[JackSpratts]

Check Out The Pixels On That Babe!
Russell Smith

This week marks the beginning of the voting for the first Miss Digital World, the first international virtual-beauty contest -- that is, a beauty contest for fantasies, for technically perfect, non-existent women.

Anyone can vote (on a website: www.missdigitalworld.com), after viewing pictures and video of the contestants. The entries are created by advertising agencies, film production companies and game programmers; the winner will be crowned in a ''breathtaking, tear-jerking ceremony'', broadcast on the Net.

The contestants won't just be images; they will have synthesized voices and personalities and measurements and dates of birth.

It won't be the first time virtual women will have become actual stars -- game and cartoon heroes such as Lara Croft (the tomb raider later played by the non-virtual Angelina Jolie) and the television announcer Ananova have long had international fan followings. Quite a few million people evidently feel there is no difference between worshipping a cartoon character with a fictitious life and a Hollywood star who is only made real through electronic media, and who can blame them?

The difference that the new contest introduces is largely one of technical quality. These models will be of startling photographic verisimilitude; they will look exactly like model-stars, and will be created, probably, by making composites of actual stars and models -- of the perfect features of each. In an amusing but serious twist, the contest even includes a morality clause: the virtual contestants must "sign" declarations stating that they have never "taken part" in a pornographic performance. (This will probably only serve as a red flag to the hackers who will doubtless re-engineer the winning character as a pornographic fantasy, coming very soon to a website near you. Most cartoon characters, including Lara Croft and Snow White, already star in erotic images on the web.)

Interestingly, the designers who have the technical expertise to design entries to Miss Digital World are overwhelmingly male. The world of computer programming is famously masculine -- famously non-sensual, too; it's a world of guys who are not likely to date supermodels. We have finally managed to create an entirely closed loop of the production and consumption of female beauty -- and actual women are no longer required.

This is unusual. Contrary to popular belief, it is not men, on the whole, who determine the beauty ideal in fashion magazines. The readership of fashion magazines, like the editorship of fashion magazines, like the audience for fashion shows themselves, is female. Fashion models tend to be much skinnier in women's magazines than they are in men's magazines. Compare the curviness of female models in, say, Maxim with the bony, ethereal elegance of those in Vogue. Any fashion editor will tell you that if you start shooting normally healthy women in fashion spreads, it is female readers, not male readers, who will complain about "overweight models."

Yes, beauty pageants in the past have mostly been judged by men (which is why the winners of them tend to be less model-like than women in magazines). But with the cultural ascendancy of the supermodel, we have seen a strange blurring of the two worlds, of the masculine and feminine ideals. I can't wait to see how much the supernerds who specialize in creating virtual women have moved away from the big-busted cartoons of the Heavy Metal era (of which Lara Croft is a textbook example). I am sure they have been influenced, like French mayors, by the skeletal feminine visions of fashion. Whatever they come up with, it will be worth remembering that they are just a bunch of guys.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl...sell04/BNStory


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Novell Offers Legal Protection For Linux
Stephen Shankland

Novell this week began offering SuSE Linux customers some legal protection for using the open-source operating system, the fourth legal umbrella to emerge from a computing industry grappling with legal threats brought by SCO Group.

Novell plans to offer the legal indemnification once its $210 million acquisition of SuSE is complete, a milestone reached early Tuesday. The closing of that deal paves the way for the completion of a $50 million investment in Novell from IBM, Novell said.
http://news.com.com/2100-7344-5139632.html


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OBITUARIES

Thomas Stockham, 70; Digital Audio Pioneer
Dennis McLellan

Thomas G. Stockham Jr., the internationally recognized "father of digital recording" whose pioneering work in the 1960s and '70s revolutionized the recording industry and laid the groundwork for music on compact discs and other forms of digital audio, has died. He was 70.

Stockham, who also served on a panel of audio experts who analyzed President Nixon's secret White House tapes, died Tuesday of complications related to Alzheimer's disease at a Salt Lake City hospice.

For his role in the development of digital recording and editing, Stockham received Emmy, Grammy and Academy awards.

He was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Utah in 1975 when he founded Soundstream Inc., the world's first digital recording company.

Stockham and his company first captured public attention in 1976.

That year, RCA released "Caruso: A Legendary Performer," the first in a series of famed opera singer Enrico Caruso's early 20th century recordings that had been digitally remastered by Soundstream.

Stockham and his colleagues digitally eliminated surface noise and compensated for flaws such as the tinny sound and echoes caused by the primitive recording horns used at the time.

The result: stunningly clear and clean restored recordings of the great Italian tenor.

The same year, Stockham made the first live digital recording, featuring the Santa Fe Opera, and demonstrated his recorder at the annual Audio Engineering Society meeting.

The demonstration caused a stir at the gathering but produced its share of skeptics.

Stockham later recalled that several prominent members of the society told him, "You can make a limited demonstration easily enough, but when you get it in the field, it will fail."

He spent more than a decade developing the equipment and methods for translating analog sound into a digital format and had encountered his share of disbelievers.

Once the concept of digital audio became a reality, it generated an active and vocal opposition. Many thought sound quality would suffer, giving rise to a group called Musicians Against Digital.

There were even those who believed that digital audio could be harmful to a listener's health.

"It was silly in those early days," said his son Tom. "Frankly, people didn't believe it could be done, and he did it."

Basically, Stockham took analog waves produced by a microphone or a preexisting recording and digitized them into numbers with a computer. The numbers are stored in a computer and are played by being reconverted into sound waves.

"It was a real big breakthrough," said Larry DeVries, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah and a friend of Stockham.

Vinyl records, DeVries said, are subject to wear, scratches and distortion with time and temperature, "but once you convert the signal to numbers on a computer, they're permanent."

And by digitizing sound, DeVries said, "it opened it to the power of the computer for refinement and manipulation that was every bit as important as the permanence part."

Today, DeVries said, compact disc technology is the norm.

"Without this pioneering work by [Stockham] and others like him, that wouldn't have been possible," DeVries said. "In all honesty, it was just a very logical step to go from sounds to pictures. So nowadays we not only have CDs, we also have DVDs. It's the same basic concept."

Bob Woods, president of Telarc International, which released the first commercial classical digital recording using the Soundstream technology in 1978, said Stockham's knowledge "went well beyond just the use of digital recording technology."

"I can only characterize him as a 'modern-day man for all seasons,' whose knowledge of science, especially new technologies, was remarkable," Woods said.

He was the principal contributing engineer to a digital hearing aid and in the years leading up to the diagnosis of his Alzheimer's disease in 1994, he worked extensively in digital image processing that aided in the human genome project.

His friends and family recalled him as a modest gentleman who loved teaching and solving problems.

"He was never consumed with trying to get rich off these things or anything close to that," Stockham's son said. "He was consumed with trying to make the very best stuff, and when somebody said it could not be done, he'd get a glint in his eye and get it done."

Born in Passaic, N.J., Stockham earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was appointed assistant professor of electrical engineering in 1959.

At MIT, he worked on projects involving the primitive digitization of sound — a process that had been discovered by Claude Shannon at Bell Labs in 1949.

Stockham's early work, however, had little to do with music.

"We were more interested in digital sound for communication purposes," he told the New York Times in 1981. "It became apparent, though, that if speech could be digitized, so could music."

But to make high-quality digital recordings of music, he said, "we needed considerably more power and sophistication than we needed for speech…. I started working on the digital recording of music back in 1962, and it wasn't until 1970 that the technology required to accomplish it with any commercial feasibility began to emerge."

He began laying the groundwork for Soundstream after moving to the University of Utah, where he helped create its computer science department.

During 1973-74, he was the primary investigator on the six-member panel that analyzed the White House's Watergate tapes for Chief U.S. District Judge John J. Sirica.

Stockham and the other panelists concluded that someone deliberately erased the 18 1/2- minute gap on one tape. The finding provided evidence of a coverup and led to Nixon's resignation.

In 1998, Stockham was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the field of digital audio recording.

In addition to his son Tom, he is survived by his wife, Martha; sons John and David; daughter, Carol Forester; and eight grandchildren.
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la...nes-technology


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Windows 98 Lifeline 'Prompted By Linux Threat'
Munir Kotadia

The growing threat from Linux is responsible for Microsoft's last-minute decision to extend the life of Windows 98. Analysts say there has never been a better time to try and negotiate a deal on the company's software.

Various research indicates that Windows 98 is still installed on about a quarter of all PCs, meaning that if Microsoft had stopped supporting the operating system as planned, the next time that a security bug was discovered, millions of PCs would be left vulnerable and users would be left with the option of either upgrading to a newer version of Windows, or looking for an alternative. Although many companies would upgrade because their applications or hardware require Windows, a significant chunk would be free to consider alternatives, such as Linux.

Lars Ahlgren, a senior marketing manager at Microsoft, told ZDNet UK that although Microsoft has not made any money from Windows 98 for some time, the company is keen to hold onto its customers and is hoping another couple of years getting used to the Windows look and feel will tie them in for life. "The more they are used to working one way, the more [it is] likely they will want to continue working that way, so it plays to our advantage. If they move to another operating system, they will need to rethink and relearn. For some people, that is painful. This is also why so many people are resisting an upgrade from Windows 98," he said.

James Governor, a principal analyst at RedMonk, said Microsoft didn't have much choice but to extend support for Windows 98, for two reasons. First, he said, Linux has become a real threat, and although it wouldn't have swallowed up all the old Windows 98 users, it would make a difference. "I'm not going to say a large chunk of the install base would have moved to Linux, but certainly there is an alternative there -- but I don't want to overstate that," he said. Governor also pointed out that unlike the dot-com boom years, companies simply can't afford to invest in new hardware in order to upgrade their operating system: "Given the terrible state that budgets have been in over the past few years and continue to be in, we are not seeing a lot of money being freed up. Companies are saying 'this is good enough so why should we change?'," he said.

Gary Barnett, research director at Ovum, said that although Linux is not a viable alternative for mainstream users at the moment, he expects that it will be in a year's time. This means, according to Barnett, that Microsoft is going to find it increasingly difficult to maintain its unfeasibly high profit margins. "Microsoft has always publicly said it does not negotiate or do special deals on price, but the truth is that Microsoft is going to be obliged to do an increasing number of them. We have already seen it in the Asia-Pacific region, where they hugely discounted Office. Linux has a crucial role in giving people choice and also [in] curbing the incredible margins Microsoft has been making out of Office," he said.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/win...9119059,00.htm


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Point -

It’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for Peer-to-Peer.

Internet 6.0

The next version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, will supply the world with addresses by the trillions. Too bad it will also make the Net slower and less secure.
Simson Garfinkel

It will be the biggest, the most drastic, and the most comprehensive change to the underlying structure of the Internet in more than 20 years. The deployment of IPv6—the sixth version of the Internet Protocol—will be a massive undertaking that will require the reconfiguration of more than 100 million computers. Not since the adoption of the Internet Protocol itself in January 1983 has there been such a fundamental shift. But when the IPv6 rollout is finally done, not all the effects will be positive: the new Version 6 Internet will be slower, more friendly to peer-to-peer-based copyright violation systems, and the computers on it will almost certainly be less secure.

In its simplest incarnation, NAT creates a kind of one-way fence: computers behind the NAT firewall can open up connections to Web servers and mail servers on the Internet, but random attackers on the Net can’t reach back through the NAT and break into your unprotected desktops and laptops. It has worked so well, in fact, that many organizations use NAT as their primary defense against hackers and worms. NAT has let organizations take the lemon of limited IP addresses and make a lemonade of improved security.

But the apparent security that NAT provides is a mirage. The proliferation of laptops, e-mail attachments, and open wireless networks means that there are many opportunities for hackers and worms to get behind a NAT and launch attacks from the inside. Many organizations have learned the hard way that you cannot achieve secure computing by relying upon perimeter defenses (a topic I discussed in a previous column). At the same time, NAT’s one-way fence makes it harder for peer-to-peer applications to operate. That’s a problem for file trading programs such as Kazaa, but it’s also a problem for Internet telephony and the next generation of multimedia groupware applications. For example, the two-way videoconferencing system that’s built into Apple’s iChat software works behind some kinds of firewalls but not behind others. The program comes with an elaborate “connection doctor” program to help users diagnose problems that their firewall might be causing.

These problems go away when every computer on the Internet really does have its own IP address—something that’s impossible today with IPv4, but which is the raison d’être for IPv6. In a world with IPv6 and without NAT, every computer in my house has its own unique IP address on the public Internet. That means my desktop can open up a peer-to-peer connection with my desktop at work, but it also means that my daughter can network her machine directly with some teenybopper P2P network in San Jose. Getting everybody’s home machine out from being a NAT box should make possible a lot of interesting applications that are either very difficult or downright impossible today. And in all likelihood, some of those applications will not be popular with the Recording Industry Association of America or the Motion Picture Association of America, both of which have taken the lead against peer-to-peer networks. As soon as they understand what a threat IPv6 is to their police actions, they are likely to start fighting against.
http://technologyreview.com/articles...nkel010704.asp


Counterpoint –

Anonymous Coward

”That means my desktop can open up a peer-to-peer connection with my desktop at work, but it also means that my daughter can network her machine directly with some teenybopper P2P network in San Jose.”

I just don't understand this part. This is nothing specific to IPv6. This is how the internet works. People can already connect like this, and it's pretty obvious that they DO network like this. Or, did P2P networks suddenly die while I was asleep?

**

SgtChaireBourne

All these articles have the same whine and miss all the issues beyond scalability. Yes, IPv6 looks to solve some scalability problems. No, not everyone is in full agreement about the urgency, but regardless of views about scalability, other issues are far more important and beneficial.

However, given the sad, vulnerable state of security and privacy, I'd expect more authors to expound on the benefits of IPv6's privacy and authentication mechanisms.

Likewise, as more bandwidth is eaten by spam and music downloading, IPv6 addresses quality of service, and better routing and addressing capabilities.

The only two reasons not to go IPv6, at least for intranets, is either espionage agencies oppose increased security and/or a particular large vendor fails to support it well. Maybe there are others. Wireless networks and VPNs are being thrown in all over the place. These are the perfect places to start with IPv6. The other option is NAT, but that will eventually have to be redone when the move is finally made. Kill 2 birds with one stone and install the new VPN or Wireless net with IPv6.


**

:Is this technical or political?
1u3hr

“IPv6 makes encourages 'peer-to-peer based copyright violation systems”

Well, it's not grammatical.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=04/01/11/2348217

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Senator Plans P2P Summit
Roy Mark

U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman plans to convene a peer-to-peer (P2P) summit within the next two months in hopes of avoiding a federally mandated response to online piracy. The Minnesota Republican said the answers to protecting copyrighted material are more likely to be found through technological innovation rather than passage of more laws.

After holding several P2P hearings last year, Congress is dealing with multiple pieces of proposed legislation concerning the distribution, use and design of P2P networking software. Most of the proposed laws are intended to stop and/or penalize file sharing of copyrighted material, particularly music and movies.

Other bills are aimed at protecting minors who use P2P software to inadvertently download pornographic material, especially child pornography. The bill would, in effect, limit the availability of P2P software in the process.

Tom Steward, Coleman's communications director, told internetnews.com,"solutions are being developed in the private sector but not all the parties are talking with other. We want to get everyone in the same room."

Steward said Internet service providers (ISP), hardware and software executives, P2P companies, entertainment industry leaders, technology experts, privacy advocates, academics and entrepreneurs will be invited to the Washington roundtable to discuss the issue.

"In 1998, Congress passed legislation that was intended to protect the entertainment industry and copyrights," Coleman said last Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. "Yet, within less than five years, the legislation was bypassed by technology. With the advent of technology such as peer-to-peer networking, law, technology and ethics are now not in synch. We need to find other ways to solve the problems rather than issuing lawsuits and lobbying Congress to pass tougher laws."

Coleman is a leading critic of the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) legal tactics in suing individual file swappers. In August, Coleman sent a letter to the RIAA expressing concern the music industry was in danger of abusing its broad-based subpoena authority to determine the extent of illegal file sharing in the U.S.

By October, Coleman chaired a hearing on the impact P2P technology has on the music industry. Coleman said the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) fines are unreasonable and force accused infringers into settling lawsuits when they might otherwise consider contesting the allegations.

A federal appeals court in December rejected the RIAA's use of the controversial subpoenas, but that decision prompted several in Congress to call for amending the DMCA to restore the RIAA's power to go after downloaders.

"I believe we need the technology experts, the computer industry, the peer-to-peer industry, the software industry, the entertainment industry, the privacy experts and the business experts to come together and discuss positive and meaningful solutions to this challenge facing a major segment of our economy," said Coleman.

Coleman added that he was not "interested in assigning blame, or pointing fingers. I want to bring together the great minds that have a role to play in this matter and develop constructive measures that can address these challenges, and determine an appropriate role for Congress to play in helping to find some common ground."

The senator stressed the answers "are not going to come solely from government."
http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news...le.php/3299511


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To P2P or Not To P2P?
Mike Martin

"In a corporate environment, P2P backup makes a lot of sense, because I essentially know that my colleague down the corridor or on the other side of the country has strong incentives to hold my backup copies," says Intel senior researcher Petros Maniatis.

That is the question for companies seeking to route, backup, store or share files using peer-to-peer architecture.

For those companies, researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel have a simple answer: To P2P, you must first climb a tree.

"The P2P systems people are most familiar with tend to be file-sharing or song-swapping, but there are other types of applications that not only benefit from a P2P solution but perhaps can only be solved in a P2P manner," explained Hewlett-Packard principal research scientist Mary Baker.

Such applications include Internet routing and data backup, added Intel senior researcher Petros Maniatis.

"The Internet is routed essentially using P2P techniques -- the 'peers' are the routers that many Internet Service Providers or other network carriers operate," Maniatis told NewsFactor. "Internet news (that is, Usenet) has been running on a P2P architecture essentially for decades."

Backup -- the process by which a user replicates files in different media at different locations to increase data survivability -- can benefit from a pool of trustworthy peers, explained Harvard University computer-science professor Mema Roussopoulos.

"In a corporate environment, P2P backup makes a lot of sense, because I essentially know that my colleague down the corridor or on the other side of the country has strong incentives to hold my backup copies," added Intel's Maniatis.

So-called "mutually suspicious" peers also make for some interesting P2P designs.

Mutual suspicions "create a service that is more trustworthy and more resistant to attack," HP's Baker told NewsFactor.

For instance, a peer in LOCKSS -- a P2P application for librarians -- "audits the correctness of its own online documents by listening to the opinions of many other peers also storing those documents," Baker explained. "A strong consensus among many mutually suspicious peers is more believable than a single isolated opinion." (Just ask anyone who has ever peer-reviewed an academic paper with a group of egocentric and sometimes jealous scientists).

Decision Tree, Oh So Pretty

"Academic research in peer-to-peer systems has concentrated largely on algorithms to improve efficiency, scalability, robustness, and security," explained Maniatis. "There has been little focus on what makes an application 'P2P-worthy,' or on what questions an application designer should ask to judge whether a P2P solution is appropriate for his particular problem."

Software designers who climb a decision tree based on actual and proposed P2P systems should be able to discern the suitability of peer-to-peer architecture for any proposed application, the researchers claim.

To qualify as true P2P, Baker explained, a virtual environment must satisfy three criteria: It must be self-organizing -- a place where peers can and do discover one another; it must foster "symmetric communication" or peer equality; and it must be decentralized, with large amounts of peer autonomy.

A designer in such an environment can scale the decision tree by climbing five branches, starting with the most important: budget.

For P2P, tight budgets make better sense.

The "inefficiencies, latencies and testing problems" of P2P solutions make less sense for companies with large budgets, Roussopoulos explained.

Use T&C to Learn the Two R's of P2P

Two R's form the next two branches: relevance and rate of system change.

"Relevance is the probability that a peer is interested in data from other peers," Maniatis explained. "If it is high, P2P cooperation evolves naturally."

It should also evolve slowly, however.

"Rapid change in P2P systems can make it difficult to provide consistency guarantees and defenses against flooding and other attacks," Baker says in a paper on the topic.

Finally, application designers should use a little T&C when considering P2P -- trust and criticality.

"Mutual distrust between peers may be essential to the problem or of little concern," notes Baker, who is also a computer-science faculty member at Stanford. Furthermore, "if the problem being solved is critical to the users, they may demand centralized control irrespective of technical criteria," thereby ruling out a P2P solution.
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtm...story_id=22986


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Supreme Court Refuses To Hear Madster Appeal

The US Supreme Court yesterday refused to hear an appeal by peer-to-peer service Madster, formerly known as Aimster, over a copyright infringement case brought by the music industry. The decision means that the company must continue to stay off-line.
http://www.out-law.com/php/page.php?...8497&area=news


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P2P Gets WASTEd
Jo Maitland

Two of the hottest applications in networking -- peer-to-peer networks and instant messaging -- are being combined in the form of private P2P networks that are taking shape in the more secretive corners of the Internet, industry insiders say.

The most popular software for creating these private networks is WASTE, which enables anyone with a computer and a Net connection to set up a private peer-to-peer network over the Internet.

”Between the FBI and the Justice Department and the Record Industry of America Association cracking down on file sharing, it was only a matter of time before users found a more secure, private way to swap software and music,” says Brian Bruns, security administrator at SOSDG (Summit Open Source Development Group). The SOSDG hosts one of about 30 different sites where the WASTE software can be downloaded for free.

WASTE differs from P2P networks like Kazaa and Limewire as it creates a closed network for instant messaging and file-sharing with trusted users. The person running the network has to swap a key with potential users before they are allowed on the network. An encryption layer is then set up between two computers using private keys to authenticate the parties. Up to 50 people can be on one network.

”There are thousands of copies out there, but there’s no way to tell exactly how many people are using it, as it’s designed to be secure,” says Bruns.

WASTE was developed a year ago by developer Justin Frankel, founder of Nullsoft. AOL (NYSE: TWX - message board) acquired Nullsoft for its Winamp MP3 software, and while Frankel was with the company he wrote WASTE. However it was deemed to be an “unauthorized project,” according to Bruns, and AOL yanked it.

Michael Gartenberg, analyst with Jupiter Research Ltd., says anything believed to encourage illegal file sharing would have a major black mark against it, which is probably why AOL scrapped the project after posting it on a site for one day.

He says the crackdown by the RIAA on illegal file sharing has fueled the distribution of this software. “The more consequences there are for actions, the more the activity is driven underground… Criminals don’t hold public meetings,” Gartenberg says.

”It’s a way to chat without having someone watching you,” says Bruns. His open source group took a copy of the entire WASTE site as it was posted on AOL, and stored it away for future use. It has since been distributed widely, including to SourceForge, which has worked on improving the original code.

Gartenberg notes that WASTE is unlikely to reach the lofty heights of fame achieved by Kazaa, which has been downloaded over 200 million times. “With WASTE you have to know someone in the network, it closes down the number of people available,” he says.

Still, the concept of private or personal P2P networks might still find its way into the mainstream, courtesy of Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT - message board). The software giant is trialing a program called www.threedegrees.com (nothing to do with the 70s pop divas, it seems), which allows users to create small private networks of up to 10 people to exchange instant messages, animations, pictures and music.

Right now the software is part of Microsoft’s NetGen division, which aims to develop products aimed at 13- to 24-year-olds, but there are broader implications for this product within the corporate world. Think of workgroups collaborating on documents or powerpoint presentations.

Microsoft had not returned calls for comment by press time.
http://www.lightreading.com/document...g&doc_id=45824


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Holidays, File-Sharing Lawsuits Bring Money To Music Retailers
Jennette Hannah, Collegian Staff Writer

Local music retailers may have benefited from the 2003 holiday season as well as the recent slew of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) lawsuits against file-sharing users.

According to a phone survey conducted by Pew Internet and American Life Project, the number of illegal file-sharers dropped from 29 percent between March and May 2003 to 14 percent between November and December 2003. Data from comScore Media Metrix noted a 15 percent decrease in Kazaa usage from November 2002 to November 2003.

Mike Negra, former owner of Mike's Music downtown, which was located at 226 W. College Ave., had to close the State College location last spring due to slumping sales. Negra is also the current owner of Mike's Music and Video, 1613 N. Atherton St., and he believes the decline in illegal file sharing is a good sign for the future.

He noted a 25 percent sale increase this December over previous months -- caused only in part by holiday sales.

"Since consolidation in May we haven't had a number like that," Negra said. "The RIAA needs to continue providing value for their product ... an extra DVD, a poster, whatever it is."

Negra said he believes recent RIAA lawsuits have changed public attitudes toward downloading, making people understand the ramifications of their actions. But he said he feels the lure of downloading has left the collegiate level the least compared with other demographics.

"One person can sit in a dorm room and say 'this isn't going to hurt anyone.' When 40,000 students all do it, Mike's is down one store, City Lights is hanging on and [students] walk out of their dorm rooms and go 'where have all the record stores gone?' " Negra said.

From 1999 to 2003, Negra said his sales have dipped 70 percent, a loss totaling about $2 million.

"In 1997, the new Dave Matthews album came out for 'Monday Night Madness.' We were the top seller of that Dave Matthews album in the county on Monday Night ... at 500 units. Now ... if we were to sell five units of an album at midnight, that's a big night," Negra said.

Greg Gabbard, owner of City Lights Records, 316 E. College Ave., said that since the days of file sharing and burning CDs began, business has been down 40 percent.

"It makes you very careful when you're ordering things ... in terms of quantity and who. When a new album comes out, you're more likely to order 25 and say 'let's see how it goes,' than say 'let's buy 50 of that.' "

Gabbard is not sure if sales have seen a marked increase in the holiday season, but feels that sales are up overall.

"It's a little too early to tell ... some of the information might come from asking. How many people would want to say [they download]?" Gabbard said.

A Webspins report contrasted the Pew Internet and American Life Project's and comScore's results, saying that file sharing actually increased 5 percent over the holidays.

Brian Newhard, president of the Penn State Computer Network Club, said illegal file sharing will continue for those knowledgeable with computers by using "darknet" alternatives, such as Internet Relay Chat.

"For people who have the knowledge of computers, if they want to get an illegal copy of whatever, it's out there and it's accessible," Newhard said. "You need to change people and not change the technology... If they don't care about copyright laws, they'll break them."

Newhard began purchasing songs online in order to avoid paying $13 to $15 for a CD and to avoid possible consequences incited by illegal file sharing.

"Since [Apple] iTunes came out, I don't think I've purchased a CD," Newhard said.

Negra said he is not concerned with legal digital downloading methods.

"I'm not concerned with 99 cent songs. If I'm competing with something that's pre-pay, that's no problem. If I'm competing with something that's for free, that's a problem," Negra said.
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive...04dnews-02.asp


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What is respectthepublicdomain.org?

Primarily, it is a response to the movie industry's media blitz about copyrights. From their Web site, to their TV ads, to their trailers in the theater, it seems that everywhere we look, we're getting lectured about copyright. Of course, the movie industry left out some interesting details – most importantly, how they (particularly Disney) torpedoed the public domain. Use the top navigation buttons for more info.

Check it out! Congress Seeks to Loosen Copyright Law's Grip. Please write to Congress, show them your support!
http://www.respectthepublicdomain.org/index.html


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British Music Industry, P2P And Suing The Kids
Struan Robertson

EDITORIAL: On Tuesday, the Director General of the BPI, the UK's equivalent of the RIAA, took on the former CEO of Grokster before an audience of MPs and industry representatives in the country's first Parliamentary Advisory Forum on P2P technology.

The Westminster debate was anything but dull. "These guys really hate each other," concluded one observer. The individuals probably don't – but their respective businesses certainly do. Hackers and security experts can find a modicum of mutual respect through shared enthusiasm for technology; but the gloves come off when the music and P2P representatives enter the ring.

Andrew Yeates of the British Phonographic Industry has to date demonstrated a measured and pragmatic approach to this problem for his industry, in contrast to the belligerence exhibited by the RIAA, most viciously in the rhetoric of Hilary Rosen, its former president.

Almost a year ago, when the RIAA was just beginning to change the targets of its lawsuits from companies like Grokster and Kazaa to individuals, I interviewed Yeates for OUT-LAW Magazine. At that time he said the BPI was not ready to sue individuals. Yeates said he wanted certain tests satisfied before considering any such action.

Yeates wanted to see improvements in the authorised download services. He acknowledged that consumers could not be expected to use them if the usability was poor and the pricing unreasonable. That is more than the RIAA has ever conceded. His next demand was to get the laws clarified: he wanted the Copyright Directive implemented in the UK before considering any action. And his third criterion was to educate the British public: to send the message that sharing copyrighted music is unlawful.

This week, Yeates again referred to these tests. But with more pay-per-track services now in the UK, with the Copyright Directive now implemented and in force in the UK, I again put the question to Yeates: is the BPI planning to sue individuals?

His answer was that the BPI does consider it reasonable to sue individuals but he implied that there were no plans for immediate action. He made a point of proportionality – that any action taken would need to be proportional to the infringement and that any damages in such action would reflect this. Unlike the US and its controversial DMCA, the legislation used against file-sharers, the damages that the BPI could expect in this country are not fixed in legislation and would likely be more modest than the RIAA could win in US courts.

He said he fails to understand the public hostility towards the music industry for trying to protect its copyrights, referring to the often-cited case of the RIAA's legal threats against a 12-year-old girl. "Nobody would question a shopkeeper catching a 12-year-old shoplifter and reporting him to the police," he observed.

However, Yeates also spoke of being an 11-year-old boy who made crude tape recordings of Top of the Pops with a microphone held to his television. He also seemed to distinguish his own situation from the digital copying that exists today, where the copy is as good as the original. But in doing so, he puts his finger on the flaw in his shopkeeper analogy: shopkeepers have always chased 12-year-old shoplifters. The music industry only began doing the same when copying technology evolved to a point it disliked.

Do not be misled by the Copyright Directive's involvement: it has little effect on P2P because while a copy of Top of the Pops can today be recorded lawfully under a narrow time-shifting exception for broadcasts in UK law (introduced in a 1988 Act), recording your own CD or vinyl album to a cassette, e.g. for playing in your car, has always been an infringement, albeit a minor one. We do not have the "fair use" exception that the US and much of Continental Europe has. But any action against an individual making a single copy for personal use hopefully would not meet Yeates' test of proportionality.

"No wonder your industry's in a state," observed his American opponent later in the debate. "I saw your Top of the Pops the other night. It was terrible!" Enter Wayne Rosso, a P2P journeyman who ran Grokster, a piece of software that competes with Kazaa but operates on the same network (so a search on either service will produce the same results).

Rosso is the man who last year famously offered to pay "out of my own pocket" the $2,000 settlement demanded by the RIAA from that 12-year-old New Yorker.

Rosso's argument began:

"The music industry has been actively selling a big lie. That lie begins with the assertion that the peer-to-peer is a rogue industry. Well rogue industries don't form trade associations in Washington DC. Rogue industries don't create self-imposed codes of conduct. Rogue industries don't testify before Congress. Rogue industries don't work with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to track down and prosecute paedophiles.

"We're not a rogue industry. Any suggestion to the contrary is a direct result of the cynical and egregious propaganda that the RIAA disseminates on a daily basis."

Rosso continued:

"The music industry is convinced that P2P technology is incompatible with what they do. […] If the music industry had become early adopters and users of this technology, they wouldn't be having anywhere near the problems that they are experiencing today. There's just no doubt about that. But, instead, they want to blame file-sharing for all their problems when, in any fair and reasoned analysis, it only represents at worst a very small portion of these problems."

Rosso is still close to Grokster, but he is now CEO of Madrid-based Optisoft which develops new ventures Blubster, Piolet and MP2P Technology. He described the new P2P network that his company is building. It will use encryption and multiple sources to give file-sharers anonymity. A search request will be answered by several computers that host the desired file. However, the download will come not from one of them but from several, being pieced together again by the requesting computer.

Some might consider such use of technology to be evidence of a rogue industry. But Rosso's take on it is that he has been driven to doing this by an unreasonable music industry that will not listen to reason, that will not even negotiate. What else is there to do, he would argue, but fight it?

As anyone would expect, neither side agrees on the level of damage caused by P2P to the music industry's profits. Both agree that it has caused some harm. Yeates also made clear that P2P is not the only problem his industry faces.

So the BPI said it believes in asserting its rights against individuals. It has said that before. Rosso accused the music industry of being run by "idiots." The P2P community has said that before, too. So did anything valuable come out of this Forum? I think that it did.

Rosso said he does believe that content providers should get paid. He said that DRM, or Digital Rights Management, could help the industry to introduce protected content to P2P networks. The files would be exchanged for free; but these are not standard MP3 files. Instead they could be programs that play a music track a certain number of times or for a certain period, then trigger a payment mechanism that takes the user to a checkout, where some form of payment is required to keep the track. The advantage to the music fan, however, is that he gets easy access to music and can try before he buys, every time.

I've never heard a P2P company advocate this before, yet Alan Morris, also present, agreed with him. Morris is Executive Vice President of Sharman Networks, the owner of Grokster's main rival, Kazaa.

I put the question to Andrew Yeates: does he see effective DRM as a way in which the music industry and P2P networks can co-exist? "I see it as a possibility," he concluded.

There was little elaboration on this point. It was a small point in a debate on a very contentious topic, and responsible use of effective DRM is not a silver bullet: DRM is arguably not yet effective; some uses of it by rights holders are irresponsible; any such system will face the same payment and licensing issues that hamper the authorised internet music services; and however effective DRM may become, analogue ripping of music will continue if P2P users are willing to listen to their music without digital quality.

There is little doubt that that P2P has affected CD sales and that the RIAA has given P2P a bad name. But P2P is a powerful technology with a lot to offer beyond unauthorised copies of music. And it won't go away – it would be naïve to think that the underlying technology can be stopped, or that developers like Wayne Rosso's Optisoft won't find new ways of protecting the users of these networks.

Even if both sides will only consider DRM as a possible solution, isn't that some sort of progress?

The BPI has the legal grounds to sue individuals. But when so many millions of individuals are now infringing copyright laws, you have to wonder whether the approach of our legal regime is the correct approach. Meantime, it can only be hoped that, if the BPI does take action against individuals, any such action is "proportionate," as Andrew Yeates described.

I have more confidence in Andrew Yeates and the BPI than I have in the RIAA. I only hope it is not too late for the industry to find something positive in P2P.
http://www.out-law.com/php/page.php?...9657&area=news


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Recording Studio in a Box
David Pogue

SINCE Steve Jobs's return to Apple in 1997, the company's most important new products have all begun with the letter i. There was the iPod, of course, and the iMac, and groundbreaking programs like iPhoto (for digital photos), iMovie (for camcorder video), iTunes (for organizing music) and iDVD (for creating homemade DVD's). In every case, Apple's goal was obvious: to create products so simple and creative that people would say, "iWant, iLove, iBuy."

At the Macworld Expo in San Francisco last week, Apple unveiled a new version of its "i" software suite, now called iLife '04. Because it's on the biggish side (several gigabytes in all), it will no longer be a free download. You'll have to buy it for $50 or get it preinstalled on a new Macintosh.

Each program in the updated suite (except iTunes) offers about a dozen enhancements. For example, the new iMovie offers video trimming with an "undo" feature right in the storyboard strip. The iDVD program introduces 20 new professional-looking templates for your DVD menu screens, and can now fit two hours of amazing-looking video onto a disc.

For iPhoto 4, the chief improvement is speed, enough to handle 25,000 photos per collection without bogging down. (Its predecessor, iPhoto 2, got draggy at about 2,000 pictures. For new parents and pet owners, that's about a day's worth of shooting.)

But iLife '04 (for the Mac OS X operating system) also includes a new program called GarageBand. It's designed to let people with even the feeblest musical talent, or even musical interest, create professional-sounding digital recordings. It puts at least as much power into amateur hands as its i-predecessors; all it lacks is the traditional first initial.

You can build a song using three distinct tools. First, GarageBand comes with 1,100 loops: snippets recorded by studio musicians (bass, drums, guitars, strings, keyboards, mallet instruments, horn and string sections, and synthesized choirs). You can drag these snippets into a sequence as though they're tiles, stretch the blocks on the screen to make them play over and over, and layer one instrument upon another. It's a lot of instant gratification, even if you don't know a quarter note from a quarter-pounder.

The loops almost always sound good together - even when you layer Island Reggae Drums 03 with Nordic Fiddle 01. That's because all of the loops play essentially the same, unchanging chord. (Of course, these days, building a song whose harmony never changes is no barrier to commercial success, as Pink demonstrated with "Get the Party Started.")

You can transpose these loops, making them play higher or lower, and even change their tempo. (Indeed, that's one of GarageBand's most impressive bits of magic; how can software make a digital recording play in a different key, or at a different tempo, without distorting it?) Still, that's not quite the same thing as complete freedom to choose chords or melodies. In terms of compositional choices, nonmusicians are pretty much limited to fooling around with when various instruments play, not what.

GarageBand's second primary tool requires a little more training. Using your Mac's U.S.B. jack, you can plug in a MIDI keyboard, guitar or drum pads. (MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface, and refers to a standard connector for plugging electronic instruments into computers.)

For $100, for example, Apple will sell you a four-octave, touch-sensitive MIDI keyboard that produces no sound of its own. But when plugged into GarageBand, its plastic keys trigger (from the Mac's speakers) the sound of a $50,000 Yamaha grand piano, an orchestra full of strings, the brassy sting of rock-hall trumpets, or any of 185 other sampled instrument sound variations.

At this point, GarageBand is a 64-track digital tape recorder. The program can even count you in with clicks - the software equivalent of, "And-a one! And-a two! And-a three! And-a four!" - and provide a metronome as you play.

As in more expensive MIDI sequencers (recorders) like Cakewalk, you can then clean up your mistakes by editing the notes, which appear as horizontal bars on a piano-roll grid. You can also perform an old favorite trick of electronic musicians: recording your performance at low speed and then playing it back at a much faster tempo, so that you sound like a virtuoso.

GarageBand's third core feature is direct-to-hard-drive recording. You can sing or play a real-world instrument directly into your Mac's microphone as GarageBand records your performance, and even "sweeten" it with studio effects like reverb and chorusing. You can't edit these recordings, except to delete muffed sections and re-record them. You can, however, sing into one track after another, eventually turning yourself into a barbershop quartet, octet or 64-tet.

Using these three musical sources in combination - prerecorded loops, sampled sounds, live recordings - you can build a rocking little band right in your Mac. Then you can adjust the relative volume levels of the tracks, add fade-ins and fade-outs, specify the balance of each instrument in the left-to-right stereo field, and finally export the finished product to iTunes. From there, you can download your masterpiece to your iPod, export it as an MP3 file for mailing to friends, use it as royalty-free background music for a movie or presentation, or burn your own CD.

Of course, none of GarageBand's three personalities are particularly new. Loop building is available in Sonic Foundry's Acid Pro 4.0 ($400) or Apple's own $300 program, Soundtrack. MIDI recording has been around for years in programs like Cakewalk and Cubase. Direct-to-disk recording is the norm in the recording and movie industries, too (Pro Tools and Digital Performer, for example).

But judging by their delighted applause, most audience members at Apple's GarageBand demonstrations last week were witnessing these software categories for the first time. This, of course, is precisely Apple's i-software specialty: turning what were once rarefied, expensive, technical tools into simple, inexpensive, everyday programs.

In some places, Apple stripped GarageBand down a tad too far. For example, the program desperately needs some sort of bookmarking feature. And the editing window never shows more than two octaves at a time, which makes it hard to edit piano parts.

The program's heavy pop music orientation can be frustrating, too. The instrument sounds, for example, don't include such expressive choices as trumpet, clarinet, harp or solo violin. (Buying Apple's $100 Jam Pack doesn't help. This expansion pack offers 2,000 more loops, 15 more guitar-amp simulations, 100 more audio effects, and 100 additional instrument sounds. But the new samples are all in the same categories: guitars, vibraphones, drums, basses and keyboard instruments.)

Similarly, GarageBand can quantize your performances - that is, clean up the timing of recorded notes by nudging them into alignment with the closest sixteenth note, eighth note, or whatever - but only an entire "take" at a time (you can't quantize only a few selected notes). Most seriously of all, GarageBand doesn't let you create tempo changes. Your song can never speed up or slow down, which puts a severe limit on musical expressiveness.

But even in version 1.0, GarageBand is an exciting breakthrough. Not so much for established musicians (although even they may find it useful for practicing, experimenting with arrangements, and rough-draft composing), but for musicians who are yet to be established.

In the "American Idol" era, it's clear that commercial talent, if not great musical talent, is always out there, untapped and undiscovered. How can a gifted singer or talented play-by-ear instrumentalist reach what could be a grateful audience? Not by mailing out demo tapes recorded with the church accompanist, that's for sure.

It won't be long before the GarageBand creations of no-name singers and players start popping up on Web sites - indeed, it won't be long before Web sites start popping up just to accommodate them - bypassing the talent scouts and gatekeepers of the American recording industry. GarageBand and the Internet give tomorrow's stars their own democratic recording and distribution channels.

That prospect of new artists growing from grass roots is probably what inspired Apple to name the software GarageBand, abandoning its lowercase i naming tradition. But when you consider both the fledgling state of the 1.0 version of this program and the immense musical and commercial forces it could one day unleash, you might conclude that there is, after all, an i-name that might have suited this remarkable software: iPotential.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/15/te...l?pagewanted=2


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Bertolucci Film To Be Released Uncut In U.S.
Anthony Breznican

Bernardo Bertolucci will not have to cut his new erotic drama ``The Dreamers'' to get it distributed in the United States.

Fox Searchlight Pictures said Tuesday it will release the director's original version with an NC-17 designation instead of demanding an R-rated version.

There hasn't been an NC-17 film in U.S. theatrical release since 1997 _ when ``Bent,'' a drama about Nazi persecution of homosexuals, and the porn comedy ``Orgazmo'' came out. The makers of some sexually explicit dramas _ such as 2001's ``The Center of the World'' _ choose to go into distribution with no rating at all rather than accept the NC-17 mark.

Bertolucci has publicly worried about the film's fate in America. ``The film risks coming out in the United States amputated and mutilated,'' the Italian director said last fall. ``Perhaps someone thinks that the U.S. public is too immature to see this.''

But Fox Searchlight decided against any cuts.

``I'm relieved _ in so many ways _ that the distributor has had the vision to release my original film,'' Bertolucci said Tuesday. ``After all, an orgasm is better than a bomb.''

``The Dreamers'' tells the story, set in 1968, of a young American student (Michael Pitt) who moves in with a Parisian brother and sister (Louis Garrel and Eva Green) whose wild lifestyle changes him. The movie includes full frontal male nudity.

``'The Dreamers' provocatively explores human sexuality in a frank way,'' said Fox Searchlight Pictures President Peter Rice, who compared the film to the Dustin Hoffman-Jon Voight drama ``Midnight Cowboy'' and Bertolucci's own ``Last Tango in Paris.''

``Like 'The Dreamers,' those masterpieces would not have been improved by cutting them to an R rating,'' Rice said.

The specialty division of 20th Century Fox studios found itself in a difficult position after acquiring the film, which screened at the 2003 Venice Film Festival and London Film Festival.

Most NC-17 rated films have difficulty finding theaters and securing advertising in the United States. Many mainstream cinemas and media companies equate the NC-17 rating to pornography _ even though it was created to differentiate adult-only dramatic filmmaking from skin flicks.

But cutting the movie's content to get an R rating would likely enrage cinephiles who would be the target audience for a film like Bertolucci's.

Bertolucci, whose 1986 film ``The Last Emperor'' won nine Academy Awards _ including best picture and director _ has faced controversy before over sexually charged films. His 1972 work ``Last Tango in Paris,'' starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, initially had distribution trouble and ended up a critical succ
http://www.salon.com/ent/wire/2004/0...cci/index.html


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Nugent Needs 40 Stitches After Chainsaw Accident
Mike Householder

Ted Nugent was injured on the Texas set of his reality show when a chain saw cut through his leg.

The outspoken rocker and outdoors enthusiast, who is the star of the VH1 series, ``Surviving Nugent: The Ted Commandments,'' required 40 stitches to close the gash in his leg on Sunday, Michelle Clark, a spokeswoman for the cable music channel, said Tuesday.
http://www.salon.com/ent/wire/2004/0...ent/index.html


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Italian Court Says Playstation Modchips Are Legal
cabalamat

An Italian court has rejected the seizure of Sony Playstation game consoles that use modchips to permit unauthorized uses of the game systems. This case is one of the first to be brought in Italy under the new European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD).

According to IP Justice:
The question before the Italian court was simple: Does the producer of a device or computer, such as the Sony Play Station Console, have the right to forbid or prevent consumers from making different uses of the device other than the particular use the manufacturer intends? According to this court's decision under Italian civil law, the answer is no.

The decision was made on 31 December 2003, by Judge Edoardo Mori. The judge was not impressed by Sony, saying they had placed "Absurd Restrictions" on usage; for example, Playstation consoles can only read discs from one geographical region. Judge Mori went on to use the analogy:
"It is similar to the Fiat car company selling cars that forbid extra drivers to use the car, or that forbid the owner to drive outside the city borders."

(Interestingly, DVDs are also region-coded; perhaps this judgement means that DVD software that breaks region coding would also be legal in Italy.)

IP Justice quotes Law Professor Giovanni Ziccardi:
The Bolzano Court ruled that the new law does not apply because the modified chips are not primarily intended to circumvent copyright protection measures.

The court held that the aim of the modified chips is not to create infringing copies, but rather to fight Sony's monopolistic business practices and to allow consumers to exercise a fuller range of their rights such as reading imported discs, back-up copies of games, and other lawful but unauthorized discs.
http://www.cabalamat.org/weblog/art_189.html


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Open Source Boost Unlikely In Australia
Kate Mackenzie

AUSTRALIA is unlikely to ever introduce pro-open source software policies at a federal level, despite a successful move to mandate the consideration of OSS in the ACT.
That was the message from both the federal Government and the federal Labor party at the Open Source in Government conference in Adelaide today, as part of Linux.conf.au.

While the Democrats in South Australia and the ACT would require government agencies to give preference to open source software in technology decisions, the major parties remain firmly averse to any such move.

The ACT Democrats were successful in passing a private members' bill last month requiring the territory government to "consider" open source software, although the original wording had said "prefer" OSS.

The federal Government used today's forum to talk up its general approach to software and technology selection, calling it one of "informed neutrality" in the open source versus proprietary software debate.

Adelaide MP Andrew Southcott, delivering a speech on behalf of Communications and IT Minister Daryl Williams, said the growing popularity of open source software could be "a good thing, even putting to one side the merits of individual open source applications, because it increases competition among software vendors".
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...E15306,00.html


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Aussie Pirates Cop $320,000 Fine
Staff writers

SONY has welcomed the $320,000 fine handed down to Melbourne-based game pirates before Christmas.

A family group trading as MJM 2000 Plus Ltd was ordered to pay the fine as compensation for the profits lost to Sony Computer Entertainment through the group’s illegal activities over a period of five years. Costs were also awarded against MJM.

The verdict was handed down by Justice Allsop in the Federal Court prior to Christmas.

A Sony statement said the action against MJM was one of a number of recent successful anti-piracy cases prosecuted by the company. In December, a man from Wollongong in NSW was fined $5000 over pirated games, as well as $5000 for selling illegal pay-tv decoders.

Also in December, a Melbourne man was fined $3000 and given a six-month suspended sentence over copyright, trademark and classification offences, after being convicted of selling pirated games and movies from his Laverton home. The prison sentence was imposed as the man had a history on involvement with counterfeiting.
http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15319,00.html


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Sir Mix-A-Lot Using Weed To Distribute Music
Posted by timothy

from the single-entendre dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Hip-hop musician Sir Mix-A-Lot has made his new CD Daddy's Home available for download using Weed technology. Weed is a relatively new file sharing system based principles of shareware and referrals. You download the DRM WMA weed file and can listen to it 3 times on any computer before deciding to purchase it or not. If you do purchase it (at a price set by the artist), you will receive referral fees (20%, 10%, 5%) for the next 3 generations of people that purchase your copy. The artist always receives 50% of the price. Certainly an interesting approach to distributing music in a world of p2p and iTunes."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0...id=187&tid=188


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Counterpoint: Downloading Isn’t Stealing
Aaron Swartz

The New York Times Upfront asked me to contribute a short piece to a point/counterpoint they were having on download. (I would defend downloading, of course.) I thought I managed to write a pretty good piece, especially for its size and audience, in a couple days. But then I found out my piece was cut because the Times had decided not to tell kids to break the law. So, from the graveyard, here it is.

Stealing is wrong. But downloading isn’t stealing. If I shoplift an album from my local record store, no one else can buy it. But when I download a song, no one loses it and another person gets it. There’s no ethical problem.

Music companies blame a fifteen percent drop in sales since 2000 on downloading. But over the same period, there was a recession, a price hike, a 25% cut in new releases, and a lack of popular new artists. Factoring all that in, maybe downloading increases sales. And 90% of the catalog of the major labels isn’t for sale anymore. The Internet is the only way to hear this music.

Even if downloading did hurt sales, that doesn’t make it unethical. Libraries and video stores (neither of which pay per rental) hurt sales too. Is it unethical to use them?

Downloading may be illegal. But 60 million people used Napster and only 50 million voted for Bush or Gore. We live in a democracy. If the people want to share files then the law should be changed to let them.

And there’s a fair way to change it. A Harvard professor found that a $60/yr. charge for broadband users would make up for all lost revenues. The government would give it to the affected artists and, in return, make downloading legal, sparking easier-to-use systems and more shared music. The artists get more money and you get more music. What’s unethical about that?
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001112


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God Is In The GPL’s
Seth Finkelstein

Basically, the pure "creator's rights" theory of copyright simply isn't true, as a factual matter. People often assert it, because that's how they think of it as philosophical matter. But the discussion tends to bog down over this point, since there's so much emotional energy invested in it. As a matter of law, copyright isn't a divine right of kings, err, creators. It's a complicated series of practical trade-offs, which don't have the rigorous axiomatic intellectual consistency so beloved of both geeks and theologians.

The GPL makes use of the pure "creator's rights" theory in an interesting way. It isn't saying the people involved necessarily believe the theory. But to the believers of the theory, it says that the creator exercises their rights by binding all believers not to enforce those rights. It's as if you went to someone and said you considered them a god, and they replied, "Well, I personally don't think I'm a god - but if you think I'm a god, my command as your god, to you as a worshiper, is not to think of me as a god, and further, if you discuss me, tell anyone else I'm not a god either."

This is completely logically consistent. But it tends to discomfort worshipers, who are used to gods telling them restrictive things - what sort of a god is it, who tells them, as a god-command, not to believe in him as a god? Sure, gods can by definition do anything. But that's some sort of subversion of status. Which is SCO's (in)famous objection.

An endless repeating of the pure "creator's rights" theory of copyright doesn't help philosophically or practically.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001112


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EFF Defends Right to Own Smart Card Technology

Files Amicus Brief On Behalf of Public in DirecTV Appeal
Press Release

San Francisco--Defending the right to own and experiment with general-purpose technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a friend-of-the court brief in an Eleventh Circuit appeals case that will determine whether satellite giant DirecTV can sue "smart card" technology owner Mike Treworgy for simply possessing hardware that enables him to program electronic smart cards.

Smart cards are computer devices that have a multitude of legitimate purposes, which can also be used illegally to intercept satellite signals. DirecTV has argued that mere purchase of smart card programming hardware should constitute proof that the hardware is being used illegally.

"Computer researchers, network administrators, engineers and others are using smart card technology in ways that are perfectly legal, yet DirecTV would have the courts adopt a theory of guilt-by-purchase," said EFF Staff Attorney Jason Schultz. "This is not only grossly unjust, it also threatens to scare legitimate innovators away from an extremely promising branch of technology."

In the lower court ruling, U.S. District Court Judge John E. Steele agreed to dismiss DirecTV's possession claim in its lawsuit against Mr. Treworgy, finding that the company does not have the authority to decide who can legally own the technology. DirecTV appealed, making this case the first such dispute in the country to reach the appellate court level.

"DirecTV is threatening innocent researchers, hobbyists and others who have never intercepted a single minute of DirecTV's transmissions," added Schultz. "This cannot be what the law intends, and we hope the Eleventh Circuit will send a strong message to that effect."

DirecTV has sent over 150,000 letters demanding settlements of $3,500 and up from individuals who purchased smart card technology. The company has followed this up with over 15,000 lawsuits claiming that mere possession of these devices is unlawful. As a result, those caught in DirecTV's dragnet have been forced to choose between paying for a lawyer and paying for a settlement.

In response to the lawsuits, EFF has partnered with Stanford's Center for Internet and Society to establish DirecTVdefense.org, a website aimed at helping innocent people defend their right to own and use smart card technology.
http://www.eff.org/directvdefense/20040112_eff_pr.php


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Warp Records Reject DRM, Go Bleep
Posted by simoniker

from the pushing-squares-of-sound dept.

DJ Phase writes "Warp Records, an independent label for electronic music (featuring artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada), has made their entire back catalog available thru Bleep, a new digital download service. Individual tracks are $1.35 for those of us in the USA, with EPs and full albums in the $4 to $10 price range. You can download Aphex Twin's rare, groundbreaking Hangable Auto Bulb EP for $4.29. To quote from the FAQ: 'We are at present the only store to offer very high quality MP3 files,' and 'Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals'."
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/01/1...tid=188&tid=95


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Synths, Drukqs And Rock'n'Roll

Aphex Twin can't spell, but his music gets across the message.
John Encarnacao

It takes extraordinary events to persuade Richard D. James to release any new music. Aphex Twin, as he is most commonly known, has made his pile. His groundbreaking electronica of the '90s, from the sublime soundscapes of Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 to the abrasive sounds of Come to Daddy, will keep ticking over on various labels worldwide. His reputation as a true original remains intact, even if his releases have become sporadic.

The release of Drukqs two years ago was prompted by a mistake. James left an MP3 player on a plane that held a mind-boggling 282 new tracks. It was labelled "Aphex Twin Unreleased Tracks" to make any would-be bootleggers quite sure that what they might post on to the internet was the real deal. This never happened, but James hurriedly put together a double CD just in case.

The man is obviously still making an incredible amount of music. Why is he so reluctant to share it with the world?

"The delay is usually just 'cause I'm lazy," he says. "I have enough cash now so I don't need to release music any more. I never really wanted to release records; it was mates around me saying, 'C'mon, you've got to release this!'"

This is put into context by James's belief that most artists do their best work before achieving recognition, and that commerce affects creativity for the worse. (He recently released a compilation of mostly old remixes entitled 26 Mixes for Cash.)

Despite the rushed release of Drukqs and the reasons behind that, he thinks "having music for free is a good thing, because I don't think music should be a commodity. I've changed my opinion to and fro over the years, but I really do think there shouldn't be any copyright on art.

"But the thing is, some kid somewhere might be really poor and think, 'If I make the best music in the world, I can get some money and buy a house and some equipment', which is what I thought. So that is a good motivation, as well. You would lose that."

As a teenager in Cornwall, England, experimenting with sound came naturally to James, whether it was making tape loops or taking apart a piano. He also showed a precocious predisposition for electronics, which accounts for his unique sound.

"I had a few standard synthesisers and I customised those. Then I built quite a few modules. I was doing an electronics course at the time. I didn't know what was around then that you could buy. I knew more about electronics than about what instruments were available. Plus I didn't have any money, either, so there was no point in finding out."

Asked if he had peers with similar interests, he says, "I was completely on my own. I literally had one friend who knew what electronic music was. And I didn't have anyone who knew what I was doing with synthesisers and circuits and stuff.

I had friends who understood electronics, but they didn't understand music."

Nowadays, James splits time between making music and co-running the Rephlex label, which supports many and varied types of electronic sound-making.

His career has been a journey from analogue synthesisers to laptop music and back again, though the non-chronological nature of his output can make this hard to discern. Drukqs includes many tracks that sound like a prepared piano, which James says is "going back to my roots in a way".

"For a few years, I only made stuff on a laptop just because I wanted to train myself. But now it's like being released from a spell that I put on myself because I'm getting back into more physical inputs and loads of analogue synthesisers again."

Analogue or digital; computers or synths; noise, beats and ambience; the most certain thing about an Aphex Twin concert is that James alone will be setting the agenda.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/...437402717.html


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TiVo's New PC-Viewing Deliberately Broken
Cory Doctorow

TiVo has rolled out "TiVo to Go," a service that allows you to move video from your TiVo to your PC's hard-drive, and then to burn the file to a DVD. Unfortunately, the system uses a proprietary DRM system that tethers the video to your machine and your home, meaning that you can't move the video to your hard-drive as an MPG file that you can edit at will, send to a friend, include in a school report, grab stills out of to make a highlight reel, etc. In other words, TiVo is lagging the functionality available for free in open source software projects like mythtv.

Once selected, the secure and encrypted TiVo recorded programs are moved to the PC, where the TiVo Content Security Key is used to unlock the files for playback or burning, preventing files from being shared online, outside of the user's home network.

The TiVo Content Security Key and the TiVo-enabled versions of Sonic Solution's MyDVD and CinePlayer applications will be sold as a bundle at www.tivo.com.
The TiVo execs I've spoken with about this have expressed TiVo's philosophy as "reasonable compromise" -- delivering features that customers want, so long as it doesn't make the Hollywood companies too unhappy. This is usually presented as a business-person's realpolitik: look, kid, we know your ideals say that crippling the stuff we sell you is bad, but we've got a company to run here.

What's funny about this is that it's the exact opposite of the traditional way of running a disruptive technology business: no one crippled the piano roll to make sure it didn't upset the music publishers, Marconi didn't cripple the radio to appease the Vaudeville players -- hell, railroad barons never slowed their steam-engines down to speeds guaranteed to please the teamsters.

Where does this bizarre idea -- that the dinosaur industry that's being displaced gets to dictate terms to the mammals who are succeeding it -- come from?

I'll tell you two things that are obvious to my entrepreneurial instincts:

1. There is no market demand for TiVo's DRM -- or anyone else's. No TiVo customer got out of bed this morning and said, "Damn, I wish there was a way I could do less with my videos."

2. If TiVo isn't giving customers the features they want, someone else (like a commercial packager of mythtv, for example) will.

Not delivering the products your customers demand is not good business. It never has been.
http://boingboing.net/2004_01_01_arc...65869430853467


Photoshop Rips Heavy Cultural Symbols Out Of Artists' Phrasebook

Photoshop CS automatically detects images of US currency and prevents the manipulation, copying and pasting of same. When my grandfather was in hospital with Alzheimer's, one of his major causes of anxiety was money, but we could soothe him by giving him $20 "bills" we ran off an inkjet (fakes easily detected by anyone not suffering from senile dementia). The images on the US dollar, being a product of the US government, are not copyrightable.

The images on US currency are among the most ubiquitous in our society. They are freighted with heavy symbolism, and have constituted part of the artistic vocabulary of visual artists for generations. Thanks to Adobe's decision to exercise prior restraint over its customers -- to punish the innocent to get at the guilty -- currency images have been ripped out of the photoshopper's artistic phrasebook.

If we ever needed an example of the idea that "architecture is politics" and that "code is law," here it is.

And as if that wasn't enough, the scanning of all images for content reportedly creates a massive performance hit in Photoshop, as your CPU's cycles are hijacked to police your lawful activity.


Michael Moore Endorses File-Sharing Of His Movies

Here's a wild video of Michael Moore at a Q&A session, being asked if he minds people on file-sharing networks passing around rips of his movies. His answer, in a nutshell: "Share away!"
I don't agree with copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it...as long as they're not trying to make a profit off my labor...

I make these movies and books and TV shows because I want things to change, and so the more people who get to see them, the better.”
http://boingboing.net/2004_01_01_arc...39932290887356


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The High-Tech Black Market

Copyright infringement is a criminal offense. Meet the new generation of geek outlaws and heroes.
Annalee Newitz

My daddy was a bank robber

But he never hurt nobody

He just liked to live that way

And he loved to steal your money

The Clash, "Bank Robber"

IT WAS AFTER midnight on a San Francisco street popular with young hipsters. Groups of glittery girls and boys with 1960s protomullets slid past homeless people too tired to beg for money. As my friends and I rounded a corner, we heard a shuffle and a soft cough. A man huddled in a doorway full of shadow, his arms curled protectively around a cardboard box so old that its edges had gone soft and fuzzy.

"Want to buy some records?" he croaked. "I've got really good old stuff."

I paused, uncertain. He paused, too.

Then, in a voice so low I thought he might be talking to himself, he muttered, "I've got some software, too. You want to buy some software?"

That got my attention. It was the first time anyone had ever offered to sell me pirated software on the street. In New York City the streets are packed with people selling crappy pirated DVDs of new movies, but I had never heard of people doing the same thing with software programs.

"What do you have?" I asked.

He named several expensive and popular music software packages and added, "Plus a whole bunch of sound files I made from rare old albums." He smiled, reached into the invisible depths of his box, and pulled out a shiny jewel case with an unmarked CD in it. A friend of mine wound up giving him 20 bucks for a couple thousand dollars' worth of music software and loads of audio clips. After the deal, we all shook hands, and he introduced himself as DJ Cupcake*, "so you can remember me." When we opened the CD on my computer at home, I discovered he'd named it "grip o shit," as if the disc contained drugs instead of code.

And why not treat the silvery disc like a bag of heroin? Selling pirated software is a federal crime. Violators face fines of up to $500,000 and five years in prison. In March a notorious Australian software pirate called Bandito was charged by a Connecticut federal grand jury with copyright infringement and - because he was the leader of a software piracy ring called DrinkorDie - conspiracy. He faces extradition, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and up to 10 years in prison. Twenty other members of DrinkorDie have been convicted of felony copyright infringement as well.

Compared to the DrinkorDie gang, Cupcake is small-time. He's just selling a handful of pirated titles on the street. These days the federal government has bigger fish to fry. With the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, it created a whole new breed of digital outlaw: people who create or distribute tools that could be used to make pirated copies. Attorneys and activists compare this to outlawing crowbars because they could be used to break into somebody's house. And yet the steepest sentences doled out for criminal copyright infringement in the last couple of years have been for people selling tools rather than bootlegs.

Copyright criminals

Consider the case of a Florida man who went by the name JungleMike, arrested earlier this year and charged on several counts of copyright infringement for selling modified smart access cards that helped his clients get free satellite TV. It's hard to deny that stealing pay TV, like selling a pirated CD, is a form of theft. But JungleMike wasn't stealing cable. He was selling hardware that other people could use to steal cable if they chose to do it. And yet JungleMike faces up to 30 years in prison, more than a bank robber does. Bank robbery, a form of theft both violent and extreme, carries a sentence of no more than 25 years.

Things weren't always this way. The first criminal provision in U.S. copyright law was added in 1897, more than 100 years after copyrights were defined and codified in the U.S. Constitution. Anyone who has followed the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America's push to sue the pants off people pirating media on peer-to-peer networks won't be surprised to discover that this century-old provision made it a misdemeanor to perform copyrighted musical or dramatic compositions "willfully and for profit." Later provisions extended the law to cover all copyrighted materials, and in 1982 a special felony provision was added for first-time infringers of movie and sound-recording copyrights.

It wasn't until 1992 that software found its way into criminal copyright law. Until that time, Cupcake's little sidewalk business might have gotten him sued but it wouldn't have landed him in jail. Now it most assuredly could.

Nevertheless, little changed in criminal copyright law for more than a century. Higher penalties were added, and more forms of media were tacked onto the list of items one might be jailed for copying and selling. But it wasn't until the infamous DMCA that the U.S. public was subjected to a dramatic and weird sea change in the law.

After the passage of the DMCA, it became illegal to "manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a [copyrighted] work" (U.S. Criminal Code, title 17, chapter 12, section 1201). What this means is that you can't distribute or sell any kind of object or service that would potentially allow people to circumvent tech that protects media copyrights. This "crime of circumvention" is different from mere infringement because these days copyrighted media are often protected by more than a simple "all rights reserved" statement. If you buy a CD, DVD, or video game, it's likely that even if you wanted to copy it illegally, you couldn't, because a "technological measure" on the disc would stop you. Also known as digital rights management (DRM), this is usually some form of encryption software that is supposed to make it impossible for you to unscramble cable signals, copy DVDs, or put the music files you buy from the iTunes store onto more than one computer.

Of course, in practice the encryption or anticircumvention devices media companies use are generally easy to break. In a famous example, people discovered they could use Magic Markers to black out the parts of their CDs that contained DRM. Once marked up, the CDs could be ripped.

JungleMike, who sold hardware that allowed people to decrypt satellite TV signals, was charged under the section of the criminal code that deals with circumvention. Had he been caught five years ago, he might have faced a zillion-dollar lawsuit, but he wouldn't have been headed to the big house for his entire adult life.

But how can the federal government outlaw tools? That's as silly as making Magic Markers illegal because they could be used as circumvention devices. As activists with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued in a recent white paper, "photocopiers, VCRs, and CD-R burners can also be misused, but no one would suggest that the public give them up simply because they might be used by others to break the law." Most of the circumvention tools the DMCA is designed to prohibit also have legitimate uses.

Perhaps more important, turning circumvention into a crime means that people who have a legal right to make fair-use copies of their media can't. Say, for example, you're a music professor who wants to make copies of certain songs available for students to download and listen to for class. These kinds of copies fall under a fair-use exemption to copyright law because they are being used purely for scholarly inquiry. It's also legal for people to make personal backup copies of media they have purchased. But under the DMCA, the tools to make these perfectly legal copies simply won't be available outside the black market. While the DMCA does provide exemptions for research and fair use, getting the tools to make good on said exemptions is such a thorny problem that technologists worry the law will stifle innovation and scholarly inquiry.

For these reasons and more, the DMCA has created a consumer rights crisis. People are being physically restrained from making legal copies of CDs and DVDs they have legitimately purchased. Moreover, they are also being told they cannot modify their game systems and computers to play backup copies. The Xbox game system will not play backup copies of games, regardless of whether they are legal copies. DVDs come with an encryption scheme called CSS that prevents people from playing their DVDs on computers running the Linux operating system. A program called DeCSS that allows Linux users like myself to play the movies we've bought is illegal under the DMCA because it has to decrypt the copy protection in order to play movies. But why shouldn't I be able to play my movies on any machine I want? Why shouldn't I be allowed to use my game system to play my backup games?

Increasingly, consumers are having to ask these questions – and in many cases, they are starting to challenge the law. But the outcome of these challenges remains uncertain. What's clear, however, is that the DMCA's anticircumvention provision has created a thriving black market where geeks rule.

Lots more: http://www.sfbg.com/38/11/cover_hightech.html - Jack


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Court Declines To Assert Jurisdiction Over Offshore Site
ILN

A federal court in Wisconsin has refused to assert jurisdiction over an offshore criticism website. Badbusinessbureau.com operates a site in the Caribbean where there are forums to complain about various businesses. A Wisconsin business filed suit after being subject to 30 - 40 complaints. The court examined several jurisdiction standards including passive vs. active, purposeful availment, and effects in determining not to assert jurisdiction. Case name is Hy Cite Corporation v. Badbusinessbureau.com.


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MEMO:
To: The next head of the Motion Picture Association of America (to be opened upon arrival)


Subject: How Hollywood can avoid the fate of the music industry

By Chris Anderson

Congratulations on your new job - and on having the courage to take it. You arrive at a historic moment, with big shoes to fill and a tough challenge ahead. Jack Valenti's 37-year reign was a remarkable exercise in the use of political power to protect an industry. But it came at a cost. The film industry has treated as a threat any disruptive new technology that might change the way movies are distributed and consumed, lobbying vigorously for legal safeguards. Valenti did this all too well; the result of his skill on the Hill is an industry that instinctively hides behind the skirt of Washington and the courts.

All this needs to change. The implosion of the music industry is demonstrating the price of getting it wrong. Nobody wants that to happen to Hollywood, but there are troubling similarities - not least a history of ham-handed industry actions and executives in denial. You've still got a little time to figure this out, but a lot less than your advisers are telling you. Allow me to offer some independent advice.

First, the good news. In the piracy wars, movies have some inherent advantages over music. From the start, films emerged in the digital world locked up with encryption - it's too hard for the average user to get past the built-in copy protection and rip a DVD. CDs (which date to the 1980s) are open to all.

Another advantage is that unlike music labels, movie studios are not hated by consumer and artist alike. Labels are seen (not entirely unfairly) as gouging consumers, screwing musicians, and otherwise failing to earn their middleman markup. But the value of studios is clear. Movies are huge, expensive endeavors that can't be made in a garage or on a bedroom mixing board. Consumers are happier paying $10 for a special-effects extravaganza or an epic drama than they are $16 for a glorified mix tape. And while the music industry takes every format change as an opportunity to charge more for the same product, DVDs offer real extra value in bonus materials and ease of use. Customers who feel they're getting their money's worth are less likely to turn into pirates.

Movie fans who do choose the black flag need a high tolerance for frustration. Even after compression, an average-size film is about 40 times bigger than an average-size album. Downloading can be a multihour experience. Broadband connections aren't getting any faster, so trading movie files is restricted to the very patient. Not to mention that unlike an MP3, the quality usually sucks.

Last, movies may never be downloaded as often as music, because the two are consumed so differently. In general, movies aren't replayed again and again. We don't rearrange the scenes or build playlists of our favorite car chases. And watching them is not an offhand activity, like listening to your iPod while driving or jogging. There's simply less incentive for typical consumers to load a hard drive full of films and copy it from machine to machine.

Now the bad news: You're at risk of alienating your customers like the music industry did. The do-not-record "broadcast flag" that the TV industry just pushed through the FCC will introduce new restrictions on programming, none of which benefit consumers. Proposed legislation that throws anyone caught with a prerelease movie on their hard drive into prison for three years is the sort of disproportionate response that gives the RIAA a bad name. The notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act is Hollywood's fault. And extending copyright protection year after year so that the film and television archives stay shut isn't just bad law, it's depriving Americans of their cultural history.

On top of that, technology is making it easier for those who want to trade movies. Napster was only half of the problem for the music biz; the arrival of cheap CD burners in PCs was just as bad. Today, music-burning is at least as big as file-trading. Now the same forces are at work in video. DVD recorders have dropped below the key $200 price point, which is just where the CD-R boom started. Get ready for a wave of homemade DVDs (the software for cracking their encryption is out there).

Online file-trading is going to get worse, too. Finally, on the wide-open Internet, the Napster for movies has been born. It's called BitTorrent, and because it can pull a single film from dozens of computers simultaneously (reassembling the pieces on a user's PC), it's incredibly fast. More important, it turns the economics of file-trading on its head. The most popular files download the fastest and make the lowest demands on the host servers (because there are more computers to download from, and the load is balanced among them). The usual barrier to sharing, say, a prerelease of Return of the King - the fear that greedy downloaders will swamp your PC - is greatly diminished. Huge hard drives are getting so cheap that digital video libraries will soon be commonplace.

The bottom line: The widespread assumption that Hollywood has plenty of time to avoid a music industry-style train wreck may be wrong. What once seemed like a five- or ten-year buffer now looks more like two or three years. Consider yourself warned.

So what should you do? Start by accepting that new technology means a new way of doing business. People will trade more movies, and new releases will leak out. It may never get as bad as music, yet it will certainly get worse than it is today. But look at it another way: The same forces are spontaneously building the best distribution network you can imagine.

Already, Bollywood studios are paying Kazaa to distribute their films, reaching audiences they could never find otherwise. This could be a model for Hollywood. The multiplex has distorted the economics of your industry, driving out independent cinemas and pushing the studios to mass-market, big-budget blockbusters. But there's a huge market for smaller, cheaper films, only it's spread out and can rarely fill a big mall screen. Reach them with digital distribution, both as Netflix is doing with rental DVDs by mail, and through smart commercial peer-to-peer file-trading services.

And don't fight the technology. People want their digital media the way they want it: every way imaginable. If you triple-wrap movies with digital rights management, or demand that anything that plays video conform to some gnarly DRM standard, you'll just force people underground. Make it easy for consumers to do what they want legally, even if that means a determined minority will probably steal. That's OK, because you'll more than make up for it with the flexible markets that digital media creates. More carrot, less stick - be the anti-Valenti!

Don't make the mistake the music folks did and charge the same price for a product regardless of the true cost of delivering it. It costs a lot less to deliver an album on iTunes than it does to package a CD and ship it to a store. So why shouldn't the consumer share in those savings? Same goes for movies. Think $5 for a downloadable film - unlimited use.

Consumers have an innate sense of fairness: If you offer a good product at a good price, they'll pay. But if you treat consumers like criminals or overcharge them, they'll turn to the dark side.

We've seen it happen - but it doesn't have to happen again. Consumers will love you if you do the right thing. But don't do it just because it's right. Do it because it's good business.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/mpaa_pr.html


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German Police Investigate Potato Computer Scam

BERLIN (Reuters) - German police are investigating after an angry man returned a computer he had just bought saying it was packed with small potatoes instead of computer parts.

The store replaced the computer free of charge but became suspicious when he returned a short time later with another potato-filled computer casing, police in the western city of Kaiserslautern said on Monday.

"The second time he said he didn't need a computer any more and asked for his money back in cash," a police spokesman said.

Police are now investigating the man for fraud.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=4111820
















Until next week,

- js.













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Jack Spratt’s Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts at lycos.com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.