with CD content protection technologies that include both a protected set of Red Book audio files - - the standard audio CD file format -- plus Windows Media Audio files, which are protected so that you'd be able to transfer them to your PC's hard drive but not distribute them online.
"Also," she said, "as the music industry supports paid music services more actively, we expect the majority of paid music services to support Windows Media Audio because the codec and the DRM are closely integrated, so every music service provider doesn't have to think about combining the two like Apple did."
Whether or not open-source audio standards will threaten the dominance of MP3 and WMA remains to be seen. Open-source audio developers -- opposed by aggressive commercial giants, ideologically committed to nonprofit but needing development capital -- seem to face unbeatable odds. Perhaps they'll take heart by looking at open source's recent progress in the corporate world.
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Database Protection Bill Advances in Congress
Andy Sullivan
An effort to protect school guides, news archives and other databases from wholesale copying won the approval of a congressional subcommittee on Thursday, despite objections of lawmakers who said it is not necessary.
The House of Representatives intellectual-property subcommittee voted 11-4 to provide a legal umbrella for publishers of factual information, such as courtroom decisions and professional directories, similar to the copyright laws that protect music, novels and other creative works.
Database providers have pushed for such protection for years, saying they have few legal tools to protect themselves from rivals who copy and resell information that they have painstakingly assembled.
Business, consumer and library groups have blocked passage in previous sessions of Congress, saying database publishers can protect themselves through existing laws and terms-of-service agreements.
Lawmakers drafted a more narrowly focused version this year, and the subcommittee amended it further so research activities at colleges and universities would not be affected.
But opponents at the subcommittee meeting said they still saw no reason for it to become law.
"This is the classic solution in search of a problem," said Virginia Democratic Rep. Rick Boucher.
"When all is said and done, this is an effort to create a property right in an area that cannot be copywritten," said California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren.
Bill proponent Rep. Howard Berman, a California Democrat, wondered if perhaps they had weakened it too much.
"All that hard work has appeared to reduce support for this ball, rather than reduce its opposition," Berman said.
No similar bill has yet been introduced in the Senate.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=3631754
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Reading the Broadcast Flag Rules
Edward W. Felten
With the FCC apparently about to announce Broadcast Flag rules, there has been a flurry of letters to the FCC and legislators about the harm such rules would do. The Flag is clearly a bad idea. It will raise the price of digital TV decoders; and it will retard innovation in decoder design; but it won't make a dent in infringement. It's also pretty much inevitable that the FCC will issue rules anyway -- and soon.
It's worth noting, though, that we don't know exactly what the FCC's rules will say, and that the details can make a big difference. When the FCC does issue its rules, we'll need to read them carefully to see exactly how much harm they will do.
Here is my guide to what to look for in the rules:
First, look at the criteria that an anti-copying technology must meet to be on the list of approved technologies. Must a technology give copyright owners control over all uses of content; or is a technology allowed support legal uses such as time-shifting; or is it required to support such uses?
Second, look at who decides which technologies can be on the approved list. Whoever makes this decision will control entry into the market for digital TV decoders. Is this up to the movie and TV industries; or does an administrative body like the FCC decide; or is each vendor responsible for determining whether their own technology meets the requirements?
Third, see whether the regulatory process allows for the possibility that no suitable anti-copying technology exists. Will the mandate be delayed if no strong anti-copying technology exists; or do the rules require that some technology be certified by a certain date, even if none is up to par?
Finally, look at which types of devices are subject to design mandates. To be covered, must a device be primarily designed for decoding digital TV; or is it enough for it to be merely capable of doing so? Do the mandates apply broadly to "downstream devices"? And is something a "downstream device" based on what it is primarily designed to do, or on what it is merely capable of doing?
This last issue is the most important, since it defines how broadly the rule will interfere with technological progress. The worst-case scenario is an overbroad rule that ends up micro-managing the design of general-purpose technologies like personal computers and the Internet. I know the FCC means well, but I wish I could say I was 100% sure that they won't make that mistake.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000458.html
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The Honorable Michael K. Powell
Chairman
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, S.W.
Washington, DC 20554
Dear Chairman Powell:
Recent reports suggest that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon act on a petition to implement a so-called "broadcast flag" proposal purportedly designed to help thwart digital piracy. If adopted, the proposal would require all digital televisions, computers and other consumer electronics devices sold in the United States to look for and respond to a specific, technological standard to prevent digital television broadcasts from being redistributed over the Internet or outside a secure home network.
As you know, this proposal has been roundly endorsed by the film and broadcast industries, but it has split off significant portions of the consumer electronics and information technology industries into opposing camps. More importantly, however, thousands of American consumers have filed comments with the Commission, and consumer advocate groups contend that granting this petition would significantly impact the commonplace viewing and recording of broadcast television that consumers have become accustomed to since the introduction of the VCR more than twenty years ago.
Consumer advocates and computer companies have also argued that the broadcast flag proposal will remain an ineffective solution to television piracy so long as there are unprotected analog outputs used to link together consumers' televisions with their cable and satellite set-top boxes, their VCRs, and increasingly, their TiVo's and DVD recorders. Notably, the Motion Picture Association of America raised similar concerns in the context of your recently completed proceeding on "plug-and-play" digital televisions, commenting to the Commission that "the continued availability of unprotected analog connections" means that the plug-and-play proposal itself "fails to achieve meaningful protection of digital content."
I understand that the content industries have asked the FCC to consider this action to support their efforts to protect highly valued digital television content from being redistributed illegally. I respect their legitimate desire to protect their valuable content. I would be concerned, however, if such protection means consumers must face an endless cycle of replacing their home electronic devices each time the next, incremental piece of the piracy solution is unveiled.
I am writing to inquire how implementation of the broadcast flag proposal would impact consumers -- both immediately and in the future. In particular, I ask you to comment on whether this impact would be mitigated or further exacerbated by future Commission actions to address the "analog hole" issues that all parties agree will persist even if a broadcast flag is implemented. Given these apparent doubts about the effectiveness of a broadcast flag, has the Commission considered whether the anticipated benefit to be derived from such a mandate justifies its potential cost to consumers?
I note that this letter reflects my own concerns on this important question of public policy. It is not written on behalf of any party seeking favorable disposition of any matter in any party to any proceeding before the Commission. Please treat this letter in compliance with all applicable substantive and procedural rules.
Sincerely,
John McCain
Chairman
cc: Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy
Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein
Commissioner Michael Copps
Commissioner Kevin Martin
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TV on DVD: What's the Difference?
Reuters
Television shows may look the same -- or even better -- when they appear on DVD. But sometimes, they don't sound the same.
Studios frequently have to replace the music heard during the original broadcast for the DVD release, largely because of the prohibitive costs associated with licensing the music, studio executives say.
Sony on December 16 will release the second-season set of Dawson's Creek, featuring new music that replaces the pop tunes from the series. Disney's first-season set of Felicity contained new music. And Universal has said that Miami Vice won't be coming to DVD anytime soon because of the difficulty of obtaining the rights to the pop music that crowded the show's soundtrack.
But in some cases, like Warner's Smallville, the music remains intact.
It all comes down to a matter of money, said Gord Lacey, founder of TVShowsOnDVD.com.
"(Studios are) saying, 'We couldn't afford to license the music we used in the show,"' Lacey said. "It's happening more and more, actually." Indeed, studio executives acknowledge that the price of obtaining those rights is prohibitive.
It does get pretty expensive to hand over cash to license the pop music that plays all too frequently in today's television series, Lacey said. And it seems as if the music companies are taking their own beleaguered industry's woes out on the studios by charging -- or trying to charge -- top dollar to let their acts be heard in DVDs, he said.
But the expense appears to be worth it to Warner Home Video, at least in the case of the Smallville first- season set.
"We believe that the consumer is entitled to receive the original and uncut music as it was delivered during its original and subsequent airings," said Jeff Baker, VP of nontheatrical franchise marketing. "Therefore, our DVD version reflects the original music." Baker said he can't think of any instances of Warner having substituted music on television shows.
But cost is indeed a factor, and Warner is sitting on two TV series, which Baker didn't name, slated for release next year, all because of the cost of music clearances.
"As the market tightens in the next year or two, we will not overextend financially if it does not make sense," Baker said. "We will either shelve the product or consider substituting the music."
The studios themselves seem to have been blindsided by the very success of TV shows on DVD. As a result, they weren't legally prepared for music clearances when it came time to put their shows on DVD, Lacey said.
The success of TV on DVD is "a relatively new business opportunity" and as a result, contracts were not written with music licensing for the DVD in mind, Baker said.
But if studios are out in front of the issue with their fans, Lacey said, consumers accept it. He said that for its first-season set of Felicity, Disney licensed the music that played in the first and last episodes -- and replaced everything in between.
"They basically didn't let consumers know," he said. "You get fans, they put it in there, and all of a sudden the music is different, and they don't like that. They complain very loudly." But Disney added a note to the back of the series' second-season set advising buyers of the change, he said.
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60890,00.html
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Senate Committee Approves P2P Security Bill
Roy Mark
The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Wednesday approved a bill mandating federal agencies to
develop and implement security plans to protect their network systems from the risks posed by peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the same legislation.
Both the House and the Senate have already implemented security measures against P2P security threats through both technical and non-technical means, including firewalls and employee training. The Government Network Security Act of 2003 would give Executive Branch agencies six months to take similar steps.
The federal government uses and stores a wide variety of classified and sensitive information, including information vital to national security, defense, law enforcement, economic markets, public health, and the environment. Government computers also contain personal and financial information of U.S. citizens and businesses.
Installation of P2P software on government computers can expose this sensitive information to the public.
The House Committee on Government Reform issued a staff report in May showing how through a "couple of simple searches" of the most popular P2P programs, personal information such as tax returns, medical records, and confidential legal documents and business files were found.
"We learned (through hearings held in May) that using these programs can be similar to giving a complete stranger access to your personal file cabinet," said bill co-sponsor Tom Davis (R-VA) said. "Needless to say, file sharing programs create a number of risks for federal departments and agencies if they are installed on government computers. Because files are shared anonymously on peer to peer networks, there is also a risk of the spread of viruses, worms, and other malicious computer files."
Instead of banning P2P networks on government computers, a Davis spokesman told internetnews.com in Sept., "We didn't want to be that draconian." Neither the legislation, the staff committee report nor the Davis spokesman could site how many government computers have P2P software installed.
Both the House and Senate legislation contains language that states, "Innovations in peer-to-peer technology for government applications can be pursued on intragovernmental networks that do not pose risks to network security."
http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/3097621
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Radio Stations Must Pay Royalties for Webcasting
Shannon P. Duffy
In a huge win for the recording industry, a federal appeals court has refused to overturn a rule passed by the U.S. Copyright Office that says radio stations must pay royalties when their broadcasts are simultaneously transmitted digitally over the Internet in a practice known as "streaming."
The unanimous three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that the rule was correct because Congress intended for the royalty exemption to apply only to "traditional, over-the- air broadcasts."
The decision in Bonneville International Corp. v. Peters, handed down Friday, upholds an August 2001 decision by U.S. District Judge Berle M. Schiller. The district judge had concluded that the rule was entitled to deference, and even if it were not, it would still pass legal muster because it is consistent with recent congressional efforts to address technological advances that threaten record sales.
The 3rd Circuit concurred, finding that, in passing the rule, the Copyright Office correctly interpreted two statutes passed in recent years to respond to technological advances -- the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995, or DPRA, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, passed in 1998.
Visiting 7th Circuit Senior Judge Richard D. Cudahy traced recent evolutions in copyright law as it relates to music, noting that for many years, the law granted protection only for public performances, and provided no protection at all for owners of the copyrights to sound recordings.
In 1971, Cudahy said, Congress passed the Sound Recording Amendment, granting limited copyright in the reproduction of sound recordings in an effort to combat recording piracy.
"However, there was still no right to public performance of that sound recording," Cudahy noted.
Although radio stations routinely pay copyright royalties to songwriters and composers -- through associations like the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) -- for the privilege of broadcasting recorded performances of popular music, they do not pay the recording industry royalties for that same privilege, Cudahy said.
The system worked well until about 10 years ago because "the recording industry and broadcasters existed in a sort of symbiotic relationship wherein the recording industry recognized that radio airplay was free advertising that lured consumers to retail stores where they would purchase recordings."
But the 1990s "brought significant technological change," Cudahy said, when advancements in digital- recording technology created the possibility that consumers would soon have access to services whereby they could pay for high-quality digital audio transmissions or even pay for specific songs to be played on demand.
The recording industry, Cudahy said, "was concerned that the traditional balance that had existed with the broadcasters would be disturbed and that new, alternative paths for consumers to purchase recorded music (in ways that cut out the recording industry's products) would erode sales of recorded music."
Congress responded by passing the DPRA, which added a digital audio transmission performance right to the list of protectable rights.
But, the DPRA also exempted noninteractive, nonsubscription broadcast transmission. That law, too, proved inadequate, Cudahy found, because technology continued to advance, and the Internet soon became a viable medium over which to transmit, in real time, sound recordings.
In 1998, Congress amended the DPRA by passing the DMCA, which specifically addressed Internet streaming.
In March 2000, the Recording Industry Association of America petitioned the Copyright Office for a rulemaking to clarify whether AM/FM webcasting -- the simultaneous Internet streaming by radio broadcasters of their AM/FM broadcast programming -- was a "nonsubscription broadcast transmission" that was exempt from the digital audio transmission performance right.
When the Copyright Office sided with the RIAA, the National Association of Broadcasters responded by filing suit in U.S. District Court to challenge the rule. Schiller upheld the rule, finding that "the Copyright Act evinces Congress' intent to empower the Copyright Office to interpret the statute."
Over the years, Schiller said, Congress has clearly shown that it "recognized the expertise of the Copyright Office in matters relating to copyright."
Turning to the specific question of whether the Copyright Office had the power to decide the issue, Schiller found that "Congress implicitly, if not explicitly, entrusted the Copyright Office with the task of determining which entities and means of transmission would be exempted."
Now the 3rd Circuit has ruled that Schiller got it right because the rule is consistent with, and effectuates the goals of, the most recent statutes.
"The exemptions the DPRA afforded to radio broadcasters were specifically intended to protect only traditional radio broadcasting, and did not contemplate protecting AM/FM webcasting," Cudahy wrote in an opinion joined by 3rd Circuit Judges Jane R. Roth and D. Brooks Smith.
"The DMCA's silence on AM/FM webcasting gives us no affirmative grounds to believe that Congress intended to expand the protections contemplated by the DPRA," Cudahy wrote.
The broadcasters, Cudahy said, "must show something more than congressional silence to argue convincingly that Congress intended to lump AM/FM webcasting with over-the-air broadcasting."
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1066080445213