Australian ISPs will fight RIAA Plans
Sue Lowe
The music industry's latest plan for recouping losses from song-swapping over the internet is to charge the service providers, but the Australian internet industry says it will fight the moves.
In a speech to a music conference in Cannes, the chief of the Recording Industry Association of America said she planned to "hold internet service providers more accountable" for internet file-sharing.
The chief executive of the Internet Industry Association, Peter Coroneos, said internet providers in Australia were well-protected by copyright law, but he still expected music file-swapping to "come to a head" this year.
"The recording industry is obviously planning some sort of an assault on peer-to-peer networks," he said.
"We will resist any moves to transfer the cost burden from the music industry to the ISP sector.
"The music and content industries have failed to adapt their business models to the realities of the internet. We're not going to prop them up."
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...911380707.html
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Courts Split on Internet Bans
Matt Ritchell
If a person goes to prison for using a computer and the Internet to commit a crime, can he be barred from using the Internet after the sentence is served?
Courts are increasingly facing the question as the Internet age gives rise to an explosion of cybercrime. But appellate courts in different parts of the country are coming up with different answers. And in the process, they are showing how an emerging technology can cause rifts in the legal landscape and pose difficulties in monitoring offenders.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, whose opinion interprets law in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, has ruled that people on probation may be barred from using computers and the Internet. The court argued that while this prohibition can greatly restrict a person's freedom and ability to find work, it also protects society from criminals who have turned the computer into a weapon.
But two other federal appeals courts, including the one governing New York, have recently concluded that such a prohibition is too broad. In overturning the sentence of a child pornographer last year, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the Internet was as vital to everyday existence as the telephone and that while the government could monitor an offender's computer use, it could not stop it completely.
And the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers New Jersey and Pennsylvania, has issued conflicting opinions in cases involving child pornography. In one case in 2000, it allowed a complete ban to stand, saying that it was necessary to deter a public threat to children. But in another — issued earlier this month — it argued that such a condition was overly broad. In this case the court said these sentences would have to depend on the facts in each individual case.
The courts have noted that computers now pervade virtually every area of life, suggesting a reason they have found a complete ban excessive, said Jennifer S. Granick, director of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.
"Computers are everywhere," she said. "The A.T.M. is a computer; the car has a computer; the Palm Pilot is a computer. Without a computer in this day and age, you can't work, you can't communicate, you can't function as people normally do in modern society."
The issue emerges just as Kevin Mitnick, the hacker once called by the government "the most-wanted computer criminal in U.S. history," is poised to start using the Internet again. Mr. Mitnick served five years for breaking into computer networks of major corporations and stealing software; he was released from prison in January 2000. As a condition of his probation, he has not been allowed to use the Internet — a restriction that expires today.
Differences of opinion among federal courts are not unusual, though this rift can mean that two people living in different states may receive different sentences, even if they commit similar crimes. But the offenders are not the only people directly affected by the changing landscape.
The impact has been felt, too, by probation officers, whose job it is to monitor offenders' activities after they are released from prison. Where they cannot rely on a complete Internet ban, probation officers are being forced to pioneer ways to make sure that offenders on probation or on supervised pretrial release do not use computers and the Internet to commit new crimes.
That has meant finding technologies to monitor what Web sites offenders visit and what e-mail messages they send.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/te...gy/21MONI.html
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Copyright and Rhetoric
Edward W. Felten
In a much-acclaimed blog posting, Doc Searls writes that the limited-copyright folks are losing the rhetorical battle to the copyright expansionists.
I believe Hollywood won because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. Copyright = property may not be accurate in a strict legal sense, but it still makes common sense, even to the Supreme Court.
Watch the language. While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.
I would go further and say that focusing on the role of the public domain is bad rhetorical strategy. It's not that the public domain is unimportant. It's just that public-domain arguments end up sounding like, "We want to use your stuff." By making a public-domain argument, you're inviting the accusation that you're a freeloader trying to make money off the creativity of others. You're saying, in effect, that certain ideas are the property of the public, and so you're buying in, indirectly, to the concept of ideas as property.
A better rhetorical strategy is to focus on the entangling effects of copyright on everyday life, including ordinary creative work. The argument is simply that copyright has become a wide-ranging regulatory scheme that goes far beyond its proper role of protecting the legitimate rights of authors. A great example of this is the section of Lessig's The Future of Ideas about the documentary filmmaker. The filmmaker isn't trying to copy other people's work. But because so many everyday objects are the subject of intellectual property claims, filming everyday life becomes problematic, with too many rights to be "cleared". Expansionist IP claims entangle ordinary creativity, even when nobody is trying to copy anything.
Even the record companies complain about the difficulty of "clearing" rights to recorded music so that they can sell it online. When the big copyright owners find the system too onerous and complicated, that's a rhetorical opportunity.
This strategy also exploits the ever-growing stock of copyright horror stories. When the Girl Scouts are worried about what they can sing around the campfire, or when the DMCA is being used to regulate garage door openers, you're seeing the tentacles of copyright reaching into places where it doesn't belong.
"Free the mouse" is a catchy slogan, but we would do better by talking more about our own freedom and less about Mickey's.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000266.html
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We mean it. Honest. Really. We do.
RIAA In Hot Denial
George V. Hulme
"Absolutely false." That's what a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America says about reports that it was paying hackers to infect peer-to-peer file- swapping networks with a damaging worm. Hoaxers posted notices on Symantec's BuqTraq mailing list and the vulnerability-tracking site VulnWatch saying they'd been recruited by the association, which represents music publishers, to deploy the nonexistent worm. Since last summer, the recording-industry group's Web site, riaa.org, has been attacked a number of times, presumably by music swappers angry with RIAA's anti-swapping policies.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030117S0037
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RIAA wins battle to ID Kazaa user
Declan McCullagh
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Verizon Communications to disclose the identity of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate in a legal decision that could make it easier for the music industry to crack down on file-swapping networks.
In a 37-page decision, U.S. District Judge John Bates said the wording of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires Verizon to give the Recording Industry Association of America the name of a Kazaa subscriber who allegedly was sharing more than 600 music recordings. Bates said "the court disagrees with Verizon's strained reading of the act, which disregards entirely the clear definitional language."
This case represents the entertainment industry's latest legal assault on peer-to-peer piracy. If its invocation of the DMCA is upheld on appeal, music industry investigators would have the power to identify hundreds or thousands of music pirates at a time without going to court first.
The dispute is not about whether the RIAA will be able to force Verizon to reveal the identity of a suspected copyright infringer, but about what legal mechanism copyright holders will be able to use. The RIAA would prefer to rely on the DMCA's turbocharged-subpoena process because it is cheaper and faster than other methods--but Verizon and civil liberties groups have said it is not sufficiently privacy-protective.
At issue in the RIAA's request is an obscure part of the DMCA that permits a copyright owner to send a subpoena ordering a "service provider" to turn over information about a subscriber. Verizon says the DMCA does not apply because the company is only a conduit and is not hosting the material on its servers.
Bates said Verizon's proposed solution--a lawsuit with a "John Doe" defendant to be named later--is "more burdensome and less timely" in copyright cases. Bates ordered Verizon to comply with the RIAA's subpoena.
"We appreciate the court's decision, which validates our interpretation of the law," Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, said in a statement. "The illegal distribution of music on the Internet is a serious issue for musicians, songwriters and other copyright owners, and the record companies have made great strides in addressing this problem by educating consumers and providing them with legitimate alternatives."
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-981449.html
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HNS Demonstrates Technological Breakthrough with Industry's First 440 Mbps Transceiver Chip
Press Release
GERMANTOWN, Md., Jan. 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Hughes Network Systems, Inc. (HNS), the world's leading provider of broadband satellite solutions, today announced the development of the first 440 Mbps digital modem ASIC, a critical milestone achieved in the development of DIRECWAY(R) terminals for the SPACEWAY(TM) broadband satellite system.
Without sacrificing performance and cost, the Maxwell chip is housed in a low-cost package measuring less than a square inch. This digital chip enables a receive capability of 440 Mbps burst mode, which is ten times the speed of today's conventional technology. The chip also enables TDMA/FDMA transmit capability at 512kbps, 2Mbps and 16Mbps. By using extremely high levels of integration to produce a single device, the cost of the terminal has been substantially reduced, while enabling very high performance. Its smaller size translates into a 20 percent cost reduction over today's comparable unit.
Scheduled for service launch in 2004, SPACEWAY will provide full-mesh connectivity for efficient delivery of high-bandwidth services. In addition to its unique peer-to-peer architecture, SPACEWAY incorporates many other advanced features-such as packet switching, spot beams, and bandwidth-on-demand.
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...2003,+08:11+AM
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Chief Intends to Leave Cable and Wireless
Suzanne Kapner
LONDON, Jan. 21 — Cable and Wireless said today that Graham M. Wallace, the chief executive and the architect of its transformation from a humdrum telephone carrier into a provider of information services to large businesses, would leave the company.
Mr. Wallace, 54, will continue overseeing daily operations until Cable and Wireless finds a successor. Peter Eustace, a Cable and Wireless spokesman, said there was no fixed timetable for filling the post.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/bu...ss/22CABL.html
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Lobbyists Held Party for Bush Telecommunications Official
WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 (AP) — The Bush administration's top official for telecommunications policy let lobbyists for wireless companies help pay for a private reception at her home and 10 days later urged a policy change that benefited their industry, according to documents and interviews.
The official, Nancy Victory, an assistant commerce secretary, said she regarded the lobbyists as friends and cleared the arrangement in advance with her department's ethics office. She did not report the party, held in 2001, as a gift on her government ethics disclosure form.
"My friends paid for this party out of their personal money," Ms. Victory said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Ms. Victory said it was "ridiculous" to draw a connection between the party and her letter 10 days later to the Federal Communications Commission urging an immediate end to a decade-old restriction on how much of a region's wireless spectrum a company could control.
"Many of the attendees had nothing to do with that issue," she said, declining to identify the guests.
Ethics experts said the arrangement might violate federal ethics standards.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/21/politics/21LOBB.html
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Some Text Messages Just Disappear, a Study Finds
Susan Stellin
A study conducted the first two weeks of December found that 7.5 percent of the text messages sent from cellphones were not received within 120 seconds and that 5 percent were never received at all.
The messages at issue are known in the industry as S.M.S., for short message service, and are slowly growing in popularity in this country, especially among teenagers. The study was conducted by Keynote Systems, a San Mateo, Calif., company that tests the performance of Internet technologies and sells monitoring services to clients. During the two-week survey, Keynote sent 25,000 text messages between various carriers: AT&T Wireless, Cingular Wireless, Nextel Communications, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile. ( Sprint PCS was not included because it uses a proprietary wireless messaging service.)
Chuck Mount, general manager for wireless services at Keynote, said the financial implications of the survey findings were double-edged: in some cases, wireless carriers are losing revenue on messages that do not reach their destination, while in others customers are being charged for messages that are lost in the ether.
Prices for text messaging services vary, but wireless users are typically charged for both outgoing and incoming messages, and whether a fee is assessed depends on where along the network a message is lost.
The survey results also raise questions about the reliability of these services, particularly since users often do not know whether their messages arrived at their destination. "The network usually comes back with a message that tells you it was sent, but that doesn't guarantee it was received or track the message in any way," Mr. Mount said. "You don't necessarily get an error message saying, `We can't deliver your message.' "
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/20/business/20LOST.html
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Move over MP3; purists demand 'lossless'
A Guide To SHN
Steve Shayman
There's a whole industry built around the MP3 data-compression format, but did you know that by using MP3s to burn music CDs, you lose part of the original recording as the data compressor does its work?
Such "lossy" compression schemes result in conveniently small data file sizes, but like audio cassette tapes of old, fidelity is lost each time you convert MP3s back and forth, to and from the CD-burnable .WAV file format, resulting in digitally degraded music files that become increasingly removed from the CD- quality benchmark to which listeners aspire.
The industry that relentlessly flogs MP3 probably doesn't want you to know that it is possible to obtain truly "lossless" audio compression with very little trouble.
Shorten, otherwise known as SHN, is an audio compression scheme that can shrink and endlessly replicate music files without any loss of fidelity. The format is especially popular among traders of live concert recordings.
SHN was developed to compress audio files while having a way of verifying that copies are digitally exact. SHN was not developed for direct listening to music (although you can play back SHN files via Nullsoft's versatile Winamp music player -- see
www.winamp.com -- with the SHNAmp realtime SHN playback plugin --
www.etree.org/shnamp.html ). SHN rather was intended to be an archival format for digital music.
Anecdotally speaking, SHN files seem to produce files that are between 50 and 65 percent of the original size. The fidelity of MP3 files, on the other hand, depends entirely on the sampling ratio you specify during the compression process. For example, on the popular MusicMatch music-file management software program, 64 kbps sampling produces supposedly "FM radio quality" files that are around 5 percent of the original file size, while 128 kbps -- so- called "CD quality" -- yields around 10 percent.
MP3 has good sound for such a small file size, but it is nonetheless a lossy compression scheme -- a certain amount of data is lost and can never be recovered after the conversion. This data loss, to your ears, can sometimes result in a "swooshing" sound in the music, particularly during playback on good headphones or stereo speakers. For this reason, hard-core purists will argue that you should never make an audio CD from MP3 files.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/...20030123a1.htm
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Is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Unconstitutional under Eldred v. Ashcroft?
JB
In an earlier post, I strongly criticized the Supreme Court’s First Amendment analysis in Eldred, arguing that the first amendment issues were not well thought out and that the Court seemed so preoccupied with the Copyright Clause that it dismissed the First Amendment issues as an afterthought. But anyone who understands the important connections between the free speech principle and the public domain should also understand that there is no way you can resolve the First Amendment issues in the case simply, or without making new law, and if you don’t pay careful attention to the larger picture, even what appear to be the simplest and most uncomplicated statements of law will have all sorts of unintended side effects.
As a lawyer and legal scholar, it’s my job, when confronted with decisions I don’t particularly agree with, to make lemonade out of lemons-- to see how the court’s reasoning might apply to future cases in ways I do approve of. And after thinking about Eldred’s First Amendment analysis, it seems to me that the Supremes have made new law that puts the DMCA into question.
http://balkin.blogspot.com/
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If it’s Wednesday, it must be Locutus. http://locut.us/
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Whatever happened to a stiff upper lip?
British Culture Minister overheated and over the top, equates file sharing with drug running and prostitution
Say what? And how exactly is this relevant when a fourteen year old sends a file to a friend?
Last Monday, major music and technology companies announced that they will re-launch an industry initiative to ‘give-away’ of online music. The campaign had been previously conducted in the UK last autumn, and will this time operate on a pan-European scale. The purpose of the event, dubbed ‘Digital Download Day Europe’, is to raise awareness of what the industry views as legitimate download services.
The move comes as record executives have begun to urgently warn each other that unless something is done to stop the phenomenal culture of music piracy their own jobs may be on the line. Some senior officials have said as many as 600,000 people in the music industry may risk redundancy unless the trend is reversed. The record industry has directly blamed royalty-free file-sharing services for the nine per cent decline in music sales last year, whilst the newspaper USA Today has estimated that Kazaa has seen its software downloaded by around 175mn homes worldwide.
Though high-profile music star Robbie Williams was last week reported to have said that he thought music piracy was a ‘great’ idea, the signs are that record executives themselves are beginning to lose their tempers. Yesterday, Forbes.com reported that the ISP Verizon Communications had been ordered by a Washington District Court to give the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) the name of a customer who had downloaded as many as 600 songs a day using the popular Kazaa music file-sharing service. The move signals a shift in the RIAA’s battle against piracy from targeting file-sharing providers to homing in on individual consumers. Though the RIAA has so far not announced any plans to take further action against the individual concerned, many media commentators are reported to have found Judge John Bates’ decision “chilling”.
British Culture minister Kim Howells, meanwhile has reacted to Robbie Williams’ recent remark by accusing the singer of supporting drug and prostitution rackets. During an online chat for the Guardian newspaper, Howells claimed that Williams’ recently negotiated E120mn (GBP80mn) record deal with EMI meant he was out of touch with the concerns of “musicians and music publishers who depend entirely for a living on receiving an honest revenue from sales of their product." Reacting to Mr Howells, others indicated that they thought the pricing policies of record companies meant that they had brough the recent trouble on themselves. Howells went to court more controversy when he maintained that Williams’ comments aided "international gangs involved in drugs and prostitution who find music piracy an excellent way of laundering profits".
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=14551
Julia Day
Culture minister Kim Howells waded into more controversy today by accusing Robbie Williams of supporting drug gangs and prostitution by saying internet music piracy was "great".
In an online debate on Guardian Unlimited this afternoon, Mr Howells was asked whether he was concerned at the statement £80m superstar Williams made about online music piracy.
"In saying that piracy is a 'great idea', Williams is doing the work for international gangs involved in drugs and prostitution who find music piracy an excellent way of laundering their profits," replied Mr Howells.
He railed at length against Williams, who made his remarks as the industry launched a campaign to stop piracy through song- swapping websites on the internet.
"I'm appalled at Robbie Williams' statement. He has an £80m contract and probably doesn't worry too much about all those singers, songwriters, musicians, and music publishers who depend entirely for a living on receiving honest revenue from sales of their product," said Mr Howells.
"He should also realise that many of these pirate operations are linked to organised crime on a worldwide basis.
Mr Howells added: "The industry should ask him to think again, not least his publishers EMI, who are one of the leading companies in lobbying government to take stronger action against music pirates."
The minister said he wanted to use the online chat to "put a few matters right", after a week in which he hit the headlines for condemning what he believed was the glorification of gun crime by rap music and TV shows such as ITV's Serious and Organised.
Today he said: "I do not believe that listening to rap is capable of turning otherwise peace-loving, respectful individuals into gun- toting gangsters.
"If that was true then my generation would all be in jail, having been brought up on cowboy movies, Sam Peckinpah films and Clint Eastwood stroking very big guns.
"It is the notion that somehow we should ignore this amoral, violent and misogynistic content as somehow being perfectly legitimate because it happens to be produced by a particular ethnic culture," he said.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia...878674,00.html
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40 Arrested in Spain for CD, DVD Piracy
Police arrested 40 people and needed two large trucks to cart away more than 240,000 CDs and DVDs in Spain's biggest crackdown on pirate recording, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said Monday.
The raids over the past 24 hours took place in 11 Madrid apartments, a country villa and a warehouse on the capital's outskirts, said Acebes. The 40 arrested included 29 Chinese, nine Senegalese and two Taiwan-born Spaniards.
The recording scam, run by two Chinese immigrants who were identified by their initials only, was capable of producing 60 million pirate copies of records and videos a year using 346 recorders, or burners.
The compact discs and digital video discs seized in the raid had a street value of at least 2 million euros ($US 2.1 million).
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...ting_crackdown
While you still can…
Prescient ad seen on ZDNet
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RF Solutions Intros WLAN Amp
Press Release
RF Solutions, Inc., an innovative supplier of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) semiconductor products, today introduced the WLAN industry’s most efficient, low-cost Power Amplifier (PA) for 802.11b/g applications – the multimode RFS P2023.
“There is no question the landscape is changing for the high-volume WLAN industry,” states Michael Hooper, CEO. “To achieve the price points required to reach high volume production, the overall cost of implementing RF components must be lowered. As a fully-matched, easy-to-use PA, the RFS P2023 offers the best combination of linearity and efficiency while eliminating the challenge and uncertainty of RF design in volume manufacturing.”
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=27249
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Pinch Me, I’m Fookin Dreamin’
Hilary Rosen, the U.S. recording industry's head lobbyist who waged a high- profile battle against Napster and music piracy, is resigning at the end of the year.
In a statement, Rosen cited personal reasons for leaving the Recording Industry Association of America, where she has served as chief executive since 1998.
"During my tenure here, the recording industry has undergone dramatic challenges and it is well positioned for future success ... But I have young children and I want to devote more of my time to them," Rosen said.
She said the RIAA board will search for a replacement.
David Munns, chairman and chief executive of EMI Recorded Music North America, said Rosen has been an influential advocate "in both transforming the music industry in the digital age and in fighting piracy."
The industry has been struggling with declining sales, which Rosen has blamed on illegal downloading over defunct online file-sharing service Napster and successors like Kazaa.
Rosen's departure comes as the organization seeks to soften its image among Internet consumers, many of whom view it with antipathy over incessant pressure for crackdowns on sharing digital music over the Internet.
Rosen was an independent consultant before joining the RIAA in 1987. She also is a founding board member of Rock the Vote, an organization aimed to
get younger people more politically involved.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/interne....ap/index.html
She got ‘em involved alright.
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Your customers bought your high bandwidth service to share files - you hire Sandvine to make sure they can’t.
Sandvine opens European subsidiary
Press release
Sandvine Incorporated today announced the opening of its European, Middle East and African (EMEA) headquarters and the establishment of Sandvine Limited in the U.K.
The new subsidiary will serve as the cornerstone of Sandvine's European sales operation and enable the company to support demand from broadband service providers for Sandvine's range of peer-to-peer policy management and network-based subscription service products.
In addition, Sandvine EMEA will augment overall support capacity and enable local-area, 24/7 coverage for the company's growing base of global customers.
Helming the new subsidiary is managing director Chris Colman, a veteran network equipment marketer with more than 20 years experience in the EMEA operational theatre (see bio, attached).
"Peer-to-peer file sharing traffic is weighing down service provider networks in every corner of the globe," said Dave Caputo, president and CEO of Sandvine. "The establishment of Sandvine EMEA signals our commitment to help service providers in this region better manage the impact of P2P file-sharing on their networks, and take advantage of the opportunity to increase their revenues by delivering network-based firewall, content filtering and anti- virus solutions to their residential broadband subscribers."
Sandvine Limited is located in Basingstoke, Hampshire; 40 minutes southwest of London. Address: Pinewood, Chineham Business Park, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG24 8AL. Telephone: +44 (0) 1256 698021; Fax: +44 (0) 1256 698245.
http://www.newswire.ca/releases/Janu.../22/c1973.html
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Record labels are under attack from all sides - file sharers and performers, even equipment manufacturers and good old-fashioned customers - and it's killing them. A moment of silence, please.
The Year The Music Dies
Charles C. Mann
Not long before his sudden death from a heart attack, I saw Timothy White at a party in Boston, standing by the bar in his usual bow tie and white bucks. When he waved me over, I was delighted: Timothy was not only the editor of Billboard but a respected music critic and biographer. Even the executives he often took to task conceded, with a wince, that he understood the secretive, confusing business better than almost anyone. "How much you want to bet that the entire music industry collapses?" he asked me. "And I mean soon - like five, ten years. Kaboom!"
Truth is, it may happen even sooner. This year could determine whether the music business as we know it survives.
The industry rightly believes that if it can make file-swapping more difficult, and legitimate online services easier and less expensive, it can turn the kids on Kazaa into paying customers. Pursuing this two-pronged approach, the companies are spending millions on their own Internet services (pressplay from Universal and Sony; MusicNet from BMG, EMI, and Warner), on lawyers to chase away pirates and peer-to-peer networks, and on anti-piracy ads featuring the likes of Britney Spears.
But this won't be enough. To survive, the industry will need the active assistance of friends it doesn't have. The labels may be able to kill Kazaa, but they won't be able to stop even more decentralized networks like Gnutella without help from Internet service providers, cable operators, and telephone companies. All their efforts to get DVD-like protection for CDs ultimately depend on the goodwill of hardware manufacturers and Capitol Hill. The online subscription services will flounder without cooperation from performers, songwriters, and record stores. And the ability of Britney to change the hearts and minds of music fans depends on public sympathy.
That sympathy is in short supply. Rightly or wrongly, record companies are detested by politicians (for corrupting youth), by webcasters (for demanding royalties), and by their customers (for inflating prices). Musicians and songwriters are famous for loathing the labels, and many have resisted licensing their songs to MusicNet and pressplay. (Both are under investigation for possible antitrust violations.) Radio and MTV aren't in the industry's corner; the labels, through "independent promotion" programs, effectively have to pay them to broadcast music. And the electronics industry's attitude toward the labels is summed up by an Apple slogan: Rip. Mix. Burn. Which, a music executive once told me, translates into "Fuck you, record labels."
Even the music trade's corporate masters are torn. Until the 1980s, most labels were controlled by eccentric, sometimes thuggish entrepreneurs who had their whole lives bound up with selling albums. In the past two decades, every big label has been swept up into one of five major groups: Universal, Warner, Sony, BMG, and EMI, which together control about 75 percent of global recorded-music sales. Despite their dominance, though, the majors are merely duchies in large media empires with other, often conflicting, priorities.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/dirge.html
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"The heads of the record labels don't know what to do about it. But I'm cool, if you want my music - download it." - Robbie Williams.
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Backfire
Richard Menta
What caught my eye when I first read about the record industry's attempt to ID and prosecute a KaZaa user for trading music files is how average he or she seems to be. The profile that Declan McCullagh offers on the individual in his article "RIAA wins battle to ID Kazaa user" is quite sparse, and yet is still telling.
This alleged peer-to-peer pirate has been targeted for trading hundreds of files. Not thousands, but hundreds.
In Napster's heyday when you could see the names of individual users and view just the files they had to offer there were plenty of folks who made available thousands of songs. Those Napster days are long gone, but more users are trading than ever and the number of files they each trade has also risen. I would think there were beter candidates. Certainly there are folk out there who share many more files.
It therefore makes me wonder if the Record Industry Association of America already knows the identity of this person. This is not a far fetched notion. Lawyers like to only ask defendants questions they already have the answer to, because there are no surprises. If they do know they have plenty of reasons to keep their mouths shut about it including privacy issues that might put the RIAA itself on the wrong side of the law. What make a small time trader in the Pittsburgh area so important?
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2003/iduser.html
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"I have more regard for music pirates. At least they respect the product."
Digital Film Censor Incurs Hollywoods’ Wrath
There's a bloody battle sequence in the Mel Gibson movie "The Patriot" which shows bullets slamming into British soldiers and a speeding cannon ball decapitating an American revolutionary.
Too graphic? ClearPlay Inc. plans to market a new DVD player that automatically skips past graphic violence, gratuitous sex and profane language.
Hollywood's top directors and movie studios are yelling "Cut!" They have filed suit to block ClearPlay and other companies from offering sanitized versions of popular films, saying it infringes on their artistic integrity and trademark rights.
"This is an abomination," said Robert Giolito, general counsel for the Directors Guild of America. "I have more regard for music pirates. At least they respect the product."
Yet ClearPlay and a dozen other firms offering cleaned-up PG-13 and R-rated videos say they are only giving viewers a reasonable alternative to what they consider objectionable material. "In the home, families should be able to watch (movies) any way they want to," said Bill Aho, ClearPlay's chief executive officer.
The controversy has ignited yet another battle between Hollywood and companies creating cutting-edge digital entertainment technology.
"It's the digital equivalent to your mom slapping her hand over your eyes in the theater," said Mike McGuire, research director for media with GartnerG2.
"Striking that balance between technological innovation and the original intent of the artists for their work is not going to be so easy."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl....DTL&type=tech
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AOL Time Warner Taking Itself Apart
After years of running up massive debt the media giant, owner of Warner Bros records, AOL and one of the largest cable TV and Internet ISPs in the world, is struggling to come up with cash. The division now on the blocks is books, the fifth largest consumer publisher in the United States.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/bu...dia/23AOL.html
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DMCA Violation? Nope.
Computer Security Expert Cracks Physical Keys
In an article in today’s New York Times a security expert applies his knowledge of encryption cracking to the physical world and attains surprising results. It turns out that buildings that employ master keys, offices, estates, schools and other institutions including high security compounds like government and military installations have a major weakness. Their keys are a snap to crack. Using this technique from Matt Blaze a 15 year can cut a 2 dollar master key that works all the locks in about 5 minutes after getting his hands on just one easy to snag key, like one to the bathroom.
No kidding.
the
story.
the crack
pdf.
- js.
nick: bobbob
pass: bobbob
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2 Telcos to Merge
AP
Two telephone companies, Birch Telecom Inc. and Ionex Telecom Inc., announced that they would merge to create a company that will compete with SBC Communications Inc. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a group of investors that includes the major backers of Ionex will provide more than $40 million in financing. The company will retain the Birch name and operate on Ionex's network. It will be based in Kansas City and led by David E. Scott, chief executive of the old Birch, which emerged from bankruptcy protection in September. The deal, which faces regulatory approval, is expected to be completed within three months. The combined company will serve over 500,000 telephone lines, mostly in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas, and is expected to generate $350 million in annual revenues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/te...gy/23TBRF.html
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"Audio fingerprinting is accurate, robust and runs in a sensible amount of time. It really works."
Instead of a D.J., a Web Server Names That Tune
Anne Eisenberg
A song and its name are easily parted, as anyone knows who has listened to a tune on the radio and then waited in vain for the announcer to identify it.
Now some companies are using a technology that can name that tune as it plays, promptly displaying words like "Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet" in text on an Internet radio or cellphone.
The systems are sensitive enough to identify not only names and artists within a vast range of recorded music, but also different versions of a piece done by the performers, even when the differences are slight.
At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, for instance, Royal Philips Electronics demonstrated a prototype of an Internet radio that was not only capable of naming the band Pearl Jam as its music streamed past but also distinguishing a version of a tune that it played at a concert in Verona, Italy, from the same tune recorded in Milan.
"To our ears the two versions sound the same," said Ton Kalker, a mathematician at Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, who led the team that developed the rapid identification system. "But the technology is sensitive enough to make a distinction."
"Audio fingerprinting works by creating a mathematical description of some of the unique features of a song," said Dr. Richard Gooch, deputy director of technology at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a trade organization based in London. The fingerprints are stored on a server. When the server is asked to identify a tune - for instance, a song playing on Internet radio - software matches a snippet of the tune, expressed in code, with the whole coded version of the song stored on the server.
Dr. Gooch said that the technology stood up even to the most difficult conditions - poor loudspeakers, highly compressed streaming files or broadcasters who speed up songs slightly to make room for commercials.
"We've found that even when broadcasters tweak a song or compress it," he said, "so long as you can still hear it, the systems can extract a description of unique characteristics in the song," quickly matching the description with the database to identify the track.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/te...ts/23next.html
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P2P Numbers down? Change the counter! http://www.unitethecows.com/forums/p...?threadid=5318
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Sheer Tunage
In a Single DVD Changer, Hundreds of Movies and MP3's
Ian Austen
Although it was not Sony's main objective, the company has made its DVP-CX875P DVD-CD changer something of a marathon machine. Among other things, the 301-disc changer can play back DVD's containing music recorded as MP3 files. Anyone who has the patience (and the music collection) to fill 301 discs with MP3 files could sit back and listen to music continuously for just under a year and a half.
But Bruce Pripido, Sony's marketing manager for DVD players, anticipates that the jumbo changer is likely to be most popular among owners of extensive collections of movies recorded on DVD's.
The gradual spread of computers that can record DVD's, Mr. Pripido said, will increase demand for devices that can store and manage the recordings. "It's our feeling that there will be quite a few of these shiny discs out there," he said.
To keep track of its contents, the player, which is $500 at
www.sonystyle.com, allows users to create individual folders that they can view on the television screen and manipulate using a joystick on the player's remote control. And for users who want to take a break from those months-long music sessions, the player will remember where a disc has been stopped, and even if it has been removed from the machine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/te...ts/23chan.html
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A Shredder That Gobbles CD-ROM's and Floppies
J.D. Biersdorfer
With identity theft on the rise, the proper disposal of old personal documents and information has become a priority for many people. Getting rid of old bank statements is easy for most shredders, but the new MD100 Media Destroyer shredder is designed to pulverize harder materials. It can chomp up old floppy diskettes and CD's and make them safe to discard.
The Media Destroyer, which was presented last week by Royal Consumer Information Products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is small enough to fit on top of a desk. It has a five-inch slot on top for inserting diskettes or discs and can shred seven folded sheets of paper in one shot.
The shredder can power through the metal strips on diskettes and slice up expired credit cards. It can rip through 30 CD's a minute; as they are destroyed, special rollers inside the machine obliterate any data on the surface of the disc so that the shards will be unreadable.
The MD100 Media Destroyer will be available this spring at major office supply stores and is expected to sell for $130. The right combination of colorful crumbled bits might even brighten up the office.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/te...ts/23shre.html
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Peak to P2P - Everest Gets Wi-Fied
Nancy Gohring
IF the 25-below-zero temperature, howling wind and grim effects of altitude sickness do not make most of those trying to scale Mount Everest feel a world away from home, the near-complete lack of communications on and around Everest surely does.
This year, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary's first ascent of Everest, climbers on the mountain will have the chance to connect with the world below by e-mail. That is because Tsering Gyaltsen, the grandson of the only surviving Sherpa to have accompanied Hillary on that famed climb, is planning to build the world's highest Internet cafe at base camp.
The technical challenge is significant. Wireless radios will be positioned on moving glaciers, and gear must be insulated against temperatures far colder than they were designed to withstand. And at the helm of the project is Mr. Gyaltsen, who is not wealthy and has no formal technical training.
But tenacious he is. From halfway around the world, Mr. Gyaltsen has attracted an all-star cast of technologists in the United States dedicated to furthering his goal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/23/te...ts/23sher.html
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Up 300%!!! Oh My GOD!!! People are using P2Ps’!!! This consultant uses fear.
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/...35&ticker=wbsn
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RIAA Head Wrongdoer Hilary Rosen To Step Down
I am glad to see Ms. Rosen go, and my only regret is that she not wait until the end of 2003 to do so. She has been instrumental in keeping the recording industry mired in the thought that it is still 1983. In the process, she has harmed the very fabric of our society in her attempts to wrest control over the way legally owned content is used by customers. The DMCA, for instance, is one of the most disgusting laws on the books, and the RIAA lobbied hard for its passing. It simply puts far too much power in the hand of big media companies.
The killer aspect of all this is that the recording industry has really only managed to hasten its own irrelevance in the digital age, and that did not have to happen. Had the RIAA put even 1% of the energy and resources into finding a new, relevant, business model as it did in trying to stop file sharing, the industry would be much healthier and happier today.
I specifically hope her replacement at the RIAA has a better understanding of what is happening around him or her. I hope that this person has the foresight to understand that record label profits can not be protected by making it harder for us to listen to our music in the manner that we want. I hope that her replacement will have the simple ability to understand that it is a sluggish economy, high prices for CDs, and the incredible levels of utter mediocrity in the crap being put out by the record labels, not to mention the labels' own behavior in regards to file sharing, that is responsible for falling profits, and not piracy.
Good bye, Ms. Rosen. We shan't miss you.
http://www.macobserver.com/columns/t...20030123.shtml
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Wireless == great jukebox in the sky?
Robert Kaye
Its been over 5 years since the first MP3 Summit where the concept of the jukebox in the sky was hotly debated. The promise of the jukebox in the sky was to make
all music available to users everywhere. Users could tap into the jukebox at home, at work, in their car or hiking up a mountain.
Five years later and the iPod is the closest thing to this jukebox we have -- not exactly what people talked about back then. With the current legal climate I'm not expecting the RIAA and its cronies to deliver this jukebox anytime soon.
Community wireless networks have a much better chance of delivering on this promise. Assume for a moment that wireless networks have come of age and in urban areas dense wireless networks blanket the neighborhoods.
Now lets assume that computer users make their music collections available via tools like iCommune. If you can aggregate the music collections of dozens/hundreds of people around you, you'll get a virtual music collection that approaches the jukebox in the sky.
This jukebox won't have everything under the sun (which physical jukebox does?), but it will have large amounts of music ready to be played, right now without waiting for it to download, which is not a bad start.
While aggregated wireless music collections won't provide everything to everyone everywhere, they do have some interesting qualities that are worth exploring.
If the community around you has the music, do you need to download all of the music to your machine? Better get another bigger harddrive, because the community will have more music than you have harddrive space. So, I hope that people will truely start sharing their collections instead of actually copying them as the current file sharing networks do. And if we're just sharing and not copying does that fall under fair use? (Never mind that fair use has been erradicated in the last few years).
And finally, if wireless networks don't rely on traditional ISPs, it conceivable to put firewalls/packet filters at locations where the wireless net connects to a traditional ISPs, so that the RIAA cannot even see these wireless jukeboxes?
Traditional ISPs unwittingly act as DMCA chokepoints, and if firewalls hide the activity of wireless networks, then how will the RIAA combat these jukeboxes in the sky?
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/wlg/2639
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Danish news search agent goes Kazaa style
Danish search agent company has begun to offer its Danish clients a version of its Newsbooster service that operates in a similar fashion to the decentralised file-sharing networks like Kazaa and Gnutella.
Similar to a news clipping service, Newsbooster provides business clients with a service that scours online content for news or other content related to their company or to any series of pre-selected keywords and then offers links directly to webpages with such related content
However, some news sites, particularly online newspapers, have charged that this sort of ‘deep-linking’ – or linking directly to a possibly premium-content designated page within a site, rather than the freely accessable main or home page – is a breach of European copyright law.
In July last year, a Copenhagen court agreed with this analysis and ordered the company to end any deep-linking.
Courts across Europe are increasingly accepting the argument that deep-linking represents an unauthorised access of a private database – viewing newspaper sites as such databases.
Newsbooster has responded by developing a downloadable programme, ‘Newsbrowser’, that runs from the user’s own computer, seeing sense in the strategy of groups like Kazaa over the defunct Napster, where a network of computers is more difficult to prosecute than a company offering the same service from a central server.
Newsbrowser is available only for Danish clients, as the Copenhagen ruling does not apply beyond the country’s borders.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=14563
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'Proof' - downloading music hurts Europe's CD sales
The debate rages over the impact of file-sharing on the music industry, with listeners and many independent artists supporting it, while industry executives saying it is nothing less than theft. A new report sides with the execs.
While supporters of file-sharing argue that the general downturn in the economy is responsible for the music industry’s reduced profits, executives claim that downloading tracks via services like Kazaa and Morpheus cannibalise CD sales, and a new report from market analysts Forrester Research argues that, to some extent, industry executives are right.
According to the report, one in seven Europeans downloads music. Around one-third of the internet population, or 13 per cent of all Europeans, uses the internet to download music, and 38 per cent of these users download more than seven tracks per month. These frequent downloaders are much younger than the rest of the online population -- about half are less than 24 years old.
Frequent downloaders burn CDs. What do downloaders do with the music? Most of them listen to it while working at their PC; only seven per cent upload files to an MP3 player. Of frequent downloaders, 63 per cent burn CDs – and, downloading an average of 12.6 tracks monthly, they can fill one per month.
Light and occasional buyers are buying fewer CDs, and more than 40 percent of frequent downloaders confess to buying less music now. However, music fanatics – heavy CD buyers – say that the advent of internet file-sharing has actually encouraged them to buy more CDs, as they become more easily acquainted with new music they would like to buy.
http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=14535
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Verizon Ruling could chill music swapping
Hiawatha Bray
In a decision that could chill the practice of Internet music swapping, a federal court in Washington ruled yesterday that the telecommunications firm Verizon Communications must reveal the identity of one of its Internet subscribers who is suspected of illegally exchanging copyrighted music files over the Internet.
Verizon said it would appeal the ruling. If the decision stands, the record industry will be able to more easily identify and sue millions of Americans who illegally exchange music files over the Internet.
The ruling is a victory for the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the nation's biggest record companies, and a major defeat for New York-based Verizon.
It's also a severe legal setback for critics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a controversial 1998 federal law designed to prevent illegal distribution of copyrighted materials in digital form. Supporters of the law, including the recording industry, computer software makers, and Hollywood movie studios, say it's a vital weapon in their efforts to prevent theft of their valuable intellectual property. But critics argue the law gives major corporations unreasonable powers to restrict the freedom and invade the privacy of consumers.
Jonathan Zittrain, associate professor at Harvard Law School, opposes the digital copyright law. But he said its provisions are clearly on the side of the music industry. ''I figured Verizon would lose,'' said Zittrain. ''Basically the publishers foresaw this very issue coming up in 1998, and they pushed for and got a specific provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to cover this eventuality.''
Zittrain said he believes the RIAA will use its subpoena power to demonstrate that large numbers of Internet users are downloading illegal materials. Then, he believes, the record producers will argue that under the act, Internet providers can be compelled to shut off service to any customer found swapping illegal files.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/02...wapping+.shtml
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Tech giants: No government copy-control mandates
Grant Gross
A coalition of technology company heavyweights and consumer groups have joined the chorus of voices calling for the U.S. government to stay away from mandating anti-copying schemes on computers.
The Alliance for Digital Progress (ADP), a lobbying group made of 27 technology companies, consumer groups and think tanks, launched Thursday in response to calls from the Motion Picture Association of America for copy protection measures from the U.S. Congress. Among the members of ADP are technology companies Microsoft, Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple Computer; and consumer groups Consumer Alert, DigitalConsumer.org, and 60 Plus Association.
Frederick McClure, president of the fledgling group, said the ADP will fight government copy-protection mandates, but he endorsed private-sector methods of solving what he called a "problem with digital piracy."
"We oppose efforts by Hollywood to use the government to design anti- copying technology and require all digital devices to be built using that technology," said McClure, a former legislative advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. "But make no mistake, the organizations here today also are committed to protecting digital content."
On Jan. 14, the Recording Industry of America Inc. joined two major technology associations in also calling for Congress to stay away from copy- protection mandates. The Business Software Alliance and the Computer Systems Policy Project, which joined the RIAA last week, are also part of the Alliance for Digital Progress, although the RIAA is not.
While McClure didn't mention it by name, it was clear his coalition would target any re-introduction of Sen. Fritz Hollings' Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act, which mandated copy-control technology on all digital devices. At least one press release in the ADP packet, from senior citizens group 60 Plus Association, focused on the Hollings bill, which went nowhere during the 2002 session of Congress. The association called the South Carolina Democrat's bill "a prime example of government reach out of control."
The MPAA supported the Hollings bill and continues to say that government solutions to file-trading over the Internet may be needed. Neither Hollings' office nor the MPAA had an immediate comment on the ADP announcement.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn...ol.xml?s=IDGNS
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IP Justice
Digital rights under fire
Lisa M. Bowman
Robin Gross thinks international copyright laws are out of step with the people. So much so that the former Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney is launching a new watchdog group called IP Justice.
Her goal is to "promote balance in global intellectual property law." Gross says she wants to make sure people won't become targets of legal action for doing things like making personal copies of CDs, DVDs and e-books they've purchased.
Gross, who's officially unveiling the project in the next couple of weeks, envisions uniting programmers and online activists across the globe to make sure consumers get a fair shake in the copyright debate. She talked with CNET News.com about how digital technology is changing copyright law, why technologists and consumers should be concerned, and why she thinks the United States is one of the most "restrictive regimes" in this area.
Q: Why did you found IP Justice?
A: I felt like there was a real need to connect the like-minded groups all over the world who are battling against the expansion of copyrights and are concerned about protecting freedom of expression.
How will IP Justice differ from other online activist groups?
We'll differ in that our focus will be on international IP law. I think our focus will also be a little bit different because we're going to be principle-based. One of the frustrations that so many people have expressed to me is that the laws are just being bought and paid for by Hollywood in the intellectual property space, and they're so out of step with the public's principles about what's fair and what's just.
What will some of those principles be?
One is the idea that we should have the right to control our own individual experience of creative works. When we're in the privacy of our own homes, and we're using DVDs or CDs that we own on the computers that we own, that Hollywood doesn't have a right to tell us how we can use that media. It's our property and our rights as global citizens to receive and express and impart information without the interference of the copyright holders.
How about another one?
We have the right to make personal private copies of lawfully acquired works. So if I buy a CD, I should have an affirmative right to make a personal-use copy of that without breaking any laws by attempting to make a copy. Unfortunately, the United States has a very dismal track record right now for protection of freedom in this area. It's truly ironic that the United States has such an international reputation as being the leader in freedom of speech, but when it comes to intellectual property, it's actually one of the most restrictive regimes in terms of what people can do with their intellectual property.
Practically, how do you see this list of principles promoting this balance that you seek?
The idea is to get groups and individuals from all over the world to sign onto to these principles, to endorse these principles, and we can sort of hold the lawmakers in check in that we can say these are our principles and you can compare them to the laws and see that there's a difference. Laws are going to have to change in some cases, and that's really the ultimate goal of releasing these principles--to get the lawmakers to understand the will of the public when it comes to intellectual property issues.
And you don't think they do right now?
I really don't think that lawmakers have been given a fair hearing about what the public's rights are and what the public's concerns are. They've got a very close connection with the Hollywood lobbyists, and their position seems to very closely reflect the views of the Hollywood executives. So I think they need to be reminded of the public and what they expect of lawmakers when it comes to protecting their civil rights and their civil liberties.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-981663.html
Until next week,
-
js.
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