RIAA Pushes Ahead With Suits, Sues Imesh, Stirs Up Senate
Faultline
It's been a busy week for the US Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is pushing ahead with 261 lawsuits filed last week against people alleged to have illegally downloaded music, but it has also decided to file another copyright infringement legal action, this time against iMesh, an Israel- based provider of a peer-to-peer file-sharing network.
In the meantime the RIAA president promises to keep the law suits coming, while a US senate committee plans a debate on the entire affair, looking for another way out, in eight days time.
The 261 lawsuits are supposed to produce a steady stream of anti piracy messages, so it doesn't make any sense to hit a group of downloaders and then stop. And RIAA president Cary Sherman made it clear this week that another round of law suits will come next month and the month after as a constant deterrent.
The action against iMesh was also filed last week, which on the surface makes little sense, since it uses the same FastTrack P2P software which was used by Kazaa and Grokster. These two companies that have been vindicated by a US judge, who said that their software didn't encourage illegal activity and compared them to a photocopier, that could be used both legally and illegally. The RIAA is appealing that decision also.
But the RIAA reckons this time it's different and said, "Imesh's recent conduct and public statements make clear that its goal is to encourage illegal behavior."
The biggest worry though, is what happens to the RIAA's legal position if the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations decides, after its debate on September 30, that the RIAA must stop being heavy handed with private US individuals. One idea that has been mooted is that the subpoena process should be extended to require the consent of a judge, slowing proceedings down and putting the onus of proof of likely wrong doing back onto the RIAA, better protecting the privacy of individuals. If that becomes the recommendation of the Senate Committee, the RIAA will be back, virtually, to square one.
Elsewhere Verizon is still trying to appeal against the ruling that said that it had to reveal those customers that the RIAA requested via the new controversial subpoena process.
Verizon told a federal appeals court this week that the subpoenas, authorized under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, are too easy to get without the need for a judge to be involved. It believes this puts privacy and free speech at risk. Verizon also asked the court if it would limit such identity revelations to web sites that are offering illegal pirated music, and go to a judge for private ISP customers.
No ruling has yet been made in the Verizon appeal.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/32997.html
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Courting Trouble
Jonny Evans
The British Photographic Institute, meanwhile, has warned that it may use the courts to fight its corner. BPI executive chairman Peter Jamieson told a music-industry conference in Manchester last week that he "didn’t take this job in order to sue music fans" but that the BPI will "not rule it out", that "it is a matter of survival for the business I love".
Blaming "anarchists", Jamieson said illegal downloading has "already gone too far and is tipping the industry into crisis".
He added: "The fact is that people who steal music are not only ripping off artists and record companies, they are ripping off honest music fans. Somebody has to pick up the tab.
"The fact that a shoplifter occasionally or even mainly gets their wallet out and buys things legitimately does not make them immune from prosecution."
Apple's iTunes Music Store is widely regarded as setting the standard and the strategy for legitimate music-download services, and is currently selling 500,000 tracks a week.
With established links with the movie industry, Apple is well-poised to seize another emerging digital-distribution opportunity – the rise of music distribution services will also drive the market for online video-subscription and movie-on-demand services, claims analysts In-Stat/MDR.
MDR predicts the market for subscription video streaming services, including movie downloads, will grow from $991 million in 2003 to over $4.5 billion in 2007.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_...fm?NewsID=6948
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Kazaa's Designers Craft Peer-To-Peer Internet Telephony Services
Michael Tarm
TALLINN, Estonia – The software developers who wrote file-swapping legend Kazaa are taking the concept of peer-to-peer sharing to telecommunications, launching an Internet phone service they claim could put traditional phone companies out of business.
The service, called Skype, purports to offer free, unlimited phone service between users – with sound quality near to what its developers derisively dub "POTS" – a Plain Old Telephone Service. Unlike Kazaa, which drew the wrath of the music industry, Skype shouldn't stir up a legal hornet's nest.
"The goal here is that we want Skype to be the telephone company of the future," Niklas Zennstrom, the firm's chief executive told The Associated Press. "Traditional network technologies date back to the 1870s. They're inflexible and costly to maintain."
At least some users praised the sound quality, including disc jockeys who use it for on-air interviews at the KUKU radio station in Estonia, a tiny former Soviet republic that sits on the eastern edge of the Baltic Sea.
"I don't think this could replace regular phones, not now" said Viik. "But it could find a niche, say, in branch offices of the same company."
Although other programs, including instant messaging programs from Microsoft and Yahoo!, permit sound and voice transfers, Skype bundles those features and catalogues users in a directory so they can find each other.
The program directs peer-to-peer data through the quickest networks, ensuring that quality isn't degraded. Privacy is ensured through encryption, the Skype Web site said.
Skype claims to operate through firewalls, software used by corporations to monitor traffic in and out of its office computers.
Zennstrom, 37, and his main partner at Skype, Janus Friis, 27, first made a splash in 2001 when they released Kazaa, which went on to become the most downloaded software on the Internet.
Estonian programmers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn – who took the lead in writing Kazaa – also did the bulk of the work on Skype, said Zennstrom, who is Swedish and maintains offices in both Stockholm and in Tallinn, Estonia's capital.
Cyber-savvy Estonia is widely regarded as having the most advanced Internet infrastructure of any former Communist country. That, plus lower labor costs and its proximity to Sweden, made it a logical place to seek designers for the company's software, Zennstrom said.
Within a week of posting the program on its Web site on Aug. 29, Zennstrom said, more than 15,000 copies of Skype were downloaded. This week, its Web site was claiming 660,000 downloads. Kazaa has been downloaded some 300 million times since its launch two years ago.
"Obviously, you get more attention when you've done something before," he said. "With us, people have expectations."
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/c...telephony.html
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The Changing Face of Online Music
Cade Metz
On Monday, September 8, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued 261 ordinary
American computer users, accusing them of using peer-to-peer file-sharing services, such as Grokster, Kazaa, and Morpheus, to illegally distribute and download large amounts of copyrighted music over the Internet. One of the suits involved a 12-year old girl named Brianna LaHara, who had just started the seventh grade at St. Gregory the Great Catholic School on Manhattan's West Side.
Then, this past Tuesday, September 23, BMG Music, one of RIAA's member companies, released a music CD with copy protection, the first time it had done so here in the States. If you purchase "Comin' from Where I'm From," by singer-songwriter Anthony Hamilton, included software from SunnComm Technologies will prevent you from making more than three copies of each track, and you won't be able to swap those copies over a peer-to-peer file-sharing service.
Ever since the rise of Napster, the first large-scale file-sharing service, the RIAA has waged a massive campaign to eliminate the free exchange of copyrighted music online, vociferously claiming that such song swapping results in millions of dollars in lost revenue for its member companies, the major record labels. But wary of angering potential buyers, the organization had focused most of its efforts on battling the companies that run the file-sharing services, not the individuals that use them.
Individually, those same music labels have long dabbled with CD copy protection from companies like SunnComm and its primary competitor, Macrovision. But since SunnComm and Music City Records were sued over a copy-protected CD in September 2001, such protection has been limited to promotional and foreign releases.
September has brought not one but two important turning points in the fight over online music. These events will not put an end to file sharing, though. Just as the Internet community found a way to swap files without Napster, which was all but shut down by an RIAA lawsuit in 2000, it will find a way around CD protection and this new round of lawsuits against users. But recent developments could move a large number of people to RIAA-sanctioned online services, such as Apple's iTunes, Real Networks' Rhapsody, and MusicRebellion.com, where you can purchase songs for a fee.
According to Minnesota research firm Ipsos-Reid, over 60 million Americans swap songs over peer-to-peer file-sharing services. Moving 60 million people is no easy task.
Most legal experts expect the recent file-sharing lawsuits to settle in favor of the RIAA. "Ninety-eight percent of all cases settle before trial, and these suits will probably follow that pattern," says William Hebert, an intellectual property lawyer in the San Francisco offices of the international law firm Coudert Brothers LLP. Several defendants, including Brianna LaHara, have already reached settlements in the range of $2,000 to $3,000.
But the RIAA can't file 60 million suits, and in all likelihood it can't frighten 60 million file sharers into quitting on their own. It may even have trouble fulfilling a promise to file "thousands" of additional suits over the coming months.
To bring suit against individual file-sharers, the RIAA must first subpoena their names and addresses from Internet service providers, and though ISPs are legally obliged to surrender such information under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, this could be changing. Verizon is fighting RIAA subpoenas in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, and in Congress, Senator Sam Brownback (R–KS) has introduced a bill that would reverse the DMCA.
Even if the law remains unchanged, most industry experts believe that people will soon be able to share files without revealing their IP addresses, so the RIAA would have no way of linking sharers to ISP accounts. "As fast as the RIAA can come up with a way to stop file-sharing, people will always find a way around it," says Mike McGuire, a market analyst who closely follows the file-sharing market for research firm Gartner. Either individual users will find ways of hiding their identities, or the file-sharing vendors will provide such protection of their own, says McGuire. "Companies will make it so that reaching the end user will be almost impossible," says Elan Oren, CEO of the file-sharing service iMesh.
Likewise, computer users will not lay down as SunnComm and Macrovision continue to build copy-protection into CDs and companies like Microsoft and ContentGuard work to protect copyrighted material by introducing Digital Rights Management (DRM) standards.
"Under the audio home recording act of 1992, it is clear that individuals have the right, when they purchase music lawfully, to make a copy of that music, onto any medium, for their own personal home use," says Cydney Tune, a copyright lawyer in the San Francisco offices of the internal firm Pillsbury Winthrop LLP. "People may use this to fight the introduction of CDs that can't be copied." And, of course, software developers could find technological means of circumventing copy protection.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1298685,00.asp
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Israeli Music Industry To Get Tough On Downloaders
Reuters
Israel's music industry vowed on Wednesday to crack down on local online song swapping and said it would show zero tolerance.
"We have decided to do anything in our capability to protect the assets of the industry," said Ronnie Braun, head of Israel's branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the global music industry's trade body.
"What was decided is there will be a policy of zero tolerance," he said. "It is the music that we are going to fight and protect."
The action is part of efforts to stamp out the copying of music over the Internet, which the music industry blames for a decline in sales of recorded music in the past two years.
Israel's decision to pursue legal action follows the example set by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which is cracking down on "peer-to-peer users" suspected of widespread copyright violations.
The RIAA sued 261 music fans in the United States earlier this month for up to $150,000 per song.
Copyright infringement is also rampant in Israel, even off-line.
"Israel is a modern hell for anything that has to deal with Internet and copyright," said Braun, who is also the owner and managing director of Tel Aviv-based Helicon Records.
He said that, acting on RIAA instructions, he had collected names of Israeli users of the file-swapping networks and intends to seek out Internet service providers (ISPs) that sell broadband services by promoting file-sharing.
"On the one hand, you have people who think they deserve to get things for free and have a philosophy of not being a sucker, and on the other hand this is a haven for early adapters to technology, so the combination makes it a real nightmare," he said.
The RIAA filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in New York last Thursday against the Tel Aviv-based file-sharing network iMesh.
The suit against iMesh, the third-largest song-swapping network on the Web after KaZaa and Morpheus, sought damages and an injunction.
KaZaa, Morpheus and iMesh let Internet users trade software, music and video over the Internet.
iMesh, which is registered in Delaware and runs on a server based in Texas, denied infringing copyright and said the lawsuit was "ill informed". It said it would "respond appropriately" and win the case on merit.
Braun said he hoped to meet iMesh CEO Elan Oren to discuss ways to cooperate.
The recording industry's long-term goal is to move users of file- swapping services to industry-sanctioned services, which charge users a fee for downloading music.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/1...6,00030010.htm
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RIAA Tactics in Question After Dismissal of Suit
Jay Lyman
Despite public outcry over its strategy, the RIAA has indicated its intention to continue pursuing individual computer users it believes have traded copyrighted music online in an effort to send a message regarding music piracy.
One of the Recording Industry Association of America lawsuits, launched this month against 261 accused illegal file traders, has been dismissed by the industry group, calling its technical tracking of alleged song swappers into question.
The RIAA said it has dismissed a suit against 66-year-old Sarah Ward of Boston after the retired teacher denied ever using a peer-to-peer (P2P) application or even having a computer capable of doing what the RIAA alleged.
The recording industry group, on a campaign against the trading of copyrighted music on the Internet, has used more than 1,100 subpoenas and 261 copyright-infringement lawsuits to send a message to regular consumers who participate in illegal file trading.
The RIAA accused Ward, a Mac owner, of using the Kazaa P2P application to download hits by the likes of Snoop Dogg, but the senior citizen denied the existence of the software on her computer, which is not technically capable of running the Windows-only Kazaa application without using a Windows emulator.
"It was a case of mistaken identity," Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn told TechNewsWorld. "It was terrifying for her. She lost sleep, and she was confused because she's not a computer user."
The RIAA dismissed the lawsuit against Ward, who contacted the EFF for legal advice, but denied it had made a mistake in accusing her of using Kazaa to download rap music.
Claiming it was giving Ward the benefit of the doubt, the RIAA said the case is ongoing and that it is reserving the option to refile the suit "if and when circumstances warrant," according to a letter from an RIAA attorney.
The industry group also called the Ward case the only lawsuit of its kind out of the 261 filed against a wide range of consumers earlier this month and denied that its findings are flawed.
The RIAA has said it uses software that searches P2P public directories for copyrighted recordings and then downloads a sample of the infringing files with date and time of access and stores the user's Internet Protocol (IP) address. The RIAA then identifies the infringer's Internet service provider.
Cohn, who said the EFF is looking into similar cases that are more complicated, pointed out the difficulty of accurately identifying P2P users via the RIAA's method.
"If you are one number off, or the time is off, you're going to get the wrong person," she said. "How many numbers have to be exactly correct for them to get the right person?"
The RIAA has indicated plans to file more lawsuits, and its strategy of serving subpoenas also is continuing, with more than 100 additional subpoenas issued recently in the Midwest, according to Cohn.
Critical of the RIAA for not contacting consumers before proceeding with lawsuits against them, Cohn said the Ward case probably will be repeated as the industry group proceeds.
"I'm quite confident, especially if they're launching a couple hundred more, they're going to continue to make mistakes," she said.
Despite public outcry over its strategy, the RIAA has indicated its intention to continue pursuing individual computer users whom it believes have traded copyrighted music online in an effort to send a message regarding music piracy.
However, Cohn said the recording industry itself could be the target of legal action based on federal requirements for due diligence. Cohn said Ward's attorney is considering such action, but it likely would take more similar cases to pursue the RIAA successfully.
"You have to have a basic due diligence investigation before you just sue people," Cohn said. "Certainly, if there were a few more [similar cases], we would see that raised. I don't know if it would work with just one case, but I can tell you for sure it would work if there were 20."
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/31675.html
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On Staying Hidden
Article covers some of the basics of anonymous surfing and file sharing, and includes a decent primer for those new to the subject.
http://www.p2pnet.net/article/8156
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Music Industry Stymies Record Companies: Kazaa Counterclaim
Sydney-based Sharman Networks, the owner of peer-to-peer software Kazaa, has filed an amended counterclaim in the U.S. District Court of California against the music industry, alleging agreements with media companies had been stymied by the industry body.
"We’ve spoken to record company executives who recognise that P2P provides the most efficient means to profitably distribute licensed music and movie content for a fee over the Internet," said Nikki Hemming, chief executive officer of Sharman Networks. "It’s time for these executives to take their business back from their lawyers and steer it into the future of digital distribution."
The amended counterclaim will detail specific information, including names and dates, of U.S. entertainment industry behaviour to boycott Sharman, Altnet (which is partnering with Sharman to provide paid music distribution via P2P) and P2P technology from the market of licensed digital content distribution. Sharman claims they and Altnet had met with senior level industry executives at record companies, including Universal, Warner Brothers Music and Interscope Music, and reached preliminary agreements which were then stymied by industry body directives.
"We remain steadfast in our desire to work with the industry to distribute their content securely using our peer-to-peer technology," said Hemming. "Thousands of content providers across the music, movie, games and software industries have already profited from working with us."
The amended counterclaim also details:
· The nature of Sharman and Altnet’s joint enterprise agreement (JEA) which demonstrates that both Sharman and Altnet are equally affected by the anticompetitive behaviour of entertainment industry plaintiffs;
· Collusion of the plaintiffs to apply pressure to advertisers, ISPs and business partners of Sharman and/or Altnet;
· Public smear campaigns to undermine Sharman, Altnet and peer-to-peer technology;
· Restrictive anti-P2P licensing practices by plaintiffs – “Dead End Licenses”— designed to exclude P2P distribution;
· Unfair business practices on behalf of the plaintiffs including breach of Sharman Networks’ copyright and privacy provisions to covertly gather information about users of Kazaa.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/ebu...0278927,00.htm
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Crackdown Does Little To Stop Student File-Sharing
Ally Diljohn
Although no students at the university were named in a recent lawsuit regarding file-sharing services on the Internet, some have been penalized for illegally downloading music.
This month the Recording Industry Association of America sued 261 defendants accused of illegal Internet file-sharing. The lawsuit is only the most recent instance of a crackdown by the music industry.
According to Jay Dominick, assistant vice president of Information Systems, “file sharing is not an illegal or objectionable activity by itself.” Problems arise when people participate in sharing copyright-protected material.
The university receives at least one notification each week regarding students who violate copyright laws by sharing copyrighted files, Dominick said. This notice comes from copyright holders through a process outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Upon notification, university officials are required to investigate the claim.
“When we are properly notified, we disconnect the (offending student’s) computer and call the owner to have them bring the laptop to the Help Desk for file removal,” Dominick said.
Even if legal action is not taken, students are often referred to the judicial system. According to Ricardo Hall, assistant dean and judicial officer, students are given an administrative hearing for Rule 20 violations, as listed in the student handbook.
Copyright violations are addressed on a case-by-case basis according to the honor code.
“A typical sanction might be a fine and/or warning,” Hall said.
Repeat offenders may lose computing privileges.
“Our office is most concerned that students are educated on the proper and legal uses of file sharing software,” Hall said.
So far this year, administrators have not heard any cases regarding Rule 20 violations. During the 2002- 2003 school year, eight students had administrative hearings for Rule 20 violations; nine cases were heard during the previous year.
Despite the illegality of file-sharing, many students on campus and around the country continue to acquire music from file sharing services such as Kazaa and Blubster.
According to the “Courthouse Rock” article in the Sept. 22 issue of Newsweek, by turning off the sharing aspect of file-sharing services, users “probably” will not get caught.
Students around campus had different feelings about file-sharing.
“I used to download until more people starting getting caught,” sophomore Brandi Rhoads, a member of the student technology committee, said.
Some students provided explanations for why they download files.
“I never really think about it as stealing,” sophomore Nikki Soriano said. “It just seems different with online music files because it’s so easy.”
Sophomore Katie Chinlund gave a pragmatic rationale for file-sharing.
“I do it because not all of the songs on a CD are good or are what I want,” she said. “Downloading is the only way to get the songs you want without spending money for the entire CD.”
Copyright laws give the authors of material the right to control the reproduction and the distribution of their work, Dominick said.
By this definition file-sharing is illegal, though most students do not consider it immoral.
According to Newsweek , the recording industry has lost at least $700 million in revenue to file-sharing.
In light of the RIAA lawsuit and other efforts to stop file-sharing, software designers for file-sharing systems have begun creating new software to prevent users from getting caught.
According to “Crackdown May Send Music Traders into Software Underground” in the Sept. 15 New York Times, measures are being taken to make file-sharing more anonymous.
http://ogb.wfu.edu/news/news_more.php?id=660_0_9_0_C
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SBC Fights Record Industry Requests
Peter Shinkle
While Charter Communications Inc. said Wednesday that it will cooperate in the music industry's hunt for computer users who share copyrighted music, another major Internet provider here is fighting for the privacy of customers.
SBC filed a lawsuit in California in July to block 208 subpoenas that the Recording Industry Association of America issued seeking identities of computer users.
"We think the standards that they're using here are so incredibly low to obtain personal information on people that it's an invasion of privacy," said Selim Bingol, a spokesman for SBC at its headquarters in San Antonio.
"It's chipping away at personal privacy and using kind of a meat ax to get at it," he said.
There is no way for now to tell whether any of the subpoenas received by SBC involve St. Louis-area customers, nor for that matter to tell whether there are local targets among 109 subpoenas filed in federal court at St. Louis this week against Charter, which is based in Town and Country.
There have been no subpoenas filed here against SBC or other service providers.
A Charter spokesman, David Andersen, said Wednesday that he did not know whether the subpoenas had arrived yet, but he said the company's posture toward the music industry anti-piracy campaign is definite.
"While I can't confirm receipt of subpoenas, I can confirm we'll fully cooperate," he said in an e-mail to a reporter.
Armed with information that identifies an Internet user by a code called an Internet protocol number, the RIAA is demanding real names and addresses of people it says have shared music files improperly. Presumably, the information could be the basis of lawsuits.
A number of other Internet providers have complied with the subpoenas.
But a lawsuit filed by SBC subsidiary Pacific Bell Internet Services, in federal court in San Francisco, claims that federal law does not authorize issuance of such subpoenas.
Pacific Bell attorneys say the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which the RIAA cites, does not authorize issuance of subpoenas to a company merely serving as a "conduit" for digital files used by others accused of copyright violations.
"The statute does not contain adequate procedural safeguards to protect the expressive and associational rights or the liberty interests of Internet subscribers," the company says in its suit.
The company also says the law does not give Internet users an opportunity to respond to the subpoenas, instead making Pacific Bell responsible for protecting its customers' free speech rights.
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/new...try+requests++
Top 10 D/Ls - Singles
BigChampagne
EMI In Talks To Buy Warner Music
Reuters
Music company EMI Group, home to old-time rockers the Rolling Stones and jazz star Norah Jones, confirmed Monday that it is in negotiations with AOL Time Warner about buying the U.S. media giant's music business.
Sources familiar with the situation said London-based EMI is discussing a $1.5 billion plus takeover of Warner Music to create the world's second-biggest music company as it scrambles for a quick fix to sliding sales and Internet downloading.
"Discussions are at a very preliminary stage, and there is no assurance that they will result in an agreement acceptable to both parties," EMI said in a statement, confirming earlier Reuters reports that EMI had approached AOL Time Warner.
An EMI-Warner recorded music combination would bring together artists ranging from pop queen Madonna to rock band Radiohead in a venture with a global market share of around 24 percent, ranking just behind Universal Music.
EMI, the world's third-biggest music company, tried to merge with Warner Music three years ago but failed after stumbling at the regulatory gate. With sales sliding, EMI hopes antitrust regulators will be more accommodating this time around.
"This can only be encouraging for EMI investors as it offers the prospect of cost savings. But we'll have to wait and see how much they end up paying," said Investec analyst Kingsley Wilson.
AOL Time Warner, soon to return to its original Time Warner name, decided last week to open the field of contenders after struggling to wrap up a deal with Germany's Bertelsmann, people familiar with the situation said.
However, talks between AOL Time Warner and Bertelsmann over a recorded music joint venture also are continuing.
http://news.com.com/2100-1027-5080366.html
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Vortex of Piracy
John C. Dvorak
The locals tell of the massive pirate ships sitting beyond the 12-mile limit, loaded to the bulkheads with millions of dollars of high-end disc stamping equipment. This is the source of the fabled DVD-9 brand of supposedly bootlegged DVD movie. You can get pristine first-run movies not yet released in the US. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Kuala Lumpur.
Trying to comprehend what's going on when you step into a commercial mall and confront what one assumes are pirated movies and software out in the open selling for amazing prices is hard. That's what you find in Malaysia, considered by many to be the nexus, or vortex, of all international piracy. And we're not talking about kids selling bootlegged copies made at home—although, as you'll see, there must be a lot of that going on too.
This is no lightweight town, but an intense rough-and-tumble metropolis, with its incredible skyscrapers, typified by the monstrous Petronas twin towers (the world's tallest structure since 1998) and the nearby Menara Kuala Lumpur, with its revolving restaurant. The place is kind of a cross between Shanghai modern and New Orleans funky with an energy level that contrasts with both that of boring ultramodern neighbor Singapore and the nearby wild and disorganized Jakarta in Indonesia. The place is an eye-opener for Americans.
I first heard about the DVD-9 brand name last year in Hong Kong after returning from Beijing with some laughable but slick-looking bootlegs that were of the New York camcorder-in-the-theater type sold on the streets of Manhattan for $5 a pop. DVD-9 refers to the approximately 9 gigabytes of data that the two layers on one side of a DVD contain. No DVD burner can make these things. They have to be stamped out by machines. With DVD-9, the entire package is so slick, you cannot look at it without wondering who, or what, is behind it. You immediately think of the Asian Triads—organized crime. If that's the power behind DVD-9, then some dangerous genius is running the operation, since the brand, which is synonymous with quality, now rules all of Asia. In fact, there is nothing to indicate that these disks are anything other than Hollywood products fronted by Hollywood to eke whatever it can from Asian markets, where buyers are used to paying nothing for the stuff. You have to wonder who is really behind all this.
The disks sell for from $2 to $4, and there is obviously some money being made, with nobody paying royalties to the artists. These DVDs are mostly first-run films and not yet officially released. They have all the DVD outtakes and special features. Are the sources inside the studios? Seems to me that with some ploys, the sources could be traced. But except for the stories about the ships offshore, nobody knows anything. In Kuala Lumpur, the slickest shop sells these discs for $3.50 and lets you look at them through players to check the quality. Name a movie, and this place has it. The discs are formatted with no country codes, so they play universally. And there seems to be no use of Macrovision copy protection.
DVD-9 has become so desired that a lot of vendors of crummy discs are using DVD-9 stickers, trying to convince users that their discs are "genuine" DVD-9s. In fact, the brand name is clearly printed on real DVD-9 packages and on the diskette labels without using stickers. By the way, a friend of mine in Jakarta says that while the US talks a big game about copyright violations, the local American diplomats load up with DVD-9s when they head back to the States.
More interesting and less organized is the bootleg or pirated software scene. In much of Kuala Lumpur, everything you'd ever want is available for $1 a disc. Some elaborate discs cost around $3. The products you can get include Windows, Office XP, all the Adobe products, and more. The locals will tell you flat out that they cannot afford expensive software, and then they tend to go off on anti-Microsoft rants. I've thought about this and am totally convinced that the piracy is tolerated because it keeps users on the Microsoft teat even though the illegal copies generate no income for legitimate publishers. The approach is like fighting a forest fire with a backfire. In this case, the forest fire is Linux. As long as Southeast Asia and China can get Microsoft Office XP for $1, they are not about to switch to Linux anytime soon. Stop the bootlegging, and then economics alone will turn the whole area over to Linux in the blink of an eye.
To test this thesis, I asked three crowds of computer users about Linux during three different speeches in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta. How many people used Linux, I asked? One lone guy in three cities raised his hand. One!
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1275902,00.asp
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The Empire Strikes Back
Amid declining CD sales, weak releases, and the continued rise of online file-sharing, the five major labels are fighting to regain market share
Ted Drozdowski
BY NOW, IT’S OBVIOUS that online music file-sharing hit the major labels like a sneak attack.
"The truth is, none of us were prepared for this, and we all got hurt," says one label VP who requested anonymity.
Coupled with other factors — including a sluggish economy and what industry watchers acknowledge as a period of artistically weak big-label releases — peer-to- peer file-sharing has contributed to an overall decline in CD shipments of 26 percent and a decrease in sales of 14 percent over the past three years. From 2001 to 2002 alone, 62.5 million fewer prerecorded compact discs were sold, according to SoundScan, which tracks retail sales. Altogether, labels’ CD business has fallen by $2 billion since 1999.
Until then, CD sales had risen nine to 10 percent annually for several years. Not coincidentally, 1999 is when Napster set the music-file-sharing world aflame. A new study by Cambridge-based Forrester Research indicates that file-sharing is responsible for almost $700 million of that $2 billion decline.
Music fans haven’t had much sympathy for labels. "The record business has got a bad reputation," Palm Pictures chief executive Chris Blackwell told me last year. Blackwell noted that the industry’s lack of competitive online alternatives at the time, as well as its campaign to get consumers to stop burning CDs — another practice at which the labels’ trade association, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has taken aim — was part of a recent pattern that riled its customers.
Further, 25-to-50-year-old listeners, who were raised on rock and roll, were alienated by the flood of teen-pop recordings. And the RIAA’s argument that file-sharing is copyright infringement took a hit when a diverse group of artists, including the Eagles, Sheryl Crow, Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne, No Doubt, the Dixie Chicks, and Korn, came together in 2002 under the banner of the Recording Artists Coalition for a series of well-publicized LA-area concerts. Their goal: raising money to battle major labels over copyright ownership, intellectual-property rights, unfair accounting practices, and rules governing contracts.
Then there’s the pricing of music CDs, which has been debated almost since their inception. The issue sizzled again earlier this year, when consumer advocates noted that soundtrack CDs are often priced higher than DVDs of the films they accompany. In an attempt to stimulate sales, Universal Music Group announced that it will cut prices for new CDs by 30 percent beginning October 1, but at this point that may be the equivalent of applying a band-aid to a decapitation.
The result of all this has been significant shrinkage in what some file-sharers call "the Evil Empire," the five remaining major labels: Sony, Universal, BMG, Warner Music Group, and EMI. Thousands of jobs have been slashed, labels have peeled back their artist rosters, and executive heads have rolled. Sony Music Entertainment boss Tommy Mottola was axed last year after the company lost more then $132 million. So was Jay Boberg, who led Universal’s MCA Records. But now, the Empire is striking back.
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/...s/03187197.asp
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The Wireless Last Mile
Entangled in their copper wires, phone companies may miss out on the broader broadband revolution
Steven M. Cherry
OWENSBORO, A SMALL KENTUCKY CITY on the Ohio River, is famous for nothing, not even its International Bar-B-Q Festival, now in its 25th year. So it's not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find technologies and business models that will either make or break some multibillion- dollar enterprises—namely, the U.S. regional Bell operating companies.
But find them you will. In October 2002, after a five-month pilot program, the local electricity and water provider, Owensboro Municipal Utilities (OMU), rolled out a high-speed broadband service to the city's 58 000 residents at US $25 a month, just $2 more than what many were paying for low- speed dial-up access.
Owensboro isn't the only obscure town conducting an experiment with huge implications for broadband. Two months earlier and 3000 km away, in Klamath Falls, Ore., a small start-up company, Always On Network Inc. (Chiloquin, Ore.), began serving up broadband to 30 test customers, converting them into paying customers a few months later.
What makes these enterprises novel isn't the data rates, which aren't exceptional for broadband, at 250-1000 Kb/s. It's the way that the bits are delivered—wirelessly—at least for the critical last mile to the home. Bypassing the copper wires that connect a phone company's central offices to its customers, these wireless Internet service providers can deliver broadband more cheaply than digital subscriber lines (DSLs) and can reach out to rural homes and others not currently served at all except by dial-up.
In truth, OMU will never go beyond western Kentucky, and Always On, critically underfunded, will be fortunate to become a major regional provider in Oregon. Even so, the two providers are destined to be midwives to the next generation of broadband: wireless metropolitan-area networks (MANs). Propelled in part by a new standard, IEEE 802.16, wireless MANs are expected to do for neighborhoods, villages, and cities what IEEE 802.11, the standard for wireless local-area networks, is doing for homes, coffee shops, airports, and offices.
How quickly wireless MANs reach your own city may well depend on what happens in Owensboro, Klamath Falls, and a few other testbeds. The reason is that OMU and Always On represent opposing approaches to wireless MANs from two of the technology's top system vendors, Alvarion Ltd. (Tel Aviv, Israel, and Carlsbad, Calif.) and Soma Networks Inc. (San Francisco). Alvarion has almost half of what's already a $250 million-a-year market for wireless MANs. Soma, a well-funded start-up, is now in trials with one of the largest phone companies in the world, NTT Communications Corp. (Tokyo). The two companies, and the market itself, are at a crossroads. Alvarion has embraced the 802.16 standard and is a founding member of the WiMax Forum (San Jose, Calif.), an industry consortium created to commercialize it and a corresponding standard from the European Telecommunications Standards Institute known as HIPERMAN. The institute is based in Sophia Antipolis, France.
Alvarion's existing wireless last-mile products, and those of the other WiMax members, are designed for wireless Internet service providers (WISPs), making the connection between homes and the Internet backbone that lets end users bypass their telephone companies. For its part, Soma, reluctant to abandon or change a five-year odyssey of its wireless MAN technology development, and believing it to be superior to anything its competitors have, is ready to stand apart from the standard and go it alone. Its system, while eminently usable by WISPs, is chock full of quality-of-service features that help it transport voice-over-Internet-protocol packets. That means it's especially well positioned to be adopted by the phone companies themselves.
In effect, the two initiatives represent the dilemma the wireless last mile presents to those phone companies: buy into wireless MAN systems or risk being made increasingly irrelevant by them.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY...ep03/wire.html
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Despite Lawsuits, Music Sharing Soars
UPI
The barrage of lawsuits seemed to touch on a break between the legal status of file sharing and the apparent cultural consensus on its morality.
Apparently, it takes more than a rash of lawsuits to stop millions from copying and sharing internet music without paying, according to reports Friday.
Despite legal action against 261 people accused of illicitly distributing music over the Internet, more than four million Americans used KaZaA, the most popular file-sharing software, the New York Times said, quoting Nielsen/NetRatings.
That's just about 5 percent fewer than the week before the record industry's lawsuits became big news. One smaller service, iMesh, even had increased usage.
The barrage of lawsuits seemed to touch on a break between the legal status of file sharing and the apparent cultural consensus on its morality. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this week, only 36 percent of those responding said file swapping was never acceptable.
What appears to be a persistent lack of guilt suggests a long process for the record industry's campaign to get large numbers of people to buy music again.
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/22329.html
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Studios Moving to Block Piracy of Films Online
Laura M. Holson
If Hollywood executives have learned anything watching their peers in the music business grapple with online file sharing, it is how not to handle a technological revolution.
While the major labels in the music industry squabbled among themselves about how best to deal with Internet piracy and failed to develop consumer-friendly ways to buy music online, the movie industry has gone on a coordinated offensive to thwart the free downloading of films before it spins out of control.
This summer, night-vision goggles became a familiar fashion accessory for security guards at movie premieres as they searched for people in the audience carrying banned video recorders. The industry's trade association began a nationwide piracy awareness campaign in movie theaters and on television. Studios are aggressively putting electronic watermarks on movie prints so they can determine who is abetting the file sharing. And some movie executives are considering whether to send out early DVD's to Academy Award voters, fearing the films will be distributed online.
Also, as early as next month the industry will begin promoting a "stealing is bad" message in schools, teaming up with Junior Achievement on an hourlong class for fifth through ninth graders on the history of copyright law and the evils of online file sharing. The effort includes games like Starving Artist, in which students pretend to be musicians whose work is downloaded free from the Internet, and a crossword puzzle called Surfing for Trouble.
"There is no issue in my life I take as seriously as this," said Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, which owns 20th Century Fox. "This is going to be with us for the rest of our careers. But if we remain focused on it, maybe it won't kill us and we won't have to panic."
This is not the first time the studios have battled technological advances they worried they could not control. Back in 1982, Jack Valenti, then as now the head of the movie industry's trade association, said the threat of videocassette recorders to the film industry was like that posed by the Boston Strangler to a woman alone. The studios hope they can find a way to co-opt online movie swapping as profitably as they did the VCR and now the DVD player. Still, many in Hollywood fear that online movie sharing could be the most serious menace to profits so far.
The concern is such that 20 of the film industry's top decision makers, including Jeffrey Bewkes, chairman of the entertainment group at AOL Time Warner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-founder of Dreamworks SKG, attended a focus group in June at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills. The participants, about 20 college- and high school-age students, quickly and easily downloaded several current hits at the executives' request. Next they confirmed what many already knew. "These kids said they weren't going to stop," Mr. Chernin said.
As a result, in late July the major studios through their lobbying group, the Motion Picture Association of America, began an advertising campaign, with the theme "Movies. They're Worth It." It profiles, among others, a set painter, stuntman and makeup artist.
The music industry, which began feeling the effects of online sharing four years ago because the relatively small size of music files makes for much quicker downloads, began running national antipiracy ads only last year. Executives lament the delay. "It could have had an impact," said Hilary Rosen, the former chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry's trade group.
But music executives then were indecisive about how best to tackle online file sharing. "I think the music industry has always resembled feudal warring kingdoms with an underworld edge thrown in," said Martin Kaplan, a former executive at the Walt Disney Company who is now the director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, which studies entertainment, business and society. "If you look at Jack Valenti's French cuffs, it is a different culture. Movie executives collaboratively deal with joint enemies at the gate."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/bu...ia/25STUD.html
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Dell to Launch Digital Music Player and Service
Reuters
Dell Inc. on Thursday said it will launch a music service and other consumer electronics products before the holidays, betting it can undercut rivals and steal market share, as it did with personal computers.
Chief Executive Michael Dell said the products, which include a digital music player and a flat-panel television, will allow the company to take on the home entertainment market. Dell already sells some consumer electronics under its own brand.
Analysts said that Dell's path is not an easy one.
``Dell has a long way to go before gaining market share in the consumer electronics market,'' said Bill Armstrong, a retail analyst at C.L. King & Associates.
But he said the company could affect competitors, which include companies like Sony Corp. (6758.T) and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.'s (6752.T) Panasonic brand.
``There are a lot of players and its entry could put pressure on product prices,'' he said.
``It appears that Dell is re-branding one of the second-tier music services that will be announced soon, just like they are re-branding Creative's MP3 player,'' Apple said in a statement, referring to Creative Technology Ltd's (CREA.SI)multi-purpose digital device. ``There is little original here.''
Dell said that it would price its service competitively with other services. MusicMatch's Artist OnDemand offers ad-free Internet radio for under $3 a month, and RealNetworks Inc.'s (RNWK.O) Rhapsody sells downloads for 79 cents a song. Media software company Roxio Inc. (ROXI.O) is planning to soon unveil a legitimate version of song-swap pioneer Napster.
``Even while some purchases may be made online or by phone, the vast majority of our buyers do come into our stores to see these systems,'' said Bob Sherbin, Gateway spokesman.
Shares of Dell were up 30 cents $34.20 in active afternoon trade on the Nasdaq.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/techn...tech-dell.html
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Burn That Genome
Ian Austen
JAMES LA CLAIR, a molecular biologist, once absentmindedly dribbled a bit of a biochemical sample onto a music CD that was lying on his lab bench. When he popped the punk-rock recording into a player later, he found that the chemical, which by that time had dried, had silenced it.
That small accident four years ago proved more inspirational than irritating.
"I was sitting beside the latest, most advanced machine for detecting molecules, that cost something like $300,000, and my CD player detected it as well - and it only cost about $20, secondhand," said Dr. La Clair, now a visiting researcher at the University of California at San Diego.
Along with Michael D. Burkart, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the university, Dr. La Clair has proposed a system for molecular screening that uses a conventional computer CD-R drive and an inkjet printer. The two men hope their system will enable individuals to do the kind of genetic testing that is now limited to well-equipped laboratories. "You can see kids squishing an ant and sequencing its genome at home with this," Dr. Burkart said.
Molecular screening machines like the one in the lab where Dr. La Clair had his mishap use various methods to accomplish tasks like determining the protein makeup of body fluids.
Some machines developed for DNA screening, for example, gather enormous numbers of samples for testing by using a variation of the technologies originally designed for fabricating electronic microchips. But ultimately most screening machines rely on dyes that that glow under certain conditions or cause changes in the wavelengths of infrared or ultraviolet light to indicate, for example, the presence of a specific protein.
That optical event is then converted by the machine, often using specialized digital cameras, into a digital signal for analysis.
Dr. Burkart said that current machines are accurate and able to process millions of samples relatively quickly. But to his mind, he said, they have one drawback.
"One of the biggest problems in this field is that the equipment is extraordinarily expensive," he said. The machines cost more than $100,000, making it difficult for physicians and researchers in developing countries to have access to molecular screening, Dr. Burkart said. Even in affluent countries, physicians must often refer patients to outside labs for tests rather than performing them in their offices.
The idea of using CD's or DVD's in screening machines is not new. Several researchers have proposed various ways to adapt current technologies to do that, and at least two companies are pursuing CD-R-based testing technologies. But the insight Dr. La Clair gained from his ruined CD reversed the prevailing way of doing things.
CD players work by bouncing laser light off the disc and reading the pattern of light, which is affected by reflective and less reflective areas on the disc. Dr. La Clair's music CD had become useless because the dye from the biomedical sample was preventing the laser from reading the digital code. He decided that for molecular screening he would embrace the errors: he wanted molecules to reveal themselves by having them interfere with an existing stream of data.
"If you manipulate something that is established, it's a lot easier to detect than something you create," Dr. Burkart said. "If I alter a picture you've seen before, you know what I've done."
The scientists start the process by recording a digital pattern onto a blank CD. The disc is then dropped into an inkjet printer. Instead of ink, however, the printer sprays transparent receptors for specific proteins onto the reflective side of the disc, directly over specific sections of its burned-in digital pattern.
The same side is then covered with a solution that needs testing and is dried. If the test solution contains the molecules the researchers are seeking, they will bind to the receptors printed on the CD. The bound molecules, in turn, will prevent a CD player from correctly reading all of the disc by blocking its laser light. To analyze the results, software maps the number and location of the errors on the disc.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/te...ts/25next.html
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Thirsty Batteries Tell Rechargers How Fast to Pour
Ivan Berger
With some battery rechargers, restoring a couple of double-A's can take up to eight hours. But with Rayovac's new I-C3 system, batteries can be charged during a coffee break.
Charging a battery too fast builds up internal pressure, so Rayovac gives each nickel metal-hydride I-C3 cell a switch that senses pressure and interrupts the charging current when necessary.
With older rechargeable battery systems, controlled by the charger, "it's like pouring soda,'' said John Daggett, Rayovac's director of marketing services. "You control the flow by the angle of the can, pouring at a slow and constant pace so foam doesn't build up.'' But with the I-C3, "you can pour in a charge as fast as you want because the battery won't let you go too fast."
The system is now in stores. A pair of the AA or AAA batteries costs about $10. The I-C3 chargers, which have small, quiet cooling fans, cost about $25 for the two- battery model; a four-battery version costs about $10 more.
If you already have conventional rechargeable batteries, you don't have to keep their charger around. The I-C3 can handle older batteries, although charging them will still be an all-day affair.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/te...ts/25batt.html
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Korean Movie Exports Equal 1,420 Car Sales Abroad
Korea exported 18.1 billion won ($15.7 million) worth of movies during the first half, generating as much added value as the sale of 1,419 passenger cars abroad, a central bank report showed yesterday.
The nation's movie exports in the six-month period were nearly equivalent to last year's annual figure of 18.7 billion won and represented a gigantic leap from 1999, when domestic filmmakers earned only 7.1 billion won in overseas markets.
"The film industry is not only pollution free but also creates a chain of economic value by creating demand for related facilities and products such as theaters and DVD titles," the Bank of Korea extolled. "It is regarded as a sector Korea should strategically foster in the 21st century."
The central bank pointed out that Korean moviemakers continued to produce blockbusters, with 11 films generating more than 30 billion won each in value added since 1999.
For example, "Memories of Murder," the nation's biggest hit in the first half, racking up 5.1 million viewers, induced an estimated 30.3 billion won in value added so far, which is equivalent to that created by 2,798 EF-Sonata sedans.
The second largest box office hit, "My Tutor Friend," is estimated to have produced as much value added as 2,651 EF-Sonata units that sell for 14.9 million won each.
The automobile-converted value added reached 4,860 units for "Memory Island," Korea's biggest-ever hit that came out in 2001, and 3,119 cars for "Shiri," a 1999 blockbuster.
"As Korean films continued to hit it big, their domestic market share has jumped consequently. Excluding the United States, Korean movies boast the highest domestic market share in the world," the BOK explained.
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/da...0309260050.asp
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Web Searches Tap Databases
Kimberly Patch
Although the computer has made it possible to quickly search through documents and databases, sifting through a series of sources -- like a local database, a bunch of text documents, and the Web -- still means using different programs and different searches.
Researchers from Birkbeck University of London in England have written software designed to allow users to search for something without having to know where it might reside.
The search method makes it possible to search different types of sources at the same time, said Richard Wheeldon, a researcher at the Birkbeck University of London. "Think of how difficult it is to search a company's intranet, file system and databases at the same time," he said. "With a few alterations to our technology, it could be made incredibly simple."
The key to the method is software, dubbed DbSurfer, that permits free-text searches on the contents of relational databases. Data stored in relational databases is ordinarily accessed using queries structured to match the organization of the database.
DbSsurfer enables free text relational database searches through a modified version of the trails method used to organize the links contained in hypertext, said Wheeldon.
A trail is a sequence of connected pages. As far back as 1945, computer pioneer Vannevar Bush wrote about the concept of a web of trails. Hypertext and the World Wide Web take advantage of this concept, but databases do not, according to Wheeldon. "Trails have often been used in hypertext systems, but never in relational database systems," he said.
Relational databases organize information using tables subdivided by fields like columns and rows. Individual pieces of information, or records, reside in cells delineated by columns and rows. Relationships between records are determined by fields that the records have in common.
The researchers' software automatically constructs trails across tables in relational databases, according to Wheeldon. The software treats each database row as a virtual Web page, and builds links according to database settings, he said.
When presented with a free text database query, DbSurfer's navigation engine calculates scores for each database row, and the best scores are used to construct trails. The scheme uses a probabilistic best-first algorithm to select the most relevant trails. A probabilistic best-first algorithm assigns more promising alternatives higher probabilities. The researchers' Best Trail algorithm does this in two ways -- proportionally according to the score assigned to the trail, and decreasing exponentially according to rank.The program presents the results to the user as a navigation search interface.
The researchers have also used the same basic system to search the Web, a group of Java documents, program code, and Usenet newsgroups, said Wheeldon. "Theoretically, it could also be used in virtual environments or as a search application at the operating system level," he said.
The method uses standard keyword searches of data sources, and is easily customized, said Wheeldon. Data is represented in the Internet's extensible markup language (XML), and this means "the look of the pages can be changed in many different ways," Wilson said.
The technical challenge to building the software was being able to construct trails efficiently, said Wheeldon. "Trail construction is now typically performed in a few hundredths of a second," he said.
The current prototype won't scale to very large databases, but this is not a fundamental limitation, said Wheeldon. "Anything more than a few tens of millions of rows and the system will choke [but] this is easily fixed in theory," he said.
The software does have a downside -- it is not secure enough for highly sensitive data, Wheeldon said.
The next steps in developing the system are linking the DbSurfer indexer to a Web robot, optimizing the indexer for common databases, and adding software that will enable the entire index and trail structure to be accessed from within the database interface, according to Wheeldon.
The software could be ready for deployment in less than a year, said Wheeldon.
Wheeldon's research colleagues were Mark Levine and Kevin Keenoy. The research was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2003/0...es_092403.html
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Librarians to P2P Critics: Shhh!
Declan McCullagh
In a hotly contested lawsuit before a federal appeals court, two peer-to-peer companies are about to gain a vast army of allies: America's librarians.
The five major U.S. library associations are planning to file a legal brief Friday siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the Recording Industry Association of America's efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography.
According to an attorney who has seen the document, the brief argues that Streamcast--distributor of the Morpheus software--and Grokster should not be shut down. It asks the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to uphold the April decision by a Los Angeles judge that dismissed much of the entertainment industry's suit against the two peer-to-peer companies.
Among the groups signing the brief are the American Library Association (ALA), the Association of Research Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Medical Library Association and the Special Libraries Association. The American Civil Liberties Union, in one of the group's first forays into copyright law, has drafted the brief opposing the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
A central argument of the brief is that the district court got it right when applying a 1984 Supreme Court decision to the Internet. That decision, Sony v. Universal City, said Sony could continue to manufacture its Betamax VCR because a company "cannot be a contributory (copyright) infringer if, as is true in this case, it has had no direct involvement with any infringing activity."
"The amicus brief will make the point that we are not supporting the wrongful sharing of copyrighted materials," ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels wrote in an internal e-mail seen by CNET News.com. An amicus brief is one filed by a third, uninvolved party that comments on a particular matter of law. "Instead, we believe the Supreme Court ruled correctly in the Sony/Betamax case. The court in that case created fair and practical rules which, if overturned, would as a practical matter give the entertainment industry a veto power over the development of innovative products and services."
The librarians' entry into the political fray over whether file-swapping networks should be shut down or not may complicate the RIAA's public relations strategy. The music industry group has been taking increasingly aggressive legal action against alleged infringers and has told Congress that "a significant percentage of the files available to these 13 million new users per month are pornography, including child pornography." The RIAA could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.
The ACLU said Thursday that the brief argues that peer-to-peer networks are speech-promoting technologies that have many noninfringing uses. If the MPAA and the RIAA succeed in shutting down peer-to-peer networks or making them more centralized, the precedent could create undesirable choke points that could be used to monitor Internet users, the ACLU said.
The RIAA and MPAA jointly filed the lawsuit in October 2001, launching what has become the most widely watched Internet copyright case since Napster. Their original complaint accuses Streamcast and Grokster of earning "advertising revenue by attracting millions of users to their systems by offering them a treasure trove of pirated music, movies and other copyrighted media."
http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5082684.html
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No Nullifying Nullsoft's WASTE
Ryan Naraine
Just months after America Online removed what it called an unauthorized copy of its Nullsoft division's WASTE file-sharing program, an updated version promising secure P2P communication has reappeared on open-source repository SourceForge.
Version 1.1 of the WASTE software, which was created by an employee of AOL's Nullsoft subsidiary, remained available for download on the site even though AOL demanded back in May that all copies be destroyed.
The new version of the program underscores the difficulty in removing unauthorized copies of programs after they are released on the Internet. Also, because WASTE was first released in May under the GNU General Public License, which allows anyone to download, modify and redistribute the software, stopping the redistribution is a major challenge.
WASTE is best described as a mesh-based workgroup tool that allows private, encrypted peer-to-peer communication on the Internet. The program was designed for small groups with support for instant messaging, chat and file-sharing. Because of its encryption capabilities, WASTE can be used to create "darknets" for music traders looking for ways around the recording industry's anti-piracy battle.
While AOL has not publicly commented on the reasons for yanking WASTE from the Nullsoft site, there has been widespread speculation that AOL's Warner Music corporate relationship helped fuel the move.
WASTE uses a distributed architecture to connect nodes in a partial mesh type network. Nodes on the network can broadcast and route traffic using link-level encryption and public keys for authentication. RSA is used for session key exchange and authentication, and the links are encrypted using Blowfish in PCBC mode (Propagating Cipher Block Chaining).
An AOL spokesperson said the ISP's position hasn't changed since the program first appeared.
In May, AOL posted this note on the Nullsoft site: "Nullsoft is the exclusive owner of all right, title and interest in the Software. The posting of the Software on this website was not authorized by Nullsoft.
"If you downloaded or otherwise obtained a copy of the Software, you acquired no lawful rights to the Software and must destroy any and all copies of the Software, including by deleting it from your computer. Any license that you may believe you acquired with the Software is void, revoked and terminated."
AOL also said "any reproduction, distribution, display or other use of the Software by you is unauthorized and an infringement of Nullsoft's copyright in the Software as well as a potential violation of other laws."
http://www.atnewyork.com/news/article.php/3084161
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Long Live File Sharing, Death To Bland Culture
Russell Smith
It's not just because of their lead-footed public relations that I have little interest in mustering sympathy for the Recording Industry Association of America.
It's not just because they sued 12-year-old Brianna LaHara for downloading such songs as the theme from Friends and If You're Happy and You Know It.
The fact is, I feel a certain glee that the pop-music industry -- the source of so much painful irritation in waiting rooms and taxis and on telephones and on television, the sausage plant for aural spam -- is being told by young people that it is unnecessary. I hope it crashes and burns and we never have to listen to Nickelback again.
File-sharing is a rejection of the social power of bland culture. Why should we pay for crap?
It's not that I don't want artists to get paid for their work. This is not about artists: It's about crap. File- sharing of pop music reflects a refusal of price-gouging for crap, for what is largely a disposable product anyway.
Anyway, it's not the artists who are taking these supposed losses in the first place. Unless you count megastars such as Britney Spears as artists, which is a tough exercise in classification, since she doesn't write her own songs and the product manufactured and distributed by her industrial team is more precisely a form of advertising for a line of merchandise.
No, it's not artists who are opposed to music sharing: For them it's excellent publicity and fan-base building. It's the record companies who are upset. They make far more profit on CDs than artists do: Most of the artists' share of CD sales goes to "reimbursing" the record companies for elaborate videos and other promotions anyway. And record companies like to control what we listen to and who we drool over in magazines: They like to control what we know about and what we don't.
Most real musicians feel that they are excluded from the major channels of attention and remuneration. We live in an age of such constant exposure to music that we feel music -- or noise, as it becomes when inescapable -- is literally everywhere, and yet with our 500 channels and the radio in every taxi and stairwell, we still have very little choice of entertainment. If you listen to pop-music radio and watch the music-video channels, you are going to be exposed to an extremely narrow band of culture. You are going to see a few hits repeated everywhere, endlessly, and those hits are going to be of such a stupefying banality that you might guess that they are manufactured as ambience for a 7-Eleven store somewhere in suburban Des Moines.
This non-selection does not represent what is desired or created by anyone I know. I do not know anyone, of any age, who is not dissatisfied by the range of music that is offered by the mass media. (This is yet another example of how a supposedly free market can end up affording remarkably little freedom.) And if you're in a band doing something interesting, it is unlikely that you will find representation in the front window of that new HMV store that has just opened in your local strip mall (which is now the only place to shop, since the little downtown record store run by the long-haired nerd closed).
Without a radio station playing you, without a major record label wasting all your profits on videos directed by Steven Spielberg and Coca-Cola, you have to find a way to spread the word, get well known, allow your fans to communicate with each other. The Internet does exactly this: It publicizes your work by allowing millions of virgin ears to hear a sample of it. If they like it, they will eventually buy something of yours, whether it's your next CD (because they haven't figured out a way to hook up their I-Pod to their car stereo, and they want to hear it while they drive) or a $15 ticket to your live show. The more fans you reach, the more likely you are to profit in very concrete ways.
I say this as someone with something to lose if my own artistic products are not paid for. Interestingly, the publishing industry has not collapsed because of photocopying or even because of the possibility of uploading e-copies (even rewritten e-copies of novels, as have circulated). Nor have libraries -- where free copies of published works are available for sharing, exactly as they are on Kazaa -- lost any writers any money. I am delighted, as an author with several books for sale in bookshops, when I hear of someone borrowing one from a library. I do not regret the loss of a sale. I am pleased that someone is taking an interest -- someone who might, if she likes the book, tell someone else about it who might also borrow it and tell someone else. This is all good for me.
The only thing the publishing industry hasn't done -- yet -- is get itself hated the way the music industry has. Books, so far, aren't quite as saccharine and omnipresent as Celine Dion is. The rebellion against record companies is an aesthetic one: It reflects a dissatisfaction with what's on offer.
http://www.globetechnology.com/servl...gy/?mainhub=GT
Until next week,
-
js.
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Current Week In Review.
Recent WiRs -
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17552 September 20th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17495 September 13th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17325 September 6th
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/...threadid=17374 August 30th
Jack Spratts Week In Review is published every Friday. Please submit letters, articles, and press releases in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Include contact info. Submission deadlines are Wednesdays @ 1700 UTC.