[JackSpratts]

Music Theft, and this Time, Not From P2P Networks
Posted by spatula

Musicians will be receiving some $50 million in owed royalties from the music industry, demonstrating that the industry is the proverbial pot...

When it comes to theft in the music industry, the file trading on peer-to-peer networks can't hold a candle to the industry itself. After a two-year investigation, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has announced a settlement with a number of record companies to pay $50 million in royalties owed to thousands of artists.

Spitzer found that record companies were not taking reasonable steps to maintain contact with artists and said, "The recording companies have an obligation to perform adequate due diligence and maintain information about the artists to whom they owe this money. What we found is that, quite simply, they were not doing it. Rather than perform the hard work and effort of tracking down the artists, they were letting these funds accumulate in their accounts."

These were not all obscure artists who left no forwarding address either. Back royalties were owed to famous names like Gloria Estefan, Dolly Parton, P. Diddy Combs, Vince Gill, Tom Jones and David Bowie.

The RIAA member companies have also agreed to try harder to track down missing artists by placing ads in major recording industry publications and by working with industry groups and unions.

No story about the recording industry could be complete without the RIAA spin of course. The group says that unpaid royalties account for a "tiny fraction" of the total royalties generated. Somehow I doubt they'd be sympathetic if I said that mp3s accounted for a "tiny fraction" of the total music played.

Companies named in the settlement include BMG Music, EMI Music Publishing, SONY Music Entertainment, Universal Music and Warner Music Group.
http://web.morons.org/article.jsp?sectionid=2&id=4949


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Record Industry Wants Still More
Michael Grebb

As iTunes, Rhapsody and other song-download sites take off with consumers, it's easy to think that the record industry finally "gets it" when it comes to selling music in the digital age.

Not so fast, says Rob Glaser, chairman and chief executive of Real Networks, owner of the Rhapsody service.

At the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit in Washington, D.C., Glaser recounted his general frustration in getting the record labels to offer creative pricing beyond the 99-cents-per-download model. In fact, some labels -- emboldened by consumers' apparent willingness to pay a buck a song -- are talking about raising per-song fees rather than lowering them to increase volume.

"Can you explain what planet the record labels are on?" asked Walt Mossberg, tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal and moderator of a one-on-one interview with Glaser at the conference.

Glaser smirked. "I guess I'd call it Planet Spreadsheet," he said. "The problem is that they don't look at it holistically."

Glaser has tried to convince the labels to compromise -- perhaps by charging more than a buck for newly released songs (and more than $10 for newly released album downloads), but then slashing the price a few months later to drive demand after the new-release sheen dulls.

So far, response has been muted, Glaser said. On a host of packaging issues, he said he can often get a couple of major labels on board. But then they hear that a couple of other labels aren't playing ball, and they back off for fear of being the only ones to make a mistake. The result, according to Glaser, is the "lowest common denominator."

To be sure, Glaser and others at the conference noted that the record labels -- despite their insistence on suing peer-to-peer users -- are coming around when it comes to digital downloading.

Even Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, said, "This is the year that digital downloading really took off. I think the prospects are looking better all the time."

But when pressed by Wired News after the panel and asked about Glaser's comments, Sherman said executives at different companies don't all agree on how to market and price downloads. And that can sometimes make it hard for all five majors to move in sync.

"They don't know what to do," he said. "They are afraid of doing the wrong thing."

The record industry already has an antitrust exemption that allows record companies to jointly negotiate royalty rates for digital distribution. Late last year, the music industry convinced Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to insert language into the EnFORCE Act (Enhancing Federal Obscenity Reporting and Copyright Enforcement Act of 2003) that would extend that exemption to "physical product configurations" such as CDs. That bill is still in committee.

One new product that record companies want is a two-sided disc that could contain music in the traditional CD format on one side. On the other, music would be recorded in new, high-quality formats such as DVD-Audio or SACD, which are slowly catching on among audiophiles.

Such discs would serve two purposes: Give music buyers a reason to buy physical products, and seed the market with the new formats even before DVD-Audio or SACD players have been widely adopted.

Sherman said some publishers want to collect separate royalties for each version of the song on the album (CD, DVD-Audio and SACD) instead of collecting one fee.

"They have said one mechanical royalty isn't enough," Sherman said. By jointly negotiating under an antitrust exemption, the labels could obviously increase their bargaining strength.

Of course, many wonder whether that's a good thing.

In August 2003, the Webcaster Alliance sued the RIAA (along with the Motion Picture Association of America) and the five major labels for anticompetitive behavior.

Meanwhile, a heavy contingent of musicians and artists at the conference seemed ambivalent about technology companies -- like Microsoft, Apple and Real Networks -- replacing the record labels, which have a rocky history with artists.

John Flansburgh, of the band They Might Be Giants, said large corporations will most likely still control the vast majority of music for years to come either way.

"It's meet the new boss, same as the old boss," he said.

Indeed, some of the most contentious debates at the conference were between advocates of peer-to-peer systems and songwriters, many of whom have seen their royalty checks plummet in the wake of downloading and CD burning.

"The best-selling CD in the country is blank," said Flansburgh.

"You're not just stealing from a big megacorporation," said Tina Weymouth, currently of Tom Tom Club and formerly the bassist for the Talking Heads, "you're stealing from the artist."

Artists should work with P2P networks rather than try to stamp them out, said Holmes Wilson, a co-founder of Downhill Battle, which advocates a flat fee imposed on broadband users to pay artist royalties from P2P use. "They have to bring peer-to-peer file sharing into the fold," he said.

Still, others were optimistic.

"In five to 10 years' time, we'll be looking at it and saying, 'What were we worried about?'" said Peter Jenner, who manages singer-songwriter Billy Bragg. "I don't see how the Internet won't make us tons and tons of money."
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0...w=wn_tophead_4


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RIA-Japan IM’s P2P users against illegal uploading.
Press Release

Recording Industry Association of Japan (RIAJ) has started to send warnings using the IM function to individual P2P users uploading music files illegally on the internet. This action was launched on 2nd March, 2004 to give full recognition to the illegality of uploading music files through file-sharing software and make them stop such illegal activities. Uploading MP3 files made from commercial music CDs without permission of right holders is an infringement of the Copyright Law.

Abuse of music on the internet has been a serious issue internationally. RIAA, IFPI and its national groups in other countries have been taking active measures such as campaigns to disseminate people's awareness about copyright and lawsuits.

We are also carrying out the "Respect Our Music" campaign and other various educational activities on copyright. We have requested thorough management to the academic institutions and companies where illegal uploading acts were found. We also had sent letters to about 1,200 universities and junior colleges nationwide to call on the enhancement of their LAN management. Due to the effect of this, the number of illegal uploads on their networks has been decreasing.

However, there is no end of P2P users who upload music files illegally, so we started sending notices to individual users. Against certain malicious users, we are preparing to take legal actions. The number of IM sent will surpass 1 million by the end of May.
http://www.riaj.or.jp/e/whatsnew/20040426.html


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Shine, Clean and Repair in a Body Shop for CD's
J.D. Biersdorfer

If a long winter spent cooped up indoors has left you with a pile of scuffed and skipping DVD's and PlayStation discs, a little spring cleaning of the digital variety might be in order. To get those scratched and battered video games, movies and albums spinning smoothly again as quickly as possible, Memorex has motorized the cleaning process with its OptiFix Pro system.

The OptiFix Pro kit, which sells for $30 in electronics stores, comes with special chemical solutions for cleaning and repairing most disc formats. It can buff up computer- friendly CD and DVD discs, audio CD's, DVD movies and those GameCube, PlayStation, Dreamcast and Xbox discs that take a lot of handling from family gamers.

The repair solution (a tube of aluminum oxide used with special repair pads included in the kit) can be used to fill in light scratches on the reflective layer of a disc. The cleaning solution, silicone oil, comes with a set of pads for use inside the OptiFix Pro unit.

Once the proper pad has been sprayed with the cleaning or repairing solution, the damaged disc is placed inside the OptiFix Pro, which automatically polishes it for 45 seconds to two minutes. Although some discs with deep scratches are beyond repair, a session with the OptiFix may save you from having to buy another "Blue's Clues" DVD after the toddlers get hold of the first one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/29/te...ts/29scra.html


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Wrapped up in Rhapsody
Chris Lester

Sing, or grunt, along with me, folks. There is no shame in the privacy of your own mind.

Poor young grandson, there's nothing I can say

You'll have to learn, just like me

And that's the hardest way

Ooh la la

Ooh la la, la la, yeah

I wish that I knew what I know now

When I was younger

I wish that I knew what I know now

When I was stronger

That autumnal lament of romantic regret, written by Ron Wood and Ronnie Lane of the Faces, has rattled around my cerebrum for 20 years gone by now.

I never really had much use for the Faces, a beery, sloppy, second-tier rock unit that nonetheless influenced some real favorites of mine, such as the Replacements. But that song always stuck with me, even after I sold “Ooh La La” and about 160 other albums during the cash crunch of 1984.

A couple of weeks ago, however, the song tugged again at my memory, and I was able to do something about it.

I simply popped up Rhapsody on my home computer, tapped in the Faces, and, voila, the group's entire recorded catalog was at my disposal.

This, my friends, is almost unspeakably cool. It's completely legitimate. And, most surprisingly to me, it makes a compelling argument that subscription-based online music marketing makes the most business sense yet for the floundering music industry.

Since its launch in 2001, the Rhapsody digital music service has been offering listeners unlimited access to a jaw-dropping library of music via computer. For $9.95 a month, subscribers now can tap roughly 40,000 albums totaling more than 600,000 songs. And songwriters, musicians, publishers and the record industry all get a cut of the action, so you don't have to fret getting sued by the Recording Industry Association of America.

That's just the start of the fun. Subscribers can listen to individual cuts, listen to a playlist of a group's most popular songs or play entire albums. You can compile your own play lists, or program “radio stations” that stream only the groups you prescribe and similar groups, from roots music to reggae. And you get unlimited playback. The only time you're charged extra is when you decide to burn your own compact discs for a 79-cent fee per track.

I haven't burned a track yet. And with $36 in cable from RadioShack, my computer is hooked directly into the home stereo.

The prevalent image, dear reader, is that of a pig in musical slop.

In recent weeks, I've sampled the first two new songs in almost two decades from what's left of the Who, and came away heartened for my old heroes. I've engaged in such deeply guilty teenage pleasures as Thin Lizzy. New music from the Postal Service was pretty impressive, while Franz Ferdinand fell flat for me.

I spent much of my youth painstakingly assembling a music collection that totals somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 record albums, tapes and compact discs. Those were halcyon days spent working at record shops largely for barter, chiding customers for their poor taste, and flipping through albums for my own collection.

There's a lot of pride built into that music collection. But its assemblage really was laborious when you think about it. And now all that work is simply blown away by immediate digital access to roughly 20 times as much music as it took more than 20 years to assemble.

Indeed, Rhapsody turns the logic of hard-core music collectors such as your faithful correspondent on its head. The major attraction for collectors is “possession” of the item, whether it's music, stamps or antique furniture. That strong emotional motivation initially made me loathe the idea of digital music delivery, and the idea of a subscription-based service that doesn't allow you to possess the music without paying an additional fee specifically.

Those reservations, however, have melted away with regular exposure to the flexibility and depth of selection offered by Rhapsody. (You need broadband Web access to enjoy Rhapsody, but not a particularly new computer. So far I'm getting away with running the service on an increasingly aged, remanufactured 1998 Gateway computer with a Pentium II processor on my desktop.)

Moreover, there's growing evidence suggesting that there is room in the marketplace for such subscription-based services as Rhapsody.

The struggling music industry, which historically has crammed changing formats and exorbitantly priced products down consumers' throats, doesn't deserve much sympathy for its recent troubles. Although the industry suffered a sales slump in recent years, there's a reasonable argument that high prices, poor product and a slumping economy have been as much to blame as rogue file- sharing applications such as Kazaa.

Yet the industry's litigious campaign against illegitimate downloading appears to be having an effect in the marketplace.

Since last June, when the RIAA announced it would start suing peer-to-peer file sharers for copyright infringement, ComScore Media Metrix estimates that the number of unique Kazaa users per month has fallen from about 35 million to 20 million.

Meanwhile, the number of unique visitors to six major legitimate online music services stood at more than 11 million in March, according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Such pay-per-download-oriented services as Musicmatch.com, the newly legitimate Napster and iTunes were most popular in that group. But subscription-based Rhapsody and related sites operated by Listen.com attracted nearly 1.4 million unique users.

For now, at least, I'm solidly, and surprisingly, in Rhapsody's camp.

I wish that I knew what I know now

When I was younger

But I'm making up for lost time.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...8581806.htm?1c


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iTunes 'DRM Killer' May Relaunch
John Ribeiro

The PlayFair free software project is likely to come online again soon, despite efforts by Apple to close it down.

Apple last month applied its legal muscle to close the project, which builds software that lets users break the FairPlay digital rights management protection the company employs to secure iTunes Music Store songs when sold.

Sarovar a free software development community site based in Thiruvanthapuram, India, said it would stop hosting the PlayFair project after receiving a legal notice from Apple's attorneys alleging infringement of copyright. Apple sources were not available for comment.

After Sarovar decided to stop hosting PlayFair on its site, Anand Babu, a free software proponent, took over as the project's maintainer. "PlayFair project will soon come online," Babu said. " We are working on a better version, and we are hosting it outside the US" A number of groups have come forward to host and mirror PlayFair across the Internet, said Babu, who lives in Tamil Nadu, India.

PlayFair has fallen foul of Apple ever since it was first hosted by its author, who prefers to be anonymous, at SourceForge.net, an open-source software development Web site. In early April, Apple invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and asked SourceForge.net to take down the project.

As the DMCA has an anticircumvision provision that could work against continuation of the project in the US, PlayFair was moved to Sarovar at the request of the author, according to Rajkumar Sukumaran, one of the maintainers of the Sarovar site.

Legal implications

Since India does not have a law similar to DMCA, Sarovar approved the project as it is legal in India, Rajkumar said. As PlayFair is a GPL (general public license), free software project, Sarovar could not find any reason for not approving PlayFair's request for hosting, he added.

Despite the decision to remove the project from the Sarovar site, free software proponents are defiant: "What is really happening is that a corporation is using legal means to shut down a free software project in India for the first time, and the small project is left defenceless – even though it believes that it is right," Rajkumar said.

The decision to stop hosting PlayFair on Sarovar was not taken because the site believes it has infringed Apple's copyrights, but because it did not want to drag the purely voluntary sponsors of the site into a legal battle with Apple, Rajkumar said.

PlayFair takes a protected AAC audio file from the iTunes Music Store, decodes it using a key obtained from an iPod or a Microsoft Windows system and then writes the new, decoded version to disk as a regular AAC audio file, according to Rajkumar. "It then optionally copies the metadata tags that describe the song, including the cover art, to the new file," he said.

PlayFair is not music theft, according to Sarovar. The PlayFair tool does not give the user any special facilities that Apple itself has not given to the user.

"PlayFair requires a valid key from Apple to convert the format of music downloaded from iTunes," Rajkumar said. "PlayFair cannot convert downloaded songs' formats without authorized keys bought from Apple. PlayFair is also not a music distribution program. All PlayFair does is convert songs from one restricted format to another, less restricted format." PlayFair is also not a method for making illegal copies of iTunes songs, according to Rajkumar, who added that PlayFair alone cannot be used to copy music to CD, distribute on a peer-to-peer sharing network, play music or edit songs.

Although Apple is likely to take legal action against any other site hosting PlayFair, Babu is undaunted. "I have faith that we will prevail in this matter," Babu said. "The public will recognize that the PlayFair code is both lawful and appropriate and support us all the way."
http://macworld.co.uk/news/main_news.cfm?NewsID=8571


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'Apple Can Keep iPod Crown' – iRiver
Macworld

iRiver, the first major media-player manufacturer to offer players that are compatible with MP3, WMA, ASF, WAV and OGG music file formats, is the company most likely to be able to take on Apple in the media-player space, but are looking to dominate elsewhere, according to a report.

But iRiver president Jonathan Sasse has no plans to take the crown from Apple. He told TechNewsWorld: "Apple can keep the iPod crown. The portable entertainment crown is still up for grabs, and we have our sights set squarely upon it."

Sasse says: "At this point, there are very few companies that have a product line that rivals iRiver. Without question, Apple has done a great job marketing their solution and the industry as a whole has benefited from that, but our strategy is entirely different.

"We aim to produce the best devices possible, in multiple categories, supporting multiple formats and services so our customers can always choose what is best for them."

"Our customers are looking for flexibility to choose the options that best suit their needs. By favouring the secure Windows Media format, it opens up the opportunity for competition in services, ultimately providing our customers with multiple libraries, service options, and payment structures to choose from."

Looking to the future

"We believe there are many different consumer needs that need to be met with the right product; as such, our product line has something for everyone, whereas other companies may take the approach of one product for everyone," said Sasse.

iRiver, like Gateway and Microsoft has plans to move into the living room with a Media Centre-type device. "As the Media Centre systems make their way into the living room, and out of the office, there are still devices that will be needed to keep that content mobile. The iRiver Portable Media Centre product launching in the second half of this year will begin that process. Home products of this kind are still very much in their infancy, but portable integration with these solutions is still a very important value add," he said.

Sasse makes the following prediction for ten-years-time: "I see two types of highly evolved entertainment devices. There will be a strong play for very small audio devices, perhaps which fit nicely in your ear, without the need for wires or cables, and possibly doubling as your cell phone earpiece when you aren't on the treadmill. Portable video will make gains with the display, either with visual glasses for personal use, or advanced display technologies enabling several people to enjoy a single portable device.

"I do believe the business and entertainment will remain mostly separated on specialized devices for each respective function. With cell phones picking up the PDA, Internet and commerce functions, and portable entertainment devices evolving the video, audio, and gaming experience."
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_...fm?NewsID=8584


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Jobs Main Man, Says Ex-Disney Exec
Macworld

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the man to fix Disney, a former director of the animation company has said.

Stanley Gold said that "if I had a short list of people who could fix this company then Steve Jobs would be on it".

He added: "Disney is suffering from morale problems, and is the last choice for artists and other creative talent looking to partner on projects."

Although Gold admitted that Jobs' position as CEO of Apple and Pixar may conflict with a position at Disney, he confirmed "Jobs is qualified to take the reins".

This is not the first time it has been suggested that Jobs should run Disney. Last year The New York Post speculated that he could be a future Disney CEO following his public falling out with Disney CEO Michael Eisner.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_...fm?NewsID=8572


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Jobs 'Proud Of Being A**Hole' – Ex-Apple Hack
Macworld

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is "proud of being an a**hole," according to Robert X Cringely, author of Accidental Empires.

Interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald today, Cringely is outspoken about Jobs, Apple, Microsoft, and the tech industry.

The report adds: "Cringely was one of Apple's first employees way back in 1977. But he has no illusions about his own programming prowess; in Accidental Empires, he describes himself as being able to program poorly in four languages".

On his stint at Apple in 1977, he says: "In my early days at Apple back in 1977 the entire technical department with the exception of the switching power supply was Steve Wozniak. There was no room for another OS guy and I would never compete with Woz for, well, anything. Okay, I'm better looking, but that's all, and even that's just on a good hair day".

The interview ends: "I like to pull out a $20 note and point out that there is something about that note that bothers Bill Gates – that it is in my pocket. Microsoft really does want all the money and I'm not sure they won't get it".
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_...fm?NewsID=8566


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Who Hacked the Voting System? The Teacher
John Schwartz

The fix was in, and it was devilishly hard to detect. Software within electronic voting machines had been corrupted with malicious code squirreled away in images on the touch screen. When activated with a specific series of voting choices, the rogue program would tip the results of a precinct toward a certain candidate. Then the program would disappear without a trace.

Luckily, the setting was not an election but a classroom exercise; the conspirators were students of Aviel D. Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University. It might seem unusual to teach computer security through hacking, but a lot of what Professor Rubin does is unusual. He has become the face of a growing revolt against high-technology voting systems. His critiques have earned him a measure of fame, the enmity of the companies and their supporters among election officials, and laurels: in April, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave him its Pioneer Award, one of the highest honors among the geekerati.

The push has had an effect on a maker of electronic voting machines, Diebold Inc., as well. California has banned the use of more than 14,000 electronic voting machines made by Diebold in the November election because of security and reliability concerns. Also, the company has warned that sales of election systems this year are slowing.

In April, the company said its first-quarter earnings rose 13 percent compared with the same quarter a year earlier. It also reported $29.2 million in revenue on nearly $500 million in sales in the latest period. But it lowered expectations for election systems sales for this year to a range of $80 million to $95 million from $100 million in sales a year earlier.

Professor Rubin took center stage in the national voting scene last July, when he published the first in-depth security analysis of Diebold's touch-screen voting software. The software had been pulled off an unprotected Diebold Internet site by Bev Harris, a publicist-turned-muckraker who posted the software and other documents she found as part of her campaign against what she calls "black box voting."

Professor Rubin and his colleagues at Hopkins and Rice University in Houston subjected the 49,000 lines of code to a deep review over a two-week period. Their report painted a grim picture: "Our analysis shows that this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts," they wrote. "We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk."

That shot across the bow was met with outrage from the industry and from election officials who had spent tens of millions of dollars on Diebold machines. Mr. Rubin was denounced as irresponsible and uninformed.

"I think when he's talking about computers, he's very good and knows what he's doing," said Britain J. Williams, a professor emeritus of computer science at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, and a consultant on voting systems. "When he's talking about elections, he doesn't know what he's talking about."

Typically, Professor Rubin decided to confront the issue of whether he had experience with elections by taking part in one. During the March presidential primary, he signed up to become an election judge and found himself sitting all day at a precinct in a church at Lutherville, Md., helping voters use the same Diebold touch-screen machines that he had criticized so roundly. He then went home and wrote a full account and posted it to the Internet.

Over the day, he wrote, "I started realizing that some of the attacks described in our initial paper were actually quite unrealistic, at least in a precinct with judges who worked as hard as ours did and who were as vigilant. At the same time, I found that I had underestimated some of the threats before."

Ultimately, he said, "I continue to believe that the Diebold voting machines represent a huge threat to our democracy."

When asked to comment on Professor Rubin's work, the company issued a statement that did not mention him by name. "Our collective goal should always be to provide voters with the assurance that their vote is important, voting systems are accurate and their individual vote counts," the company said.

While the debate has largely been constructive, Diebold said: "A key consideration in this dialogue, though, should be that the debate be positive and productive. We must not frighten voters or inadvertently provide any type of disincentive to voting, because at that point the dialogue itself begins to disenfranchise voters - the very thing this beneficial discussion is trying to prevent."

Professor Rubin is not the first person to take on the risks of high-tech voting.

Since Professor Rubin's paper came out last year, other reports have broadened and deepened his conclusions.

But Professor Rubin is in a class by himself, said David Jefferson, a computer scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, who calls him "the most important figure in the United States in articulating the security problems with electronic and Internet voting."

The only damage Professor Rubin has sustained along the way is largely self-inflicted. Last August, he resigned from an unpaid technical advisory position for a voting company, VoteHere Inc., and turned in stock options that he had received but never redeemed.

Professor Rubin, 36, a child of two college professors, seems too soft-spoken to be a firebrand. But his quiet exterior conceals a deeply competitive streak: he has played soccer as a blood sport for most of his life, breaking both wrists and ankles repeatedly over the years. He still plays twice a week, he says, but now it is "a more social game, without slide tackles."

Born in Kansas, he grew up in Birmingham, Ala., Haifa, Israel, and Nashville, and got his computer science training at the University of Michigan, where he earned bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degrees by 1994. In late 2002, he became the technical director of the Information Security Institute here at Hopkins.

Because of his passionate advocacy for his views, many people expect Professor Rubin to be something of a "smart aleck" in person, said Gerald Masson, the head of the institute. Instead, he said, "He comes across as someone who sincerely believes that what he's doing is right, and he has the technological depth to support it."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/te...gy/03vote.html


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High-Tech Voting System Is Banned in California
John Schwartz

California has banned the use of more than 14,000 electronic voting machines made by Diebold Inc. in the November election because of security and reliability concerns, Kevin Shelley, the California secretary of state, announced yesterday. He also declared 28,000 other touch-screen voting machines in the state conditionally "decertified" until steps are taken to upgrade their security.

Mr. Shelley said that he was recommending that the state's attorney general look into possible civil and criminal charges against Diebold because of what he called "fraudulent actions by Diebold."

In an interview, Mr. Shelley said that "their performance, their behavior, is despicable," and that "if that's the kind of deceitful behavior they're going to engage in, they can't do business in California."

The move is the first decertification of touch-screen voting machines, which have appeared by the tens of thousands across the nation as states scramble to upgrade their election technology.

Opponents of the high-tech systems argue that the systems are less secure than what they replace, making it possible for the electoral process to be hacked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/01/national/01VOTE.html


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California Toughens e-Voting Standards
Reuters

California set tough new standards for electronic voting on Friday, barring a third of existing machines from November's ballot and ordering new security measures before thousands of others can be used.

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley also called for a criminal investigation into the state's largest e-voting machine supplier, Diebold, a firm he called "reprehensible."

Democrat Shelley said that he would decertify Ohio-based Diebold's AccuVote-TSx Voting System, which accounts for a third of all of California's electronic voting machines following glitches in the March ballot.

"I'm asking the attorney general to pursue criminal and civil actions against Diebold in this matter, based on finding of fraudulent action," he said.

"They broke the law," Shelley continued. "Their conduct was absolutely reprehensible."

Shelley said he nearly acted to bar all electronic voting machines, but then said he would give all but four counties the chance to use them if they can provide a paper receipt and fulfill other conditions.

Critics expressed disappointment, saying the move did not go far enough.
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5203769.html


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State Allows E-Vote for November
Kim Zetter

A panel of state election officials recommended on Wednesday to give all voters the option of voting on paper ballots instead of paperless electronic touch-screen voting machines in the November presidential election.

While officials didn't recommend that the state decertify all touch-screen equipment, as some voting activists had hoped, they called on the California secretary of state to forbid purchases of any new types of e-voting equipment before the November election. And they want touch-screen machines already in place to be used only under the condition that voting companies and counties comply with several security procedures.

After hearing from dozens of voting activists, vendor representatives and county election officials pleading the pros and cons of touch- screen voting, the Voting Systems and Procedures Panel made its recommendations, which will go to California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, who has until Friday to change or approve them.

Shelley is expected to participate in a conference call with election officials on Thursday before making his decision.

The panel's recommendations called for all vendors to submit source code to the state before the November election so that the code can be placed in escrow. The state can then examine the code if questions about an election arise. One panel member said he would push to have the state get permission to examine the code for all voting systems.

The state also will prohibit vendors from making last-minute changes to their systems, unless the secretary of state deems the changes vital. Vendors would have to pay a penalty for every change made after an as-yet- undetermined deadline.

This requirement came about because of problems in the March election when Diebold Election Systems made last-minute, untested changes to a device used with its AccuVote-TS and TSx voting machines. As a result of glitches, hundreds of polling places failed to open on time, disenfranchising voters who couldn't cast ballots.

In addition to the vendor requirements, counties will not be able to purchase any new types of voting equipment before November, unless the machines can produce a voter-verified paper audit trail.
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63257,00.html


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For Sony, a Brief Respite in Its Recent Struggles
Laura M. Holson

Here is a number to make any investor think twice about the entertainment business: For the first time in as long as Sir Howard Stringer can remember, the Sony Corporation of America's film division has produced five profitable movies in a row.

"We couldn't find a time that was ever true," Sir Howard, the chief executive, said in an interview last week.

What is more, Sony Music Entertainment, which as it awaits approval of its merger with BMG is sharply reducing costs, has finally turned a profit of $175 million in the corporate year that ended March 31, after losing hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years.

"Fiscal prudence is a polite way of saying fiscal responsibility," Sir Howard said of Sony's music and film operations, where top executives have been replaced in the last two years.

But while Sony's entertainment divisions seem to be recovering from years of bloated spending, the company still faces several challenges. And, it is too soon to know if the burgeoning turnaround is a harbinger of things to come or a brief respite in an otherwise tumultuous industry.

No one knows, for example, if Sony executives will ultimately embrace the former Time Warner executive, Michael Lynton, the new chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment, as he seeks even more cost savings and tries to bring stability to a studio once known among many in Hollywood as a study in dysfunction. Executives there have often worked at odds with each other, and Mr. Lynton is charged with improving communication between them. Sony too has as much riding on lower-priced fare like this year's "Little Black Book" from Revolution Studios as it does on the sequel to "Spider-Man."

In the music arena, it is unclear which company will emerge as the dominant force in the merger proposed last year between BMG and Sony. Some people in the business suggest it may more aptly be named BMG Sony rather than Sony BMG as it was when the merger was announced. These days, BMG, a division of the entertainment giant Bertelsmann, is outperforming Sony with successful acts like Usher and Outkast.

Sony, unlike other entertainment companies, said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Fulcrum Global Partners, is not driven by the vagaries of the advertising market because it does not own a network. Instead, he said, Sony, whose corporate parent is based in Japan, "needs to grow its content business."

Operating profit at Sony's movie division fell 40 percent for the fiscal year ended March 31, to $320.5 million, or 35.2 billion yen, from the previous year's 59 billion yen, but that is compared against a year in which the blockbuster "Spider-Man" was released. Indeed, there have been recent improvements in the division's profitability attributable to cost cutting put in place even before Mr. Lynton arrived.

"We've certainly gotten tougher on our deals and tougher on everybody," said Amy Pascal, a vice chairwoman at Sony Pictures Entertainment who oversees film production. "It works out better that way."

Sony had been criticized in Hollywood for paying actors and producers too much to get sequels made and spending gobs of money on marketing, including last summer's "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle." Now Ms. Pascal said the studio was limiting profit participation for actors, producers and others to about 25 percent of a movie's box- office revenue. Other studios pay participants as much as 35 percent to 40 percent.

At Revolution Studios, whose movies are distributed by Sony and was responsible for box-office bombs last year like "Hollywood Homicide" "The Missing" and the much- maligned "Gigli," executives there are also holding down costs. "We embarked on a slate last year of less expensive movies and the first two have performed nicely for us," said Rob Moore, an executive at Revolution. Those two movies, "Hellboy" and "13 Going on 30," have done well at the box office, compared to earlier misses that cost twice as much.

Mr. Moore said Revolution was rethinking pricey premieres: the Los Angeles after-party for "13 Going on 30" was held at a nearby restaurant. By contrast, the premiere for "Mona Lisa Smile" starring Julia Roberts was held at the Plaza Hotel in New York last year with 800 attendees dancing to a swing band.

Sony's recently improved performance, with hits like "Something's Gotta Give," "50 First Dates" and "Secret Window" among the string of profitable movies, comes after a year of management turmoil.

Last year John Calley, who preceded Mr. Lynton and was hired by Sir Howard to oversee the filmed entertainment operations far from Sony's headquarters in Manhattan, spent more time at his home in Canada and less at Sony. He was the public face of the studio but at times refused to explain financial performance, feigning ignorance. When asked by a reporter in an interview about the profitability of "Men in Black II," he changed the topic to whether women liked to shave their legs. Last August, the studio announced that he was leaving and, later, a troika took his place: Ms. Pascal, Jeff Blake, who oversees worldwide movie marketing, and Yair Landau, who runs Sony's digital and television operations.

But that arrangement sometimes got out of hand. In a meeting last year in Japan with Sony's top executives, Mr. Landau yelled at Sir Howard during a discussion about his division. According to Sir Howard, Mr. Landau misinterpreted the discussion in its translation from Japanese to English, believing that Sony executives were criticizing his performance. "The Japanese were shocked at the response," Sir Howard said.

Mr. Landau attributed the incident to work pressure. "It was a big restructuring year in Tokyo, and we were working through a lot of stuff," he said. "They were under pressures, and we were under a lot of pressure."

The outburst only fueled Sir Howard's desire to hire Mr. Lynton in December to oversee the Culver City, Calif., operations. Mr. Lynton, the former head of AOL Europe and chief executive of the book publisher Penguin Group, is still an unknown in Hollywood. One of his first tasks was to make each of the divisions accountable for a movie's success, as the film division would blame a movie's failure on poor marketing while the marketing department would complain the film division did not make better movies.

"All of the divisions working together hadn't been done before," he said.

Sony has a lot riding on the June release of the "Spider-Man" sequel. It cost $200 million to produce and will surely cost a minimum of $50 million to market. Sir Howard said he was not worried about the project given that the first "Spider-Man" pulled in $800 million worldwide.

Indeed, there are other issues to ponder. Many analysts are focused on whether a Sony-led consortium acquires MGM for about $5 billion. While the acquisition would give Sony access to some 4,000 movies in MGM's library, some analysts question the $5 billion price tag even though much of the money would be put up by Sony's partners. A person involved in those talks said Sony's corporate parent could balk if they have to pay much of anything at all.

"If MGM gets $5 billion, I think we have rethinking to do on the valuation of all these media companies," said Michael Gallant, a media analyst at CIBC who thinks MGM is worth $3.5 billion to $4 billion.

Sir Howard declined to discuss any talks.

Last year, Sony Music Entertainment rebounded, posting a $173 million gain, or 19 billion yen, in contrast to the 7.9 billion yen loss it experienced the previous year. Much of that was attributed to a restructuring in which almost 3,500 jobs have been cut, a move overseen by Andrew Lack, who succeeded Thomas D. Mottola when he was ousted two years ago.

According to one music manager, Mr. Lack has taken a hard line with artists, unwilling to renegotiate contracts - a common practice during Mr. Mottola's era. But, what has most people buzzing is what Sony Music will look like once it merges with BMG, a deal announced last year that has yet to be approved by regulators. Only the top four executives have been named in the proposed company, including Mr. Lack as chief executive and Rolf Schmidt-Holtz from BMG as chairman.

According to a BMG music executive, once a merger is completed it will be midlevel record executives who will be vying for prized spots. (Both Mr. Lack and BMG executives declined interviews.) When the deal was first announced, many people in the music business believed that Sony would dominate the culture. But BMG has overshadowed Sony with artists like Avril Lavigne, Pink and Usher, despite Sony's stable with Beyoncé and John Mayer.

In 2003, BMG's share of the domestic market for both catalog and current hits based on units sold was 15.46 percent, greater than Sony's 13.71. But, it was for current albums released that BMG excelled, tallying 18.39 percent. Sony's share, by contrast, was 12.53 percent. This year, so far, it is more of the same. BMG has 20.23 percent domestic market share for current albums while Sony has 12.4 percent.

But that is of little concern to Sir Howard, as any restructuring takes time. "You aren't going to reverse the past overnight," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/03/bu...ia/03sony.html


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Sony Announces New Effort To Clear Out MiniDisc Warehouses

Apple's continued dominance of the digital music market is looking less and less likely, never more so than today. Sony launched its Sony Connect music service in the States this morning, the first real challenger to Apple's iTunes Music Store. Like ITMS, Sony Connect offers an impressive catalog of music, some 500,000 songs from a variety of major and independent labels. And like ITMS, those songs will play only on its proprietary line of portable music players. But unlike ITMS, Sony Connect arrives at market with vast potential audience: About 2.5 million U.S. consumers own Connect-compatible devices, and Sony expects to sell 4.5 million more by the end of the year. That's 4.5 million people who probably won't buy iPods, and by extension probably won't purchase music from ITMS either. And that could make the digital music market tougher, if only slightly, for Apple. "[Sony is] a force to be reckoned with," said Mike McGuire, a researcher at GartnerG2. "How they execute, just like everybody else, is the thing."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...sv/8595559.htm


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From Sony, the Hits and Misses
David Pogue


Stuart Goldenberg

WOO-WOO! Clang, clang! All aboard!

Yes, kids, the train is leaving the station. It's the Online $1-a-Song Music Express, and your company had better be on it. Apple, Napster, Musicmatch, MusicNow, BuyMusic, RealNetworks, Dell, Microsoft and even Wal-Mart have either seats or reservations. You wouldn't want to be left behind.

That, apparently, was the thinking behind Sony Connect, the new online music service that opened for business on Tuesday. It's an easy-to-use but, in its debut version, almost embarrassingly crude imitation of the music services that preceded it.

The twist: You know how the iPod is the only portable player compatible with Apple's popular iTunes music service? In the same way, songs from Sony Connect play back only on certain Sony music players (so-called Atrac-compatible Memory Stick-based players and MiniDisc players). Sony says 2.5 million such Sony players have been sold in the United States, and predicts even greater popularity for its new Hi-MD minidisc players: at the lowest music quality, they hold up to 45 hours of music per $7 disc. For the owners of all these Sony players, to be sure, a crude copycat service is better than no service at all.

But Sony Connect makes the rules of the online music game more confusing. Music fans already had to contend with two incompatible music copy-protection formats: Apple's AAC files (compatible only with iPods) and Microsoft's WMA format (used by Napster, Musicmatch, Wal-Mart and others). Sony's music service employs yet another format, called Atrac. Predictably, Atrac files don't play on any of the three million iPods or the four million WMA-compatible players in use. Unless you have a Sony player, Atrac may as well be 8-track.

(Officially, by the way, Sony wishes to distance itself from the notion that its songs-and-hardware formula was inspired by Apple's wildly successful iTunes-iPod model. Sony points out that whereas Apple doesn't share its AAC format with anyone, Atrac is available for licensing by other music-player makers. So far in the United States, though, there have been no takers.)

If you've used one of the existing song-downloading services, you'll be right at home with Sony Connect. A program called Sony SonicStage (for Windows 98 and later, free from www.connect.com) serves as a digital jukebox. It lets you organize your computer's collection of music files into playlists and burn them onto audio CD's in any order.

SonicStage is also the gateway to the music service, a searchable online database of songs whose electronic rights have been made available. Like its rivals', the Sony collection of 500,000 songs is heavily slanted toward commercial pop, with a few classical, comedy and soundtrack albums thrown in for seasoning. (The Beatles, Madonna, Led Zeppelin and other reluctant rights-givers are conspicuously absent.)

You can listen to a 30-second sample of a song, download a song for $1 or download an entire album for $10. At that point, you can burn your music onto CD's, transfer them to Sony portable players or copy them onto a couple of other Windows computers. They're copy-protected so generously that only dedicated eye-patched music pirates would object.

Apple is sometimes accused of worshiping at the altar of cool design at the expense of practicality, but Sony Connect takes that concept to a ridiculous extreme. The best thing you can say about SonicStage is that it's certainly not cluttered. The problem is that it's practically empty. The list of songs huddles in a small square area, floating in a vast ocean of light gray screen margin. Expect to do a lot of scrolling.

And a lot of cursing. The "live" area inside Sony's enormous waste of pixels is much too small for the software's seven columns of information (title, artist, album and so on). As a result, many song or album names are chopped off, abbreviated by ellipses. Search for "Britney Spears,'' and you find a song called "Me Against the " (Wind? Establishment? Grammarian?). A jazz album is called "Louis Armstrong and " (Friends? Company? His All-Zither Band?). Billy Joel offers "Scenes From an " (Anthill? Antiwar Demonstration? -noying Software Designers?).

Now, in most jukebox software - like Apple's, Napster's or Musicmatch's - you would simply adjust the column widths or hide the columns you don't need. But the columns in SonicStage are fixed in width, and you can't hide or rearrange them. And don't think you can outsmart Sony by buying a bigger monitor, either; as the screen gets larger, only SonicStage's gray margins expand, not the live area.

Otherwise, Sony Connect is almost exactly like its predecessors - but less. Most songs are $1, but Sony arbitrarily doubles the price of any song longer than seven minutes. (Billy Joel's "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" on Musicmatch.com or iTunes costs $1. On Sony Connect: $2.) This tactic makes no logical sense - since when is a song's value determined by its length? - and therefore smacks of simple greed.

Similarly, most music services let you burn a certain playlist of songs onto 10 CD's. Sony Connect advertises the same feature - but the fine print reveals that you can burn only five standard audio CD's. The other five must be Atrac CD's, a kind of disc that holds many more songs but plays back only on 11 models of Sony CD players. (In other words, you can't play an Atrac CD in your car, which is a chief reason for burning a CD in the first place.)

Note, too, that SonicStage can't rip audio CD's (that is, copy their songs onto your hard drive) into the most popular music format, MP3, as Musicmatch and iTunes can. Sony says that thwarting song piracy was its aim, but why should you, the honest music lover, suffer as a result?

Software annoyances are everywhere. When you search, for example, no progress bar tells how much longer you have to wait, so you conclude that the software hasn't responded and pointlessly click again. The scroll wheel on your mouse doesn't work in the list area until you click there first, either.

But above all, Sony Connect lacks the lively community elements that make its rivals so much fun: discussion boards, album articles, Internet radio stations, Billboard charts, gift certificates, monthly allowances, audio books, free weekly song downloads, music videos, movie trailers, customer playlist sharing and so on. The only shopping guidance you get are a Staff Picks list, a Celebrity Mixtapes list and - for some albums - one-sentence reviewer quotes. The whole thing feels put together by accountants, not music lovers.

To be fair, although the newborn Sony Connect is as barren as a parking lot in Antarctica, it's not entirely idea-free. A few tendrils of fresh thinking are visible through the six-foot snowbanks of commercialism. You can, for example, specify which musical genre you want to use as your "home page." And if you want to play the songs you have purchased on a second or third computer, you don't have to copy them manually from the first machine; you can download them again directly from Sony Connect without cost, which is handy if you and that second PC happen to be 3,000 miles from home.

Sony also says it will soon allow payment for songs using unique currencies, like United Airlines frequent-flier miles. A deal with McDonald's is in the works, too, although the companies haven't announced what the unique currency will be. (Big Mac wrappers? Used ketchup packets?)

Clearly, many of Sony Connect's problems have to do with the inefficiency and inconsistency of its software; the rest have to do with the sparseness of its feature offerings. Both could therefore be fixed with a little more time, a little more effort and a little less greed. Fortunately, Sony acknowledges the problems and the featurelessness - particularly the software's inflexible, space-wasting design - and promises that an overhauled version will appear by summer's end. Individual service features like music videos will appear even sooner.

But in its first incarnation, you'd never guess that this service comes from a company that's both the world's most recognized consumer-electronics brand and the owner of one of the world's biggest record companies. For the time being, maybe they ought to call it Sony Disconnect.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/te...ts/06stat.html


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Playing Old Records (No Needle Required)
Anne Eisenberg

THE traditional way to preserve old sound recordings is to play them, typically with a stylus, and then convert the sound into a file that can be stored digitally. But two physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California have developed a new way to preserve the contents of old discs and wax cylinders: they take pictures of the groove instead of dropping a needle into it.

The team shoots thousands of precise sequential images of the groove and then stitches the images together, measuring the shape of each undulation and calculating the route a stylus would take along the path.

"We grab the image and let the computer model what the stylus would have done if it had run through the surface," said Carl Haber, a senior scientist at the lab who led the research team in collaboration with Vitaliy Fadeyev, a postdoctoral researcher there.

The new method may be particularly important for recovering the contents of recordings that are too fragile or too damaged to be played in traditional ways. It can work on disks or cylinders that have been scratched, cracked or even shattered.

"The real excitement for me is that the method has the potential to rescue recordings," said Daniel P. Sbardella, a sound engineer at the Rodgers and Hammerstein archives of recorded sound of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. A recording could even be scanned in bits and pieces, Mr. Sbardella said, and then converted to audio files that can be edited to reconstruct the whole recording.

"The mission of a sound archive is to preserve as much sound as possible," he said, "so even if that means rescuing a few seconds that are one of a kind, it's really worthwhile."

The Library of Congress is financing research in the new method, now in the early stage of development. The library holds some of the earliest sound recordings, including many wax cylinders, said Mark S. Roosa, the director for preservation at the library. The cylinders were made of inexpensive materials and have not held up well, he said. Some of the cylinders and early Edison discs are cracked or in pieces.

"This method is going to have far-reaching impact on sound archives," he said.

Mr. Roosa predicts that the technology will one day make a dent in the enormous preservation tasks that libraries face. "We have thousands and thousands of cylinders and hundreds of thousands of discs, and we are just one library," he said.

The method involves no contact with the recording surface. After the camera does its work, image-processing algorithms take over, detecting scratches or spots of dust and deleting them. Then software simulates the stylus motion, and the results are converted to a digital sound format.

"The advantage of the method is that it is completely noncontact," extracting information from the groove by mapping the surface, Dr. Haber said. "You take these pictures and it's purely a software issue of how the recording is processed after that," he said.

Both Dr. Haber and Dr. Fadeyev came to music preservation accidentally: they are particle physicists, not music archivists. But at work they routinely use precision optical techniques to align arrays of particle-tracing detectors.

One day a few years ago, a radio program that caught their attention prompted them to consider a new application. "We heard a show on National Public Radio on the problems of preserving delicate recordings of the past," Dr. Haber said. He wondered whether the precision methods the group used for particle detectors might be of use. "Why not just measure the shape of the grooves on the surface?" Dr. Haber said, and then pose the question to a software program: what would a needle do?

The physicists began with old 78 r.p.m. discs, on which grooves run laterally, undulating in the plane of the record parallel to its surface. "So from the top down, you can see the groove profile," Dr. Haber said.

The team used a commercially available electronic camera and zoom microscope to acquire images of the grooves. But it was a slow process. It took 40 minutes to scan one second of audio, primarily because the optical tools were not optimized for the task. "It will run much faster when people use a machine built solely for scanning records," Dr. Haber said.

The reconstruction of a snippet of a 1950 recording of the folk song "Goodnight Irene" by the Weavers and Marion Anderson's 1947 rendering of "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," both released on shellac discs, can be heard at www-cdf.lbl.gov/~av. For comparison, the same music can be heard there drawn from a commercial CD remastered from the original studio tape, as well as in a playback by stylus of the original shellac disc.

Recently the team reconstructed music stored on a 1909 wax cylinder. In cylinders the information is stored vertically, perpendicular to the surface. "You can't tell height when looking at it from above," Dr. Haber said, so the two-dimensional techniques used with discs would not work. Instead, the group used a scanning microscope able to measure the height for any given point on the surface of the groove.

The three-dimensional method is even slower than the two-dimensional one, and much work lies ahead to develop special machines configured to match the requirements of record scanning.

But Dr. Haber is confident that such machines will emerge, partly in response to demands for precision measurement in many fields. "We just wanted to prove in principle that optical methods could do this job," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/te...ts/06next.html


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Repeat after me: “Copying is not theft.” OK, now say amen brother.

Even Christian Music Is Subject To Digital Piracy
Susan Hogan

DALLAS - Christian teens are stealing Jesus music.

They're doing it through Internet downloads and CD burnings at nearly the same rate as secular music is being pirated by non-Christians, according to a new study done for the Gospel Music Association.

The findings were a jolt to many in the evangelical music industry, who expected churchgoing teens to be mindful of the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal."

"I'm surprised and disappointed that the behavior isn't that ardently different between Christians and non-Christians," said John Styll, president of the Gospel Music Association, the leading trade group for evangelical music.

But not everybody thinks the pirating is a bad thing. After all, some church leaders say, isn't getting the Gospel out more important than getting paid? How can it be wrong if it saves souls?

"That's convoluted logic," said Barry Landis, president of Word Records, a major Christian label. "You would never steal Bibles to give them away. You shouldn't steal Christian music to give away either."

Last year, sales of Christian albums fell by 5.2 percent, to just over 47 million. The major labels cut their work force by 10 percent, Styll said. He blames the economy, downloads and CD burnings.

Even with the dip in sales, Christian music is big business. Last year, its artists sold 68 CDs for every 100 in country music. The $800 million in sales topped that of classical music and jazz combined - and at least as much money was generated in merchandise and concert tickets, Styll said.

Musicians say the piracy issue is particularly thorny for them to broach. Many fear being seen as greedy. The heavy metal band Metallica faced a backlash when it sued Napster, once the most popular file-sharing software system.

"We can't be like Christina Aguilera and get all attitudy," said Jaci Velasquez, a platinum-selling singer originally from Texas. "We're supposed to be like Christ and turn the other cheek."

Like their secular counterparts, Christian music executives say digital music theft is hurting sales. But they've kept a low profile in the war being waged by the Recording Industry Association of America against piracy - a battle that includes more than 1,000 suits against illegal downloaders. (The music industry said sales have improved in the first quarter of this year, in part because of its suits.)

Mainstream music sees piracy as purely a legal issue, Styll said. The Christian industry frames the issue differently, even though its major labels are owned by mainstream companies.

"We take it further and say it's a moral issue," he said. "But we're not going to sue people. It just doesn't seem right. And nobody really has the will to do it."

The industry is grappling with how to discourage piracy.

"It's going to take an enormous educational effort," said Landis of Word Records. "Maybe we've missed this generation. We all know they shouldn't take the music. We all know they do. How do you put toothpaste back in the tube?"

Warning labels about copyright laws - part of a "do unto others" strategy - have begun appearing on some Christian CDs. But research shows the task of changing minds, much less hearts, is Herculean.

Many Christian teens simply don't think they're stealing.

Scott Ferguson, a junior at Fort Worth (Texas) Christian Academy, said he has never burned a CD but has received them as birthday gifts. He considers burning CDs morally wrong, but he said many of his buddies don't.

"If a CD comes out and you like a couple of songs, they'll burn it for you," he said. "It's what friends kind of do for one another. It doesn't take long, and it's easy. That's how they look at it."

Others say they do it for religious reasons.

"A lot of students think it's, like, a cheap way to witness to the Gospel," said Scott Flagg, 22, who belongs to the Christian fraternity Beta Upsilon Chi at the University of North Texas. "They go out and buy a CD, then burn several copies to give away."

Youth minister Scott Burks said he regularly confronts youths at Pantego Bible Church in Fort Worth, Texas, about the issue. But they have a hard time understanding how they could be stealing when the music is readily available on the Internet.

"They'll literally say, 'Really? Come on.'" he said. "They're surprised. But when I'm able to help them understand the truth behind it, a student is typically remorseful."

Christian pollster George Barna recently completed a study on teens and piracy for the Gospel Music Association. The study hasn't been made public, but key findings were shared by Styll with the Dallas Morning News.

He said the most alarming results showed that only 10 percent of Christian teens considered music piracy to be morally wrong. Of those, 64 percent have engaged in downloading or CD burning anyway - virtually the same percentage as non-Christians.

"A lot of these people don't see it as any more wrong than speeding," he said. "I would say to you that speeding is wrong. But I would also admit that I have probably violated that law today."
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...ey/8561046.htm


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FastTrackMovies – Back In Action

From an email

We are proud to announce the return of our site at http://sharethefiles.com/ !

You are receiving this e-mail because at one point in the last 2 years you have registered a username with us. I must begin by apologising for this e-mail if you already know of our return or you have recently become a new member at our new site ShareTheFiles.com.

It may have been a long time since you have heard from us. A lot has happened since we were shut down by the MPAA. The paragraphs below will give you an insight into what has happened, and inform you of our plans for the future...

FastTrackMovies was shut down back in August 2003 and we have been busy revamping it for the last half a year.

It all started when the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), which represents the big movie companies such as Universal, sent an e-mail to our Hosting Company saying that we were offering copyrighted files and that the site should be shut down. This was, of course, completely false. We have never hosted files on our server and have always clamped down on any direct web links to files (and at any rate we would not be able to handle the bandwidth that this would generate if we did host the actual files). In turn, our Hosting provider shut down the site, opting to side with the MPAA rather than investigate themselves whether or not we were breaking any rules.

When we challenged what they alleged, the MPAA basically agreed that we didn't host files but instead said that what we were providing was unlawful by nature due to the USA's DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998), which contradicts our civil rights and the basics of democracy in the civil rights system. Using the powers vested to them with that act, the MPAA could keep us shut down until we proved that we were not guilty. Basically guilty until proven innocent; if the glove doesn't fit, we'll make it fit. They didn't need hard facts to do it; by just saying that we were guilty it was enough to keep us shut down. Of course we wanted to prove that we were not guilty of breaking any laws, but we didn't have $20,000 lying around to fight a multi-million dollar organisation. So we chose the only option we could -- we took the last backup we did of our website (thankfully 3 days before we were shut down) and moved the site outside the borders of the US.

As many of you already know, the previous owner of the site passed the site and old domain over to `·. ZiN `·.. In order to keep the site up legally, `·. ZiN `·. got a pretty substantial loan in order to buy Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. This means that (with monthly server costs and excluding the amount of money he paid for the actual server) he is paying about $800 a month just to keep the site up and running. Keep in mind he is not even getting close to half that in donations, so every little bit helps. At any rate our resident web designer H2O then got his hands on the code for the site and as they say, the rest is history. Without him this site, as you see it, would not have happened!

A big thank you also to EclipseGSX, TheFaimousOne and Stoepsel who helped with quite a bit of the coding, as well as Nikeus for running the backup forum for us all this time! I would also like to thank all other staff which put a lot of their time into this website. You know who you are...

So FastTrackMovies is now ShareTheFiles -- we've gone beyond the world of just FastTrack and now cater for the popular ed2k network and even offer magnet links (which should soon become a standard for Kazaa). Shortly down the road you can expect some major integrations with the BitTorrent network as well..

The new features that we have added that you could have access to are...

1) FastTrack Sources on a film - This allows you to see the average amount of sources you can expect for a film on any supernode around the world before even clicking on the Sig2Dat or Magnet link. Coming soon: ed2k.

2) Detailed Film Information - Not just the name, we're talking bitrates, resolutions, source of rip (i.e. DVD rip, TS, TC, etc.), Release Group, NFO and imdb links, voting from members and staff, and more. This is by far the most complete database available anywhere on the Web. 3) Increased Forum diversity - Again like the site the forum now caters for so much more - check it out - http://www.ShareTheFiles.org

Theres not much more to add to this EMail, the rest is available in the forums and on the site, the URLs again are:

http://ShareTheFiles.com - Main Site
http://www.ShareTheFiles.org - Forum

We look forward to having your support with our new ventures. Help bring P2P back to where it belongs!

Remember: Share Knowledge, Share Thoughts and ShareTheFiles!

BuzzB2K, EclipseGSX, H2O, Nikeus, TheFaimousOne & `·. ZiN `·. - ShareTheFiles.com Administration

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Editors note: The link to this article was sent to me on Wednesday via Waste, yet another in a long line of reasons why everyone should jump on this program. Although Bayley’s piece was published over 20 years old it is as relevant today as it was when first written, I’d argue even more so today, and that makes it amazingly prescient for it’s time. If only it had gotten more attention before the DMCA was passed ten years later. Thanks to multi for passing it along. It ends this week’s edition. - Jack.


Who Owns The Nöosphere
Barrington Bayley

From what cause I will not bother to go into, I regularly receive batches of Irish newspapers. These often - nearly always, in fact - have an unintentionally comic aspect and should be required reading for those among us who imagine the Irish joke an English invention. Slightly bizarre, from the English point of view, is the religious content, which these days - even Ireland having now failed to hold back the tide of prurience - is sometimes forced to exist jowl by cheek (in that order) with full-colour photos of naked girls.

One such religious columnist is Friar D'Arcy, who recently devoted his page to a sermon on the practise of taping pop music from the radio instead of going out and buying the record.

The practise, the good friar warned his readers, breaks the eight commandment. It is definitely theft. It robs artists and record companies of their earnings and creates unemployment.

It would be evil to speculate on what friends or acquintanses Friar D'Arcy might have in the popular music industry. We all know that the private and also the pirated taping of music and now video has been of concern to copyright holders for some time, so much that music companies have tried to persuade the government to put a tax on blank tapes, the revenue to be turned over directly to them as compensation for their losses. They also play the ethical card. Why not? Patriotism may be the last refuge of the scoundrel; what is certain is that the ethical plea has been the first resort of every scoundrel great and small.

A broadly similar piece of villainy, one that does not even have copyright law to back it, has succeeded on the part of a guild of British writers, who have persuaded parliament to introduce what is called Public Lending Right. The argument goes like this: authors are being robbed because public libraries buy books and then lend them to lots of people to read. A book should only be read by the person who buys it (this isn't stated nearly as badly, of course). Therefore authors should be compensated... it is unfortunate for the music companies that so few MPs are pop singers. The fact is that this sort of thing is an old, old, old story. Adam Smith wrote about it in Wealth of Nations: "Rarely do people of the same occupation gather together, even if only for merriment, that it does not end in some plot to defraud the public." Mostly these schemes must either ignore, in their greed, or else try to circumvent, one of the most tested laws of exchange economics: that the more a thing costs the less of it will be bought. Since this law will not be broken, the conspiracies are apt to come a cropper.

In the present case, the circumvention takes the form of having the paymaster a goverment department, not the public libraries themselves. We shall now see how long that lasts.

The reason why I mention all this is that Friar D'Arcy's intimations of sin got me thinking about that peculiar convention of modern civilisation: legal ownership of intangibles. Until a couple of hundred years or so ago (I'm poor with dates) there was no such thing. Ownership meant ownership of something having mass and substance. An author owned a literary work of his, for instance, only while he had possession of the manuscript! Once the publisher had issued it, any other publisher was at liberty to copy it and issue his own edition, so that if a book proved popular rival editions were apt to hit the street with alacrity. Until, that is, certain parties found a way to protect their expectations of profit, again with the help of friends in the parliament.

When you think about it, and leaving 'ethics' aside for the moment, legal claim to intangibles is a pretty odd thing. It is rather as if I thought up a particularly good joke and told it to you. Later on I came across you telling the same joke to a third party. "Stop!" I thunder. "That is my joke you are telling! You will hear from my solicitor in the morning."

Or imagine that I once wrote and had published a story all copies of which have since perished. I can't even remember it myself properly. The only true record that exists is in the mind of a deluded science fiction reader who thought it a fabulous story and memorised it word for word.

In law, I own what is in his head. If he wants to set it down on paper, he may not publish copies of it without my permission.

What, then, is the ethics of copyright? That's what I've been trying to explain: there isn't any, it's only a convention. And I haven't much doubt that it is a doomed convention.

To go back to Friar D'Arcy's musical tapes, why is it that the law of copyright has held pretty well for literature for centuries, but is already crumbling for recorded music? It is simply because copying a book, by whatever method, is still an expensive procedure. But attempting to maintain sound copyright in a world of ubiquituous cassette recorders flies straight in the fact of the fundamental law of exchange economics.

This law may be expressed as follows: whatever I pay you to provide me with a good or service must have less value to me that the effort of providing it for myself.

If I have worked all day to earn £20, and we are sitting at table together, it is unlikely I would accede to your demand for my £20 if you are to pass me the salt, when it lies only a few inches beyond my reach. (I say 'unlikely' in deference to the calculus of probabilities. In my case the probability is not vanishingly small; it is classically zero.)

Makers of music tapes are said to be seeking a way of putting a signal on the tapes that makes them uncopyable. I have not heard that they have succeeded, and if they do a countering filter will not be long in coming. Producers of software for home computers, which at present is also on tape cassette, face the same problem. Some of the mushrooming software businesses use various tricks, such as disabling the Break key, arranging for the program to wipe itself out if Save is entered, etc., to prevent their programs being saved from RAM. There is a tape on sale in the USA which tells you how to get round these measures. Other firms don' t bother, and indeed it is quite futile if they buyer has some decent recording equipment; he can just copy the tape.

So in these spheres ownership of intangible 'creative work' is already unenforceable, whatever the law says, and will likely die the death. After all, why is it that you can patent an invention but not a philosophical idea or the discover of a physical law? Just as much mental labour might be involved, and just as much originality. The answer is simply, how would you enforce it?

On the premise that graphic reproduction will eventually go the way of sound reproduction, i.e. it will become easy and cheap and available to all, the same is due to happen to literary copyright.

It's a-coming, boys! You'd better get used to it!

Good heavens! Does this mean writers won't make anything out of what they write? Then there won' t be any writers ! After all, a neighbourhood friend insists on informing me that I only became a writer with the intention of writing a 'best-seller' and becoming a millionaire. (If a person like myself mixes with the common folk he discovers a curious fable. Painters are all penniless, struggling bohemians. But writers are all wealthy, suave men-about-town, living 'the hoi loife'. People get confused on having me pointed out. I am not a person to whom one automatically touches one's forelock. But I should be. Something is wrong.)

It's useless to argue. "You are absolutely right, sir!" I sententiously tell my friend, and quoting Dr Johnson, "No one but a fool ever wrote, except for money!" And donning my clown's nose, I blow soap bubbles at him.

Yes, there is always going to be a living for writers. The consequence of the above is that a book, whether incarnated in ink and paper, laser disk, silicon, gallium arsenide, memory bubbles, or War and Peace encoded in DNA, will cost more than the blank on which it is inscribed, but not so much more that it would be worth your while to borrow a copy and duplicate it. Whatever deal authors and publishers make with one another will have to take cognisance of that. I expect authors will still be able to demand royalties. Whether an author will be able to become stinking rich, as a few now can, I don't know. What does it matter? It isn't necessary to the continuance of civilisation: for writers and pop singers to be paid like film stars, or for the film stars to be paid like film stars.

(Of course, I am over-simplifying. There can be other considerations that make people willing to pay more for a bought copy - better quality, the desire for an original edition. etc. Then again, some people think the 'incarnation' substance will disappear from the market place altogether, and you'll pay a small sum to have a book piped into your files as data down the telephone. Well, maybe.)

For the products of literary effort to become public property the moment it is open to view might seam a little weird; but only if one is in a culture bind. New technology - the printing press - led to the devising of copyright, and newer technology is going to eradicate it. As it is I have heard that the communist world disallows copyright on principle; and the communists are right, because in the long term intangible wealth is wealth released into the nöosphere, available 'to each according to his need', put there 'from each according to his ability' - controlling it is like trying to control air (remember Ron Hubbard's The Great Air Monopoly?).

The only way to keep private possession of it is to keep it secret. And that, in the philosophical sphere, is just what used to happen long ago. Societies such as the Pythagorean Society, and probably others we've never even heard of, were repositories of knowledge and ideas that were kept under tight security for centuries. That we know as much of Pythagorean doctrine as we do is chiefly thanks to a certain Philolaus, who so the story goes published an account of it because he needed money (it is believed to have become the source book of Plato's The Timaeus).

All this secrecy must have held back civilisation considerably. Material of this kind needs to be aired and circulated if there is to be progress - the surviving fragments of Pythagoreanism, for instance, led directly to the achievements of Kepler and Newton.

So what has all this got to do with science fiction? Well, if I need an excuse for this article maybe it's because I think science fiction is more nöospheric than other fiction. Crude though it often is, it's the mythology of our age, like the mythologies of tribes, their mental dimension - such as the fables of the Kalahari bushmen. a stone-age people in the last stages of being ground into eradication between the iron-making black barbarians from the north and the machine-gun wielding white barbarians entering from the south, yet whose myths contain such insight that one is dumbfounded to know where they came from.

Widen the view yet further. Psychologists have expressed wonderment at the way a human being can learn a language in the first few years of its life. Every sentence that is strung together is an act of creation, they say. In learning the secrets of its construction, every two-year-old is acting like a genius.

Identifying the reason for this 'amazement' can tell us a great deal about the early beginning of the 'nöosphere', if I may continue to use that jokey word. Language reflects the power of thought, the power to place facts in relation to one another, to test for validity, to arrive at new relations by experiment. The last is what we call 'creative thought'.

We can all talk, but even the better among us employ the power of thought but rarely. G B Shaw was not joking when he quipped: "Most people think once or twice in a lifetime. I have made myself an international reputation by thinking once a week."

We have thoughts. But to have a thought is not thinking: it is to thinking what an animal's ability to make noises is to human speech. Thinking means stringing thoughts together correctly and carefully, in such a manner as to elucidate some aspect of the world. And yet, we know that the power to think is part of the brain's hardware, just like the power or speech, in me as much as in Einstein. So why is it so little used? Because (a) it takes a certain kind of effort, and (b) we can get along without it.

What I am talking about hasn't much to do with IQ. What 'intelligence tests' measure are aptitudes. Thinking is a function. A slow-witted, gormless-seeming nerd of low IQ can be better at thinking than a high IQ smart-ass who cottons on to everything in a trice and passes all his exams with a smug smile on his face. (Do I sound hostile? It's because I answer to the first description.)

But consider for a moment. An organ evolves only if it confers some benefit on its owner. Why do we have these marvellous brains, when we seem incapable of using them?

The answer should be fairly obvious. The nöosphere uses them. In the first place, we think in bits and pieces here and there and society puts the thoughts together eventually. Secondly, if only one individual in a thousand, or a million, or a thousand million, stretches his mental capacity to the utmost and communicates the results to the other, there is survival value to the group in having the other one-thousand-million-minus-one unused genius-type brains.

But wait. Go back to the beginning. How did this brain evolve in the first place? In creatures that made no use of it? Hardly.

Imagine back to the emergence of the hominids. The brain would not have stabilised in its present form except by use. But remember that the evolving species was small in numbers, leaving little room for the large-scale mental redundancy of modern man. It had only rudimentary language. And it had no material for the automatic association of thoughts that passes for thinking among us: no accumulated knowledge, no backlog of ideas.

Conclusion: our primitive ancestors must have been our mental superiors. Typically they were geniuses. True, their mental capacity was smaller than our, their facility with thought unpracticed, their IQs low, even lower than mine. But they used what they had, at full stretch. Their efforts bootstrapped our neocortex into existence.

The above scenario helps make some questions more explicable. Such as the existence of religion, which is so persistent it must be in our genes somewhere. It was part of our evolution...

Skip back over the millions of years, for another look at the question of ownership of intangibles. Pythagoras is most famous for having investigated the properties of sound vibrations. Two and a half thousand years were to pass before this investigation was taken up again: by the inventor Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was a sort of science fictional superman, a true inheritor of our primeval ancestors, a man who did force the power of his thought to the utmost. Though he experimented with sound, his chief interest lay in the vaster range of electrical vibrations. He was the inventor of the polyphase system of AC current which is the basis of power transmission today, and which made possible the AC motor, previously thought impossible.

Tesla licenced his invention to an industrialist called Morgan for one million dollars plus a royalty on the horsepower developed. Tesla's biographer relates that the time came when Morgan's accountants told him he had given Tesla too much; he would have to ask him to negotiate another deal.

Under protest, Morgan did so. "And if I agree," Tesla said. "will you continue to develop the polyphase system?"

''I shall continue trying to develop the system whatever happens,'' Morgan told him.

"Giving my polyphase system to mankind means more to me than any amount of money,'' Tesla said. And he tore up his contract before Morgan's eyes.

He was tearing up, at the very least, eight million dollars. Alas, he was later to become secretive with his prodigious inventiveness, recording nothing on paper but committing everything to his perfect memory, not even telling his workmen the exact nature of the projects they worked upon. It's said he intended eventually to make more millions from the patents. When he died in 1943 he possibly took with him details of a laser device able to project energy in any amount in a beam a tiny fraction of millimetre in diameter (he lectured on the problem of generating coherent light in the 1890s), and a practicable system of broadcast power transmission that could be tapped anywhere on the earth's surface. At any rate he died with more knowledge of electricity than any man before him or probably since. But he made the same mistake the Pythagoreans made. He kept it as his private property, and now no one has it.

http://www.oivas.com/bjb/bjb-es5.html

















Until next week,

- js.














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